London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good day to you, London Walkers.
Wherever you are.
It’s Friday, February 13th, 2026.
And here it is.
Here’s your daily London fix.
Friday, the 13th. Goodness.
How’s this for a Friday the 13th vision.
Let us go then, you and I, to Rome.
Not the Rome of gelato and Instagram.
Medieval Rome.
12th century Rome.
Pilgrims. Relics. Heat. Pestilence.
And an English court jester named Rahere is dying.
Flat on his back.
Temperature through the roof. We’re talking 105.
Rahere’s delirious.
Tossing. Raving.
Seeing things no one else in the room can see.
And then it happens.
A monstrous, feathered, scaly creature –
something out of a Bosch nightmare – swoops down.
Grabs him. Up he goes.
Higher. Higher.
And then he’s over a black, bottomless pit.
That pit is death.
The thing – the monstrous creature –
drops him. Curtains. End of Rahere.
At which point, enter stage right:
St Bartholomew.
Comes swooping in. Catches Rahere.
Snatches him from the jaws of the abyss. But there’s a catch.
St B, in what can only be described as best mafia style, makes him an offer he cannot refuse.
“I’ll save you,” says the saint,
“but when you return to London I want you to found a hospital. A hospital in my name.
On the smooth field. What do you say, Rahere? Is that a deal?
And Rahere, hovering somewhere between fever and faith, says, in effect, you’ve got yourself a deal, St B.
It’s the reverse Godfather offer. Not “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.” More, “I’m going to save him with an offer he can’t refuse.”
Rahere recovers.
And in 1123 he keeps his side of the bargain.
Welcome to St Bartholomew’s Hospital.
Oldest hospital in Britain. Second oldest in Europe. Founded because a fever dream turned into a vow.
And what comes next – what comes today – is almost a fever dream in its own right.
Because now, at last, you can visit the holy of holies at Bart’s.
Bart’s has opened its 300-year-old Great Hall and the magnificent Hogarth Stair to the public.
Which means you can stand inside a building born of a hallucination over a bottomless pit.
And let’s be clear, Smithfield was no spa retreat. It was livestock. It was stench. It was noise. It was blood. It wasn’t just animals that were slaughtered at Smithfield. It was London’s principal execution ground. William Wallace was put to death in Smithfield. Protestant martyrs were burned at the stake in Smithfield. The air would have carried the stench of animal waste and blood and smoke and burnt flesh. And cheek by jowl with all of that – care.
Monks tending the sick.
Washing wounds. Offering broth. Offering prayer.
Fast-forward six centuries and up the magnificent staircase you go.
Because in the 18th century along comes William Hogarth. London’s great visual satirist. The scourge of gin and gambling. The painter who understood this city’s sins and sympathies better than anyone.
And he gives Bart’s two enormous paintings.
Gives them The Pool of Bethesda. And The Good Samaritan.
Biblical subjects, yes.
But look at the faces.
Those aren’t idealised biblical figures.
Those are Londoners.
The poor. The lame. The miserable. The hopeful.
And the story doesn’t stop with Hogarth’s paintbrush.
Because many of those faces were drawn from life – from Bart’s itself. Hospital patients, used as models for the figures in the great canvases. Real London bodies.
Real London ailments.
And for years – right up into the 19th century – the paintings doubled as teaching tools.
Medical students were, in effect, frog-marched over to the stair and told: all right then – diagnose him. Diagnose her. What’s he got? What’s she suffering from?
Art on the wall. Medicine in the making.
Climb those stairs and the canvases rise up in front of you – almost life-size. Flesh and fabric and suffering and desperation and disfigurement in oil.
Hogarth isn’t painting polite charity. He’s painting something gritty. Immediate.
It’s not just art. It’s manifesto.
This is what a city should do, they say. This is what civilisation looks like.
And then you step into the Great Hall.
Georgian grandeur. Portraits of benefactors. High windows. Light falling in that very London way, pale and slightly diffused, as if it has passed through centuries before it reaches you.
Think of who has walked here.
Florence Nightingale trained at Bart’s.
Elizabeth Blackwell studied here. During the Blitz, operations continued while bombs fell on the City.
All of it flowing from that moment in Rome.
That fever.
That beast.
That deal.
And what’s not to like about the saint specifying the “smooth field.”
Smithfield.
The name is still there if you listen carefully. The smooth field of Rahere’s vision became London’s hard-edged market district. But the hospital endures.
There is something gloriously medieval about the origin story.
No committee.
No feasibility study.
Just a man, a monster, a saint and a promise.
And now, hundreds of years later, the doors are open.
You don’t have to be a governor. You don’t have to be a consultant. You can simply walk in during visiting hours and climb the staircase.
It feels slightly illicit.
Like you’ve stumbled into a secret London.
Art and medicine under one roof.
A hospital that understands its own story is part of the cure.
So here’s what I’d do.
Go in with Rahere in your head.
As you climb, imagine that winged creature banking over the abyss. Imagine the saint intervening. Imagine the deal being struck.
Then stand in front of Hogarth’s “Good Samaritan” and ask yourself whether the bargain is still being honoured.
Because it is, you know.
Every day.
On the smooth field.
And that,
my fellow London aficionados,
is a London story worth fever-dreaming about.
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.