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 Sunday, August 31st 2025.
Now look, since this one’s about theatre-going – well, sort of about theatre-going – I think our little London Book Club Corner session this morning has to be chaired by one of our actor-guides. One of our great actor-guides. This is Shaughan. The much-loved Shaughan. Shaughan, the singing guide. Shaughan, been a London Walks guide for close on to 40 years now. Shaughan, famous for his Hidden London Walk and Monday afternoon Legal London Walk and Little Venice of course. So what’s Shaughan reading? Here’s Shaughan: “I’m currently reading the Daughter of the Desert biography of Gertrude Bell by Georgina Howell. What an extraordinary woman. She spoke six languages. Along with Churchill and T.E. Lawrence she helped to set up and midwive Iraq after World War I. And being a two book man I’m also merrily paddling through A History of Water by Edward Wilson Lee. It’s something of a hybrid. A history and a murder mystery set in Portugal in the 16th century.
Thanks Shaughan. They both sound like winners.
Ok, main course time.
A week ago or so I interviewed another one of our actor-guides, Nick Day. He’s playing Cardinal Wolsey in A Man for All Seasons at the Harold Pinter Theatre. It’s got just one more week to run. Ends Saturday, September 6th. Anyway, that was a fun interview. The only interview I’ve ever done in a famous dressing room in a West End Theatre.
And then afterwards, outside, queuing, waiting to get into the front of house, waiting for them to open the doors so we could march in and get to our seats, I switched from mind in idle to mind full on, I started to think about where we were, what I was looking at, started to think about the location of the Harold Pinter Theatre. And that was it, I was off to the races. One of those London moments that fairly regularly overtake London Walks guides. One of those immersion London moments. I started to riff about that on the face of it fairly nondescript corner of London. And now I’m going to take you there. Let’s go.
Right then, let’s set the stage. So to speak. You’re at the corner of Oxendon Street and Panton Street, half an hour or so before the house lights dim and the curtain rises on A Man for All Seasons. But here’s the trick: that corner you’re loitering on, tapping your foot, eyeing the pub across the way – well, it’s no mere patch of tarmac. It’s a time machine, a palimpsest. Scratch the surface and it fizzes with stories. Let’s open the trapdoor.
First glance: It doesn’t look like much, does it? A couple of streets that feel more like service roads feeding into Leicester Square and Haymarket. But start with the names – always start with the names. Oxendon Street. Rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Oxen… dun. Earthy, bovine. And indeed, the street takes us back to Sir John Oxendon, a Restoration-era gentleman whose family held land here in the 17th century. Think powdered wigs, silk stockings, and that raffish, Charles II-era confidence. The Oxendons were movers and shakers in Westminster, their name stamped on the map forever, like graffiti in stone.
Then swing your gaze to Panton Street. Named after Thomas Panton – no less a character than the King’s Master of the Horse. He was a gambler too, ran gaming houses, a bit of a rake. You can almost smell the candle wax and hear the rattle of dice from those heady, smoky rooms. This was Restoration London’s wild west: gambling, horse-racing, horses themselves clattering down Haymarket. And Panton was at the heart of it. His street is a monument not to prudence and thrift but to pleasure, chance, and luck.
And across the way, anchoring it all: the Tom Cribb pub. Now we’re cooking. Tom Cribb – champion bare-knuckle boxer, the pride of Regency England. Cribb wasn’t just a pugilist; he was a legend. Fought Jem Belcher, vanquished the mighty Molineaux – an African-American challenger whose presence in 1810s London set the city alight. The Cribb–Molineaux bouts were like heavyweight title fights mixed with international politics. And Cribb won them. So there he is, immortalised in pub-sign paint: fists up, chest out, a bruiser made respectable by time. Step inside, and you’re drinking where the memory of bruised knuckles, sweat, and glory still clings to the air. The pub itself has been a theatre crowd favourite for over a century – actors, hacks, and punters rubbing shoulders over pints before curtain-up.
But don’t stop there. Tilt your head up from your pint and notice where you are. Just a minute’s stroll away lies Haymarket. In the 18th century it was notorious – London’s red-light district. “Petticoat Lane by day, petticoat alley by night,” as the wags put it. Ladies of the night, gin shops, and all the low amusements you can imagine. Samuel Pepys, bless him, once came to this neighbourhood for “a little musique” and stayed for something rather spicier. So when you stand at that corner, waiting for your theatre to open, you’re actually straddling centuries of London vice.
And then the theatre itself. You’re here to see A Man for All Seasons, but don’t forget: the theatres in this part of town were built on the bones of pleasure gardens, cockpits, gambling dens. The very ground is steeped in performance. Leicester Square just around the corner? Once a duelling ground. Men settling honour at dawn with swords drawn. St. Martin’s Lane nearby? Artists’ quarter, Hogarth strutting down with his engravings underarm. It was a neighbourhood of bruisers and brushstrokes, lords and loafers, courtesans and clowns.
And let’s not forget: during the Blitz, this corner shook under the Luftwaffe’s bombs. The neon lights went dark. But Londoners still queued for the theatre, still ducked into pubs, still gambled in the shadows. Imagine it: Oxendon and Panton, blacked out, but alive with whispers, with trysts, with the unkillable pulse of the West End.
Now, picture your moment. You’re in the queue. Someone sighs, checks their phone. And you – well, you lean in, you give them a wink, and you say:
“See that pub? Tom Cribb’s. Named for the bare-knuckle champ who beat an American in 1810 and made London roar. See that street name? Panton—he was a gambler so notorious he built a street from his winnings. And just over there, in the Haymarket? That’s where the ladies of the night once plied their trade while Pepys sneaked about looking for music. This corner, my friend, is London with its gloves off, its wig askew, and its heart thumping.”
Suddenly, queuing isn’t dull. It’s part of the show. The city is the show.
That’s the alchemy of London: taking a nondescript corner and revealing the carnival underneath. Stand still on Oxendon and Panton, and you’re shoulder to shoulder with gamblers, boxers, courtesans, dandies, duellists, artists, and actors. By the time the usher calls you in, you’ve already had Act One.
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.