London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good day to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Tuesday, October 13th, 2025.
Got the Get to Know Your London feast underway yesterday. Served up the aperitif.
And now, coming up, the first proper course. Napkins in place. Knives and forks and soup spoons at the ready. Here you go.
Camden – heart of London, home of contrasts. The borough that built better homes for its people and better ideas for its politics. From Holborn’s law chambers to Hampstead’s literary heights, from punk Camden Town to genteel Bloomsbury, this is a walk through London in cross-section – the city’s brains and its backbeat, its conscience and its chaos. Radical councils, visionary architects, railway cathedrals and rebel poets – they all meet here, in the borough that is London, in all its contradiction and glory.
Right then. Let’s get our bearings.
Let’s find Camden on the map.
The London Borough of Camden sits right at the very heart of things. Dead centre. You couldn’t miss it if you tried.
If London were a great tree, Camden would be the trunk – roots running down toward Holborn and Bloomsbury, branches reaching north toward Hampstead and the Heath.
Geographically, it’s one of the Inner London boroughs – compact, dense, astonishingly varied.
You can walk it, border to border, in under two hours. But what a walk that would be – a vertical journey through London’s social strata.
From the suits and chambers of High Holborn, past the student bicycles and bookshops of Bloomsbury, through the punky clatter of Camden Town, and on up to the leafy hush of Hampstead Heath.
In eight and a half square miles, you get eight hundred years of London’s history and half its personalities.
Ok, so what are Camden’s Boundaries? Who are its Neighbours?
South, Camden rubs shoulders with Westminster and the City of London – it even takes in a good wedge of the West End.
Head north and you’re in Hampstead and Highgate, where the pavements turn to gravel and the air’s almost alpine.
To the east, Islington. To the west, Brent.
So Camden covers about a third of central London – the great middle slice of the capital.
It’s the borough that connects the Establishment to the everyday.
The drawing room to the drum kit.
So How did Camden Come to Be?
Modern Camden was born in 1965 – the Swinging Sixties, Mary Quant and the Mini, the Beatles and Harold Wilson.
Three older boroughs were stitched together: Hampstead, St Pancras, and Holborn.
The patrician north, the proletarian middle, the professional south.
And out of that unlikely mix came something remarkable.
Camden quickly became a byword for progressive politics – the most forward-thinking local authority in the land.
Between 1975 and 1982, it was described – admiringly and sometimes despairingly – as “the most progressive council in Britain.”
In its first eight years alone, Camden realised 47 social housing projects – of a quality, scale, and ambition that hasn’t been bettered since.
The borough’s leaders made no secret of their mission: to build superior homes for low-income families.
They were willing to raise the rates to fund good architecture, not just cheap shelter.
The result? Some of London’s most daring post-war housing.
By way of example, the Alexandra Road Estate near Swiss Cottage – that concrete ziggurat straight out of a utopian sci-fi film.
Ditto the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury – terraces and shops cascading down like a modernist hillside.
Both now listed, admired, filmed.
The camera loves them.
Camden wasn’t afraid to lead.
Camden was the first to introduce concessionary fares for older people – radical then, par for the course now.
It spent heavily on care for children and the elderly, and yes, the rates were high.
Conservative councillor Enid Wistrich quipped that “overall control of expenditure was of low priority.”
But Camden’s unspoken motto might as well have been: So be it – we’re building something better.
The borough’s MP, Lena Jeger, had the gift of the telling phrase.
She looked at Centre Point, that empty monument to speculative capitalism, and said:
“Centre Point is a symbol of a society in which those who make money are more blessed than those who earn money.”
That’s Camden through and through – eloquent, indignant, idealistic.
For a while there, it really did seem to be practising a form of radical municipal socialism.
What else? Here’s what else. Camden is a Borough of Contrasts
Camden wears its contradictions like a badge of honour.
At one end, Hampstead – poets, psychoanalysts, and people who use “weekend” as a verb.
Down the hill, Kentish Town and Gospel Oak – terraced streets, family pubs, the faint whiff of red politics and real ale.
Then Camden Town itself – once a railway hub, later the punk bazaar of London.
Markets, music, murals, mayhem – and beneath it all the Regent’s Canal, winding through like a secret corridor.
Swing east into Somers Town, the working-class enclave between the great stations – Euston, King’s Cross, St Pancras – still hanging on in the face of redevelopment.
And just beyond, genteel Bloomsbury – garden squares, universities, blue plaques by the dozen.
It’s a dazzling mix: the townhouse, the tenement, the terrace.
A borough where you can overhear a Nobel laureate and a busker in the same coffee queue.
And that brings us to Camden’s Landmarks and Legends
You could make a borough-wide treasure hunt out of Camden’s landmarks.
The great railway stations first – King’s Cross, St Pancras, Euston – three cathedrals of steam in a row.
St Pancras, all red brick and turrets, that Gothic fantasy rescued by poet-campaigners.
King’s Cross, reborn as a 21st-century hub with a sly wink to Platform Nine and Three-Quarters.
Euston, the eternal building site, forever promising redemption.
And then, just like that, the stations give way to institutions:
the British Museum, encyclopaedia in stone;
the British Library, red-brick ark of human thought;
University College Hospital, gleaming over Euston Road.
Up north, the Heath unrolls like a green flag – London’s lungs.
On its edge, Kenwood House, Robert Adam elegance on a hillside.
And in the middle, that great success story – King’s Cross regeneration.
Fifty new buildings, two thousand homes, twenty new streets, ten public squares.
The whole area reborn from soot and sidings into cafés, fountains, and public art.
Camden’s headquarters now stand right there, in the midst of it all.
Ok, who’s for some hard particulars: the Shape, Size, and Soul of Camden.
Camden covers about 22 square kilometres – eight and a half square miles. It’s home to just over 210 thousand people.
Rich and poor, old and young, dreamers and doers.
Camden and its next door neighbour Westminster have more in common than people think – both powerful, both going their own way, the two of them jointly responsible for the West End.
The topography mirrors its politics – hills and hollows, ambition and reality, the buried Fleet River running unseen beneath it all, the literal undercurrent of London’s history.
Closing Thought Time.
Camden is London in cross-section.
It’s the engine room, the study, and the drawing room all under one roof.
It’s the city’s brains and its backbeat.
Camden Town is London’s tradition and its rebellion.
Stand on Parliament Hill at sunset and look south.
There it is – the whole story in one sweep.
The squares of Bloomsbury.
The curve of Euston Road.
The domes of the museums.
The glint of glass at King’s Cross.
And beneath your feet, the earth of Hampstead, holding it all up.
A Borough that once set out to rebuild society from the bricks up – and, in its own way, succeeded.
That’s Camden.
The Borough that is London – in all its contradiction, its conscience, and its glory.
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from – www.walks.com – home of London Walks, London’s signature walking tour company.
London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size walking tour company.
And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything.
It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £20 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science: you get what you pay for.
And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question: Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world?
You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world you do whatever you have to do to attract and keep the best guides in London – you want them guiding for you, not for somebody else.
Bears repeating: the way we’re structured – a guides’ cooperative – is the key to the whole thing.
It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason people who know go with London Walks, it’s the reason we’ve got a big following, a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished, in many cases distinguished professionals:
By way of example, Stewart Purvis, the former Editor (and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And Lisa Honan, who had a distinguished career as a diplomat (Lisa was the Governor of St Helena, the island where Napoleon breathed his last and, some say, had his penis amputated – Napoleon didn’t feel a thing – if thing’s the mot juste – he was dead.)
Stewart and Lisa – both of them CBEs – are just a couple of our headline acts.
Or take our Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian, Donald is, in the words of The Jack the Ripper A to Z, “internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” Donald’s emeritus now but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains up and mentors our Ripper Walk guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks Aristocracy of Talent – its All-Star Team of Guides – includes a former London Mayor. It includes the former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. It includes the Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. And the former chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, a former London Museum archaeologist, historians, university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actors, a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners (people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award)… well, you get the idea.
As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament, every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note… come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.