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 Monday, January 25th, 2026.
And here it is.
Here’s your daily London fix.
We did a birth yesterday. Virginia Woolf. Today we do a death. A horrific death. Violent in the extreme.
Chinese Gordon
Killed this day, January 26, 1885
And there he is, on that staircase. Charles George Gordon. Butchered on that staircase in Khartoum.
Speared at close quarters when the city finally falls. His body mutilated. His head taken and displayed.
And London doesn’t know.
For nearly a fortnight the city goes on breathing. Bells ring. Letters are posted. Dinners are eaten. Omnibuses roll through the streets. Nobody yet realises that the empire’s most famous soldier is already dead.
That delay matters. It sharpens everything that follows. It allows hope to linger. It lets fantasy do its work. When the truth finally reaches London in early February, it hits like a hammer blow.
Because Gordon is not just another general.
He is already a legend.
And he is a Londoner from the start.
He’s born on 28 January 1833 at 1 Kempt’s Terrace, Woolwich.
A military address in a military town.
The Royal Arsenal nearby. The Thames broad and purposeful, already pointing outward to the world.
Woolwich smells of gun oil and damp cloth.
Gordon grows up in that atmosphere.
Army. Discipline. Empire.
Even as a boy he’s difficult. Brilliant. Eccentric.
At the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich he’s disciplined for bullying younger cadets.
His father writes, half proud and half terrified, that while Gordon is there he feels like a man sitting on a powder barrel.
That line is prophecy.
Gordon chooses the Royal Engineers.
Map making. Fortifications. Turning drawings into facts on the ground.
Then comes war.
The Crimea. Balaklava.
Sevastopol. Siege work. Danger. Hard labour under fire.
Gordon volunteers eagerly.
He’s brave. And energetic. And ambitious.
Later he’ll claim he went hoping to be killed, but at the time his letters fizz with excitement.
He enjoys war.
He enjoys testing himself.
Then comes the turn.
Illness. Confinement. Bible reading. A religious intensity that never loosens its grip.
From this point on, Gordon lives as if God is not an abstraction but a daily presence.
He once tells a friend that as he walked up South Audley Street, God walked with him arm in arm.
South Audley Street. Figures in our Mayfair Walk. Like Gordon we walk up South Audley Street.
London pavement.
Not a desert vision.
That’s Gordon exactly.
Money means nothing to him.
He insists his salary be reduced.
He gives things away.
He despises luxury. He studies the Bible daily.
He comes to see death not as something to be feared but as a gateway.
Something almost to be welcomed.
And then comes China.
This is where the nickname is born. And it matters.
China in the early 1860s is convulsed by the Taiping Rebellion, one of the bloodiest civil wars in human history.
Around Shanghai, foreign merchants panic.
Trade is threatened.
Order is collapsing.
Gordon is given command of a ramshackle private force with a swaggering name:
the Ever Victorious Army.
When Gordon takes it over, it’s mutinous, ill disciplined,
barely controllable.
Under Gordon, it becomes deadly.
His genius is movement.
Speed. Improvisation.
Steamboats racing through canals. Sudden strikes. Refusal to sit still. The rebels can never quite catch him. In 18 months he smashes the Taiping forces around Shanghai and the lower Yangtze.
The Chinese emperor offers him lavish rewards.
Gordon refuses the money.
He accepts only honour:
the highest Chinese military rank and the right to wear the yellow jacket.
Britain goes wild for this.
And this is when he becomes Chinese Gordon.
Not a casual label. A brand.
A shorthand. A myth.
Chinese Gordon.
The man who conquered chaos in the Far East,
spent his pay on his men,
turned down riches,
and came home morally spotless.
The nickname does enormous work. It makes him sound exotic.
Proven.
Almost superhuman.
And by the time London later cries, “Gordon must go,” it is Chinese Gordon they are summoning.
The fixer.
The man who’s done it before.
London cried bring him home.
Back to the Thames.
Gravesend, mid 1860s.
Gordon supervises the forts guarding London’s river mouth. And here he does something that’s both deeply touching and deeply unsettling.
He takes in poor boys.
Street children. Feeds them.
Clothes them. Teaches them.
Bathes them.
Calls them his kings and angels.
It’s charity. It’s tenderness.
It’s strange.
Even in his own lifetime,
senior figures describe him as queer.
He doesn’t fit comfortably into polite society.
Then Africa.
Sudan. Khartoum.
The Mahdi rises.
Egyptian forces collapse.
British ministers want out.
Peace. Retrenchment.
No adventures.
But Fleet Street rediscovers
Chinese Gordon.
An interview. Headlines.
Public clamour. Crowds shout in London streets, “Gordon must go.”
And so he goes.
Officially, he’s sent to supervise
an evacuation. In reality,
he’s incapable of being merely an evacuation man.
He arrives in Khartoum in February 1884, declaring that he comes without soldiers but with God on his side.
He issues his own currency.
He floods London with telegrams. Ministers grind their teeth.
They can’t control him.
They can’t quite abandon him either.
The siege drags on.
Three hundred and seventeen days. Hunger. Disease. Exhaustion. Gordon is angry, elated, weary, defiant.
He believes himself honour bound to the people of Khartoum.
On January 26th 1885, the Nile falls.
The attackers get in.
Gordon is killed in the palace.
And London still does not know.
When the news finally reaches the capital in early February,
the reaction is hysterical.
Grief. Rage. Moral outrage. Gladstone is damned as the murderer of Gordon.
Chinese Gordon is transformed overnight into a martyr.
London needs a saint in uniform. And it gets one.
So London does what London always does.
It puts him in bronze.
In 1888 a statue of Gordon is unveiled in Trafalgar Square, right in front of the National Gallery. Bible under his arm. Cane in hand. A statement about what the city honours.
For decades, Londoners pass him daily.
Then the mood changes.
Empire grows awkward.
Certainty drains away.
During the Second World War the statue is removed.
It never returns to Trafalgar Square. In 1953 it reappears quietly on the Victoria Embankment,
near the Ministry of Defence.
Still honoured. Still visible.
But no longer at the blazing centre.
There was a statue of Gordon in Khartoum, too.
This one showed
Chinese Gordon riding a camel. Installed in the city where he had been butchered.
Empire honouring its dead on the very ground of the catastrophe.
Years later, after independence, word came that the statue was to be removed.
And here’s a story for you. Possibly apocryphal.
Almost certainly perfect.
There was a man in Khartoum who used to take his little boy regularly to see the Gordon statue.
Just a quiet ritual. A walk. A look.
A story.
When the news came that the statue was going,
the father took the boy one last time. Final chance. Last look.
They stood there together.
The rider. The camel.
Bronze against the sky.
The little boy stared for a long moment.
Then he tugged at his father’s sleeve and asked,
“Daddy… who’s the man sitting on Gordon?”
And in that moment,
the whole thing gently collapses.
The cult.
The martyrdom.
The certainty.
Because for the child,
Gordon isn’t the man.
The camel is.
Killed this day, January 26th, 1885.
And London, for a very long time, couldn’t stop remembering, couldn’t stop talking about Chinese Gordon. Which, come to think of it, is what we’ve done on this day in 2026. And for my part, I keep thinking about that little boy in Khartoum who loved the camel named Gordon. Maybe, just maybe, that little boy is still alive. He’ll be a very old man now. I wonder if he tells his grandchildren about the camel named Gordon in far away Khartoum.
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 a former Member of Parliament, three terms at Westminster, bringing first-hand experience of power, policy and political theatre to the very streets where it all played out.
It includes two barristers, three doctors, two geologists, a distinguished museum curator and a former Time out Editor.
It includes authors, historians, national journalists, a former London Museum archaeologist, and university professors (one of them an eminent Cambridge University paleontologist).
It includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre actors, and two professional photographers. And last but not least, the creme de la creme of top flight professionally qualified Blue Badge Guides, including 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 here’s the clincher. We’re playing at home.
London Walks is London-based. Period.
We’re not an impersonal, faceless platform run from halfway round the world. There’s no chatbot. No call-centre script. When you contact us, you reach a real person. A Londoner. Someone who actually knows the streets you’re about to walk.
That’s not a detail. That’s the difference.
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.