Lonely Planet Audio Walking Tours: London: Spitalfields

Welcome to Spitalfields, where you can enjoy the sights and competing aromas in this fascinating, engrossing and cosmopolitan part of London. Paul Chequer will guide you through this feast for the senses, which includes eyewitness accounts and archive material. Immerse yourself in the culture of Brick Lane, a stopping off point for generations of immigrants and a melting pot of Huguenot, Jewish and Bangladeshi culture before finding the Brick Lane Mosque. A building with an unusual history having been at various times church, chapel and synagogue - it's one of the oldest surviving Georgian buildings in East London. Discover the famous Old Truman Brewery, which in its heyday was producing around 200,000 barrels of bitter - and which, at the time, was more hygienic than drinking the local water. Then 'catch history with its pants down' at Dennis Severs' House, where you can head back in time to the 18th century - as if the family had just left. Pause by the Charnel House where the remains of long-dead Londoners were kept and then witness the modernisation of Old Market - once the centre of Spitalfields for three and a half centuries. Dorset Street deserves some contemplation - even though it no longer exists: it was made infamous as the place where Jack the Ripper murdered his fifth and final victim, Mary Jane Kelly... Next, admire the striking Christ Church building - Nicholas Hawksmoor's masterpiece of weird proportion - before visiting the Women's Library: a collection dedicated to women's history dating as far back as the suffrage movement. Your tour ends at the edge of Spitalfields with the Whitechapel Gallery - the first British gallery to show Jackson Pollock's work and said to have introduced Pop Art to the UK.