• Stonehenge & Salisbury Explorer Day
  "you'll never see anything like it again"

• Behind Closed Doors
• Historic Greenwich - "Versailles with a riverfront"
• Secret London
• The National Gallery Tour 
• The Beatles "In My Life" Walk
  
  

• "Somewhere Else" London
• Old London - the Mediaeval to Georgian City
• Old Westminster - 1,000 Years of History
• Literary Bloomsbury & the Old Museum Quarter
  
  
   

• The Hidden Pubs of Old London Town
• Ghosts of the Old City
• Jack the Ripper Haunts
  
  

• Additional London Walks on Selected Tuesdays
  
  Okay, now scroll on down for full details of each of Tuesday's London Walks...

10.30 am on Tuesdays (Except Dec. 29th)
from Covent GardenTube

Let's hear it for the life-giving tingle of new experience. For the tonic of delightful discovery. For a walk that shakes you gently, like a sieve, and drops you into places of long ago...places that you probably wouldn't get into off your own bat. And into is the mot juste. Because this walk has cracked open some doors. We're going into these places. Into the the Floral Hall for a view that will spike your Wow! Factor Graph.

Into "St. Petersburg-on-Thames". Up Nelson's Stairs. Into the venerable - and passing strange - RAF church. Into a stunning early 17th-century room that Shakespeare may have frequented. Into the old Bank of England - be prepared to gasp with wonder! And to crown it all, we'll go into the Royal Courts of Justice to watch a trial (when the Royal Courts are in session). And here's the ace in the hole: Tom, who guides this walk, is a barrister. And Brian, the other guide, read Law at university. N.B., cameras and tape recorders are not permitted in the Royal Courts of Justice.

The Behind Closed Doors Walk takes place
every* Tuesday at 10.30 am

*Except December 29th

Meet Tom or Brian just outside the exit of
Covent GardenTube.

Covent GardenTube is on
the Piccadilly Line

Guided by Tom or Brian

10.40 am on Tuesdays
from Tower HillTube

We begin with an overture: the best boat ride in London. The Tower, Tower Bridge, Docklands, and then, three miles downstream, the Thames bursts into one of the sublime sights of English architecture: "the most stately procession of buildings in England." Moments later, another frisson: the mast and spars, the web of rigging of the Cutty Sark, the hauntingly beautiful old tea clipper. As the poet said, "they mark our passage as a race of men; earth will not see such ships again." Welcome to Greenwich! Maritime Greenwich. Royal Greenwich. Greenwich the home of time and centre of space. The Greenwich of crooked lanes, bric-a-brac shops, and bustling antique and flea markets. Greenwich the "green village." Greenwich of the Queen's House, Old Royal Observatory, Royal Naval College, the world's largest nautical museum, the Millennium Dome, and the Cutty Sark itself! Gillian or Nick or Chris or Hilary will turn the pages of its history for you.

The Historic Greenwich Walk takes place:

every Tuesday at 10.40 am,
every Thursday at 10.40 am,
and every Sunday at 10.40 am.

N.B. The boat trip costs £3.50 (a huge discount);
Richard, Gillian, Chris, Nick or Hilary go with you on the boat.

 Guided on Tuesdays by Gillian or Chris 
 Guided on Thursdays by Nick or Hilary 
 Guided on Sundays by Chris

Meet your guide just outside Tower HillTube.

Tower HillTube is on
the Circle & District Lines

---

10.45 am on Tuesdays
from Chancery LaneTube, exit 3



"I love a little bit of secret history", said Dr. Johnson. He would have been well served on this walk through his old neighbourhood. Its concealed courts and alleys are keyholes into London's past, harbouring everything from traces of Roman London to a forgotten Norman crypt; and from the musty cells of an ancient prison to a beautiful but virtually hidden 300-year-old courtyard and hall. Let alone some fine old churches and a venerable inn or two. And betwixt and between Hilary conjures up - out of the bend of a road, the shape of a doorway, an old badge on a wall, a place-name, a custom or ritual, even out of a turn of phrase - a millennium and more of London's history.

The Secret London Walk takes place
every Tuesday morning at 10.45 am.

Meet just outside exit 3 of Chancery LaneTube
Look for Hilary...she'll be right in front of these buildings:

Yes, they're Elizabethan - the finest half-timbered buildings in London!

Chancery LaneTube is on
theCentral Line

Guided by Hilary

10.45 am on Tuesdays
from EmbankmentTube

"You've been nailed again, eye-popped. Life has just been adjusted."

As the wonderful Simon Schama puts it, "Great art has dreadful manners. The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure and then proceed in short order to rearrange your sense of reality." And on that note (warning?) you are cordially invited to a levee withe the likes of Rembrandt, Rubens, Leonardo da Vinci, Van Dyck, Goya, Constable, Turner, Monet, Renoir and Van Gogh.
  
Which is by way of saying, "In the National Gallery, as perhaps nowhere else, you can walk through seven centuries of European painting, on the mountain-tops. And, as always on the mountains, it's useful to have a guide, a companion who can spot things that you might miss and trigger thoughts that might not occur to you on your own." Let alone the fact that the National - "the single best picture gallery in the world" - covers 10 acres, has 75 galleries, and houses 2,300 of the world's greatest paintings! Here's a taster. It's Margaret "engaging with" Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Adoration of the Magi. And here's a grab from her exploration of the Arnolfini Wedding.* Here's a measure of how special this tour is: the Arnolfini Wedding painting and I go back a long way. I've spent a lot of time looking at it, know it fairly well. But having Margaret take me through it was like seeing it in High Definition for the first time. I'd missed the red pattens. Hadn't clocked that the bed was on the first floor and what that imports, hadn't spotted the second window, etc. It's wonderful stuff. And as long as I'm at it, well, here's some plain speaking about this one - why it's a better deal than the alternatives (the audio wand, the "free" in-house tour, etc.).

Meet just outside the exit of EmbankmentTube.

EmbankmentTube is on
theCircle, Bakerloo, District & Northern Lines

Guided by Helena, Margaret, Molly or Tom

11.20 am on Tuesdays
from MaryleboneTube

"There are places I'll remember all my life", sang the Beatles in one of their most evocative songs. Many of those places are in the "London Town" of this walk...so get back with Richard, "the Pied Piper of Beatlemania" (The Miami Herald), to the film locations for A Hard Day's Night and Help, the registry office where two of the Fabs were married, and the apartment immortalised by Ringo, John and Yoko. We'll also see the house where Paul lived with his glamorous girlfriend, actress Jane Asher. Those were the days...for it was in that house that John and Paul wrote I want to hold your hand. And to cap it all we'll go up to St. John's Wood to see the legendary Abbey Road studios and crosswalk. As the Toronto Globe and Mail said of the walk, "A splendid time is guaranteed for all."  Here's a "grab" from the walk. And here's another 'un.

The Beatles In My Life Walk takes place:

every Tuesday at 11.20 am
and every Saturday at 11:20 am

Meet Richard P. just outside the exit of
MaryleboneTube. 

MaryleboneTube is on
the Bakerloo Line

N.B., we take a short tube journey to Abbey Road, so getting "a ticket to ride" - an Oyster Card or a 2-Zone Travel Card - is a good idea.

Guided by "Beatles genius" Richard P.

2pm on Tuesdays
from EmbankmentTube

What a wonderful goulash of a walk this is. It gets you into streets that you'd never find off your own bat - streets that look like an old movie shot through a vaselined lens. Into a neighbourhood that precious few Londoners have seen, let alone visitors. It's a thrilling discovery - the real deal. There's no better sense of place in London - and no finer architectural effect. Yellow brick, perfectly preserved, all unselfconscious self-respect, real Cockney - unaltered Dickensian London. And the miracle is that it's still there, embedded in central London - screwed in to the big city. That discovery alone makes this one of those bewitching "somewhere else" London Walks. And getting there is a bit of all right too - because there's a dramatic river crossing, a stroll along the Thames, the world's foremost arts complex, London's best loved old theatre, a real London street market (instead of a tourist trap), a stunning bird's eye view of the capital (and there's a lift, so we won't have to climb hundreds of stairs!), and buckets of character.

The "Somewhere Else" London Walk takes place
every Tuesday at 2 pm
and every Saturday at 10.30 am.

Meet Steve or Stephanie just outside
the exit of EmbankmentTube
(they're normally outside the exit that leads out towards the Thames).

EmbankmentTube is on
theCircle, Bakerloo, District & Northern Lines

Guided by Steve or Stephanie

2 pm on Tuesdays
from Tower HillTube

"Now lighted shops down aisles of mist smoulder in gold and amethyst;
And, paved with fragments of the skies, our sooty town like Venice lies..."

And so we come to the great period. What a city it was, with every view inflected, the steeples bigger than the houses and St. Paul's much bigger than either - Wren ringing the changes infallibly. Three hundred years on a surprising amount of the classical city survives, but it's hidden - the pearl in the oyster. Come upon it unawares and you feel you've walked into another dimension: London cracks into poetry. It's that London we'll discover. Everything from a rare surviving mediaeval church - there's no better gauge of Wren's achievement - to St. Paul's itself. And betwixt and between we take in the church that's regarded as the world's most perfect building (if it doesn't stop you in your tracks nothing will - miss the Tower of London, if you have to, but don't miss this little church), let alone Hawksmore's masterpiece and alleyways that breathe history. Guided by Hilary. *Or if you prefer, The Showcase for Old London!

Old London - the Mediaeval to Georgian City takes place
every Tuesday at 2 pm.

Meet Hilary just outside the exit of Tower HillTube.

Tower HillTube is on
theCircle & District Lines

Guided by Hilary

2 pm on Tuesdays 
from WestminsterTube, exit 4

This is the cornerstone, the seminal London Walk. Miss it and you've missed London. For Old Westminster is London at its grandest: the place where kings and queens are crowned, where they lived, and often were buried. It's the forge of the national destiny, the place where the heart of the Empire beat, the Mecca of politicians throughout the ages. The past here is cast in stone and we take it all in: ancient Westminster Hall, the Houses of Parliament, the Jewel Tower, and Westminster Abbey. And to see it with a great guide is to have that past suddenly rise to the surface...like seeing a photographic print come up in a darkroom. It doesn't get any better than this. And embarras de richesse, we'll also explore the private face of Westminster - the London equivalent of Georgetown! Unlike the tourist hordes, we'll get to see the hidden and ever so picturesque Georgian back streets where all the political salons are! We end at the Cabinet War Rooms, the fortified bunker that housed Winston Churchill's centre of operations during the war. You'll get an extremely handsome discount on the price of admission if you want to visit the War Rooms.

The Old Westminster Walk takes place
every Tuesday at 2 pm,
every Thursday at 2 pm,
every Saturday at 11 am,
and every Sunday at 2.45 pm

Meet just outside exit 4 of WestminsterTube.

WestminsterTube is on
theCircle, District & Jubilee Lines

Guided Tuesdays by Judy, London Tourist Board Guide of the Year Award winner!
Guided on Thursdays by Shaughan or David
Guided Saturdays by Karen, London Tourist Board Guide of the Year Award winner!
Guided on Sundays by Graham

"The lamps of London uphold the dark
as upon the points of burning bayonets."
                        Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room, 1922

7 pm on Tuesdays
from TempleTube

"The History of London is the history of its taverns;
to know one is to know the other."

Welcome to cheek-by-jowl, higgledy-piggledy, quintessential London. To gnarled, brooding back-alleys, secluded courtyards and tortuous zigzag passages. Oh there are famous sights, but to get to them we have to walk crookedly, through a maze of curiosities. We set our course by the best old pubs in town - including the most famous London inn of all. Old pubs that are, as every English pub should be, a solace and a delight...and all the more special for being hidden away down this or that dark alley, like precious gems in rumpled velvet. Here, like no other place in town, we have 2,000 years of London and its inns in the palm of our hand. The echoes are of Roman tabernas and Shakespearean ale-houses and Dickensian coaching inns...of feasting and wine and song...of the souls of poets dead and gone...the very zeitgeist of London. And what better company to keep than the shades of Dr. Johnson, Oscar Wilde, and Dickens himself.

The Hidden Pubs of Old London Town Walk takes place
every* Tuesday at 7 pm.

*Except January 1st

Meet Steve or Andy just outside the exit of TempleTube.

TempleTube is on the Circle & District Lines 

Guided by Andy or Steve

7.30 pm on Tuesdays
from St. Paul'sTube exit 2

At night the ancient City is deserted...and eerie. Exploring its shadowy back streets and dimly lit alleys we might be in a medieval citadel, in overpowering stone. The very street names - Aldersgate, Cloth Fair, Charterhouse, Threadneedle - take us far back. We're alone...or are we? For this is the hour when the She Wolf of France glides through the churchyard, the hour when the dark figure on Newgate wall rattles his chains, the hour when the Black Nun keeps her lonely vigil, and something inexpressibly evil lurks behind a tiny window. We're on their trail...or are they shadowing us?

The Ghosts of the Old City Walk takes place
every Tuesday at 7.30 pm
and every Saturday at 7.30 pm.

Meet Adam or Shaughan or Angela
just outside  exit 2 of St. Paul'sTube.

St. Paul'sTube is on theCentral Line

Guided on Tuesdays by Adam
Guided on Saturdays by Shaughan or Angela

And you're going to like this. If you roll up early for the walk and you want a sit-down and a coffee, well just make your way to Casa di Caffe - it's directly behind exit 2 of St. Paul'sTube (at the top of the exit 2 staircase do a U-turn and walk toward St. Paul's Cathedral, Casa di Caffe is on your left, half way between the cathedral and the tube stop. And why Casa di Caffe? Well, it's the best coffee shop in the neighbourhood for one. And for two, London Walks has carved out some "added value" for you. If you print this page out and show it to Mehran and his wonderfully international staff - Estonian lasses, a Chinese chap, etc. etc. etc. - you'll get a whacking great 20 percent discount on whatever you order, whether it's a cappuccino or one of their delicious paninis or this, that or the other. Can't be bad! And it's just an attractive place for a sit-down: light streaming in, brightly coloured overstuffed chairs, a view of the cathedral. YUM YUM!

7.30 pm every night of the week
from Tower HillTube

Please tread carefully and keep away from the shadows -
you are about to enter the abyss...

He came silently out of the midnight shadows of August 31, 1888. Watching. Stalking. Butchering raddled, drink-sodden East End prostitutes. Leaving a trail of blood that led...nowhere. Yes, something wicked this way walked, for this is the Ripper's slashing grounds. We evoke that autumn of gaslight and fog, of menacing shadows and stealthy footsteps as we inspect the murder sites, sift through the evidence - in all its gory detail - and get to grips, so to speak, with the main suspects. Afterward you can steady your nerves in The Ten Bells, the pub where the victims - perhaps under the steely gaze of the Ripper himself - tried to forget the waking nightmare. And if you'd like a bang-up-to-date independent assessment of our Ripper walk - "an eerie experience" - here are some choice words from the Toronto Star. Now, anyone for some audio? Want to hear the man who is "internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper" in action? I thought so. Click here. And here. And for a pictorial or two, click here.

The Jack the Ripper Haunts Walk takes place
every* single night at 7.30 pm.

Meet your guide just outside the exit of
Tower HillTube.

N.B., on Saturdays there's also a Ripper "matinee".
It goes every* Saturday afternoon at 3 pm.

Tower HillTube is on
theCircle & District Lines  

*except December 24th & December 25th

Guided by Donald & Molly on Tuesdays
Guided by Steve on Wednesdays
Guided by Angela and Shaughan on Thursdays
Guided by Donald or Shaughan on Fridays
Guided by Fiona on Saturday afternoons
Guided by Steve on Saturday evenings
Guided by Donald on Sundays
Guided by Donald & Molly on Mondays

N.B. Let's call a spade a spade. Going on Donald Rumbelow's walk is as close as you're going to get to nailing the Ripper. Donald is the author of the best-selling The Complete Jack the Ripper, the definitive book on the subject. He's been the chief consultant for every major television and film treatment of the Ripper for the last 20 years. In the words of The Jack to Ripper A to Z (the bible of Ripperology studies): "Donald Rumbelow is internationally recognised as the leading authority on the subject". The former Curator of the City of London Police Crime Museum and a two-time Chairman of the Crime Writers" Association, Donald is Britain's most distinguished crime historian. And I hasten add, he's not some dry-as-dust academic. He spent 25 years on the City of London Police Force - which in effect means you'll be taken over some of the most famous crime scenes in the world by a law enforcement professional. Oh and I almost forgot - he's also a professionally qualified Blue Badge Guide!

But a word of warning: never part with your money or set off with anyone until you're absolutely certain you're with Donald or - if it's another night - one of his London Walks colleagues. Donald (and co.) will be holding up copies of the distinctive white London Walks leaflet. And remember, Donald and his colleagues never ever start the Jack the Ripper walk before 7.30 pm. In short, don't let anyone pull a fast one on you. In the words of the Toronto Star: "rip-off tours...capitalize on his[Rumbelow's] popularity and try to confuse people who show up knowing that this is the place for Ripper Tours, but haven't got the details straight."