marx walking tour london

Karl Marx The Walking Tour

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Karl Marx The Walking Tour - All You MUST Know BEFORE You Go (2024)

Karl Marx walking tour

Karl Marx in London his life and ideas. A walking tour in Soho

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Karl Marx the walking tour

Karl Marx was the most influential thinker of modern times. We walk you through the story of his life in London, and explain his ideas and their influence on human destiny.

His epic life story combines comedy and tragedy, love and hate, hope and despair. This set the backdrop to an intellectual expedition that sought to unravel the mysteries of history, politics, economics and philosophy.

Marx’s work inspired protests and strikes, rebellions and revolutions, terrorism and war, struggles for freedom, democracy and liberty, as well as regimes of tyrannical repression.

We take you to the places in and around Soho where Marx lived and worked, show you traces of the London he knew, and tell the extraordinary tale of this man who would change the world. Join us as we walk you through the life, times and ideas of Karl Marx.

Call Heiko on 07722523629

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Why London’s Karl Marx walking tour attracts crowds of tourists each week

• 12 February 2020
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Walkers of the world unite on a Karl Marx tour of central London every Sunday.

The walk includes a stop at the former Red Lion pub in Soho where Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of modern communism, were asked to write the first Communist Manifesto in 1847.

Along with two other guides, radio producer and Marx historian Heiko Khoo has been educating the masses on the London life of the exiled German philosopher since 2012.

He said: “I became interested in the ideas of Marx when I was 17 and I’ve been actively involved in Marxist politics.

“I do the tour because I was often unhappy about the way Marxism was taught, on the one side in academia because it tends to be non-Marxists explaining it, and on the other side within the Marxist movement I found it was too instrumental and sectarian,” he explained.  

“The tours offer a sort of go-between for me with a bit of theatrics and a bit of politics.”

The walk also takes in sites frequented by both Marx and Engels in Chinatown, before ending at the Reading Room of the British Library where Marx worked on his seminal book Das Kapital.

With an international crowd of up to 50 people attending each week, it seems Marx’s appeal is still strong and wide-reaching.  

Chao-Hsuin Tang, 55, from Taiwan, said: “I think his works covers a very full range of human ideas. He is a great thinker.”

Brazilian Pedro Rocha, 34, said: “Although all his concepts might not apply directly today, we do have to go back to his ideas because we have key points to discuss for our society today.”

The tour leaves from Piccadilly Circus at 11am every Sunday. Tickets are available at www.marxwalks.com . 

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Karl Marx The Walking Tour

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KARL MARX THE WALKING TOUR: All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (with Photos)

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Take a tour of Karl Marx’s London

Celebrate the 200th birthday of Karl Marx and the latest book in the Pelican series,  Marx and Marxism ,  with a tour of 10 London locations.

'Karl Marx was the Jesus Christ of the twentieth century.'

One of the most influential and controversial political thinkers in history, Marx's critique of capitalism  continues to resonate today, in the wake of the recurrent financial crises and growing social inequality.

Having lived in London from 1849 until his death in 1883, the capital city features a wealth of famous Marx hot spots: from the room where Karl Marx penned Das Kapital, to the pub where Marx and Engels first discussed The Communist Manifesto, and modern-day tributes. 

Explore Marx's London below and  download the map  to take with you. Scroll down for more information about each location.

4 Anderson Street, Chelsea

The address of Marx’s first home when he first moved to London in 1849. His fourth son, Henry, was born here on Guy Fawkes Night resulting in the nickname Guido.

The Red Lion, Great Windmill Street, Soho (now Be at One)

The Second Congress of the Communist League was held in the upstairs room of the Red Lion pub. It was at this meeting that Marx and Engels were asked to write an action programme for the Communist League. This published in Feb 1848 as the Communist Manifesto.

Spirit of Soho Mural, Broadwick Street, Soho  Created in 1991, the mural depicts St Anne presiding over local famous figures. It shows Karl Marx taking a sip of Coca Cola.

Quo Vadis, Dean Street, Soho

Formerly a brothel and a home to Karl Marx. A blue plaque adorns the frontage of the now restaurant to commemorate the time Marx spent living at 28 Dean Street in the 1850s. A ‘Marx Room’ is available to rent for private functions.

The British Museum Reading Room

One of Marx’s favourite places to write, it is here that he worked on his most celebrated book, Das Kapital. His favourite seat was G7.

The Marx Memorial Library, Clerkenwell Green, Clerkenwell

 Founded in 1933 with the aim of advancing knowledge of Marxism and the working class movement. The building was previously home to Twentieth Century Press. William Morris was an early benefactor of the press, which published several of the earliest English editions of the works of Marx and Engels, and was office to Lenin during his exile in London.

1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park Road, Belsize Park

The address that the Marx family moved to in 1864. The entire area was destroyed by bombing during the Second World War and has since been redeveloped.

41 Maitland Park Road, Belsize Park

Just a few doors down from their previous address, the Marx family moved here in 1875, supposedly because they felt more comfortable in a smaller home. It is here that Karl Marx resided until his death in 1884.

46 Grafton Terrace, Belsize Park (formerly no. 9)

The Marx residence from October 1856-March 1864, after he left Soho. It is the most intact of all the places he has stayed in London, remaining virtually unchanged since the 1860s. During this time, Engels, who lived in Manchester, helped to subsidise Marx’s writing by giving the family £350 a year (about £35,000 today).

10. Highgate Cemetery (East Cemetery), Swain’s Ln, Highgate

The site where Karl Marx is buried. Other notable residents of Highgate Cemetery include authors George Eliot, Christina Rossetti and Douglas Adams, as well as prominent left-wing thinkers, Paul Foot and Ralph Milliband.

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Karl Marx The Walking Tour

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Karl Marx The Walking Tour

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Karl Marx The Walking Tour - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (2024)

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Litro London Walk: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in Camden

This walk was put together by Heiko Khoo, who runs the Karl Marx Walking Tour in Soho, London, a tour that gives a full introduction to Marx’s ideas, legacy and life in London. Find out more at their website .

You can follow this walk on our interactive google map below, or read about the places visited in the accompanying article. nearest tube stations: chalk farm, camden town, kentish town west, gospel oak, hampstead heath..

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels transformed the world. Their ideas about economics, socialism and society changed the way we think forever, influencing everything from how we view history to how nations are governed. It’s a well-known London fact that Karl Marx is buried in Highgate Cemetery, but most of us don’t know much else about one of the world’s most famous German authors’ time in London. Our walk around his old haunts in Camden will take you through Marx’s years here, his relationship with his lifelong friend and financial supporter Friedrich Engels, his greatest writing, and his sad death.

Marx came to London in 1849, exiled from his native Germany and from France as a political threat. He remained here for the rest of his life, learning English so that he could write in for English language newspapers, sometimes living in extreme poverty (only three of his seven children survived into adulthood). He was largely supported by his friend Engels. The headquarters of the Communist League also moved to London, and the city became an international centre of the socialist movement.

Marx was from a middle class family. A writer of fiction as well as his best know philosophical works, Marx had studied in Bonn and Berlin, becoming involved in radical left-wing politics. He began to develop his theory that societies naturally go through a process of class struggle, a war between the owners and the workers, and that capitalism would be overthrown by socialism and then communism. He called for the working classes to fight to bring this about.

Marx and Engels met on the radical scene in Paris in 1843. Engels had already lived in England, working for his family business in Manchester, where he wandered the slums, researching his work The Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844. It was this book that persuaded Marx that the working classes would be crucial in the final revolution that would bring about communism. The two would collaborate on The Communist Manifesto in 1848.

Engels moved with Marx to London, going back to work in Manchester in order to support himself and Marx, whom he saw as an important thinker. During their time in the city they wrote some of their most important works, and were both leading figures in the International socialist movement, putting them under scrutiny from the British authorities.

1. Escaping Poverty: Marx at 36 Grafton Terrace (Formerly no. 9)

Click here for the location. Marx moved to London in 1849 after being exiled from France and Germany as a political thread. His first years in the city were plagued by dire poverty and squalor. In October 1856 the Marx household moved here, to Grafton Terrace near Chalk Farm, escaping the miseries of their former rooms in Dean Street, Soho, where three of their children had died. The move was financed by Marx’s friend Friedrich Engels, who had sold his share in a Manchester factory to fund their joint studies.

The new house had eight rooms, enabling the Marx children to entertain other children from the neighbourhood. Initially, their life was radically improved, but Marx was soon overspending the money he and his wife had inherited from his father, and was soon reduced to begging cash from Engels again. The exterior of building has an appropriate red door, and it remains little changed from when Marx lived there.

The leader of the German workers’ movement, Ferdinand Lassalle, stayed here in 1862 while he was visiting the International Exhibition. He engaged in profligate spending whilst Marx was completely broke, infuriating Marx.

Marx would trundle off from here, taking the omnibus to the British Museum, where he would spend hours in the reading room, researching and writing his great life’s work, Das Kapital .

2. Death of Marx: 44 Maitland Park Road

Click here for the location. The house is gone, but a plaque on a council flat marks the spot where the Marx family, now made up of Marx himself, his wife Jenny von Westphalen, his daughter Eleanor and their maid Helene Demuth, lived from March 1875, a smaller house than their previous address.

Marx was suffering from liver complaints, lung problems, and numerous minor but extremely uncomfortable ailments.

Jenny died on 2 nd December 1881, but Marx was so ill himself that his doctor forbade him to attend the funeral.

Engels called on Marx at half past two in the afternoon on 14 th March. He left Marx in his room for a few minutes, finding him dead on his return. Marx was buried in Highgate Cemetery on 17 th March 1883, his death going largely unnoticed. He was officially a “stateless person”, someone with no nationality, a with only a handful of mourners at his funeral. Engels said in his speech;

“On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep—but forever.”

A hundred years later, 37% of the world was living under governments ruling in Marx’s name. We will never know for certain, but as a man who believed that true social change is brought about by natural social development rather than the actions of “a handful of men”, it seems likely that these regimes would have horrified him.

3. New-found Prosperity: Location of 1 Modena Villas

Click here for the location. The Marx household moved here in March 1864, paying £65 a year in rent. Marx had inherited £820 from Willhelm Wolf, to whom he duly dedicated the first volume of Das Kapital , which was finally ready for publication in 1867 after more than 16 years struggle with the complexities of economics.

In his new-found prosperity, Marx wrote to his uncle Lion Philips claiming that he’d been successfully speculating on the stock market and made more than £400. This was indeed the family’s most prosperous period, when the children could entertain and life was good. It was also Marx’s most productive period in politics and publication.

Marx was hurled into hectic participation in political life when the socialist organisation First International was created in September 1864. Marx’s collaborators organized protests in Hyde Park in 1866, calling for the extension of the male franchise. The Paris Commune of 1871 made Marx the centre of political attention, and he was condemned as the Pope of Communism.

It was during his time here that his clash with the Anarchist leader Michael Bakunin came to a head.  

4. The Good Life: Engels at 122 Regent’s Park Road

Click here for the location. In 1870, Frederich Engels sold his share of his Manchester factory Ermen and Engels, overjoyed at finally giving up the “shitty business”. He made £12,500 from the sale, with which he moved to this house, also supporting the impoverished Marx family with the cash.

Karl Marx’s wife Jenny found the house for the Engels family, writing, “I have now found a house, which charms all of us because of its wonderful open situation. It is next to Primrose Hill, so all the front rooms have the finest and openest view and air. And round about, in the side streets, there are shops of all sorts, so your wife will be able to buy everything herself.”

It was in this house that Engels wrote his main works and ploughed his way through Marx’s illegible scribbles, producing volumes two and three of Das Kapital , as well as his own famous works, Anti-Duhring , Socialism Utopian and Scientific , and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State .

It’s a five minute walk from here to the house Karl Marx and his family lived in at the time, a trip Engels would make daily. They loved to take long walks up to Hampstead Heath for picnics, with a compulsory stop at the Jack Straw’s Castle pub.

British police and foreign spies would observe the comings and goings at this strange house from the front of the pub opposite. Engels was relaxed about the attention.  “The imbeciles evidently think we are manufacturing dynamite, when in reality we are discussing whisky.”

Engels loved the good life, entertaining deep into the night with large quantities of claret and champagne laid on. In 1878, he married Lizzy Burns on her deathbed in the house, the younger sister of his lifelong partner Mary, who had died in 1863.

After Marx died in 1883, Helene Demuth, Marx’s maid, moved worked for Engels. When she died, Sophie Kautsky, the estranged wife of the German Social Democratic leader Karl Kautsky moved in, much to the alarm of Eleanor Marx, who feared she was deliberately isolating Engels.

Engels became a leading figure in the new socialist organization Second International, created in 1889. It eventually included the German Social Democrats, the British Labour Party and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. This house acted as both command centre and intellectual hub of the international Labour movement, with Engels becoming known as “The Grand Lama of the Regent’s Park Road”,

Visiting this house was a pilgrimage for young revolutionaries. All manner of socialist newspapers in many languages would arrive to be studied by Engels every day.

5. Engels’s Death: 41 Regents Park Road

Click here for the location. Engels moved to this house in 1894, but would only spend a year here before his death. He died in this house of cancer of the throat on August 5 1895. His last words were said to have included a confession that Helene Demuth’s son Freddy was Marx’s child, but this story has always been contested.

His body was taken to Woking Crematorium after being given a send-off at Waterloo Station by socialist delegations from all over Europe. A small group of friends and comrades, including Eleanor Marx, Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky rowed out to sea near Eastbourne and scattered his ashes. Engels wanted no monument, statue or tombstone. In the years since his death, thousands of statues of Engels and Marx have been erected all over Eastern Europe, China and the Soviet Union.

Thanks to Heiko Khoo for the design and information for this walk. The  Karl Marx Walking Tour   in Soho, London gives a full introduction to Marx’s ideas, legacy and life in London. Find out more at their  website .

About emily cleaver.

Emily Cleaver is Litro's Online Editor. She is passionate about short stories and writes, reads and reviews them. Her own stories have been published in the London Lies anthology from Arachne Press , Paraxis , .Cent , The Mechanics’ Institute Review , One Eye Grey , and Smoke magazines, performed to audiences at Liars League , Stand Up Tragedy , WritLOUD , Tales of the Decongested and Spark London and broadcasted on Resonance FM and Pagan Radio . As a former manager of one of London’s oldest second-hand bookshops, she also blogs about old and obscure books. You can read her tiny true dramas about working in a secondhand bookshop at smallplays.com and see more of her writing at emilycleaver.net .

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Karl Marx’s London

Much is made of Britain’s reputation for providing refuge for people seeking political asylum but many consider such self-congratulation undeserved, pointing instead to Britain’s relative resistance to taking in Jewish refugees before and during the Second World War, to the small number of Vietnamese boatpeople taken in in the 1970s (in comparison with those taken in by the United States and France) and, more recently, to a governmental reluctance to accept refugees from the Syrian civil war.  And yet the historical record of political dissidents being given sanctuary in Britain is clear, and this seems particularly to have been the case in the 19th century, when arguably the most famous political dissident, Karl Marx, made London his home for the last 34 years of his life.

In this guest blog, Dr Thomas C. Jones,  lecturer in history at the University of Buckingham and  producer of the audio walking tour ‘Marx’s London’ (available as a History Workshop podcast ), outlines Marx’s passage from poverty-stricken Soho to the then suburban Kentish Town.

Refuge from a reactionary continent . . .

A depiction of jubilant crowds in Berlin at the beginning of Germany’s revolution in March 1848

In the aftermath of the failed European revolutions of 1848, thousands of political exiles sought refuge in Britain. Almost alone in Europe, Britain had no significant immigration restrictions and its maintenance of a free press and rights to free speech and assembly made it particularly attractive to the disappointed revolutionaries streaming out of Europe as reaction spread across the continent. By 1852, some 7,000 radical, nationalist, republican, and socialist refugees from France, Hungary, Poland, the German and Italian states, and elsewhere had arrived, clustering above all in London. In their midst were famous individuals like the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, the French socialist Louis Blanc, and the leading light of the Hungarian independence movement Lajos Kossuth. They were joined by many much more obscure exiles, including a thirty-one-year-old philosopher and journalist from the Rhineland region of Prussia in western Germany, Karl Marx. Marx, who had successively been expelled from Prussia, France, and Belgium, was at this time a rising star in the small European socialist movement, having written for several radical publications throughout the 1840s, co-authored The Communist Manifesto with his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels in early 1848. Like many other exiles, Marx expected revolution to break out again soon and for his stay in London to be temporary. In fact, he would remain for the rest of his life.

1 Leicester Street, London, the former site of the German Hotel.

20 Great Windmill Street, the former site the Red Lion pub.

Marx arrived in London in August 1849 and was soon joined by his wife and childhood sweetheart Jenny von Westphalen and their children Jenny, Laura, and Edgar. The family first stayed in the German Hotel near Leicester Square, a popular destination for Germans in London. Their first flat, in Chelsea, proved far too expensive and they were quickly evicted for failing to make rent. On the suggestion of Heinrich Bauer, another German refugee, they moved to Dean Street in Soho, first to a modest two-room flat at number 64 in May 1850 and then in December to number 28, into a flat they managed to expand to three rooms after about a year.

This put the Marxes at the heart of refugee London. A cheap district with a long history of immigration, Soho was a natural gathering place for exiles after 1848, and many English commentators marvelled at the growing multinational population to be found in the neighbourhood’s tangled streets. One article in Charles Dickens’s newspaper Household Words from 1853 remarked on simultaneously encountering ‘ex-representatives of the people’ from France, German ‘scientific conspirators’, ‘swarthy Italians’, Hungarians with ‘glossy beards and small embroidered caps’, and Poles ‘who have been so long fugitives from their country’. Foreign-language newspapers and bookshops soon sprang up to service this population, as did numerous shops, restaurants, taverns and other meeting places owned and frequented by the refugees.

For the roughly 1,000 German refugees in London in the early 1850s, a key social and political centre was the Red Lion pub at 20 Great Windmill Street. This housed the London branch of the Communist League, a small but international organisation for which Marx and Engels had written The Communist Manifesto . It was also home to the German Workers’ Educational Society, which was founded in 1840 and lasted into the twentieth century. Marx was active in both organisations, arguing politics with his fellow refugees in the former and teaching classes on economics and running a relief committee for poor exiles in the latter. A short walk from Dean Street, the Red Lion was also a welcome social outlet where Marx drank, smoked, dined, and played chess with his countrymen. More generally, the Marxes enjoyed an active social life in Soho, often hosting gatherings of exiled or visiting Germans, frequenting the district’s pubs and restaurants, and taking weekly walks on Sundays to picnic on Hampstead Heath.

The site of Marx’s home at 28 Dean Street.

The ‘blue plaque’ was put up by the Greater London Council to commemorate his residence.

The cartoon ‘A Court for King Cholera’ from “Punch” in 1852, depicting squalor in urban districts like Soho.

A photograph from 1864 of (left to right) Marx and Engels standing and Marx’s daughters Jenny, Eleanor and Laura seated.

The site of Marx’s home on Maitland Park Road, near Kentish Town.

A commemorative plaque set up by Camden Council.

Yet, as the 1850s wore on, the family’s fortunes improved. Marx gained steadier income as a European correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune , the largest newspaper in the world at the time. Between 1852 and 1862 he and Engels, who provided crucial assistance with Marx’s written English, published 487 articles explaining European and global affairs to an American audience, often earning more than £100 a year in the process. In 1856, Jenny received two bequests worth a combined £270. These were substantial sums in that era and allowed the Marxes and their surviving children, Jenny, Laura, and Eleanor, to leave Soho.

In September 1856 they settled in an eight-room house in 9 Grafton Terrace, in Kentish Town. This was a newly urbanised neighbourhood, one of the areas engulfed and developed by the rapid growth of London facilitated by the railways. It therefore had the feel of a building site, and Jenny complained that ‘one had to pick one’s way over heaps of rubbish and in rainy weather the sticky red soil caked to one’s boots so that it was after a tiring struggle and with heavy feet that one reached our house’. Yet these difficulties were outweighed by the benefits of increased space, giving Marx room for a proper study and privacy for the by-now adolescent girls. Indeed, they would remain in the area for the rest of their lives. In March 1864, as Marx inherited a combined £1,500 from his mother and from his friend Wilhelm Wolf, the family moved to a nearby house at 1 Modena Villas. The house’s £65 annual rent and £4 8s property rates (£4.40 in today’s money – but worth a lot more at the time) were substantial and would have given Marx the right to vote even before the widening of the franchise by the Reform Act in 1867, had he been a British citizen.

18 Greek Street, where the International’s General Council met.

‘The British Museum: the interior of the reading room, in use. Wood engraving by [I.C.] after C. Gregory, 1874’ by Charles Gregory. Credit © Wellcome Collection

Marx’s tomb in Highgate Cemetery, where he, Jenny, their daughter Eleanor, grandson Harry Longuet, and Helene Demuth are buried.

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Karl Marx The Walking Tour

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KARL MARX THE WALKING TOUR (London) - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go