London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Top of the morning to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Wednesday, December 17th, 2025.
And here it is, your daily London fix.
Here’s a thing to warm the cockles. On this very day in 1843,
a slim red book slipped into London’s winter gloom
and changed Christmas forever.
A Christmas Carol.
Charles Dickens.
Published on this day,
December 17, 1843,
priced at five shillings,
stitched in gilt and hope.
You can almost see it, can’t you, gleaming in a bookseller’s window like a promise.
And out there,
beyond the glass,
London rolling past
in its great clanking,
steaming,
shouting,
fog-wrapped swirl.
We of course do a Dickens’ Christmas Carol & Seasonal Traditions Walk. It’s the great classic Christmas London Walk.
And that great great clanking,
steaming,
shouting,
fog-wrapped swirl
is the London our walk sidles up to and whispers, ‘Come on then, tell us your secrets.”
It’s all in the title, really.
Dickens’s Christmas Carol and Seasonal Traditions.
Part ghost story,
part time machine,
part cosy fireside yarn told out in the streets
where it all happened.
Picture it.
The city in 1843.
A brass-bound metropolis of two and a quarter million souls,
absolutely fizzing with contradictions.
The place is booming.
Railways exploding outwards.
New money pouring in.
Smoke pouring up.
It’s the London of the penny post,
the London of gas lamps marching down the big thoroughfares
like little amber soldiers.
A city inventing the modern world and tripping over its own shoelaces as it does so.
And right in the middle of this great Victorian upswing
sits Charles Dickens.
Thirty-one years old.
Celebrity-status.
A man in a hurry,
fuelled by coffee,
goodwill,
outrage and
a fierce belief that stories
could make people better.
London was his hunting ground,
his inspiration,
his workshop.
He walked it for hours,
miles at a clip,
absorbing every clang of a bell, every sniffle from a street urchin, every tottering cart of geese bound for Christmas tables.
But December 1843
London wasn’t all plum pudding and merriment.
The shadows were long that winter. The recession had been biting. Factories laying off workers. Families sliding into cold, gnawing poverty.
The Poor Law was still sending people to those dreadful workhouses where, as Scrooge says,
the surplus population
might as well decrease.
And Dickens,
who’d visited factories and schools and slums,
came away appalled.
He wanted to write something to shake his country awake.
What he produced wasn’t a sermon. It was a story.
A rattling good one.
A ghost story full of rattling chains and flying visions
and time bending like a London fog in a stiff wind.
Our walk, if you’ll join us,
drops you straight into that world.
It takes place in the City. That’s City with a capital C.
Dickens territory.
Cheapside,
Cornhill,
the alleyways curling behind the Royal Exchange.
Echoes everywhere.
Here’s where the clerks scurried to Scrooge’s counting house,
fingers blue with cold because
he wouldn’t spare a lump of coal. Here’s where the crowds bustled in their end-of-term frenzy,
geese under their arms,
cabmen shouting,
costermongers singing out their wares.
Here’s the very atmosphere
Dickens bottled,
the sparkling jumble he poured into that opening chapter.
Londoners in 1843 were just beginning to fall in love with Christmas again.
The holiday had been a thin,
wan thing for decades,
but the Victorians were bringing it roaring back.
Trees indoors.
Cards.
Crackers.
Charity.
The whole feel of the season.
Prince Albert had only just introduced the Christmas tree to Windsor Castle a few years earlier, and the Illustrated London News ran a drawing of it which absolutely set the city’s imagination afire.
Suddenly everyone wanted a tree. And a goose.
And plum pudding.
And a sense that Christmas meant something.
Dickens, clever man,
rode that wave and steered it.
He didn’t so much capture the revival of Christmas as shove it firmly into the national bloodstream. Scrooge’s transformation
became a moral fable
the whole country recognised.
Tiny Tim became a symbol
of all the vulnerable children London had been previously stepping over without quite seeing.
And the Ghost of Christmas Present, with his holly crown and
glowing torch,
became a sort of secular saint of good cheer,
wandering through the smoky streets blessing dinners both grand and meagre.
As we walk,
we follow those spirits through the streets they knew.
You’ll see old churches bending into the sky
like they did when Dickens
paced past them with his notebook. You hear the chime of Bow bells drifting over the rooftops.
You feel that strange Victorian tension between light and dark.
It was the age of
glowing shop windows
but also of pea-souper fogs
thick enough to make a cabbie swear he’d lost the whole of Holborn somewhere behind him.
And oh, the traditions.
They sparkle up everywhere. Wassailing songs.
Mince pies full of spice and symbolism.
The great roast goose,
the ultimate prize for a family scraping by.
Dickens’s own Christmas table groaned with dishes because
he adored abundance.
Not for his own sake,
but because abundance implied community.
Sharing.
Plenty spreading outwards.
That’s the key to the whole story. Connection.
Scrooge’s London is a city where most people rush past one another, collars up,
shoulders hunched against
cold and care.
Dickens’s London is a city where people open their eyes,
notice one another, help.
The same streets, different vision.
He wanted readers to see the London he saw
when he walked late at night,
the London where families huddled and sang and made the best of things, the London that cracked open with generosity
exactly when times were hardest.
Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol
in six feverish weeks.
He was desperate for cash because of a bad publishing deal,
but he was also desperate to make a point.
When the book came out on this day, readers devoured it on trains,
by candlelight,
in crowded parlours.
The first edition sold out by Christmas Eve.
London talked of nothing else.
One factory owner read it and
gave his workers Christmas Day off. The Times,
no slouch at sniffing out sentimentality,
declared it a triumph.
Even Thackeray,
Dickens’s sometimes rival,
said it was a national treasure.
And you know what?
It still is.
Because London still has that same tug of dark and light.
That same capacity for
bustle and for kindness.
Those same alleyways where
ghosts might plausibly lurk.
The same twinkle when
Christmas rolls round.
So by all means,
come walk it with us.
Step into 1843.
Feel the frost on your nose.
Hear the clatter of horses on cobblestones.
Smell the roasting chestnuts drifting up Cheapside.
And as we turn a corner and
the city spreads out in front of us, half modern, half ancient, let Dickens whisper in your ear that lovely, evergreen truth.
No one is beyond redemption.
Not even a miser on Cornhill.
Not even a great city roaring
into the industrial age.
Christmas, Dickens tells us,
is the season when
London becomes its best self.
And on this day in 1843,
a little book helped it along.
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 £25 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 Jack the 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.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.