London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good afternoon to you London Walkers, wherever you are. It’s Tuesday, December 2nd, 2025.
Ah, yes, December 2nd.
You want to know about London
you need to know about December 2nd.
Come this time of the year
that date
hangs in the
London dusk
like a small illuminated sign.
One of those hinge-moments when
the city shifts, almost imperceptibly, onto a new track.
Which December 2nd are we talking about?
December 2nd, 1823.
A date that enters the story with
a faint radiance,
as if carrying its own candle
into the dark.
A seed was planted that day.
A seed that grew into a mighty oak.
A mighty oak that still shades,
shelters
and nurtures Londoners
two centuries on and counting.
Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye.
Let’s hear the tale.
We’re in the Strand on this date in 1823.
It’s a cold evening.
Gaslamps trembling in the wind.
Inside the Crown and Anchor Tavern,
in an upstairs room thick with
expectation, there’s
a small gathering of determined men.
They’re about to set
something extraordinary in motion.
An institution
for London’s working men.
Evening learning.
Science shared with anyone
who cares to walk through the door.
And into that flickering glow steps George Birkbeck.
Physician.
Reformer.
Yorkshire Quaker stock.
A man lit from within
by a private engine of purpose.
Now, step back in time. Back to January, 10th, 1776.
Head north.
To Settle, in Yorkshire.
To a Quaker household of
enterprise and conscience.
A baby boy is born. A baby born named George Birkbeck.
In not so many years that baby will turn into one of those bright sparks of a kid,
a kid who disassembles the world
to understand it.
Some 20 years later the young man George Birkbeck arrives in London
to study medicine,
forever wanting to know,
wanting to find out,
see how it’s done, asking questions, navigating the narrow staircases of the private anatomy schools.
Then it’s back up north, to Edinburgh, where he completes his training. Then Marriage. Back to London.
Finsbury Square.
A son born.
And ten days later, catastrophe.
His wife Catherine dies.
Something breaks in him,
but not the part that works.
Grief-stricken George Birkbeck’s response is
relentless motion.
Aldersgate Dispensary,
home visits,
medical journals,
lectures,
societies.
Forward, always forward.
He’s on his way in London.
But credit where credit’s due.
The spark that defines George Birkbeck ignites earlier,
in Glasgow.
There, he opens his lecture room
to mechanics.
And that word matters.
In 1823 a mechanic isn’t someone
in overalls at a car workshop.
A mechanic is a craftsman
of the Industrial Revolution. Millwrights.
Engine men.
Machinists.
Iron-workers.
The aristocracy of labour.
The men who build the new world
with their hands and understand its mysteries with their minds.
He invites them in.
Free lectures.
Free science.
And the room fills
like a bellows taking breath.
Now return to London.
The Strand.
The Crown and Anchor.
This day, December 2nd, 1823.
George Birkbeck stands up, gets the floor, says, in effect, “I have a vision” and he lays out the blueprint of that vision.
And London changes.
They call it
the London Mechanics’ Institution. Within weeks,
the lecture rooms in
Southampton Buildings
off Chancery Lane are packed.
Picture it:
men coming straight
from ten-hour shifts,
boots scuffed,
shirts smelling faintly of engine rooms, notebooks under arms.
They sit shoulder to shoulder
in the warm, lamplit air,
learning how heat becomes power,
how force becomes motion,
how the new world they’re building actually works.
Not everyone approves.
The guardians of the old order
mutter about working men
absorbing dangerous ideas.
Too much knowledge can unsettle
a society.
But Birkbeck ignores them.
He’s everywhere at once.
Fellow of the Medical Society.
Member of the Geological Society. President of the Meteorological Society.
Campaigner.
Advocate.
He battles newspaper taxes.
Opposes harsh libel laws.
Supports Polish liberty.
Helps spare Chartists from execution. He’s a nineteenth-century dynamo
in human form.
And today?
The poetry of London’s geography provides its own epilogue.
The college that bears his name
stands at the very heart
of the University of London.
To the south: Senate House,
the university’s administrative fortress.
To the north: University College London – my alma mater, as it happens – the pioneering first college,
the spark that set the university alight.
Birkbeck sits between them
like the hinge of an intellectual door. No surprise
our Bohemian Bloomsbury Walk lingers in this neighbourhood.
The air feels charged with ideas.
And its alumni?
A Nobel Prize winner,
a Prime Minister,
an astronaut.
Tell me more, you say.
Release those files.
Name those names.
As directed, here you go:
Ramsay MacDonald, first Labour Prime Minister.
Aaron Klug, Nobel laureate.
Helen Sharman, first Briton in space.
For good measure,
Dame Helen Mirren, actor of global renown.
And the great World War I poet Isaac Rosenberg.
And social reformer Sidney Webb.
And filmmaker Derek Jarman.
And novelist Margaret Drabble.
A scattering of writers, jurists, scientists, artists, dreamers.
A kingdom of night-school strivers who turned effort into change.
Not bad for an idea born over the din of hammers and flywheels in a Glasgow workshop.
Now the light dims.
We return to Finsbury Square.
It’s December 1st, 1841.
A cold night.
George Birkbeck is dying,
worn down by
a brutal attack of prostatitis.
It is the eve
of the anniversary
of his great creation.
The hinge-day.
The day the oak first took root.
Twelve days later,
on December 13th,
London gathers.
Rain falls.
A thousand people
follow his coffin
from 38 Finsbury Square
to Kensal Green Cemetery.
At the head march members
of the Mechanics’ Institution.
Men whose lives he transformed.
Men who
walked into evening classrooms and walked out into new futures.
As the procession
makes its way
through the wet streets,
you can almost see
a faint glow
trailing behind it,
like the after-image
of a lantern just extinguished.
But London is stubborn with memory.
The lamps Birkbeck lit
never went out.
Pass Birkbeck on an evening today
and you’ll see lights in the windows.
Working people learning after work.
Modern mechanics
in the broadest, noblest sense.
Turning effort into opportunity.
George Birkbeck believed
that knowledge
is a kind of light.
Two centuries on,
London still walks
by the lamps he left burning.
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.