London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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A very good evening to you, London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Tuesday, July 15th, 2025.
You know, London is so vast and so complicated and so historically rich, it’s a bit of a labyrinth, really. Bearing that in mind, how about if we start tonight with a word. The word clue. Except we’re going to give it its old spelling. Clew – Clew – rather than clue – clue. That’s its very old spelling. It’s Middle English and ultimately Old English spelling. So back a thousand years and more. It was a Germanic word originally. And it meant in those days a ball of thread or yarn. We think it ultimately came from a Proto-Indo-European word that meant gather into a mass or conglomerate. Linguists – historical linguists – are pretty sure it’s cognate with the word clay.
But here’s the joy of the old old word clew. A clew of thread – a ball of thread – was what Ariadne in Greek mythology gave to Theseus to help him negotiate the Labyrinth. The purely figurative sense of the word clue – that which points the way – doesn’t pitch up until the 1620s. A few years after Shakespeare dies. So our sense of the word clue – something that helps you find your way out of a puzzle or clear up mystery – that would have been Greek to Shakespeare. He only would have understood it in that sense in connection with the ball of thread that helps Theseus find his way out of the labyrinth.
Ok, main course. Back we go to Bow Street. This is the third part of our stroll along Bow Street. And what’s that up ahead? Hey, it’s a port of call. It’s Will’s Coffee House.
Ah, Will’s Coffee House—now there’s a place where you can almost hear the hum of history if you tune everything else out. And stand there quietly on the corner of Bow Street. Picture it: Number 1 Bow Street, right across from where the Royal Opera House stands today.
The times, they have a-changed. A long time ago Number 1 Bow Street was where it was happening. It was the liveliest nerve centre of 17th and 18th-century London.
We’re talking a lifetime, 80 years. From 1671 to 1749 Will’s Coffee House was London’s social and literary gyroscope. It wasn’t just a place to grab a hot drink; it was a stage, a salon, a sparring ground for the great minds of the day.
It was founded by a chap named William Unwin. Hence the name Will’s. Who knows why but it took off. It quickly became a magnet for London’s literary elite. Packed a lot of wallop for a coffee house. You’ve heard of the Enlightenment? Will’s was one of its smoky little cradles. I think of Will’s as Twitter, but with powdered wigs, quills, and far better manners.
Time to do some name-dropping. Think of that scene early on in Goodfellas when the gangsters are all out on the town. Scorcese pans the camera across the nightclub they’ve all pitched up at. And Henry Hill puts a name to each of them. Well, let’s go in for a bit of that here. Let’s start with Samuel Pepys. The great diarist regularly frequented Will’s. And you can be sure every visit he was scribbling mental notes about the gossip and grub.
And who’s that over there? Why none other than John Dryden. Our first-ever Poet Laureate. Yeah, John Dryden—poet, critic, and London’s self-proclaimed literary sheriff. Dryden held court at Will’s like it was his own front parlour. He sat by the fireside, near-sighted and pensive, puffing on a pipe while others leaned in to hear his pronouncements on the state of poetry.
Cue Alexander Pope. Alexander Pope, who practically invented the literary feud. He started out as a kind of Dryden fanboy, hanging about the edges at Will’s just to catch a bit of Dryden’s brilliance.
Now here’s a corker: one evening, Jonathan Swift—yes, that Jonathan Swift, he of Gulliver’s Travels fame— one night a very irked Jonathan Swift stormed out of Will’s after being heckled by a young poet who dared question his Latin.
“A coffee house?” Swift snarled as he slammed the door on the way out. “More like a monkey house.” But of course, he came back. They always came back.
But rest assured, it wasn’t all bickering and verse. Sometimes there was real camaraderie. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele hatched editions of The Spectator magazine from their seats by the window. And if you were lucky enough to wander in on the right day, you might find John Gay—he of The Beggar’s Opera—trading jests with Pope or perhaps listening in as Samuel Johnson, then just starting to make his mark, tried out a new phrase or two.
So the next time you’re on Bow Street, look down. The cobbles may be long gone, but the ghosts of Will’s are still chatting over coffee and controversy. And if you happen to catch a whiff of roasting beans and brilliant ideas on the breeze—well, now you know why.
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.