London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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And announcement time. Especially today, Saturday, February 8th, 2025.
This weekend is Hampstead Spies Weekend.
Our most distinguished guide – and that’s really saying something given the ‘dream team’ of London Walks guides – anyway, our most distinguished guide, Stewart Purvis, Stewart Purvis CBE – that’s Commander of the British Empire – Stewart’s created a second Hampstead Spies Walk – it’s called the Atomic Secrets Spies – and Stewart’s rolling it out this weekend. Tomorrow, Sunday, February 9th, at 10.45 am. Meeting point is Belsize Park Tube Stop.
But it’s Hampstead Spies weekend because today, Saturday, February 8th, Stewart’s running his original, completely different Hampstead Spies Walk, Philby & Comrades. Same time, 10.45. Same Tube stop, Belsize Park Tube. Just twenty-four earlier. But also in a sense 10 years earlier. Because today’s walk is looking at all those Soviet Spies who were nesting in Hampstead in the 1930s. Tomorrow’s Walk, Atomic Secrets Spies, heads on into the 1940s. Aside here: as a Hampstead resident I for one can’t get over it that Hampstead was a hotbed of Soviet Spies and British traitors who’d turned their coats – gone over – and were reporting to Moscow.
And it’s not just me that looks on this phenomenon with stunned disbelief. As it happens, the Ham & High has got wind of the tale. And is running, in its current issue, a major spread on Stewart and the ground-breaking espionage detective work he’s done – done in Las Alamos in New Mexico and at the Public Record Office in Kew, where all those newly declassified documents are kept. Stewart’s so highly regarded that he’s one of just a handful of experts who were given access to those newly declassified – formerly – for over 50 years – Top Secret documents. Anyway, the Ham & High – widely regarded as the foremost local newspaper in the UK – got wind of the tale, interviewed Stewart, got the lowdown, and, as I said, is featuring, in its current issue, a big backgrounder about Stewart, his work, and the walks. So if you want to read yourself in get yourself copy of the February Ham & High. And of course it’s also on their website version. It’s headlined: Hampstead spies guided walk now adds atomic secrets. A search for that headline will of course bring up the article.
Anyway, yes, the Hampstead Spies Philby and Comrades walk takes place later this morning. So if you’re at a loose end and would like to spend a couple of hours in the company of one of the architects of modern television news, have him show you round the Hampstead haunts of that hotbed of Soviet spies and their British accomplices, well, why not head up to Belfast Park Tube Stop. And if you want to make a double header of it – baseball idiom – the new walk, the Atomic Secrets walk – will be taking place tomorrow morning.
So that’s one quick announcement cum recommendation.
The other one is Ruth’s urban geology walk this afternoon at 2.30 pm. Ruth is Ruth Siddall, the award-winning professional geologist. The walk she’s doing this afternoon is Geology and Building Stones in the City of London. Meeting point is just outside exit 1 of Bank Underground Station. On the corner of Poultry and Princess Street.
Ruth’s walks are at the pinnacle of that very special, change the way you see London category. Who would have guessed that geology could be so much fun, so interesting. My best American pal, David Hall, went on one of her walks a few years ago and he’s not got over it. He lives in Manhattan and to this day he stoutly maintains, “I can’t walk past these Manhattan buildings without wondering what Ruth would have to say about the stories informing and inhering in these building stones. Walking with her through an urban environment, it’s like that transition moment in the Wizard of Oz from drab black and white rural Kansas to the technicolour wonders of Oz. It’s “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
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.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.