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 Sunday, December 21st, 2025.
And here you go, here’s your daily London fix.
At one o’clock on a dark December afternoon in 1846, a man lay on a table in Bloomsbury, a surgeon raised a knife, and pain was about to be switched off for the first time in British history.
December 21st. Winter Solstice. The longest night of the year. You could not script it better if you tried. On that day, inside University College London Hospital, the darkness of surgery finally met its match. Anaesthesia arrived in Britain. Light flooded in.
The surgeon was Robert Liston, the fastest knife in the west, or east, or anywhere. The patient was a working class man named Frederick Churchill. He needed his leg amputated. Until that afternoon, that sentence alone meant agony so intense it had to be experienced to be believed. Surgery was speed, strength, restraint, screams. You survived by being quick, and your surgeon survived by being quicker.
Liston was legendary for that. He could remove a leg in under three minutes. Sometimes under two. He once said a good surgeon should be able to amputate before the patient had time to scream twice. This was not bravado. It was mercy.
Picture the room. Not an operating theatre as we know it, but a steeply raked anatomy theatre. Wooden benches rising in a horseshoe. Students leaning forward. The smell of damp wool, unwashed bodies, blood soaked aprons. No gloves. No antiseptic. The knife wiped on a coat sleeve. London outside was a city of smoke and mud and horse dung. Inside, it was all eyes on Liston.
And now, something radically new.
Churchill inhaled vapour from a glass apparatus. Ether. Sweet, sharp, unmistakable. Within moments, he slumped. Liston waited. He pinched the skin. No response. Silence. A kind of holy hush.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “this Yankee dodge beats mesmerism hollow.”
And then he cut.
The operation was swift, clean, decisive. When it was over, Churchill woke up and asked when the operation was going to start.
That question right there is the hinge of medical history.
Liston had not invented anaesthesia. The breakthrough came two months earlier in Boston, at Massachusetts General Hospital, where dentist William Morton stunned the world by removing a tumour while his patient slept. The room where it happened is still called the Ether Dome. News crossed the Atlantic at steamship speed. Letters. Reports. Gossip. Medical London buzzed.
Liston was instantly intrigued. Not everyone was. There were grumbles about danger, about loss of surgical skill, about God’s will. Pain, some argued, was part of the natural order. Remove it and you risked hubris.
Liston didn’t buy it. He was a pragmatist. Pain was the enemy. Anything that reduced it was an ally. He arranged for ether. He moved fast. That was his genius. Speed of hand, speed of mind.
The result was a sensation.
Medical journals lit up. Some hailed a revolution. Others were cautious, even sniffy. Ether could be unpredictable. Doses were guesswork. There were risks. But the die was cast. Surgery without agony was no longer a fantasy.
And yes, it worked. Churchill survived. The operation was a success. He lived for years afterwards. That matters. This wasn’t theatre. It was real life, changed forever.
Step back for a moment and look at where this happened. University College London was young then, radical, non-sectarian. No religious tests. Open to dissenters. A place for modern ideas. This was not an accident of geography. UCL was exactly where anaesthesia belonged.
Liston fitted right in. A Scot in London, blunt, brilliant, occasionally terrifying. He dressed sharply, moved in scientific circles, but never lost the practical edge. He hated inefficiency. He despised cruelty disguised as tradition.
He also knew London. This was a city where progress rubbed shoulders with squalor. Where surgery was still a spectator sport. Where bodies were robbed from graves to supply anatomy schools. Where death was familiar, intimate, unavoidable.
Anaesthesia changed all that. Slowly, then suddenly.
Once pain could be controlled, surgeons could take their time. Precision replaced speed. Complex operations became possible. Abdominal surgery. Brain surgery. The unimaginable edged into the routine.
And it all starts here. Bloomsbury. December 21st, 1846.
That date keeps ringing. Winter Solstice. The return of the light. How perfect is that? Pain goes dark. Consciousness drifts. The knife does its work without suffering.
It’s also the date the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock. A new world beginning. And the birthday of Benjamin Disraeli, another great disruptor, another man who changed the script.
History loves its coincidences, and London is especially good at them.
Walk past UCL Hospital today and you’d never guess it. Sirens. Coffee cups. Phones glowing. But stand there for a second. Let the noise drop away. Imagine the winter light slanting across Gower Street. Imagine the hush as ether took hold. Imagine a man waking up without pain and changing medicine forever.
That’s a London story. That’s a London Walks story. And it happened on the longest night of the year, when the light was just starting to come back.
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.