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In 1587 a young man from the provinces came to London. Twenty-three year old Will from Warwickshire wanted to be a writer, and in Queen Elizabeth’s beautiful and bloody, marvellous and murderous metropolis, theatre was the new sensation.

But the London that called out to William Shakespeare was a far different city from today’s megalopolis. During the last four centuries a great fire and a blitz destroyed most of Elizabethan London. Fortunately Shakespeare sleuths can still find places that cheated fire and war - places where our man lived and worked.

The Bard’s life is a marvellous mystery. Hard facts are so few that we have to look to the writing to find the man. Many of his fabulous characters were inspired by the bawdy, bibulous Elizabethans who were William’s friends and neighbours along the south bank of the Thames. This area was a Tudor Las Vegas-cum-Hollywood, and Shakespeare lived at its heart.

Tudor Londoners drank ale, never the poisonous local water - so our first stop is the George Inn. Hidden behind an unpromising sooty façade, this sixteenth century pub was built around three sides of a courtyard. Before Elizabethan impresarios saw the profit in building theatres, plays were performed in inns. The audience stood on the double-tiered balconies, the players working the crowd from below.

The George was one of Shakespeare’s locals. He may have watched plays here, supping the evening away after the show. Four centuries later it’s still a working pub, restaurant and – in summer – it still stages plays. So before starting our walk down the South Bank, sit in The George’s high pine-settles which divide the tables in the smallest of the bars.

Westward down the riverbank is London’s oldest gothic building: Southwark Cathedral. In Elizabethan times this was St Mary Overy's - Shakespeare’s parish church. In Tudor England everybody went to church and William must have attended service here many times.

But St Mary’s held a special place in Shakespeare’s heart. On a cold December morning in 1607 he buried his brother Edmond here. Edmond wanted to be an actor and followed William to London. But by twenty seven he was dead. We sense William’s grief by the way he commemorated his brother. Edmond was buried in the choir, at the cost of twenty shillings - a sum which his brother - a gentleman writer - could afford. Edmond’s gravestone still sits in Southwark Cathedral choir.

William’s walk to work was westward along the Thames path - from his lodgings by the cathedral to Bankside. Bankside was the Elizabethan Broadway, home to the Rose, Swan and Globe theatres. The playhouses competed for audiences with bear fights, riverbank prostitutes and thronging taverns.

Secreted among the space-age art galleries and glassy penthouses of modern Bankside is London’s tribute to Shakespeare: the new Globe theatre. William was a shareholder in the original Globe. Built in 1599, the “wooden O” shaped playhouse charmed audiences with his celebrated plays until puritan frenzy closed the theatres and The Globe crumbled into the Bankside mud.

Four hundred years later actor Sam Wanamaker came to London from the US. During a homage to Shakespeare’s great playhouse, he was shocked by the meagre memorial plaque marking the spot. Wanamaker was determined to crate a fitting tribute, and the idea to rebuild Shakespeare’s Globe was born. The new Globe is made from the same green-oak and horse-hair plaster as William’s theatre, and covered by the only thatched roof in London (thatched roofs were banned after the great fire which destroyed the city).

So the Globe graces London’s riverscape once again. Its dynamic theatre company offering Shakespeare’s plays in the theatre they were written for. The “groundlings” are back too, audiences who pay around £5 ($8) to stand and watch the play. In Shakespeare’s time these were the ordinary people who paid one penny to come in. They would drink and shout and, with only one set of clothes and an aversion to bathing, on a hot day the seething mass would not smell so good, earning them nickname of “the penny stinkers”.

During the summer season of plays the more fragrant modern groundlings are encouraged to cheer and jeer the actors. They can also visit a Shakespeare exhibition, tour the theatre and tour the original foundations of the Rose theatre.

Across the river Thames at Victoria embankment is a building Shakespeare knew: Middle Temple Hall. A survivor of the great fire of London, this oak-timbered hall with its imposing gothic wooden ceiling, detailed carvings, and ornamental armour was home to English lawyers.

In one of those elusive glimpses of Shakespeare’s life, on the 2nd February 1602 a lawyer at the Middle Temple wrote is his diary: "At our feast wee had a play called "Twelve Night or What You Will." He didn’t say if the performance was a success, but as Elizabeth I was in the audience, it’s pretty certain that William was there to see if the Queen enjoyed the play.

A short walk along the north bank of the Thames is another building William would recognize: Westminster Abbey. By the time Shakespeare left London to retire to Stratford in 1612, the glove maker’s son was the most popular writer in England. William would certainly have visited the Abbey, but he could never have imagined that his statue would stand in poet’s corner.

Most people associate Shakespeare with Stratford where he was born and buried, but his working life was spent in London. Londoners inspired his stories and feted him for his tales. And though the city is much changed, if you spend few moments in the places where he lived and worked, you can conjure up the spirit of this writer.

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