London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good day to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Tuesday, September 9th, 2025.
As usual, we’ll get underway by stopping by the London Calling Book Club Corner.
In the Chair, once again, Barrister guide – affectionately known to all of us – as recovering lawyer Tom Hooper. Bears repeating, Tom’s a promiscuous bibliophile. He’s dating three books at the same time. None of them know about the others. His third book – also about a journey – is titled, simply, James. It’s about a slave who leaves his family behind and flees along the dangerous Mississippi River. Don’t know the book but I’m certainly going to make its acquaintance. My every hunch is it must be a take off on the greatest American novel of them all, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Sharing main character honours in the novel is the slave Jim, who runs away with Huckleberry Finn. The two of them take a raft down the Mississippi. Anyway, Tom says about the novel he’s reading, titled James, “it’s poignant, at times funny and incredibly insightful.”
Ok, moving on.
Let’s bowl you a googly to get started. Cricket term of course. And it’s got a great history. Watch this space, I’ll doubtless be circling back here one day to do justice to the term itself. Googly. But yes a Googly to get us out and midstream here. This is London Calling from the muddy place, from KL, from Kuala Lumpur. And you know what they say about travel. It broadens our horizons and everything.
And here I’m thinking about what’s coming up this evening. Busman’s holiday for us. We’re going on a walking tour. A Kuala Lumpur walking tour. A Foodies Walking tour.
And I’m going to bowl a googly to the guide when I meet him or her. Bowl a googly by greeting them with a big grin and saying “Sudah makan?”
It’s the most wonderful nugget about Malysian greetings. They don’t start with a “hello” or “how are you?” They start with “Sudah makan?” Literally: Have you eaten?
So—picture it. You’re in Malaysia. You’re expecting the usual: “Hello,” “How are you?” – the conversational starter kit of the English-speaking world. Forget it. Doesn’t happen.
Instead, what you’ll hear is: “Sudah makan?” Translation – repeating myself here, but it bears repeating, it’s like getting seconds, translation: “Have you eaten?”
Now, at first blush, you think – hang on, that’s odd. Why are they asking me about lunch? But it’s not about food, not really. It’s about care. About connection. About you.
Because in Malaysia, food isn’t just fuel. It’s community, it’s love, it’s the glue of society. To ask “Have you eaten?” is to say, “Are you well? Are you looked after? Are you part of the circle?”
Compare that with our Anglo-Saxon “Hello.” A sound, a noise, no meat on the bone. Or “How are you?” – which half the time we don’t even want answered. In Malaysia, the greeting is practical, warm, generous. It says: if you haven’t eaten, well, come along. Sit. Share.
It’s a cultural reflex rooted in hospitality. Food is never far away in Malaysia – hawker stalls, night markets, steaming bowls of noodles at every corner. So the greeting folds neatly into the rhythm of daily life. It’s as natural as breathing: “Sudah makan?”
So next time you hear it, don’t just take it literally. Hear what it really means: Welcome. You matter. You belong. That’s Malaysia in four syllables.
Ok, and for a second Googly . Wonderful review just in for the magic Charlie worked on Sunday. The leg of his extraordinary creation, The Ultimate London Walk. The walk right across London, north to south. It’s the London Walks planting the flag on Mount Everest moment.
Anyway, local – Londoner Melanie Goodwin – was there at the beginning. She went on the first two walks that got the show on the road. And Melanie’s response – well, it’ll be instantly obvious why this was music of the spheres to our ears. Here’s Melanie’s review: “Having lived in High Barnet for over 40 years I thought I knew the area well and was only doing the first two walks as I wanted to do the whole series, but I should never have doubted that Charlie could tell me something new and open my eyes to seeing things in a different way. I had never really thought about the existence of the London Boroughs or the Greenbelt but learnt about them and so much more. I discovered new paths for future dog walks and was inspired to think about why places are where and how they are. I am so looking forward to continuing this journey across London over the next few weeks.” Many thanks, Melanie. Needless to say, we’re in full agreement with you.
Ok, main course at last. These last few episodes – well, in themselves they’re a measure of how The Ultimate London Walk has impacted me. It was a huge Googly for me. Stunned by it. Transfixed by it. Keep thinking about it, over and over again. And maybe the main point here is that there – where the walk started – we were out on the far edge, the northernmost edge, the Hertfordshire border of London. So I thought for today, let’s swing the pendulum in other direction, go right back to the very centre of London. To where London got underway. To the whyfore of London. The reason London is where it is. That of course is the Thames. And then I thought, let’s not just do the Thames generally, let’s find a different, maybe slightly offbeat angle for the Thames. With any luck introduce you to a dimension of London that you maybe don’t know very much about.
Ok, that’s the pan primed, the barrel charged, the ball inserted, ball rammed down, musket shouldered, let’s squeeze the trigger.
Right – here we are, riverside. Pause a moment. Look at the Thames. London’s liquid history. Great highway. Great sewer. Great graveyard. And great temptation. Because if it floated – it got nicked.
Late 18th century. Picture it. London’s docks: bedlam. Ships jammed together like a forest of masts. Cargo worth millions – gin, tea, sugar, silk. And what happens? Smugglers, thieves, crooked lightermen. They’re dipping their beaks into everything. River crime’s not just petty – it’s industrial scale. Sort of like online scams today.
Now – cue the Scot. Patrick Colquhoun. A magistrate with ideas. He says: enough. Sets up a river police force. 1798. That’s three decades before Peel’s Bobbies ever patrolled a London street. Which means – the Thames Police are the oldest police force in the world.
And what a sight they were. Blue coats. Cutlasses. Patrolling in rowing boats. Half constable, half privateer. Policing not the pavements, but the tide.
But here’s the other truth of the river. Death. Drownings. Suicides, accidents, murders. The Thames Police, like it or not, became London’s undertakers. To this day, they’re still the ones fishing bodies from the water. Drop voice here. Every officer carries not just handcuffs – but a river in his head.
Now fast forward. Their patch? Sixty miles of tidal Thames. Their kit? High-speed launches, radar, night vision. They’re shadowing container ships, watching for drug runs, terrorism, people smuggling. Old job, new kit. Same mission: keep the river in order.
And – here’s a treat. Their HQ? Wapping. Same spot since Colquhoun’s day. Step inside – you’re in Dickens-land. Dark wood. Oil paintings of long-dead inspectors. Relics of cases centuries old. You half expect Fagin to step out from behind a door. Pause
So next time you’re here, riverside, and you see a police launch cutting through the tide – blue light shimmering across the water – know you’re looking at history. The world’s first police force. Still guarding London’s great highway.
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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.