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Before craft beer, before the taprooms, before the Saturday crowds with their route maps, Bermondsey smelled of rotting hides, urine, and dog filth. In short, industry!

Episode 11 of Publicity - Your London Travel Toolkit pulls us south of the Thames to trace the evolution of one of London's most overlooked neighborhoods.

From stinky medieval tanneries banished across the river by the City of London, the world's largest brewery, Victorian railway arches built of sixty million bricks, post-war council estates that held a community together through decades of industrial collapse, to the night a furious Irish cheesemonger returned from New York, rented an arch on Druid Street, and accidentally started a revolution.

The Bermondsey Beer Mile gets decoded, Publicity style. Not just as a fun Saturday crawl, but as the latest chapter in a five-hundred-year story about what happens when a place is cheap enough and overlooked enough for the right people to do something important in it.

The episode where a railway arch becomes the most honest expression of a pub in centuries, and where the smell of malt derives from the same story as those nose curling tanning pits, except now we have Instagram.

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Step into the bustling streets of old East London, where the air is thick with history and the scent of freshly baked pies, and discover the story behind one of the city’s most iconic comfort foods, now part of Britain's "Heritage Foods Movement".

This bonus episode serves up more than just pie and mash—it’s a journey through generations of grit, flavor, and tradition, from eel-slinging street vendors to the tiled institutions still standing today. You’ll meet the legendary families who built this culinary empire, uncover the surprising origins of that vivid green “liquor,” and feel the pulse of a city that fed its people fast, cheap, and with heart. By the end, you won’t just be hungry—you’ll be planning your own pilgrimage to London, ready to pull up a marble-topped table, order a “two and two,” and taste a living piece of history.

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Join Publicity – The Guidebook Gap in our two-mile walking tour of Charlie Chaplin’s London neighborhood. Our walk maps how institutional poverty and family chaos produced the raw material of Chaplin’s art.

We’ll visit pubs, music hall sites, residences, markets, and street art in Walworth, Kennington, Lambeth, and Camberwell. Discover how Chaplin’s character of The Tramp was not invented in California but assembled from lived experience on these specific streets.

We begin with Chaplin's disputed birth on East Street in 1889, run through his parents' separation, mother Hannah's mental collapse, the workhouse, the pauper school at Hanwell, and the death of his alcoholic father.

We then follow Chaplin’s professional growth from a childhood spent absorbing crowd mechanics at the Canterbury Music Hall, to Fred Karno's mime-based training at the Fun Factory in Camberwell, where the grammar of silent performance was drilled into him six years before Hollywood needed it.

We pivot through Chaplin’s American ascent, The Tramp's debut at Keystone in 1914, the political courage of The Great Dictator, and the revocation of his re-entry permit at sea in 1952, before closing with his honorary Oscar, his 1975 knighthood, and that stolen coffin.

At our final stop at the Chaplin Mosaics at Chandler Hall on Lambeth Walk where we consider that pub back rooms created music hall, music hall created Chaplin, and Chaplin by removing dialogue, turned a South London street education into a global art form.

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In 1850, a Victorian journalist walked into Bermondsey and wanted to head back for the door. His senses assaulted by raw hides, tanning pits, human urine, pigeon and dog feces, slaked lime, and ground oak bark.

The unmistakable fragrance of a neighborhood that had been turning dead animals into leather for five hundred years.

Today it's barley malt over dead cows and dog feces, a significant upgrade for the community.

How do you get from bovines to barley, cows to craft beer in one postcode? We’re going to decode that in this episode.

Our story involves a cheesemonger who went to New York and came home furious. An Austrian general who made the catastrophic decision to tour a brewery full of people who despised him. And a working-class community that held an entire neighborhood together long enough for something remarkable to happen inside it.

It's a pub crawl, of sorts. By the end I'll make the case that a taproom in a Victorian railway arch isn't a departure from the London pub. It's the most honest evolution of it in fifty years and built on a logic that's been running in this neighborhood for half a millennium. Find the space nobody else wants and do something essential in it.

This is Publicity – The Guidebook Gap. I’m your host, Expat Andy, broadcasting from Miami in the Sunshine State. My job is to be your insider guide to the London that doesn’t make it onto the highlight reel - the London that’s hidden in plain sight, decoded through its pubs – if you know where to look.

Pull out your walking shoes. Episode Eleven - The Bermondsey Beer Mile, Going The Extra Mile drops Monday April 20 wherever you get your podcasts.

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A late 19th century South London childhood shaped by poverty, illness, and instability. These are the tough beginnings of a generational creative talent that would emerge into global stardom, and exile.

On these South London streets, and in the backrooms of its pubs, the music hall begins. Unruly, unforgiving audiences. If you wanted attention, you earned it. This is where Charlie Chaplin learned his craft – born out of survival.

A performer at aged five. Workhouses at age seven. On stage again before age ten. By his twenties, Chaplin leaves for America to join a new start up industry - moving pictures. Within years, he becomes the most recognizable figure on earth, a self-made man.

The Tramp. The walk, the resilience, the quiet defiance. It originated not in California, but South London. In the next episode of Publicity – The Guidebook Gap, we’ll walk Charlie Chaplin’s formative years through Walworth, Kennington, and Lambeth. The workhouse, music halls, eviction addresses, and the pub where he last saw his father. Every stop a chapter in how a South London kid in borrowed clothes became the most recognizable person on earth.

Charlie Chaplin’s London - Poverty. Pubs & Music Halls, Episode 10 available Tuesday April 7 wherever you get your podcasts.

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It's all about London's great street food in this episode. We start with a famous Earl who named the humble sandwich. John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich, is remembered not for his long career at the Admiralty, nor for giving Hawaii its first English name, but for a piece of bread with meat inside it.

We follow that legacy into the broader story of London's street food - from Roman oyster shells in the mud of Londinium to the eel pie shops of the Victorian East End, the surprisingly global origins of fish and chips, and the foods that didn't survive long enough to be romanticized.

We visit the George & Vulture Pub, Cornhill, home of the Earl of Sandwich's Hellfire Club, The Red Lion, Barnes - the pub running the world's biggest sausage roll competition.

We trace the line from a jellied eel to the birth of British rock and roll, and ask why the oyster went from the food of the poor to the food of the privileged while the whelk just disappeared.

Plus the best street food markets in London, and where to find the city's finest fish and chips.

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Bite Me – The Upper Crust & Underbelly of London Street Food

April 1779. A man waits outside a London theatre with two loaded pistols. A lady he’s enamored with is about to leave the building. The problem is she’s the mistress of another, well known man. What happens next will scandalize the city.

Who is this other well-known man?

You probably had at least one of these snacks named after him already this week.

This is Publicity – The Guidebook Gap. I’m Expat Andy, broadcasting from Miami in the sunshine state. My job is to be your insider guide to the London that doesn’t make it onto the highlight reel - the London that’s hidden in plain sight, if you know where to look… History, culture, pubs, and all.

Our next Episode, Episode 9, is titled Bite Me – The Upper Crust & Underbelly of London Street Food.

It’s about London street food – the portable kind you eat with your hands, on the go.

It’s about John Montagu - the Fourth Earl of Sandwich. Hellfire Club member. First Lord of the Admiralty. The man who accidentally named Hawaii. The man who died broke. And the man whose defining contribution to human civilization may have been invented at a gambling table – or a desk - depending on which version of the story you prefer.

It’s about the East End of London, and the eel. The only creature that could survive in the filthy Victorian Thames. And the food culture it produced that’s still - just barely alive today.

It’s about Greggs. And Pret. And fish and chips. And why “as cheap as chips” no longer means anything.

It’s about London’s famous food markets such as Borough Market. Their Cornish pasties, pork pies, sausage rolls, and scotch eggs.

And it’s about a pub named after a food, that became famous for something else entirely. It launched the careers of the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, and Eric Clapton in the process.

London’s food. London’s myths. London’s pubs.

Launching wherever you get your podcasts Monday March 23.

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We're off to Marylebone - using the neighborhood's dark origins as a launch pad for a story of spectacular reinvention.

Our walk begins at Marble Arch, where a barely-noticed pavement plaque marks the site of Tyburn Tree - London's primary gallows for nearly six hundred years and the execution ground for over 50,000 people.

From there, we traces how the area shed its grim "Tyburn" identity through a medieval rebranding around a church dedicated to St Mary, eventually becoming the elegant Georgian grid of Harley Street, Portland Place, and Baker Street laid out by the Portland and Portman estates in the 18th century.

Against that backdrop, Expat Andy guides listeners through a carefully chosen set of historic pubs - including the 1791 Barley Mow on Dorset Street, one of the last free houses in central London, with its rare surviving Victorian drinking booths - weaving in characters ranging from executed highwaymen and Catholic martyrs to Charles Babbage and the piano player Tony "Fingers" Pearson, who has been holding court at the Golden Eagle on Marylebone Lane since 1988.

Marylebone's pubs are the living memory of a neighborhood that reinvented itself so thoroughly it nearly erased its own history. Its pubs are the best place to find what was buried underneath.