In these more liberal times, any corner of London has a gay bar or two. My favourite walk, however, centres on the heart of modern gay London - Soho - and takes in some of the prettier streets and squares. They're historical as well, obviously, but we are a shallow people, so pretty is best.
The sophistication of Regent Street and Piccadilly meets the plastic pop world of Leicester Square at Piccadilly Circus. You'll have plenty of time there as you'll be trapped behind large numbers of Italian students. The naked figure of Eros stands over an area that (and I'm no size queen) is smaller than you'd expect. Less Times Square, more Village Green. But few village greens will have seen the staggering number of prostitutes that have made this area notorious.
Rent boys were plying their trade here long before the arrival of Eros. In the 18th and 19th centuries, 'Mollies' and 'Marjories', as male prostitutes were known, were common in the area. Nowadays they don't seem to be prevalent; or maybe it's just that I'm distracted by all those Italian students.
Across the Circus is the glittering world of the Criterion. The theatre, which has a wonderful tiled interior, was the West End home of Joe Orton's Loot in the Sixties.
Lillywhites, a large sports shop, has no obvious appeal, except to lesbians, who might want to loiter in the tennis and golf departments.
Behind the theatres of Shaftesbury Avenue are the media whores, the regular whores, the Rainbow flags, the Poppers and Posers, that are Soho.
Take a left up Great Windmill Street, to the sight of the famous Windmill Theatre, which made the bold claim 'we never close' during the Blitz, continuing to present their strange mix of comedians and naked women as the bombs rained down.
Nowadays, it's the modern equivalent, minus the comedy: a table-dancing club.
Where Rupert Street meets Brewer Street is Prowler, our very own gay department store. Don't get too excited: I mean, how many departments can there be? Videos, magazines and skimpy T-shirts for the disco bunnies.
Across Brewer Street is the famous Madame Jo Jo's. This is essentially a drag bar that puts on a show in a faded velvet setting. Whenever I've been, it's always been full of businessmen and their secretaries/mistresses, who've come to stare at the transvestite waitresses, in a sort of gay zoo way.
Next to Jo Jo's is Escape. It's alright as live-music drinking holes go, but I loved it so much more as the Piano Bar. This was a late-night bar where chorus boys, rent boys, waiters finishing their shifts and older men working their way through all the others would sip warm beer while watching a strange mix of drag queens and people from West End musicals ritually slaughter classic songs. Bliss.
Take a right along Brewer Street. You'll pass the back entrance (I'm saying nothing) of Village. This was the first bar to change the gay scene in London. There were clear glass windows, it was nicely decorated. It was assuming acceptance and tolerance in a way the other bars - blacked-out windows, sticky carpets - weren't. It was a tremendous step forward to get away from the self-imposed shame of the old-style bars.
Then cross Wardour Street and end up in Old Compton Street, Soho's main drag that can satisfy practically every gay need. The Admiral Duncan pub is here, where a bomb exploded one Friday evening in 1999 - the perpetrator was waging a hate campaign against gays and ethnic minorites (bombs also went off in Brixton and Brick Lane), but also killed whites and straight people, obviously failing to understand that the various communities can and do mix.
The first cross street you come to is Dean Street. The corner here was the site of a failed gay peep show. Presumably it didn't work because we wouldn't pay for something that's available free in public toilets.
On Frith Street is the Bohemian nirvana that is Bar Italia. Like most things that Londoners really enjoy, it reminds us of being abroad. This building is also where John Logie Baird demonstrated television for the first time in 1926.
Frith Street leads you into Soho Square. Now, if you're wondering what's gay about this place, just come here in summer and see all the bike messengers with their shirts off. It's like a Bruce Weber wet dream. However, be warned - with most bike messengers, it's a case of admiring their package, but don't expect them to deliver.
History lovers should visit 19 Cleveland Street (which runs parallel to Tottenham Court Road), the site of a notorious male brothel where Queen Victoria's grandson and heir presumptive to the throne, Prince Eddie, along with other members of the aristocracy, got involved in a sex scandal in the 1880s.
Walk down Great Russell Street and into Bloomsbury Square. Number 20 is where Gertrude Stein spent a winter in 1902 recovering from an unhappy lesbian ménage à trois. If you glance to your left down Bedford Place, you can understand why we make so many costume dramas in this country - the sets are so cheap.
In Marchmont Street, at No 66, is London's best gay bookshop, Gay's the Word. The staff are incredibly knowledgeable and stock a huge range of titles. At the bottom of Marchmont Street, walk on to Russell Square - notorious as a gay cruising area, which comes alive after the pubs shut. Alan Hollinghurst, in his book The Swimming Pool, pays homage to the area.
Local residents aren't that thrilled and Camden Council has tried everything - lights, chopping down all the shrubbery, there is even a plan to put up big gates. Of course, what they fail to realise is that gay men are like salmon - we must return to where we've spawned before.
Bedford Way leads off the square, and it was at No 31 that Oscar Wilde spent his last few hours in England on 19 May 1897 before setting off for his self-imposed exile in Paris following his jail term for homosexuality.
Sorry to finish on a depressing note, but perhaps it is fitting since Wilde's story reminds us just how much has changed for gay men and lesbians living in this city, while also reminding us how much still needs to change.
Three more urban trawls...by those who know the city best
Janet Street-Porter: Clerkenwell
As a long-time resident of Clerkenwell, Street-Porter is well placed to reveal just how much the area has changed in the 30 years since she moved in. From a warren of engravers, clock repairers and furniture makers in the 17th century, Clerkenwell has transformed into London's answer to New York's SoHo, with loft living aplenty and some of the most expensive real estate in the capital. 'There are too many wine bars and not enough grocery stores,' says S-P. 'When I moved in the area was dying, now it's buzzing, so I'm prepared to sit through the birth pangs.' Highlights include the Karl Marx Memorial Library, the Quality Chop House and Smithfield meat market.
Margaret Drabble: Grand Union Canal and W10
The novelist chooses a lyrical walk along the Grand Union Canal in West London, dodging the joggers and the cyclists and the 'prehistoric' herons. Of the 'extraordinarily handsome' gasometers that loom over her, she writes: ' You can sometimes hear them creak and grind and clank as a few thousand North Kensingtonians cook their Sunday lunch.' Drabble passes the foreboding gothic Wormwood Scrubs prison, before ducking under the concrete slabs of the Westway A40, 'gazing up from time to time at the great dripping underbelly of the monster'. As a self-professed lover of desperate urban wasteland, the gentrified environs of Notting Hill, or 'Martin Amis-land', as she calls it, mark the end of her interest and perambulations.
Lucinda Lambton: Kensal Green Cemetery
'Nothing could be more enlivening than a walk through Kensal Green Cemetery,' writes Lambton. 'It is a place that makes your spirits - like those of the remarkable company that lie about you - reach for the skies.' And what company. During the one-hour meander, we visit Thackeray and Trollope the novelists, Brunel the engineer and Blondin the tightrope walker. WH Smith has a marble book atop his memorial, while most poignant perhaps is the grave of Marigold Churchill, Winston's daughter, who died of meningitis aged three. There was once a bench opposite, where Britain's wartime leader would sadly sit.
