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 Saturday, January 17th, 2026.
And here it is.
Here’s your daily London fix.
I spend time with Sir Leslie Stephen every week.
Not in a séance sort of way.
In a library.
Because Leslie Stephen is still there.
In the systems he built.
In the habits he formed.
In the quiet confidence that knowledge can be ordered without being bullied into submission.
Stephen was a walker, a climber, a thinker, an organiser, a writer, an editor.
A Victorian who distrusted cant, distrusted gush,
distrusted the lazy certainty of people who thought the world could be reduced to a slogan.
He believed in work.
In clarity.
In doing the job properly.
That belief shaped three of the most important intellectual engines in London life.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
The London Library.
And a house at Hyde Park Gate that functioned like a small power station of ideas.
A house full of children.
One of them, Virginia Stephen.
You’ll recognise that name.
Let’s start with the library.
Stephen was President of the London Library.
Not a figurehead.
A hands-on president.
He organised it.
He worried over it.
He understood what libraries are really for.
Not just storage, but use.
And nowhere is that clearer than in the Library’s classification scheme.
It is not Dewey Decimal.
It is not the Library of Congress.
It is Stephen’s mind, hanging between the stacks.
My favourite section is Science and Miscellaneous.
Five floors of stacks of Science and Miscellaneous.
Even the title has a twinkle.
Science, yes.
And then everything else that refuses to behave.
Consider the twenty-five or so end-of-stack subject signs that tell you what lives there, shelf by shelf.
Unfussy white laminates.
Black type.
Alphabetical.
Correct.
And gloriously eccentric.
You move along quite sensibly and suddenly encounter a sequence that feels like a Victorian circus procession passing by.
Dogs.
Domestic Servants.
Dreams.
Drink.
Drugs.
Duelling.
Human Sacrifice.
Hunting.
Hydraulics.
Alphabetically impeccable.
Intellectually mischievous.
It’s like a Petri dish of ideas.
Put any three neighbouring subjects together and watch something strange and interesting start to grow.
Science rubbing shoulders with folklore.
Rational enquiry elbowing superstition.
Seriousness undercut by wit.
That’s Sir Leslie Stephen all over.
He loved systems but hated rigidity.
He wanted order, not tidiness.
He understood that knowledge is contiguous.
It leaks.
It overlaps.
It refuses to stay in its lane.
Which brings us to the other great machine he built.
The Dictionary of National Biography.
Yes, the DNB, as it’s fondly known.
Sir Leslie Stephen launched the Dictionary of National Biography and edited its early volumes, a vast enterprise that eventually ran to
63 volumes.
A mad idea.
A magnificent one.
A national roll-call of the dead.
Poets, politicians, adventurers, scoundrels, saints.
Alphabetised.
Unsparing.
Unsentimental.
It bears repeating:
Sir Leslie Stephen was the DNB’s first editor.
He may have been the only man in Victorian London equal to that monumental task.
He called himself an autocrat.
But a considerate one.
No waffle.
No puffery.
No reverence for reverence’s sake.
Facts first.
Context always.
Brevity as a moral virtue.
He wrote hundreds of entries himself.
He coordinated thousands of contributors.
He built a machine that worked.
What he accomplished in the 15 years he worked on it is a feat that still makes modern editors blink.
Truth be told, it nearly killed him.
Overwork.
Collapse.
Influenza.
Pneumonia.
Eventually he had to step back.
But the engine kept running because he had built it properly.
With principles.
With standards.
With trust in his contributors and zero tolerance for nonsense.
And then there’s the house.
The Stephen house in Kensington.
22 Hyde Park Gate.
The three blue plaques right there, by the front door.
The only house in London with three blue plaques. One for Sir Leslie, one for his daughter Virginia the famous novelist, and one for his other daughter, Vanessa, the equally famous artist.
They always look to me like blue buttons on a naval officer’s formal white dinner jacket.
Now look up.
The top two storeys of the house were added by Stephen himself.
His study right at the very top.
Below that, the children’s rooms.
Stephen above.
The next generation below.
Years later, his daughter, Virginia Woolf, would write of hearing her father drop books on the floor above her.
Heavy books.
Thudding.
Many of them borrowed from the London Library.
Ideas literally falling through the ceiling.
That detail matters.
Not because it centres Virginia Woolf, though she is there.
But because it shows how Stephen lived.
Work upstairs.
Family below.
Knowledge in motion.
Nothing ornamental.
Everything used.
Stephen was born into public service.
His father, Sir James Stephen, was a senior civil servant who helped draft and shepherd the legislation that abolished slavery across the British Empire.
Words as instruments of change.
Moral conviction translated into legal prose.
Leslie Stephen inherited that seriousness.
He just shifted the arena.
From Parliament to print.
From legislation to literature.
From Acts to lives.
He was a climber who treated the Alps like a cathedral.
A walker who thought best with miles in his legs.
A sceptic who rejected religious certainty but believed ferociously in responsibility.
A man who distrusted easy answers
and preferred well-made ones.
And yes, his daughter absorbed all this.
She walked with him. They regularly went for two long walks every day in Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park.
She listened.
She inherited the respect for work
and the suspicion of fixed categories.
But Virginia Woolf is accompaniment here, not the tune.
This is Stephen’s story.
A man who organised knowledge without strangling it.
Who believed libraries should invite curiosity, not police it.
Who built systems that still breathe.
Every time I stand under a Science and Miscellaneous sign, every time I read a list that runs from Hydraulics to Hypnotism, I feel his presence.
Still organising.
Still walking.
Still reminding us that the mind works best when it’s allowed to wander, provided someone has taken the trouble to hang the signposts.
Sir Leslie Stephen.
A Victorian who made order humane.
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.