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 Friday November 7th, 2025.
And away we go … here’s your daily London fix.
Your daily London fix that’s going to start in … South Africa.
And that’s by way of saying – Happy Birthday, Helen Suzman.
Born 7 November 1917.
One of those birthdays that doesn’t just belong to South Africa … it belongs to the world.
Because Helen Suzman changed it. //
A birthday in South Africa – that’s our jumping-off point for today’s London fix. //
Ok, hold on tight. Handbrake turn coming up.
You know you’ve been meaning to do it. So make it happen. Treat yourself. One of these Sunday mornings head up to Hampstead and go on the legendary Hampstead Walk with me.
The air’s sharp, the Heath still beading from last night’s rain.
We’re heading down across the Heath, heading for that tucked-away corner… the Vale of Health.
I’ve got something to show you. One of several somethings.
Want to see the house where Janet Suzman and Trevor Nunn lived?
Right next door to my friend Peter’s.
It’s one of the stops on my Hampstead Walk and every time I think … good grief, that front door has seen some traffic. //
But before we get there, we start with the birthday woman herself.
Helen Suzman.
Born 1917, Germiston, Transvaal.
White, Jewish, English-speaking … walking into an apartheid Parliament dominated by Afrikaner men and saying, in effect, “Right. Let’s talk.”
She’s elected in 1953 for Houghton.
For thirteen years she’s on her own – the lone voice of her liberal party in a whites-only House.
One woman. One small figure. Facing a government built on race laws.
And she does not blink.
She stands up, asks the questions, forces the record to show what they’d prefer hidden.
A minister moans about the murder rate in his constituency. Helen, deadpan –
“Don’t you go there … it’ll rise by one.”
That’s Helen: dry as dust, hard as nails, morally unbudgeable.
She visits Nelson Mandela on Robben Island.
She uses parliamentary privilege like a crowbar.
Courage in sensible shoes. //
And now … here’s where the family door opens.
Because Helen Suzman wasn’t just a great South African figure out there in the newspapers.
She was Aunt Helen to a girl called Janet.
Janet Suzman.
Born Johannesburg, 1939.
Daughter of Saul Suzman and Betty Sonnenberg.
Grand-daughter of Max Sonnenberg – MP and retail pioneer.
Niece of Helen Suzman – the woman carving a trench through apartheid in Parliament.
This is a family where public life is the family business … where asking awkward questions is practically genetic.
What a family.…Difference-makers. //
Now – follow Janet to London.
She leaves South Africa … the air too thick with pass laws and police raids … and comes to Britain to act.
Hampstead, naturally, gets its hooks into her.
She joins the Royal Shakespeare Company – and bang – she’s off.
Kate. Portia. Rosalind. Cleopatra.
That Cleopatra performance goes into the folklore.
And in the rehearsal room…there’s a young director from Ipswich: Trevor Nunn.
He casts her as Kate in The Taming of the Shrew.
Sparks on stage, sparks off.
He later says – with a certain satisfaction – “I married my Kate the following year.”
That’s 1969. //
Which brings us – at last – back to our quiet corner of Hampstead.
The Vale of Health.
Little lane. Close-packed houses. Trees leaning in to eavesdrop.
One of those houses is where Janet Suzman and Trevor Nunn lived in those early years. We could be about to drop in on Janet and Trevor. Their house is one of the five or six stops we make in the Vale of Health.
Picture it…Inside, scripts everywhere. Phone going. Janet’s working on Cleopatra; Trevor’s cooking up productions that will become Les Misérables and Cats.
Out front, just another Hampstead house. Inside, the little matter of changing British theatre.
And threaded through it all, that South African family weather system.
You’ve got Aunt Helen in the Whites only House of Assembly in Cape Town – going ten rounds a day with apartheid.
You’ve got Grandfather Max in the backstory – the businessman-politician reformer.
You’ve got Janet – their niece and grand-daughter – taking Shakespeare by the scruff of the neck.
And you’ve got Trevor – bringing it all to the biggest stages in the world.
Same clan. Same current. Speak up. Do the work. Don’t take the lazy script.
And that’s why I love this house.
Most people stroll past and think: pretty, bit of wisteria. But as Constable said, you don’t truly see until you understand. We get to truly see that pretty house tucked away in that corner of the Vale of Health, Hampstead Heath and the Vale of Health Pond just outside the back door. Get to truly see it because we understand it.
And once you know, you can’t un-know.
You see a Hampstead doorway plugged into Johannesburg, into the whites only House of Assembly in Cape Town, into Stratford-upon-Avon, into the West End.
You see a family of people who, in their different ways, all refused to look away.
So…happy birthday, Helen Suzman.
And yes, bears repeating, maybe one of these Sunday mornings come on my Hampstead Walk. From up there on the roof of London, London’s skybox I call it, up there on the summit, where all of London is spread out before us, we’ll make our way down across the Heath into the Village on the Heath, the Village within the Village, make our way down into the Vale of Health … and I’ll say, “Want to see where Trevor Nunn and Janet Suzman lived?”
And as you look at that front door, you’ll have Helen in your ear in Parliament, Janet on stage, Trevor in the rehearsal room, Max in the background … and you’ll think –
A Hampstead doorway that opens all the way to South Africa.
What a family. … Difference-makers.
Once you know who walked in and out of that house, you never see the place the same way again. //
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.