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 Thursday, January 22nd, 2026.
And here it is.
Here’s your daily London fix.
So, how to get this show underway.
How about this.
Bangkok calling. London answering.
That’s right. This morning’s London Calling is coming you from Bangkok.
Which is of course, completely, utterlt appropriate. Because London, more than any other city in the western world, is not really a city at all.
It’s a world.
Or better, it’s lots of worlds,
living cheek by jowl, rubbing shoulders on Tube platforms, queueing for coffee,
borrowing each other’s words, food, fashions and festivals.
Big toe in first.
How many nationalities live in London?
The honest answer is: more than anywhere else.
Depending how you count it, well over 300 languages are spoken in the capital.
That’s not a typo.
Three hundred.
The United Nations has fewer member states than London has languages.
Roughly four in ten Londoners were born outside the UK.
Pause on that for a second. Let that sink in.
Walk down any street in London and nearly half the people you pass began life somewhere else. Different passports.
Different childhoods.
Different alphabets, in many cases. And yet here they all are, Londoners now.
London isn’t multicultural as a policy.
It’s multicultural as a fact.
And within that
great human tide are communities that are visible and noisy, and
others that are quieter, more
woven in, more interstitial.
Which brings us neatly to Thailand in London.
Because there isn’t a Thai Chinatown.
There isn’t a Thai Little Italy.
There isn’t a single neighbourhood you can point to on a map and say, that’s Thai London.
And yet Thailand is everywhere.
Let’s start with the numbers.
Yes, numbers.
Numbers are always a good way in.
There are something in the region of 45,000 to 50,000 Thai nationals living in the UK.
Well over half of them are in Greater London.
So you’re looking at perhaps 25,000 to 30,000 Thais in the capital, depending on
how you count dual nationality,
long-term residents,
students and families.
That makes the Thai community in London smaller than, say, the Indian or Nigerian communities, but larger than many people realise. And crucially, it’s been here longer than you might think.
The story really begins in the late nineteenth century, with diplomatic contact between Siam and Britain. The big symbolic moment comes in 1897, when King Chulalongkorn,
choo-lah-LONG-gawn
Rama the Fifth, visits London.
Aside here. Teaching moment.
Great name, choo-lah-LONG-gawn. Means ‘supreme ornament’ or ‘exalted crown’.
And Rama is even older and more resonant. It comes from an ancient Indian tradition. Rama was the hero of an ancient Indian epic. You want a rough western analogy, maybe think of Achilles in the Iliad.
So, yes, put those two names together choo—lah-LONG-gawn and Rama the V you’re not just saying ‘the fifth king called Rama’
You’re saying: the fifth embodiment of ideal kingship in a sacred, ancient tradition.
Anyway, back to London and 1897, it’s a world-stage moment. Siam presenting itself as modern, sovereign, outward-looking, and London receiving it as such.
That relationship never goes away.
But the modern Thai community in London really gathers momentum after the Second World War, and especially from the 1960s onwards. Students. Nurses. Hospitality workers.
Later, entrepreneurs. Restaurateurs. Families.
And this is where Thailand makes its most visible mark on London.
Food.
Londoners sometimes forget this, because we take it for granted now, but Thai food is one of the great quiet revolutions of the late twentieth-century city.
There are hundreds of Thai restaurants in London. From tiny family-run places with laminated menus and plastic tablecloths, to high-end dining rooms where the price of the wine exceeds the cost of the flight that brought the cuisine here in the first place.
Green curry. Pad Thai. Tom yum. Mango sticky rice.
These are no longer exotic novelties. They’re weeknight staples. Comfort food.
Food Londoners crave.
And there’s a reason Thai food travels so well.
It’s balanced.
Sweet, sour, salty, hot.
It works at speed.
It works at scale. It works in a city that eats late, eats fast,
eats together.
In that sense, Thai London isn’t a place.
It’s a taste.
But there are places too, if you know where to look.
One of the most important is
Wat BOOD-dha-pa-DEE-pa in Wimbledon.
Wat Buddhapadipa in Wimbledon. Opened in the 1970s, it’s the first purpose-built Thai Buddhist temple in the UK.
Set in unexpected, leafy grounds, it feels like a piece of Thailand gently laid down in southwest London.
It’s religious, of course.
But it’s also cultural. Festivals. Food stalls.
A place where Thai London gathers, and where non-Thai Londoners are quietly welcomed in.
Then there’s Earl’s Court.
Not officially Thai.
Never branded as such.
But for years it’s been a hub.
Thai restaurants.
Thai grocery shops.
Thai massage places. Language schools.
A soft clustering rather than a hard boundary.
And that’s typical of the Thai presence in London.
It isn’t loud.
It doesn’t demand arches or gates or signage.
It seeps.
It integrates.
It becomes part of the everyday life of the city.
There are Thai nurses in London hospitals.
Thai students in London universities.
Thai designers, dancers, chefs, entrepreneurs.
There’s a Thai embassy in South Kensington.
There are Thai cultural events that come and go with the calendar.
And dates matter too.
The most important of them is Songkran,
pronounced song-KRAHN,
the Thai New Year.
It falls in mid-April, usually from the 13th to the 15th,
fixed to the solar calendar rather than the lunar one, which is why it arrives every year at the hottest moment of the Thai calendar.
At its heart, Songkran is about renewal.
Washing away the old year.
Starting fresh.
Traditionally it involved the gentle pouring of water over elders’ hands, over Buddha images,
a symbolic cleansing, a blessing.
Then modern life got hold of it.
And Songkran became the greatest water fight on earth.
Bangkok turns into a laughing, drenched carnival.
Buckets. Hoses. Water pistols. Everyone fair game.
Age, rank, job, none of it matters once the water starts flying.
But underneath the fun is something serious and tender.
Families come together.
Temples fill. Houses are cleaned. Merit is made.
It’s about respect as much as release.
And in London, Songkran is quietly observed by the Thai community.
Not with water cannons in Trafalgar Square, but in temples,
community centres, restaurants. Bowls rather than buckets.
Candles rather than chaos.
A line back to home, traced in water and memory.
Songkran has become a quiet fixture in London’s festival life. Sometimes in temples. Sometimes in parks. Sometimes spilling into restaurants and streets.
Loy Krathong, the festival of lights, is marked more privately.
But it’s marked. Candles.
Water. Memory. Home.
And that, perhaps, is the key to understanding Thailand in London.
It isn’t a transplanted village.
It’s a set of threads.
Threads of food, faith, family, work and memory, woven into the bigger fabric of the city.
Which brings us back to where we started.
London isn’t a city.
It’s a world.
And worlds don’t exist as neat blocks on a map.
They exist in overlaps.
In borrowed words.
In shared meals.
In the smell of lemongrass drifting out onto a London pavement on a damp Tuesday night.
Bangkok calling.
London answering.
And the line is wonderfully, deliciously, permanently open.
——————-
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 a former Member of Parliament, three terms at Westminster, bringing first-hand experience of power, policy and political theatre to the very streets where it all played out.
It includes two barristers, three doctors, two geologists, a distinguished museum curator and a former Time out Editor.
It includes authors, historians, national journalists, a former London Museum archaeologist, and university professors (one of them an eminent Cambridge University paleontologist).
It includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre actors, and two professional photographers. And last but not least, the creme de la creme of top flight professionally qualified Blue Badge Guides, including 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 here’s the clincher. We’re playing at home.
London Walks is London-based. Period.
We’re not an impersonal, faceless platform run from halfway round the world. There’s no chatbot. No call-centre script. When you contact us, you reach a real person. A Londoner. Someone who actually knows the streets you’re about to walk.
That’s not a detail. That’s the difference.
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.