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City Poems

City Poems uses satellite navigation to guide Londoners and tourists through the streets of central London through relevant poems.

Wherever you are standing in London with an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, the City Poems app will tell you how many metres you are away from poetry places and events.

Poems tell us more about street life than any history book. Tales from past centuries illuminate the present whether a seventeenth century pub crawl, a football match erupting in Covent Garden, a man allowed “one for the road” at a Holborn pub before being hanged, advice on red light districts, a public burning in Smithfield or the verse behind the statues in Trafalgar Square.

City Poems guides users through the streets of London as satellite navigation unearths its buried stories.

Entries include the execution of the criminal Jonathan Wild (one of the inspirations for John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera), public burnings in Smithfield (“His guts filled a barrel”) or the curious stories behind the statues in Trafalgar Square.

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