大象传媒

1. Apart from a brief spell in West Sussex, Blake, born in Soho in November 1757, lived his life in various homes in the capital, both north and south of the river. Only 17 South Molton Street, however, has survived the demolition ball.

Blake portrait by Thomas Phillips, 1807

2. A contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge, his poetry is taught in schools in works such as 'The Tyger' from his Songs of Innocence and Experience, causing children over the years to complain about the rubbish rhyme of "what immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry".

3. Blake the painter, meanwhile, can be found on permanent display in Tate Britain, which created the first ever Blake Gallery in the 1920s.

Blake's Nebuchadnezzar, courtesy of Tate

4. Keen-eyed viewers would have registered him at number 38 in the 大象传媒's recent public vote for the 100 Greatest Britons - unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge and fellow painters Constable and Turner, none of whom made the list.

5. Blake is loved at least in part for the poem that became the hymn 'Jerusalem' during World War I. Its indelible opening line about feet is famously matched by its "chariot of fire" and "bow of burning gold" references. At the time of its conception, however, he was also awaiting trial for supposedly making insulting remarks about the king and praising Napoleon to a soldier.

visions of God

6. His image as a wild man of art, an outsider and dissenter, has boosted his appeal over the years, as have the facts of his birth and upbringing: the son of a hosier, who came from the wrong class to be an artist and trained instead as a humble engraver.

The interior of 17 South Molton Street

7. As a writer and thinker Blake espoused the value of humanity and played a crucial role in developing our understanding of the 'sixth sense' of imagination. "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite", he said in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, influencing the writer Aldous Huxley and a certain LA rock band called The Doors among others.

8. So radical were his thoughts that many considered him mad. A view not helped by Blake's claims to have seen visions from an early age of God, various angels and, on one occasion, Satan himself, in an encounter on the staircase of his South Molton Street home.

Blake-inspired mosaics in a SE1 tunnel

9. The final years of his life, until his near pennyless death in 1827, were spent behind the Savoy hotel in what was then Fountain Court, an alleyway referred to today as Savoy Buildings.

10. Superficially, London has changed a great deal since his day. But to his admirers, Blake's spirit still hovers in the streets and alleys and in the air. A guided walk regularly visits his haunts in central London, while a two-year project in Lambeth has created a series of Blake-inspired mosaics in a tunnel near the poet's former home in Hercules Road SE1.

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