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 Saturday December 6th, 2025.
And here we go, here’s your daily London fix.
Springing a surprise on you today.
Going off-piste. Something a little different.
For any and all, but especially for those of you who are going on our Old Westminster Walk. Or Dan Perry’s London’s Spymasters Walk. Or the Hello London Walk. All of which begin at St James’ Park Underground Station.
Let me put it this way, here’s an insider’s tip for you.
If your walk begins at
St James’s Park Underground Station, don’t arrive on time.
Arrive early.
Treat yourself.
Because directly across the street is
a place that rewards the curious
like few others in Westminster.
The five-star Conrad London
St James.
A hotel, yes, but really a sort of Westminster curiosity cabinet.
A power-village parlour.
A political art gallery
with bedrooms attached.
Step inside and you’re in a
different register of Westminster,
the offstage one,
the whispered one,
the one where deals get warmed up over coffee
and ministers practise
their TV smiles in
the lift mirrors.
Let’s start with the look of the place. The façade:
Edwardian red brick and
Portland stone,
upright,
respectable,
with that unmistakable Westminster expression that says
important men
used to smoke pipes in here.
And they did.
The building began life as
Queen Anne’s Chambers,
lodging and office space for
civil servants,
lobbyists,
Treasury lawyers,
and the great, grey men of government.
People whose names
never made the papers but
whose fingerprints were
all over the policies.
During both World Wars it
became a hive of
emergency committees and
industry fixers.
Rationing,
regulation,
wartime production.
The quiet machinery of
national survival whirred
behind those walls.
Cut to today.
You step inside the lobby and
before you’ve even got your bearings you’re rubbing your eyes –
there it is,
right in the middle:
The Ladder To.
A great, swaggering,
larger-than-life bronze of a builder climbing a ladder.
Hod in his right hand,
the business end resting against
his right shoulder.
Except it’s not bricks he’s carrying. It’s the Palace of Westminster. Parliament itself,
balanced on a labourer’s shoulder
as if it weighed no more than
the offcuts from a building site.
The sculptor is the Tasmanian
Tom Clark,
who doesn’t do understatement.
Come in close.
Look carefully at Big Ben.
The time is set at five to four.
Tea time.
Not a winding-down hour at Westminster at all.
If anything,
it’s the moment when
the place shifts gear.
Parliament often sits long
into the evening.
The formal business thunders on.
But running alongside it,
almost in counterpoint,
comes the unofficial life of the place. The tea-room diplomacy.
The corridor encounters.
The strategic loitering.
The off-the-record nods and nudges that oil the wheels
while the chamber carries on performing its great national drama.
It’s the hour when the public theatre
is still brightly lit
but the backstage manoeuvres
begin to hum.
And the builder?
He’s climbing.
Always climbing.
There’s something quietly heroic
in the set of his shoulders.
Something of the idealist.
But of course there is.
He’s an artist’s creation.
Tom Clark is shooting for the moon with this one.
His message is clear as daylight: power is there for the taking.
It’s not locked up in palaces or
sealed behind carved oak doors.
It can be lifted.
Carried.
Built.
Rebuilt.
You can do it, folks.
Use politics.
Take control of politics.
Take ownership.
Climb.
Change things.
The workman as kingmaker.
It’s a wonderful opening note for
the hotel because it tells you instantly what the Conrad is all about.
Not just luxury.
Not just comfort.
But politics.
Art.
Humour.
Ambition.
A wink and a nudge and a challenge: come on then,
what are you going to build?
And once you’ve clocked
the sculpture,
only then do you start noticing
the rest of the lobby’s visual language. The materials,
the geometry,
the soft echo of chain loops
in a few of the design motifs,
a subtle nod to the suffragettes
who, it’s said,
chained themselves to railings here, rattled the gates of the establishment, and shook the whole edifice loose.
The hotel doesn’t shout about it.
It just lets the attentive visitor
feel the resonance.
Because here’s the thing.
It’s a hotel,
a pub,
an art gallery,
a very special rendezvous,
a backstage pass to Westminster,
a living scrapbook
of political London,
a motherlode of history,
and a film set all rolled up into one. There’s no other place quite like it in London.
Maybe not in the world.
Right.
Let’s talk about the art.
Because the Conrad isn’t decorated. It’s curated.
The hotel’s a love letter
to the British political cartoon.
The corridors are practically a
Who’s Who of satirical ink.
Giants like Gerald Scarfe,
Ralph Steadman,
Ogden,
Rowson.
All the big guns.
The artists who saw prime ministers not as leaders of the nation
but as overinflated dirigibles,
rutting bulls,
startled meerkats,
or panicking cartoon penguins on melting ice floes.
The Blue Boar pub – the Conrad’s a hotel built round a pub –
the Blue Boar especially, is a gallery in its own right.
You sit down with a pint and
there’s Theresa May
tripping over her own Brexit red lines. There’s Boris Johnson
looking like
he’s just fallen out of a wardrobe. There’s John Major in his
superhero underpants.
It’s Westminster’s bloodstream rendered in ink and wicked humour. And the beauty of political cartoons is that even when you don’t know the scandal,
the drawing tells you the truth.
One well-placed line of Scarfe’s pen tells you more about the week in Westminster
than six hours of Newsnight.
Now the pub itself.
The Blue Boar.
The name isn’t an invention of a branding consultant.
It’s Tudor.
The blue boar was the heraldic badge of the powerful De Vere family,
Earls of Oxford,
big beasts in the
political menagerie
of the 15th and 16th centuries.
A blue boar over a doorway in
Tudor England meant you were in
De Vere territory.
Allies welcome.
Enemies, mind how you go.
By reviving the name,
the hotel has created a
sort of time-tunnel.
A Tudor pub spirit in
a 21st-century gastropub body.
Step inside today
and the vibe is warm wood,
soft lighting,
proper pints,
and food that looks like a pub classic but turns out to have been to finishing school.
It’s popular with MPs and
civil servants who want
somewhere discreet but not dull.
And because this is Westminster,
you might find yourself one table away from a Cabinet minister
scoffing chips with the air of a man who’s just survived
a Select Committee hearing.
Who stays in the Conrad?
Diplomats.
CEOs.
American senators in town for
NATO consultations.
Actors working in the West End who want to be slightly off the radar.
When Disney filmed in Westminster,
a couple of their marquee names
holed up here because it’s posh without being preening.
A room’ll set you back a few hundred. Five or six times that
if you fancy a luxury suite with
a view of the Abbey or the Palace.
Not cheap, but you’re paying for geography and hush.
The Conrad’s great superpower is being luxurious
without ever being loud about it.
And that brings me to
the feel of the place.
It’s not a grand-standing London hotel like the Ritz or the Savoy.
It’s subtler.
It’s Westminster distilled.
You feel it the moment you step in. Everyone here
has a job that matters somewhere else. You hear
low murmurs of conversation.
You glimpse confidential papers being slid across tables.
You catch that delicious tingle of proximity to power.
And all the while,
on the walls,
the cartoonists are
gleefully puncturing the very egos
that built the place.
Which is why I’d say it makes a cracking pre-walk warm-up.
Arrive early.
Have a coffee or a drink
in the Blue Boar.
Wander the lobby and
let the art work on you.
Soak up
the hints of suffragette history.
Stand before Tom Clark’s
climbing builder and
let him give you a quiet talking-to. Then, cometh the hour
when your guide gathers the group outside St James’s Park Station
and the walk begins,
you’re already primed.
You’ve had a little backstage glimpse of Westminster’s soul.
And that, in this part of London,
is priceless.
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 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.