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, September 17th, 2025.
Our first port of call, as always, the London Calling Book Club Corner.
In the Chair today, the only person I know who talks like a well-written magazine article. Well, you talk a national journalist into becoming a London Walks guide, what else do you expect but words that are like a waterfall of gemstones – brilliantly turned phrase after brilliantly turned phrase. And it’s not just me saying that. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, consider Exhibit A. This is the most recent review of a London Walk. Came in just a few hours ago. Penned by one Carla A., it’s a review of Adam’s Beatles Magical Mystery Tour. And I hasten to add, it’s representative. Tributes of this stripe for Adam’s walks thunder in like an ovation. Hundreds of them. Adam’s trophy case of many splendoured reviews stretches to the end of the rainbow and halfway back. Anyway, here’s Carla A. “Magical Mystery Tour with Adam – Adam is superbly knowledgeable about all things Beatles. He’s n engaging and energetic storyteller, and entertaining to say the least. Simply the best tour ever! Thanks for the great adventure, Adam!”
And on that note, here’s Adam:
[Adam’s book recommendation follows]
Moving on.
“A foggy day in London town…” – you can almost hear Gershwin’s tune in the background, can’t you? That lazy, smoky trumpet line. The air heavy, muffled, soft around the edges. The gas lamps throwing halos. The Thames breathing mist.
And was there ever a better overture to a London anniversary. I think not.
And that’s by way of saying, on this day – September 17th – 244 years ago London opened its Coal Exchange on Lower Thames Street: the market for the black gold that warmed hearths, powered workshops, built streets. Coal wasn’t just fuel – it was finance; it was smoke; it was the invisible scaffolding of a city rising from ashes.
And hand in glove with coal, the London fog. Those two, they’re the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of the London saga.
A foggy day in London Town, that’s the London of historical memory, the London of your imagination – the London of Dickens and Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper. The London of pea soupers. It’s a London that’s no more – gone with the Clean Air Act, gone with smokeless fuel. Well, not quite gone – it’s still with us, just a little, the genuine article, not just the bygone London of Dickens and the rest of them – yes, still with us, this very day, if you know where to look. I said I’ve lived here 52 years and in all that time – more than half a century – have only seen fog once. But in another sense, a very real sense, every day in London this past half century and more has been a foggy day. Stand by and I’ll take you there, I’ll show you.
Now about those old peasoupers – they weren’t just weather – they were walls. You could stretch your arm straight out ahead of you and you couldn’t. see your fingertips. Mary remembers a peasouper when she was a tiny little girl. Her dad at the wheel of the car, blind at the windscreen, couldn’t see the road ahead. Her mum had to get out of the car and walk ahead on the street, torch in hand, guiding them inch by inch through the yellow, lowering gloom. That was London. A city swallowed whole.
Now here’s your payoff. Yes, I see London fog every day. Have seen it every day for 52 years. Look at any old London terrace – red brick, yellow brick, grey – and you won’t see red or yellow grey. You’ll see black. Soot-black, smoke-black. The colour of a century and more of coal fires. That’s London’s lost weather, still clinging to the bricks.
And today – September 17th – is the perfect day to summon it up. Because 244 years ago this very day, London opened its Coal Exchange on Lower Thames Street.
Picture it: the Pool of London, choked with colliers from Newcastle, the air already gritty with their cargo. The Exchange flings open its doors, the brokers, the factors, the shipmasters jostle in, prices shouted, deals struck. Coal – the very stuff that built and heated and blackened and befogged London – was London’s business.
And let us not forget those coal duties – those taxes on every chaldron – paid for the city’s resurrection after the Great Fire. Paid for Wren’s St Paul’s, for the City churches, for the new London rising from its own ashes. So in a way, every lump of coal carried a bit of London’s rebirth in it.
Today the Exchange is gone – demolished in the sixties for a road – but if you stand there on Thames Street, near the Monument, you can still feel it. The smoke, the shouting, the river stink, the ledgers, the grit of coal dust underfoot.
London no longer wears its fog in the air – but it wears it in memory, in story, in literature. In Bleak House, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, in Turner’s paintings and Whistler’s nocturnes. The fog is Banquo’s ghost at London’s feast – it’s always there. And this anniversary — the Coal Exchange anniversary – is the day to raise a glass to that lost London. To conjure it up for a moment, see it swirling round the Monument, hear the colliers’ bells, smell the smoke. And then thank heaven we can breathe easy again.
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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 familiarand the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note… come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.