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, February 8th, 2026.
And here it is.
Here’s your daily London fix.
There are jobs that only make sense after dark.
Jobs that want fog.
Jobs that need cold.
Jobs that do their best work when London is asleep and the ground is hard.
Body-snatching was one of them.
Winter was the season.
Always winter.
Cold weather slowed decay,
kept the goods fresh,
made the night’s work worthwhile. Summer bodies were no use to anyone.
They bloated,
they soured, they betrayed you.
But in January, February, early March,
London’s churchyards became pantries. Larders. Stockrooms.
And London supplied the demand.
By the eighteenth century the city was crawling with anatomy schools. Surgeons.
Students.
Teachers who needed bodies to cut, pull apart, learn from.
The law allowed very few legal corpses.
Murderers, executed criminals.
A trickle.
Nowhere near enough.
So London improvised.
It always does.
The men who met that demand hated the name “body snatcher.”
It made them sound grubby,
furtive, criminal.
Which of course they were.
But they preferred something grander.
“Resurrectionists.”
Now that has a ring to it.
Charles Dickens, who knew London’s underbelly like a rat knows a drainpipe,
gives us one of the great examples. Jerry Cruncher in A Tale of Two Cities.
By day, he’s an odd-job man planted outside Tellson’s Bank on Fleet Street.
No. 1 Fleet Street, right by Temple Bar. Respectable enough. A bit shouty. Lots of coming and going there. But that’s just his day job.
Jerry moonlights.
At night, he tells his little boy he’s “going fishing.”
And one night the boy follows him.
All the way to Old St Pancras churchyard.
There, by lantern light, the child discovers what his father is really fishing for.
Not trout. Not eels.
The dead.
Jerry takes offence if anyone calls him a body snatcher. “Don’t call me a body snatcher, I’m a Resurrectionist.”
Classic London humour. Rename the crime. Elevate the language. Keep a straight face.
That joke lands because Dickens knew his audience recognised the type.
These men were everywhere.
The work followed a rhythm. Moonless nights were best.
Teams of two or three.
Wooden spades, not metal, to keep the noise down.
Dig straight down at the head of the grave.
You didn’t need the whole coffin. Just enough to break the lid,
hook the body under the arms, and haul it up.
Clothes stayed behind.
Taking them would make it theft. Bodies, absurdly, belonged to no one.
London law could be very precise about the wrong things.
A good team could clear a grave in fifteen minutes.
The best could lift several bodies in a single night.
Sack them. Carry them off.
Deliver them to basements and back rooms before dawn.
Surgeons paid well.
Prices rose through the century. Children fetched less. Adults more. The rarest and most valuable were pregnant women.
Medical science wanted what it had never properly seen.
And London found a way to provide it.
Churchyards fought back.
Iron cages over graves.
Watchmen. Guns loaded with spring traps.
Families sat vigil for weeks until the body inside was too far gone to be useful.
There were riots. Mobs. Beatings. Resurrectionists were stoned in the streets, shot at in Ireland, occasionally killed outright.
Still the trade flourished.
Because demand never stopped.
The most active grounds were the poorest ones.
St Giles. Stepney. Southwark. Bloomsbury.
Burial places attached to workhouses and hospitals.
Paupers’ graves.
Mass graves. Shallow graves. Easy work.
The respectable West End liked to imagine this was all happening somewhere else.
But it wasn’t.
The great anatomy schools were right there in London.
Covent Garden. Soho.
Near enough to stroll home after a night’s work.
One young surgeon, newly arrived in London in the 1740s, looked out from his dissecting room window and could see his supply chain.
Churchyards within five minutes’ walk.
Convenient.
This was not random criminality.
It was organised.
Managed.
Efficient.
A black-market industry that grew more professional by the decade. Teams had territories.
Rival gangs sabotaged each other’s work,
tipping off watchmen or digging out a grave first and leaving the coffin propped open, a warning.
There was no honour among body thieves.
London’s humour about it all was pitch-black.
Ballads. Jokes. Knowing winks. Everyone understood what “going fishing” meant.
Everyone knew why graves were guarded.
Everyone suspected that the march of medical progress was being greased with something unspeakable.
Eventually,
the whole thing collapsed under its own weight.
Public outrage boiled over.
Murders followed.
Bodies weren’t being stolen fast enough anymore.
Some men decided to make fresh ones.
That finally forced Parliament’s hand.
The Anatomy Act.
Legal access to unclaimed bodies. The end of the resurrection trade.
Or almost.
Because London never really lets a good phrase die.
“Resurrectionist.” It lingers.
A beautiful, euphemistic, morally elastic word for a job that could only have existed here.
In a city large enough to forget its dead.
Practical enough to monetise them. Witty enough to joke about it afterwards.
And seasonal enough to know that winter was the time to work.
So if you feel a chill in the air tonight,
if the frost’s in the ground and
the moon’s gone missing,
remember this.
Somewhere beneath your feet, London once kept its dead on layaway.
And someone, lantern in hand, was always going fishing.
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 a former Member of Parliament, three terms at Westminster, bringing first-hand experience of power, policy and political theatre to the very streets where it all played out.
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 paleontologist).
It includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre actors, and 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)… 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 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.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.