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 Wednesday, October 15th, 2025.
So, we’ve found out where Camden is, what it’s made of, and how it came to be.
Now let’s ask the obvious next question.
What can you do here?
Short answer: almost everything.
Long answer – well, that’s what this episode’s for.
So, yes, Camden, The Borough That Never Bores
Camden is one of those rare places where every kind of London seems to fit.
It’s as if the city, running out of patience with zoning and planning, simply said: “Fine, I’ll put it all here.”
Here’s how it goes.
If you want green space – the kind that makes you forget you’re in a metropolis – Camden’s got the best of it. For the record, 20 percent of Camden is green space. Totaled up it comes to 4.4 square kilometers of greenery.
And if you want art, or music, or food, or history, same answer.
It’s the only borough in London where you can swim in a pond, see a mummy, buy a vintage leather jacket, and hear live jazz – all before teatime.
Up on the Heath
Ok, let’s do Camden. Let’s start at the top.
Hampstead Heath.
Some eight hundred acres of rolling wildness, right on the edge of the city.
It’s London’s lungs – a tangle of woods, meadows, and ponds that feels eternal.
On a summer morning, you can join the early risers – the bold and the bracing – for a dip in the mens’, ladies’, or mixed bathing ponds.
It’s not a swim, it’s a rite of passage.
The water bites, the geese glare, and you come out feeling properly alive.
Walk up to Parliament Hill, and there’s the view: the whole of London at your feet.
You can trace the city from the dome of St Paul’s to the Shard, from Canary Wharf to Wembley.
It’s the postcard skyline, and it’s free.
And at the northern tip, Kenwood House – Robert Adam elegance, creamy stucco against the green.
Inside, a small but perfect art collection: Vermeer, Rembrandt, Gainsborough.
Outside, concerts on the lawns and picnics under the trees.
Bloomsbury’s Brains
Ok, let’s go down the hill. Into Bloomsbury, where the air smells faintly of books and blossom.
This is the intellectual quarter – London’s brainbox.
Universities everywhere: UCL, Birkbeck, SOAS.
Squares lined with plane trees and blue plaques.
And right at its heart – the British Museum, the mother of them all.
The Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon sculptures, the mummies, the Enlightenment Gallery – a world within a world.
And a short walk from the British Museum the British Library: millions of volumes, from Magna Carta to the Beatles’ scribbled lyrics on the backs of envelopes.
And then there’s Museum Mile – Camden’s cultural corridor.
From King’s Cross down to the Thames, thirteen museums and galleries in a walkable trail.
The Wellcome Collection, all about health and humanity.
The Charles Dickens Museum, the Foundling Museum, the Postal Museum with its tiny underground railway.
The Petrie Museum, the Grant Museum, the Cartoon Museum – every flavour of curiosity.
The Londonist reckons Camden has more museums than any other borough.
You can see why.
It’s the borough where curiosity never clocks off.
As for the middle stretch – say hello to Camden Town – the Carnival that never ends.
Camden Town.
If Hampstead is the lungs and Bloomsbury the brain, Camden Town is the pulse – noisy, colourful, and gloriously anarchic.
The market started in the 1970s as a few craft stalls under the railway arches.
Today it’s a labyrinth of five connected markets – Camden Lock, Stables Market, Buck Street, Inverness Street, and Hawley Wharf.
You can lose a weekend here – food from everywhere, fashion from nowhere else, music, art, jewellery, incense, piercings, tattoos.
It’s touristy, yes, but it’s also unmistakably London.
The smells alone – joss sticks, churros, fried noodles, rain on stone.
And the music!
It’s practically a birthright.
Start with the Roundhouse – once a railway engine shed, now a world-class venue.
And then add to the mix the Electric Ballroom, Dingwalls, The Jazz Café.
And, forever associated with the borough, Amy Winehouse – Camden’s soul in high heels.
The canal threads through it all, linking the locks and bridges.
You can stroll east toward King’s Cross, or west through Regent’s Park to Little Venice – one of the loveliest walks in London.
Old towpaths, waterside pubs, the soft slap of narrowboats against brick.
King’s Cross – Reinvented
And speaking of King’s Cross – what a comeback story.
Once it was all soot and sidings, a no-go zone after dark.
Now? Fifty new buildings, two thousand homes, twenty new streets, ten public squares.
An entire district reborn – offices, restaurants, fountains, art installations, even a rooftop pool.
The Granary Building, that vast Victorian warehouse, now houses Central Saint Martins, the art school of dreams.
And Camden’s own headquarters are up there now – the borough planting its flag in the future.
You can wander into Coal Drops Yard, designed by Thomas Heatherwick – the perfect blend of history and architecture made to Instagram.
Old arches, new curves, twinkling lights.
A place that feels like London reinventing itself in real time.
And who’s for Hidden Corners and Everyday Delights?
Which is by way of saying, not everything in Camden is headline-grabbing.
Part of its magic is in the small stuff – the corners, the side streets.
Marchmont Street in Bloomsbury, with its bookshops and cafés.
Primrose Hill, all pastel houses and park views.
Fitzrovia’s pubs – The Fitzroy Tavern, The Wheatsheaf – where writers and drinkers once sparred with wit and gin.
Camley Street Natural Park, an urban wild patch by the canal, buzzing with dragonflies where once there were freight sidings.
And the pubs! Camden’s full of them – from the Spaniards Inn, rumoured highwayman haunt, to the World’s End, to the Southampton Arms, where you can still find a proper pint and a piano.
What else? Try this. Camden’s a Borough That Works and Plays
That’s Camden’s trick – it’s serious and silly, scholarly and streetwise.
It’s where the city goes to learn, to argue, to perform, to breathe.
You can study at UCL in the morning, browse Camden Market in the afternoon, watch a gig at the Roundhouse at night, and still have time to catch the last Overground home.
And all of it – all of it – inside one borough.
Closing Thought
So what can you do here?
You can do London.
All of it.
Camden’s got the city’s pulse, its lungs, its brain – and its heart, beating loudest just as the sun goes down and the lights come up over the canal.
It’s a place that never runs out of stories, never stops changing, and never stops surprising you.
That’s Camden – alive, layered, and endlessly London.
We took the plunge into Camden a couple of days ago by taking a good look at – unpacking – its logo. While we’re at it, why don’t we fit it up with the Borough’s official motto. Here it comes: Non Sibi Sed Toti. Latin of course. And it means, Not for Self but for All. Very Camden, that. And it’s a bit of all right, that. Good for you, Camden. And good for yours.
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.