In the City of Last Things

Join actors, musicians and bestselling historian Dr Matthew Green for an immersive voyage of destruction through the invisible city, exploring the places that no longer exist but which, somehow, still define modern London, and through their terminal beauty and melancholic grandeur portend our post-apocalyptic future.

• The tour takes place in the ancient City now known as the Square Mile, and lasts two-and-a-half hours.
• All the extinct drinks from various doomed Londoners are included in the ticket price.
• Part popular history, part immersive theatre, part séance, part prophecy this brand new experience is brought to you by the bestselling author of London: A Travel Guide through Time (Penguin) and Shadowlands: A Journey through Lost Britain (Faber).

We think of the city as permanent.

But London has died many times before.

And when we look at the glass-and-steel towers of the City we are staring into the ghettos of the future.

Join bestselling historian Dr Matthew Green, alongside actors, musicians and revenants from vanished centuries, on a haunting multi-sensory journey through the invisible city: the successive doomed Londons hidden within the modern streets around us.

From lost Roman temples and Viking ruins to magnificent glass-and-gargoyle follies, stupendous mansions on London Bridge and royal castles and magic houses erased by war, fire and time, experience the terminal beauty of successive doomed Londons, each unknowingly poised on the brink of extinction, and hear dispatches from travellers in time.

In the ancient alleyways and hidden pits of the Square Mile, the lost worlds folded into the City slowly begin to stir.

A Roman soldier emerges from the twilight of Londinium, speaking in the strange cadences of a dying empire before his words slowly fade into modern dialect.

A lone Viking prowls the wold-haunted ruins of the abandoned city on the eve of Alfred’s reconquest.

A monk-scribe shivers in the ruins of his monastery awaiting Protestant and print oblivion.

A plague doctor wanders the streets before the Great Fire.

A refugee climbs Hampstead Heath to see the Wren spires swirling in the wasteland of water below.

Around you, the invisible city gradually emerges.

Monks chant somewhere beyond the traffic.

Medieval bells toll out across streets where the churches themselves no longer stand.

Lantern light flickers across darkened alleyways.

A hooded figure slips silently through the gathering dusk. Ancient melodies drift through the summery air. Lost playhouses, ruined palaces, plague pits, monasteries and forgotten worlds rise once more from beneath the modern city like revenants

As voices from vanished centuries seep into the present-day city — a balladeer singing in the traffic, a plague doctor in the crowd, a Dionysian flute-girl emerging from a Wetherspoons — these lost worlds emerge once more around us — not as isolated disappearances, but as rehearsal acts for an uncertain future.

And finally, another witness appears: a traveller from the future standing amid the coarse grass and bitter winds of Hampstead Heath, gazing down upon the drowned Wren spires of London rising from tidal waters below like the ruins of some northern Atlantis.

Part séance, part danse macabre, part prophecy, ‘In the City of Last Things’ explores the evanescent nature of civilisation itself as, with the threat of eco-catastrophe, nuclear armageddon and AI sentience, London slides once more into the shadow of oblivion.

With servings of extinct drinks from doomed Londons to leaven the mood!

All things come to pass.

Every age assumes its London is the last.