Matthew Beaumont is a Professor of English at UCL and the author of Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (2015) and The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City (2020). This podcast leads listeners into the streets of Bloomsbury and nearby St. Giles, where it reveals that, in the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Dickens, feeling lost and lonely, roamed the city at night, confronting his personal demons and recording the presence, still of course all too visible in the early twenty-first century, of the poor and the homeless.

Find out more about the Faculty of Arts & Humanities induction for new and returning students, Inspiring Minds 2020, at https://bit.ly/inspiring-minds.