London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good morning to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Thursday, September 11th, 2025.
As ever, our first port of call will be the London Calling Book Club Corner.
And here I’m going to own up to something. You know, my game plan was to come over here, get the PhD, go back to the land of my birth, and become a university professor. But of course no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. I got over here. And I did the PhD. But I didn’t want to go back. I knew after six weeks that I’d found the place I wanted to spend the rest of my life in.
So I didn’t become an American university professor. Or for that matter, an academic on this side of the pond.
But here’s the thing. I sometimes think of London Walks as a university. And London Walks guides as the Faculty. So we’ve got a law faculty, and a medical faculty, and a history department, and a Music Department, and a Theatre Department, and an Urban Studies Department, and an Art Department, and an English Department, and, yes, a Paleontology Department, and an archaeology department, and a Geology Department. And on it goes.
But it’s that last one that I want to linger on for a moment. Our Geology Department. That’s Ruth. She’s an award-winning professional Geologist. She’s been on the faculty of a couple of very prestigious British and Irish universities. Ruth guides, needless to say, our Urban Geology Walks. Which more than perhaps any other walk change the way you see London. Buildings never look the same – London never looks the same – once you know something about building stones and the titanic forces and the deep time, the millions of years, that forged them. Indeed know something about what the spot where you’re standing was like millions of years ago. Yes, so two hours with Geologist Ruth and those buildings change before your eyes. And London follows.
Anyway, here’s what Dr Ruth Siddall, Chair of the London Walks Geology Department, is reading. Ruth says:
“Not directly related to my walks, but I am reading Nature’s memory: behind the scenes at the world’s natural history museums by Jack Ashby (Allen Lane, 2025).
I can’t recommend it enough! A very interesting read on how these museums work. It’s an excellent book and one of the best I’ve read in a while.”
Message received. And thank you very much, Ruth. That one goes straight on to my personal Must Read List.
Moving on. A tasty London factoid just in. We learn today that the average income in London is just under £70,000 a year. This little nugget of information has come our way thanks to the Tube and DLR strikes. Apparently Tube drivers are earning £70,000 a year. But they can’t make ends meet on seventy grand a year. Specifically what’s beyond their means is getting on the London property ladder. Apparently you need a hundred thousand a year to get onto that first rung.
Be that as it may, statistics always need to be taken with a grain of salt. I think it was Mark Twain who said, “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”
By way of example, get ten people together, ten Londoners, nine of whom are each earning £9,000 a year and one is earning £619,000 a year. That group of ten Londoners, their average income is £70,000 a year. A pretty meaningless average for that particular group of nine part-time baristas and one pretty well paid City of London stockbroker.
And that brings us to our main course. I’ve had yet another idea for an occasional series. To wit: what I personally like about London. Chances are this series will run to ten or twelve entries.
And I thought I’d start with my refrain, “this is the greenest major city on earth…and that’s one of the important reasons it’s the most liveable city in the world.
First plan was to take a satellite view of London. Roll out the facts and figures about all the parks and squares and heaths and green spaces generally. Stun and astound you with just how green this place in. And make some very telling comparisons. With New York, say, and Mexico City and Tokyo and Cairo, etc. etc. But of course the problem with that approach is which set of damn lies and statistics are you going to adduce?
The elephant by the poolside in this instance is the Green Belt? Do you count it? Or not count it. Greater London covers 607 square miles. The Green Belt covers 1963 square miles. In short, the Green Belt, all by itself, is just over three times the size of Greater London. So if you factor in the Green Belt London is vastly greener than, say, New York City. But if you don’t count the Green Belt, well, London is still greener than New York. But it is more of a horse race.
In the end I thought, ah, that one can wait a bit. I need some time to figure out how I’m going to play that hand.
So my course correction is a piece on the first bits of London green that everybody gets to know. And marvels out. The Royal Parks right in the centre.
Are you ready? Come on, let’s go a-greening in central London.
Let’s start by each of us taking a deep breath.
Good. Now take this on board.
There’s a chance – a scientific chance, not just poetic – that some of the molecules you’ve just inhaled once passed through Shakespeare’s lungs.
And Julius Caesar’s.
And Christ’s.
Think about the words, Inspiration, respiration – they’re kin.
Breath is spirit.
Every time we breathe, we share spirit.
And where better to think about that than here – in the green lungs of London – where every gulp of air seems thick with ghosts?
We start in St. James’s Park.
Henry VIII chased deer here.
Charles II – the Merry Monarch – turned it into a playground, even put in that lake you see now. Pepys tells us he saw “the King and Queen walk round the Park.”
Stand here at dawn and it’s almost quiet enough to hear Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway whispering that even after we die, we’re still here –“…on the ebb and flow of things, here, there… part of people we have never met; being laid out like a mist between the people we know best… lifted on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist…”
And you breathe that mist in.
And they – the kings, the queens, the Nell Gwynns and Pepyses – breathe you back.
Cross The Mall and step into Green Park – the park without flowers.
Legend says Catherine of Braganza had them all dug up when she caught Charles II picking blooms for another woman. True? Who cares. It’s a good story.
And it means that what you have here is just grass, just trees, just air.
Which makes it perfect for thinking about breath.
Because some of the air you’re breathing – this very second – has been through Shakespeare’s lungs.
Through Caesar’s.
Through these trees, too, who’ve been standing here since the Battle of Trafalgar and quietly transmuting carbon dioxide into oxygen ever since.
Through Wellington Arch and into Hyde Park – London’s open-air parliament.
Duels were fought here.
The Chartists rallied here.
The Suffragettes heckled and harangued here.
If Yeats’s line – “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” – belongs anywhere, it belongs here.
And yet – that’s the magic Hyde Park holds. It takes all London’s steam, all its protests and passions, and somehow breathes it back into calm.
Take a breath here. The molecules might have brushed past Marx’s beard, Gladstone’s whiskers, Emmeline Pankhurst’s scarf. The ghosts are thick on the air.
Slip into Kensington Gardens and the mood softens.
Here’s Kensington Palace, where Victoria grew up.
Here’s Peter Pan, forever boyish, forever dawn-fresh.
In spring, when the blossom is out, Housman’s lines land perfectly:
“Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough…”
And Clarissa Dalloway comes back to you – that vision of being “laid out like a mist,” part of the trees, part of the people you have never met.
And you realise London’s parks are not just lungs.
They’re memory made breathable.
History you can inhale.
Take another breath.
The past is in it.
So is the future.
And so are you.
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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.