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 December 13th, 2025.
And here it comes,
bright and early, your daily London fix.
You can almost hear the growl, can’t you.
Samuel Johnson.
The great voice of
eighteenth century London.
On this day in 1784
that great voice fell silent.
But oh, what an echo it left behind.
Picture it.
Snow in the air.
Coal smoke drifting over Fleet Street. Hackney carriages clattering on cobbles.
And up a little court off the great printing thoroughfare,
the most splendidly improbable Englishman who ever lived
is breathing his last.
Dr Samuel Johnson.
Colossus of letters.
The man who wrote the book that wrote the language.
But he begins nowhere near London. He begins in Lichfield, in the midlands.
A gawky,
near blind,
pockmarked boy,
brilliant beyond measure,
and afflicted in every possible way. Poverty,
illnesses,
tics,
twitches,
that famous ungainly shuffle.
Life saddled him like a packhorse. And yet the brain.
Oh yes, the brain.
The young Johnson devoured books the way other boys demolished apples. At school
they said he was the finest mind
who had ever sat at one of their desks. And they had the good sense to let him roam wild in the library.
He came to London
the way they all came to London. Footloose,
half starved,
determined to make his name.
And what a London he found.
Coffee houses humming with gossip. Printers stamping out pamphlets
at a furious clip.
Actors,
poets,
pickpockets,
politicians,
all swirling together in a broth
only London can cook.
Johnson arrives and London does what London always does.
It tests you.
He and his beloved wife Tetty are so poor
he walks the streets at night for want of somewhere to sit indoors.
He translates.
He hacks.
He writes for pennies.
He is, as he later said,
a man who had to turn his hand
to whatever could keep him going
for another week.
But the brilliance keeps pushing through.
You can’t hide a sun under a bushel.
And then, in time,
comes the great commission.
A dictionary of the English language. Nobody has managed it before on this scale.
He promises the booksellers
he’ll deliver it in three years.
It takes him nine.
Nine years in a garret
in Gough Square,
just off Fleet Street.
A warren of little rooms
buzzing with amanuenses.
Johnson pacing.
Johnson muttering.
Johnson booming out definitions
like artillery fire.
And he does it almost single handedly. French lexicographers
had academies,
royal support,
battalions of scholars.
Johnson had a table,
a quill and that
extraordinary mind.
“I am a stranger here,”
he once said of the world.
“I am not on mine own ground.”
But give him words,
give him sense,
give him meaning,
and he was at home.
His definitions are literary jewels. Lexicographer.
A harmless drudge.
Oats.
A grain which in England
is generally given to horses,
but in Scotland supports the people. That mix of
precision and mischief.
It’s a portrait of a mind
that never quite stops smiling
at the absurdities of life.
And then,
having delivered the dictionary and made his name,
he becomes,
without trying,
the most quotable man in London.
The clubs love him.
The great and the good love him.
And best of all,
James Boswell loves him.
Without Boswell we’d have a giant. With Boswell
we have a giant who talks.
Johnson’s wit is volcanic.
It erupts.
The man can’t help himself. Somebody drones on
about the torments of being a writer. Johnson growls:
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”
Somebody frets
over the meaning of life.
Johnson fires back:
“Courage is
reckoned the greatest of all virtues because it is the virtue which guarantees all others.”
And then,
the famous thunderbolt.
“When a man is tired of London,
he is tired of life.
For there is in London all
that life can afford.”
The line that launched a thousand walking tours.
You can imagine him striding through Covent Garden,
cloak billowing,
stick tapping,
Boswell trotting to keep up.
They’d drop in at Tom Davies’ bookshop in Covent Garden or
go prowling after midnight t
hrough the markets.
Johnson loved the city at night.
Loved the strange unfurling of London after hours.
He said: “The true Londoner is
one who can find something worth seeing
and worth enjoying in every street.” He could.
He did.
He knew everyone.
David Garrick,
the greatest actor of them all,
had been his pupil in Lichfield. Reynolds painted him.
Edmund Burke admired him.
And London’s booksellers dreaded and adored him
in equal measure.
He was the kind of man who frightened you
by telling you the truth about yourself, then invited you to supper
to soften the blow.
But he was more than a wit.
More than a dictionary machine.
More even than the essayist of the Rambler and Idler.
Dr Samuel Johnson
was a moralist in the finest sense.
He believed in kindness.
He believed in perseverance.
He believed in the possibility of bettering oneself
through unglamorous, everyday effort. He filled his house with
people who needed help.
A blind poet.
A former prostitute.
A black servant boy, Francis Barber, whom Johnson treated as family and made his heir.
In an age not known for its warmth, Johnson’s house was a refuge.
And now it is one again.
Dr Johnson’s House, Gough Square. A time capsule of
eighteenth century London.
The creaking floorboards.
The garret where
the dictionary was hammered out.
The smell of old paper and ink
lingering in the walls.
Step inside and you half expect him
to lumber from the staircase,
brushing past you,
eyes bright with another pronouncement ready to detonate.
And how should we mark his passing?With a sigh for the loss
of a London original.
With a laugh at his jokes.
And with gratitude for
a man who wrangled this
magnificent mongrel tongue of ours into something like order.
Johnson didn’t invent English.
He just made it make sense.
And he did it with style.
He once said:
“A man ought to read
just as inclination leads him,
for what he reads as a task
will do him little good.”
Inclination led him everywhere. Poetry,
biography,
a novel,
criticism,
travel writing.
And of course that dictionary.
The book that became the
spine of our language.
So on this December day,
under a London sky that would have been familiar to him,
raise a quiet mental hat
to Dr Samuel Johnson.
The great talker Cham as Boswell called him.
The great walker.
The great watcher of
London’s ceaseless theatre.
The man who gave us our words then gave us himself.
Not a bad legacy for a boy from Lichfield.
Not bad at 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.