London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good evening to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Friday, September 5th, 2025.
London Calling Book Club Corner first.
In the Chair today – second day running – actor and ace Blue Badge Guide Sam Bond. As I marvelled yesterday, how do you go wrong with a name like Sam Bond. “Bond, Sam Bond.” Sam tells me his father is named James. So veteran actor and ace Blue Badge Guide Sam Bond’s father is James Bond. Sam says his dad was 89 last week, older than the character himself.
Anyway, Sam’s second book is Borough Market Edible Histories. By Mark Riddaway. Sam says it was a birthday present from Simon Whitehouse. Yes, the one and only Simon Whitehouse. Everybody’s favourite guide. Sam says, “I love the book. As a younger man I also trained in a professional capacity in cooking. And I live round the corner from Borough Market. So the detail in the book about the history and provenance of things like oil, coffee and tomatoes fascinates. And appeals to the nerdish side of my brain.”
Ah, sounds just the ticket, Sam. Another one that’s going straight onto my ever-lengthening must-read shelf.
And through the revolving door we go to today’s main course. Most of you know The Ultimate London Walk lifts off the launch pad tomorrow. With the first of the 14 walks that will take us all the way across London, from Hertfordshire in the north to Surrey in the South. Yesterday’s podcast was an advancer on Hadley Wood, which is the start line for The Ultimate.
So, settling in, like a middle-distance runner locking into an efficient pace through the opening laps, here’s an advancer on High Barnet, the meeting point for the second leg of The Ultimate London Walk. It’ll go tomorrow afternoon.
Here’s what you don’t need to know but might want to know about High Barnet.
High Barnet. Our point of departure. The advance begins here. In military terms Hadley Wood was the beachhead. High Barnet – the ridgeline, the command post, the bugles sounding. You can feel the ground rising under your boots, the air sharpening, the horizon opening. It’s upland London, this. Ridgeway country. You’re up high and looking out. No wonder Barnet has always been a place of beginnings and reckonings.
History doesn’t just brush past here, it collides. Think of 1471 – the Battle of Barnet. A foggy Easter dawn, two medieval armies blundering into each other, steel on steel, mud, blood, banners torn to rags. King Edward IV smashing the Lancastrians. And the death of the great Earl of Warwick, “the Kingmaker.” The whole Wars of the Roses shunted onto a different set of tracks because of what happened on this ridge.
And then there’s the coaching age. Barnet High Street was a bottleneck of clattering stagecoaches, steaming horses, bawling ostlers, and inns doing a roaring trade. This was the Great North Road – the M1 of its day. Every rickety coach from London to York or Edinburgh rattled through. Barnet was where you changed horses, downed a swift pint of porter, or maybe slipped upstairs for forty winks before tackling the next leg north. Dickens himself knew it. He stayed here, he noted it – Barnet’s bustle, Barnet’s colour.
It’s also the land of eccentrics and worthies. Jonathan King – the eighteenth-century physician, not the disgraced pop impresario – founded Barnet’s famous fair, a monster of noise and nonsense that made Victorian moralists clutch their pearls. Barnet Fair, by the way, is the very one that gave Cockney rhyming slang “Barnet Fair” = hair. (As in, “Love the barnet, mate” – meaning your hairdo.)
And there’s the sprawl of St John the Baptist church, keeping an eye on everything since the fifteenth century. Its spire pointing the way, its yard full of Barnet ghosts: merchants, soldiers, innkeepers, locals who saw it all and passed it on.
High Barnet today? Bustling market town, yes – but it still has that liminal quality. You’re not quite in London, not quite out of it. It’s frontier. A threshold place. Perfect for us – because this is where the London story takes a deep breath, squares its shoulders, and marches southward.
In other words – and this bears repeating – Hadley Wood was the beachhead. High Barnet is the trumpet call. The Ultimate London Walk starts flexing its muscles here.
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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 familiar and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note…. come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.