London Through Blake's Eyes
- Julia Warren
- 15 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Celebrating William Blake’s birthday with a poetic, historical, and slightly mystical stroll through the city that shaped a visionary.
William Blake was very much a child of London. He rarely left the city, and the streets, churches, and riverbanks seeped into his poetry and art. This is a look at London - not as we experience it, but rather as Blake perceived it: full of angels, revolution, and strange beauty.
🚶♂️ Stop 1: Soho – Blake’s Birthplace
Location: 28 Broad Street (now Broadwick Street)
Blake was born at 28 Broad Street, Soho, in 1757, above his father’s hosiery shop. Soho in Blake’s time was a busy place, filled with craftsmen and philosophers, engravers and dissenters, revolutionaries, and mystics—a perfect breeding ground for the ‘glorious visionary’ as William Michael Rossetti later described him.
The young Blake walked through open-air markets, encountering street preachers, and seeing visions of angels perched in trees.
“How sweet is the Shepherd’s sweet lot!
From the morn to the evening he strays…”
— Songs of Innocence
Blake claimed he saw angels in the mulberry trees on Peckham Rye as a child. As he wandered the streets, taking in the everyday life of shops, traffic both human and horse-drawn, feeding his mind with movement and colour - there was another London, a visionary one, overlapping, and blending,...
“My friend the Angel climbed up from his station into the mill. I remained alone, and then this appearance was no more; but I found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight, hearing a harper who sung to the harp; and his theme was: "The man who never
alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind."
From: A Memorable Fancy, THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, by William Blake
Blake’s London was increasingly Georgian - the timbered walls of the Tudors and the Baroque style of the Stuarts were being overshadowed by the tall, narrow, elegant new houses that let the light in - for windows were the new fad - three panes across and as deep as you could afford, these eyes of the Enlightenment bore witness to a new age of exploration - the exploration of nature, spirit and mind.
Stop 2: Golden Square – London’s Shadows
Experience & social injustice
“In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.”
— London
Golden Square blends elegant Georgian buildings and narrow lanes : here is the tension, almost tangible, born of contrast: beauty and confinement, grandeur and disillusionment. Enlightenment and Impoverishment. Blake‘s “mind-forg’d manacles” were the internalized limitations imposed by society, politics, and religion.
The Industrial Revolution is barely nascent, yet already William Blake felt that London was spiritually wounded - while on the one hand there was a striving for understanding, philosophy, philanthropy, science and the natural world, there were also gin shops, gambling dens, lunatic asylums, prostitution and paupery - the extremes of wealth and poverty were before him every day.
'How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse'
— London
Stop 3: Westminster Abbey — Ghosts, Effigies, and the Gothic Imagination
“I have conversed with the spiritual Sun. I saw him on Primrose Hill.”
— Letter to Thomas Butts
Later, he would describe seeing ghostly monks drifting through the Abbey. His dislike of neoclassicism—and love of Gothic drama—comes from sketching here as an apprentice. One of his fellow students was Henry Fuseli, lately arrived from Switzerland - they spent many hours together working on illustrations for Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, published in 1791. Both artists shared the liberal views expressed in the book. An example of their collaboration is the Fertilization of Egypt, featuring Anubis praying for rain. Blake created the engraving based on the original design by Fuseli. As to who influenced who - opinions remain divided, but as is often the case, it is entirely possible that the two artists influenced each other in equal degrees.
What does remain is a poem written in tribute to Fuseli by Blake:
The only man that ever I knew
Who did not make me almost spew
Was Fuseli: he was both Turk and Jew -
And so, dear Christian Friends, how do you do?
Blake’s art during this period moved away from symmetry and reason to embrace the wild, the visionary and the divine.
Stop 4: Lambeth — The House of Visions
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
— The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Blake wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in Lambeth — his home during his most explosive creative period. Here too were composed Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and large parts of Songs of Experience. This is where he claimed to see angels among the trees and devils in flaming chariots rolling across the sky.
From 1790 to 1800, Blake lived on Hercules Road, then a semi-rural area of fields, gardens, and lanes. The house is gone, but the spirit of his Lambeth visions still hovers over the street, where mosaics inspired by his artworks now adorn the walls.
Lambeth thus becomes the symbolic midpoint of the walk—the place where Blake’s private visions fully ignite into cosmic mythmaking.
What were his visions? He spoke of fourfold, threefold and twofold vision. Newton’s single vision refers to the simple perception of material objects; but what of the other three?
‘And a fourfold vision is given to me;
"Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single Vision & Newton’s sleep!’
— Newton's Sleep, by Blake (1795)
According to Kerrison Preston, there is a connection between the four qualities of Blake’s Zoas, and the four types of vision: material, emotional, sensation and prophetic imagination.
‘“Single vision belongs to Urizen, who sees primarily the material form ... Luvah adds the emotions of the heart . . . giving an added meaning to form, which is the double vision of the artist... . Tharmas contributes the universality of the senses,, …which Blake calls Beulah and the threefold vision. . . . All this is raised to fourfold vision by Urthona, the prophetic imagination, transporting the beholder beyond Beulah...”
Kerrison Preston, from William Blake, The Politics of Vision, by Mark Schorer
Urizen − from Blake's Ancient of Days, 1794
‘I see London blind & age-bent begging thro the Streets
Of Babylon, led by a child, his tears run down his beard . . .
The Comer of Broad Street weeps; Poland Street languishes
To Great Queen Street & Lincolns Inn, all is distress & woe.’
✨ Stop 5: The Thames — The Spiritual Threshold of London
The Portal
“And I saw the River of Life flow From the fires of the Sun.”
— The Four Zoas
The Thames is a very present element in Blake’s work; rather, it is a presence —sometimes polluted and “charter’d,” sometimes a divine boundary between the earthly and the eternal. The river flows through his poetry as a liminal, shimmering threshold. A threshold to another world.
“And I saw the River of Life flow
From the fires of the Sun.”
From The Four Zoas.
✨ Stop 6: Tate Britain — Where Blake’s Visions Are Kept
Blake’s myth-world through art
“Art is the Tree of Life.”
— Annotations to Reynolds
Tate Britain houses the largest collection of Blake’s works—illuminated manuscripts, engravings, and bold visionary canvases. Standing before The Ancient of Days or Newton, you sense the force of his line, the tension in every gesture, the luminous colors that still burn across the centuries.
After the Thames, this is the perfect place to contemplate how Blake transformed his encounters with London—its streets, its spirits, its river—into a symbolic universe.
✨ Stop 7: Bunhill Fields — Blake’s Resting Place
“I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball: It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate…”
— Jerusalem
Blake is buried here among nonconformists, prophets, revolutionaries, and religious outsiders, including John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe. The perfect ending point: the place where Blake himself crossed the final threshold.
Further reading:
Blake by Peter Ackroyd, Random House, 1996
William Blake The Politics of Vision by Mark Schorer, Vintage Books, 1959
William Blake by G.K. Chesterton, Duckworth & Co, 1962
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