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 August 6th, 2025.
The 80th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. And I did a walk this morning. A private Inns of Court Walk for a group of law students from California. S.O.P. Standard Operating Procedure. Bit of telescoping when the walk finished. By telescoping I mean extra innings, to use the baseball metaphor. Overtime to use the American football metaphor. Injury time to use the English football metaphor. A tiebreaker to use the tennis metaphor. In short, telescoping is London Walks parlance for doing an added bit of sightseeing or exploring in that same neighborhood after the walk is over and you’ve parted company with your walkers.
And it was always on the cards, wasn’t it, this being Hiroshima Day. Had to go and see – yet again – the statue of Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, in front of St Clement Danes, the RAF Church. And couldn’t have been convenient, given that my Inns of Court walk ends at the Royal Courts of Justice, just 35 yards away from the ‘Bomber.’ I’ve touched down there hundreds of times. But you know something, I think today it did look a bit different. How could it be otherwise given that my head was swirling with thoughts of Hiroshima tale and where its radioactive bread crumbs have spread to – a planet armed to the teeth with over 13,000 nuclear warheads, like so many sleeping dragons under the floorboards of the world. Many of them 300 times as powerful as Little Boy, the atomic bomb that turned Hiroshima into a furnace.
So yes, I wanted to go see Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris on Hiroshima Day.
And there he is, that imposing nine-foot bronze statue by Faith Winter. Gazing down from his plinth as though he’s sizing up the Strand for target practice. Or a bombing run.
Let’s fast backward. To May 31st 1992. There she is, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, unveiling the statue. Somebody gave some thought to that date. 1992 was Harris’s centenary year. And May 31st 1992 was the 50th anniversary of the inaugural “1,000 bomber raid.” Actually it was 1,047 aircraft. But who’s counting?
Ok, now let’s zoom out a bit and give us a gv – a general view – or a wv – a wide view – of the star of this show.
Arthur Travers Harris was born in Cheltenham in 1892, but he wasn’t English in the comforting sense. We’ll come back to that in due course. He was known in RAF circles as “Butcher” or “Butch,” and in the media (rather more politely) as “Bomber” Harris. To his friends, he was simply “Bert.” He took over as Commander-in-Chief of RAF Bomber Command in February 1942. He hadn’t turned fifty yet. He was driven. And he had energy. And he had the only possible temperament for that job. He rolled up his sleeves and got on with it. Ruthlessly reshaped the force into a night‑flying, incendiary‑dropping juggernaut.
In terms of sheer duration and percentage of lives lost, Bomber Command became an offensive that challenged comparison with the attritional grind of the Western Front in the First War.
In the words of the great British military historian Corelli Barnett: Bomber Harris’s three‑year campaign – night after night, month after month – was bloody in ways only trench warfare had previously achieved on land. And it wasn’t just hundreds of thousands of German lives that were fed into the cauldron.
Over the course of that three-year-long offensive some 57,000 British and American airmen were killed. Around 44 percent of the force. Those were the ghosts at the banquet of the Bomber Harris statue. That’s the figure Faith Winter and the Bomber Command Association wanted to memorialize. It wasn’t just about Harris the man, but about the crews he commanded – and the terrible price they paid.
Harris himself was a hard case – flamboyant, forthright, short‑tempered (Barnett says even more so when his ulcer flared up) and utterly single‑minded. He claimed that by the end of the war his bombers had “virtually destroyed” 45 out of the 60 major German cities. In January 1945 he submitted a revised “shopping list” of further targets to obliterate. Tough doesn’t begin to cover it.
The statue reflects that personality: Harris stands stock‑still, hands clasped behind his back – RAF uniform crisp, head tilted slightly upwards – as though contemplating the moral and physical weight of what he had set in motion. John Slessor, Air Chief Marshal, called him “a man single‑minded. A desperately cynical character,” and the statue seems to capture that hard edge.
Faith Winter sculpted both Harris and the statue it’s paired with, just along from the Air Chief Marshal. Hugh Dowding, head of Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain. There they are like a couple of twin engines. At attention outside the RAF’s central church, St Clement Danes. The church was gutted by the Blitz in May 1941; later rebuilt and reconsecrated in 1958 as a perpetual shrine to the service of the RAF.
Dowding saved Britain from the Luftwaffe; Harris helped bring mechanized vengeance to Germany. They’re locked in tension across the Strand – Dowding quietly decisive; Harris outwardly belligerent.
Faith Winter trained at Guildford and Chelsea, exhibited early, but only in her forties turned fully to sculpture. She said she captured Harris as a man who “absolutely hated what he was obliged to do.” I wonder. Did he absolutely hate it? I’m thinking now of that letter he wrote to the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff. Butcher Harris said, “I would not regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British grenadier. The feeling over Dresden could easily be explained by a psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses.” Well, that one’s your call.
But however you call it, you can see that internal tension – it peers from the bronze.
The words carved beneath the RAF wings on the plinth read:
In memory of a great commander and of the brave crews of Bomber Command, more than 55,000 of whom lost their lives in the cause of freedom. The Nation owes them all an immense debt.
But make no mistake – the unveiling wasn’t without controversy. German cities like Hamburg and Dresden protested. Protesters in London shouted accusations of “mass murderer” at the Queen Mother. The statue was even guarded 24‑hours for a time after repeatedly being defaced—sprayed with red paint, “Shame” scrawled across it.
So while you might telescope this stop after your legal walking tour of St Clement Danes, you’re entering a moral zone that defies simple narrative. Harris was South African by upbringing – he emigrated to Rhodesia in 1910, joined Rhodesian forces in the First War, then returned to England to join the RFC in 1915. Not quite the English hero as advertised.
And as Barnett reminds us, the scale and continual attrition of the bombing campaign rivalled the Great War in duration and deadly wear on its crews. That’s a blunt point that you can drop to puncture any romantic image of the bomber barons.
Let’s take a close look at the statue. His posture for starters. Stoic, imperious, unyielding. A man clasping gloves behind his back, the quiet pose of someone convinced in advance that the worst must be done. If there is a tragic paradox, it hinges on whether deep inside Bomber Harris he had doubts, had a conscience that gnawed away at him. Yes, I’m helping us to win this war but I’m having to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people – women and children in particular – in order to bring about that end. Dowding just across the way achieves victory with fighters; Harris wins with firestorms. They’re two halves of the RAF story—and here in the RAF churchyard, the pair confront us with issues of necessity, morality, loss.
A final thought – back to Hiroshima. The 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Now think of scale: the Hiroshima atomic bomb killed some 160,000 people. It bears repeating, nuclear arsenals now hold weapons 200 to 300 times more powerful. Over 13,000 of them world wide. It’s catastrophism writ large. Harris’s area bombing killed hundreds of thousands in Germany – but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the inferno that’s now possible. So Bomber Harris’s statue is a mini‑time machine: from Blitz‑wrought London, to doctrinal fire bombing, to Hiroshima and beyond.
So that, for me personally, was today’s double history. The Inns of Court – Legal London – a walk, which, incidentally, looks at some of the damage, some of the scars from one of the first aerial bombing raids carried out against a city. Scars caused by a bomb dropped on the Inns of Court in 1915. There’s a direct line from that single Zeppelin drifting over Lincoln’s Inn in 1915 to a thousand Lancasters darkening the skies over Dresden in 1945 to the Enola Gay dropping Little Boy on Hiroshima on this day in August 1945.
So mine was a journey from the London of the 1270s – when the lawyers began to establish themselves here – to the moral courtroom where Bomber Harris stands as judge, jury – and executioner. Gazing at this statue, you’re not just looking back at one man, or one war—but the trajectories of air power, ethics, and the ever‑widening arc of destruction we still live under.
Good Londoning, good walk, god‑speed (and thinking of those 13,000 nukes, maybe say a prayer for all of us) – and give Harris a long look before you walk on.
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.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.