The world’s greatest writers did not simply live in their cities — they transformed them, embedding invisible layers of meaning into streets, cafés, and bridges that remain long after the authors are gone. Walking in the footsteps of James Joyce through Dublin, or tracing Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment across St Petersburg’s canal bridges, or following Jorge Luis Borges through Buenos Aires’s library corridors, changes how you see those cities entirely. This literary walking tour guide follows the Bloomsday route through Dublin as its centrepiece, showing what it means to walk a city through the literature it produced.
About This Walking Tour
Magellan and Greyhound’s Bloomsday episode follows the route of Leopold Bloom — the central character of James Joyce’s Ulysses — through the streets of Dublin on June 16, the date on which the entire novel is set. The walk takes in the key locations that Joyce mapped with extraordinary precision into his 1922 masterwork: the Martello Tower at Sandycove where the novel opens, Davy Byrnes pub on Duke Street where Bloom eats his Gorgonzola sandwich and drinks his glass of Burgundy in the famous Chapter 8, Glasnevin Cemetery where the funeral procession passes, and the streets of the city centre that Bloom traverses over the course of a single day.
The video captures Dublin as it exists now alongside the Dublin Joyce described — the Georgian terraces, the canal bridges, the pub interiors, and the bookshops — showing how little and how much has changed since 1904, the year in which Ulysses is set. For any visitor planning their own literary walk, this episode functions as both a visual guide to the route and an introduction to why the Bloomsday walk has been made by Joyce devotees every June 16 for decades. The channel’s travel-narrative approach keeps the content accessible without reducing the literary significance of the locations.
Highlights of the Literary Walk
Davy Byrnes pub on Duke Street is the most famous single stop on the Bloomsday walk. Joyce described Bloom ordering a Gorgonzola cheese sandwich with a glass of Burgundy here, and the pub — which has operated since 1889 — still serves both on Bloomsday each year. The interior retains its Art Deco renovation from 1941 and the walls are lined with murals commissioned by the pub to commemorate the Joyce connection.
7 Eccles Street, the fictional home of Leopold and Molly Bloom, no longer exists as a building but the front door is preserved at the James Joyce Centre on North Great George’s Street. The James Joyce Centre itself occupies a beautifully restored 18th-century Georgian townhouse and operates guided walking tours of the city from Thursday to Saturday. Glasnevin Cemetery, where the fictional funeral scene is set, is also the real burial place of Daniel O’Connell, Michael Collins, and Éamon de Valera — the walk through its Victorian Victorian monument-filled avenues connects literary fiction to real Irish history.
Beyond Dublin, the literary walking concept extends to Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury in London (46 Gordon Square remains the address of the former Bloomsbury Group), Dostoyevsky’s St Petersburg (where scholars have traced every step of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment), and Jorge Luis Borges’s Buenos Aires, where he worked as a librarian at the National Public Library despite being nearly blind in his later years.
A Brief History of Literary Walking
The tradition of purposeful urban wandering has roots in the flâneur philosophy developed in 19th-century Paris by Charles Baudelaire and later theorised by Walter Benjamin — the idea that observant, unhurried walking through city streets was itself a form of cultural and intellectual practice. Jane Jacobs extended this thinking in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, arguing that walkable mixed-use streets were the foundation of healthy communities.
Bloomsday on June 16 is celebrated annually in Dublin as the date on which Ulysses is set. Devotees dress in Edwardian costume and walk the routes of Leopold Bloom through the city, reading passages aloud at significant locations. The celebration began informally in 1954 when a small group of Irish writers met at the Martello Tower and has grown into a global event observed in cities from Tokyo to Buenos Aires. James Joyce chose June 16, 1904 as his date because it was the day he first walked out with Nora Barnacle, the woman who would become his lifelong partner and wife. Dostoyevsky mapped the St Petersburg of Crime and Punishment with such precision that scholars have been able to trace every step Raskolnikov takes in the novel — a walk that is approximately 3 kilometres in the Haymarket district around Stolyarny Lane.
Practical Tips
The Dublin literary walk is most atmospheric on or around June 16 (Bloomsday) when the James Joyce Centre and many pubs lay on special events, readings, and guided tours. Outside of Bloomsday, the James Joyce Centre on North Great George’s Street offers guided walking tours departing Thursday through Saturday at 11am; tickets should be booked in advance. Davy Byrnes pub on Duke Street is open daily and welcomes visitors. Most of the key Bloomsday locations are within a 30-minute walk of each other in central Dublin, easily managed on foot. Comfortable shoes are essential for Dublin’s Georgian cobblestones. The National Library of Ireland on Kildare Street has an extensive Joyce archive and free exhibitions.
Watch & Explore More
For more literary and cultural walking tours, Magellan and Greyhound’s full Ireland series covers the country in depth. Discover more city walks at @walkingtoursvideoscom. On this site, the Dublin walking tour through Temple Bar and Phoenix Park pairs perfectly with this literary route, and the Prague walking tour covers the Kafka city in full.