About

A walking tour of the palaces along the English Embankment and the wider Kolomna district — the historically English and diplomatic quarter of central Petersburg. The route covers aristocratic and merchant mansions that most tourist itineraries skip, and reads the district as a cultural phenomenon: the specifically Anglo-Russian layer of the 19th-century Petersburg upper class. Guides cover the lives and family stories of the residents — the diplomats and expatriate families of the imperial period, whose relationships and reputations were a specific part of the district's social history. In Russian; the visual environment does much of the work.