Books, Bombs & British Backbone

London calling.

London Walks connecting.

This… is London.

This is London Walks.

Streets ahead.

Story time. History time.

Top of the morning to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.

It’s Friday, September 26th, 2025.

To get us started let’s call in at the London Calling Book Club Corner. In the Chair today, our most cerebral guide, Matthew Devereaux. Not just our most cerebral guide, Matthew’s a 21st-century Renaissance man. He’s a composer, an artist, an actor, and perhaps most important of all – at least for our purposes here at London Walks – he’s a brilliant raconteur. For good measure, he’s utterly charming, has got a big personality and is very friendly. Matthew’s the complete package. And where are you going to catch up with him. Well, he guides his home patch, Highgate, from time to time. And the Unknown East End. And the National Gallery. He’s creating a Constable in Hampstead Walk. He’s painted some of the same scenes Constable painted. Anyway, you add all that up – get the measure of it, think about it – it speaks volumes about Matthew’s range: Highgate, the East End of London, London galleries – not just the National Gallery – the guy’s enclopaedic. Anything else? Yeah, Matthew’s modest. Fitted out the way he is he could – pretty much justifiably – have the biggest swollen head this side of Buckingham Palace.

But that’s not Matthew. He’s too bright, too interested in everything to want to wallow in the cramped quarters of egoism.

Anyway, here’s Matthew’s current reading, here’s what he’s been riding bareback of late.

He says, “It’s pretty abstruse stuff. At the moment, the John Florio translation of, The essays of Michel de Montaigne. As you probably know it was this translation that Shakespeare would have read, probably introduced to him by the Earl of Southampton, who was a mutual friend. Also, Authority and the individual – by Bertrand Russell.”

And Matthew signs it, “I am not sure my reading list is one that would bring people flocking, alas, M.”

And then he leaves us with a closing epigraph.  It’s so Matthew, that touch, that bit of thoughtfulness. And needless to say the closing epigraph is a very fine Montaigne pensée. Serving it up now.

  “We must not cleave so fast unto our humours and dispositions. Our chiefest sufficiency is to apply ourselves to diverse fashions . It is a being not a life to be tied by necessity to one single course. The goodliest of minds  are those that have the most variety and pliablenes in them.” Ok, moving on. Main course. Tomorrow, Saturday, September 27th I’m guiding my Kensington Walk. September 27th is an important anniversary in the history of Kensington. The day before I do a walk I send my walkers a cup runneth over advancer email about the neighbourhood we’ll be exploring. The advancer tomorrow’s Kensington walkers are going to receive later today will have a link to this piece. Because I want them to know that they’re going to be walking in Kensington on a day that’s rife with important historical echoes.

So here we go.

Picture it: Kensington, 27 September 1940. The sky is lit with fire. Ten hours of it. Incendiaries raining down like hell’s own hailstones. And right there in the middle of it all – Holland House.

Now Holland House wasn’t just any old house. It was the Jacobean mansion of west London – all swagger and panache. Built in 1605, when Shakespeare was still turning out plays, when the Gunpowder Plotters were still digging their tunnel. A great, honeyed-brick pile that looked like it had strolled straight out of an Elizabethan pageant. For centuries it was the social capital of fashionable London. Kings and queens came calling. Charles James Fox and the Whigs plotted reform under its roof. Byron dropped in, Sheridan told his scandalous stories, Disraeli made his social debut there. The place positively reeked of politics, poetry and privilege.

Fast forward to 1940, and the house – well, it’s still grand, but the world’s moved on. London’s at war. Night after night the Luftwaffe is overhead. September is the month the Blitz really starts to bite. On this particular night the Heinkels and Dorniers come droning in. Their target: London’s heart and lifeblood. Their weapon: fire.

And Holland House is right under the flight path.

The numbers still make you whistle through your teeth: twenty-two incendiary bombs landed on Holland House that night. Twenty-two! Imagine being the fire-watch that evening. You’re standing there on the terrace, listening to the engines, hearing the whistle as the bombs fall, and then – whump! – the place is alight.

The west wing takes the brunt. Roof goes first, timbers blazing like matchwood. The great hall – gone. The Long Gallery, the ballroom – gutted. Flames climbing up the oak panelling. And yet – miracle of miracles – the east wing somehow survives. As does most of the library. Well, after a fashion. Overnight some of it became an open-air library. An open-air library shin deep in rubble and masrony. But the library walls, lined with books, are still standing.

That’s where one of the two the most famous photographs of the Blitz was taken. You know the one: three men, clad in hats and coats, standing amid the rubble, calmly browsing the books as if it was any other Tuesday morning. The roof’s gone, daylight’s pouring in, there’s rubble everywhere – and they’re just… reading. It’s a crystallisation that photograph: civilisation and barbarism. caught in a single frame. And it also perhaps epitomised –  became the very picture of British sangfroid. (To be fair, it was probably a staged photograph – but so what. In which connection look closely at the men’s attire. Three different coats, three different hats. I’m pretty sure what that attire says is British working class, middle class and upper class. The image says, we’re all in this together. So yes, it probably was staged. But the sentiment was genuine. This was London saying: “You can smash our buildings but you won’t smash us.”)

And today? Well, today, Holland House is the Ghost in the Park.

After the firestorm of that bombing raid, Holland House was never fully rebuilt. The war ended, the years passed, and the house became a romantic ruin – a Kensington Colosseum. Today, if you walk into Holland Park, you can still see the remains. The east wing is intact – a charming, slightly wistful reminder of what was lost. It’s now the backdrop for the open-air Holland Park Theatre, home of Opera Holland Park.  Come a summer evening, with Shakespeare or opera on stage and the bats flitting overhead, you can almost imagine you’ve stepped into the seventeenth century.

You stand there, looking at those honeyed ruins, and you can peel back the layers. Seventeenth-century splendour. Nineteenth-century political salons. Twentieth-century firestorm. All right there in front of you.

There’s something about Holland House that feels like London in miniature. Surviving. Adapting. Wearing its scars with a certain panache. Yes, the great house is mostly gone – but it didn’t vanish entirely. It morphed into something else: a public park, a cultural venue, a place where the ghosts of Byron and Fox might nod approvingly as the orchestra tunes up.

And maybe that’s the real story of 27 September 1940. The bombs came, the house burned, and Londoners carried on.

You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from  –  – 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, , the former Editor (and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.

And , 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.