London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
But hold the usual order.
This is not the regular daily edition.
That’s the Sir Thomas More anniversary story. It’s already up.
This is a little top-up.
A Special.
An Extra. Extra.
Read all about it, as the newsboys used to bark.
And let’s hammer home the dateline.
London. Saturday, February 7th, 2026.
And because today is the anniversary, and because London sometimes insists on interrupting itself, here it is.
Not your daily London fix.
Your Extra! Extra! London fix.
There are front doors in London that stop you in your tracks.
And then there is this one.
On this date, 7 February 1987, the bronze-green front door at number 13, on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, became the scene of something almost unthinkable. Guns drawn. Shots fired. A man collapsing on the steps. Blood on the threshold.
At the Sir John Soane Museum.
Arguably the most civilised venue in all of London.
London Calling. And this is an Extra! Extra! edition.
I was at the Soane Museum yesterday. I’m going back again today. I’ve been readying a piece to go alongside our London Walks that begin at Holborn Underground Station, just around the corner. And then the calendar does that thing London calendars do. The anniversary leaps out. The archive cracks open. And suddenly the past is no longer past.
Because once you know what happened here on the night of 7 February 1987, you never roll up at number 13 again in quite the same way.
Let’s slow it down and place ourselves properly.
Lincoln’s Inn Fields. London’s largest square. Calm. Measured. Barristers’ footsteps. Pale stone. Plane trees. A place that knows how to keep its voice down.
And on the north side of it, a house that is not really a house at all. It’s a mind turned inside out and made architectural. Sir John Soane’s mind.
Inside, some of the greatest treasures on earth. Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress. A glowing Canaletto. Classical fragments. Sarcophagi. Coade Stone. Layer upon layer of civilisation, stacked, folded, revealed.
And on that February night in 1987, police were waiting.
They had been tipped off. Forewarned. Armed officers lying in wait for what they believed would be an audacious museum raid. Possibly a commissioned job. Not smash-and-grab chaos, but something colder and more targeted. Specific works. Specific orders.
Imagine that.
Someone, somewhere, deciding they want a Hogarth. Or a Canaletto. And dispatching men with guns to fetch it from one of the quietest squares in London.
Shortly before midnight, the men arrived.
Reports spoke of six of them. One carrying a sawn-off shotgun. Another covering him as he ran for the door. The police moved. Shouts. Confusion. Seconds stretching and snapping.
Three shots were fired.
One man, Denis Bergin, twenty-six years old, from west London, was hit in the chest. He collapsed outside the museum door. He would die later in hospital.
Another man was wounded. Others fled into the night. Some were arrested after a chase through the surrounding streets.
And suddenly, number 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields was no longer just a museum address. It was a crime scene.
This happened in a London already raw. Only months earlier, the shooting of Cherry Groce in Brixton had shaken the city. Armed policing was under fierce scrutiny. Trust was brittle. Nerves were exposed.
An Old Bailey inquest followed. The language of headlines hardened.
“Policeman had no alternative.”
“Gun verdict.”
“Museum raider.”
The jury returned an open verdict.
The officer had fired at close range. The shotgun Bergin was carrying was later found to be unloaded, though he had cartridges in his hand. He was running. He was desperate. The officer believed lives were at risk.
Seconds. Always seconds.
Now here’s the detail that stops me cold. That front door, the one where Bergin fell, is studded with oak knobs. Nail heads. They are there deliberately. They imitate the bronze nail heads found on the doors of ancient tombs.
Soane wanted visitors to feel they were crossing a threshold. From the everyday world into something sacred. Timeless. Almost funerary.
Which makes it almost unbearable, and utterly London, that on this night the threshold became exactly that. A place of death.
And then lift your eyes.
Above the door, serenely overlooking Lincoln’s Inn Fields, are two figures in Coade Stone. Free versions of the caryatids of the Erechtheion in Athens. Classical calm. Perfect balance. Eternal composure.
Down below, chaos. Fear. Guns. A body on the steps.
Civilisation literally looking down on mayhem.
The thieves never got the paintings. The Hogarths still hang in sequence. The Canaletto still glows. The museum remains intact.
But London had changed, just a little, forever.
Because this is what London does. It layers things. It lets horror brush up against beauty. It allows violence to graze refinement and then vanish, leaving only a story, if you know where to look.
That’s why this is an Extra! Extra! edition.
Because it’s the anniversary. Because I was there yesterday and I’ll be there again today. Because this is surreal beyond belief. And because this is classic London Walks territory.
London Walks guides know things about London that other people don’t know. And once you know them, the city shifts.
Next time you stand on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, outside number 13, you won’t just admire the door.
You’ll read it.
You’ll see the tomb nails.
You’ll feel the weight of that February night in 1987.
And you’ll understand, once again, that London is never just one thing.
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 emeritus now, but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains and mentors our guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks aristocracy of talent includes a former London Mayor. The former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. The Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. The former Chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes a former Member of Parliament, three terms at Westminster. It includes two barristers, three doctors, two geologists, a distinguished museum curator, and a former Time Out Editor.
It includes authors, historians, national journalists, a former London Museum archaeologist, and university professors, one of them an eminent Cambridge University palaeontologist.
It includes Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre actors. Two professional photographers. And last but not least, the creme de la creme of top-flight professionally qualified Blue Badge Guides, including a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners, people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award.
As that travel writer famously put it, if this were a golf tournament, every name on the leaderboard would be a London Walks guide.
And as we put it: London Walks guides make the new familiar and the familiar new.
And here’s the clincher. We’re playing at home.
London Walks is London-based. Period.
We’re not an impersonal, faceless platform run from halfway round the world. There’s no chatbot. No call-centre script. When you contact us, you reach a real person. A Londoner. Someone who actually knows the streets you’re about to walk.
That’s not a detail.
That’s the difference.
And on that agreeable note, come then. Let us go forward together on some great London Walks.
Good walking.
And good Londoning.
See you next time.