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 Sunday, January 4th, 2026.
And, yes, here it is, your daily London fix.
Steady now.
It was the line that stopped you.
After jungles and ice caps,
coral reefs and cloud forests,
after Komodo dragons,
mountain gorillas, blue whales and the slow, miraculous unscrolling of evolution itself,
David Attenborough looked straight at the camera and said he’s lived in London for over 70 years – and wouldn’t live anywhere else.
Not anywhere.
Not the Galápagos. Not Borneo.
Not the Serengeti.
London.
It landed with quiet force because it wasn’t civic boosterism.
It wasn’t a tourism advert.
It was the considered judgement of the most travelled, most attentive observer of the natural world we’re ever likely to have.
A man who has seen the planet entire, calmly saying:
after all that, I choose this city.
The programme itself, London’s Wildlife, was gently revelatory.
No bombast.
No helicopter glamour shots.
Just the patient, attentive gaze Attenborough has always brought to living things –
now turned on foxes, peregrines, bats, hedgehogs, eels and beetles. The unnoticed dramas playing out in parks, gardens, railway cuttings and church towers.
London, David Attenborough reminded us, has around four million private gardens and roughly 3,000 parks and green spaces.
Add them together and the city has been declared a National Park in its own right.
Pause on that.
A National Park. London.
It sounds like a contradiction until you see it through Attenborough’s eyes.
Here was a fox padding across a suburban street with the easy assurance of long residency.
Here were peregrine falcons nesting on cathedrals and tower blocks, stooping at terrifying speeds. And yes, stooping is the correct word. A stoop is the high-speed diving attack a falcon makes on its prey. For comparison, a human skydiver in a stable, belly-to-earth freefall hits terminal velocity at around 120 miles an hour. A peregrine folds itself into a living dart and keeps going. A full stoop can exceed 200 miles an hour, making it the fastest animal on the planet.
But I’ve just stooped on a stoop. Digressed. Let’s get back to David Attenborough’s London.
Here were eels, improbably returning to the Thames, that old working river written off within living memory as biologically dead.
Or take the sequoias of London. Plane plane trees. So familiar we barely notice them. But David Attenborogh noticed them. Noticed them and revealed them as quietly heroic survivors of smoke, soot and centuries of abuse.
There was a lovely, dry aside about animals becoming expert readers of traffic lights.
Urban foxes, it turns out, have mastered the Green Cross Code.
Classic Attenborough.
Finding wonder not in the exotic but in the overlooked.
He never raises his voice.
Never lectures. He simply points and says, softly: look at this.
That way of seeing did not come from nowhere.
David Attenborough was born in 1926 in Isleworth, west London.
But it was Leicester that really shaped him.
He grew up there, on the grounds of what is now the University of Leicester,
because his father, Frederick Attenborough, was the principal.
It was an academic household, but not a cloistered one.
Students, visitors, ideas constantly coming and going.
Learning as something lived, not locked away.
As a boy he collected fossils rather than trophies.
Ammonites instead of medals.
He trained his eye early to notice small distinctions and deep time.
His mother, Mary, added another layer.
During the Second World War, she and her husband took in two Jewish refugee girls from Germany.
No speeches. No self-congratulation. Just decency, quietly enacted.
That sense that knowledge carries responsibility, that curiosity and humanity belong together, runs right through Attenborough’s life.
Grammar school in Leicester followed.
Then zoology and geology.
Then Cambridge, reading Natural Sciences.
National Service in the Royal Navy. And finally the BBC,
in the early 1950s,
when television itself was still being invented and nobody yet quite knew what it could become.
Leicester gave David Attenborough his grounding.
London gave him his platform.
The world gave him his subject.
His career, of course, towers over all of this.
Broadcasting since the early 1950s. The voice that taught generations how to look properly.
Zoo Quest. Life on Earth.
The Living Planet. The Blue Planet. Planet Earth.
Programmes that didn’t just entertain but fundamentally altered how we understand our place in the web of life.
He didn’t invent nature television, but he perfected it.
Which is why there is something especially moving about seeing that same curiosity turned inward,
toward the pavements and parks of his own city.
The global naturalist,
now in his nineties,
walking us through the extraordinary life of an ordinary London street.
For decades now David Attenborough’s home has been in Richmond upon Thames,
where the city loosens its tie a little and the river broadens.
It’s easy to imagine him there, notebook in hand,
quietly delighted by something most of us would walk straight past.
A bat flickering at dusk.
A kingfisher flashing electric blue along a canal dug for industry. Parakeets screeching like
escaped toys in the plane trees, now so familiar we forget they were ever interlopers.
At one point in the film he reflected that cities may yet prove crucial to the future of wildlife.
Concentrate human living,
he suggested, and you leave more space elsewhere for nature to flourish.
It was a hopeful thought,
offered gently, without sermonising. David Attenborough never scolds.
He invites.
London, as he understands it,
is not a city that excludes nature but one that absorbs it.
Adapts.
Makes room.
Like the foxes and falcons he celebrates,
it’s resilient to the point of stubbornness.
That final declaration – that after everything he’s seen,
London is where he chooses to live – felt like a quiet love letter.
Not to London as spectacle or brand, but to London as lived place.
The back gardens. The parks.
The river paths. The fox that pauses to look back at you under a streetlamp.
Coming from anyone else it might have sounded parochial.
Coming from David Attenborough, it sounded like wisdom.
And perhaps the greatest compliment of all.
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.