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 Tuesday, January 13th, 2026.
And here it is.
Here’s your daily London fix.
Come in. Just for a look.
You don’t have to buy anything. You can just wander.
Everyone does.
Welcome to Harrods.
The most theatrical shop in Britain, possibly the world.
A department store that thinks it’s an opera house,
a palace,
a small city,
and a law unto itself.
A place where the word “shopping” feels hopelessly inadequate.
Harrods doesn’t just sell things.
It performs them.
But before we get dazzled by chandeliers and gold leaf,
let’s rewind.
Because Harrods didn’t begin life here,
preening in Knightsbridge like a peacock in a dinner jacket.
It began life elsewhere.
And very differently.
Eastcheap. Not the East End.
Harrods starts in Eastcheap, in the City of London.
That matters.
Eastcheap is trading London. Old London.
Provisions, groceries, wholesalers, margins.
A street that had been buying and selling for centuries. Chaucer knew Eastcheap. Shakespeare knew it.
Eastcheap is hard-nosed commercial territory,
not romance, not retail fantasy.
Henry Charles Harrod was a wholesale tea merchant there. Tea. Groceries. Essentials.
No glamour. No green and gold. No sense yet that his name, his shop would become a global byword.
Then comes one of those hinge moments when London history quietly changes direction.
The Great Exhibition Gamble
The Great Exhibition of 1851.
Six million visitors. Hyde Park. The Crystal Palace. The world coming to London.
Harrod gets wind of it and realises something crucial. That’s where the feet are going to be. And where the feet go, money follows.
So he moves. West. Knightsbridge. Right place.
Right moment.
No Great Exhibition, no Harrods in Knightsbridge.
It really is that simple.
Built the Hard Way
This wasn’t instant splendour.
It was grind.
Charles Digby Harrod buys the business from his father in instalments.
Staff work from seven in the morning until eight at night.
By 1870 there are sixteen assistants.
The total weekly wage bill is fifteen pounds.
This is a family enterprise built on long hours, tight margins, and ambition.
Harrods is not born grand.
It earns its way there.
By the 1870s it’s selling perfumes, stationery,
patent medicines.
The shop keeps expanding. Acquiring. Breathing in.
Fire, and the Moment That Makes the Legend
Then, in 1883, disaster.
Fire. Harrods burns.
And here’s the moment that seals its reputation.
Charles Harrod writes personally to his customers.
He apologises.
He explains that their orders will be delayed by a day or two.
And he promises delivery.
And then he does it.
Every order honoured.
Goods replaced or refunded.
No excuses.
London notices.
Trust is built.
And when the store is rebuilt, turnover more than doubles.
This is where Harrods becomes Harrods.
Selling the Future, Carefully
In 1898, Harrods installs something startlingly new.
The first escalator in London.
Customers are so unnerved that an assistant stands at the top armed with sal volatile and brandy, just in case.
Victorians confronting the future one moving stair at a time. Harrods doesn’t just sell modernity.
It steadies you after it.
Behind the scenes, the operation is becoming formidable.
There’s a depository at Barnes. Storage. Logistics.
Back-of-house muscle.
Glamour resting on an industrial backbone.
And today, A Building That Insists on Being Looked At
Look at it now.
Five acres.
Over three hundred departments.
More than a million square feet of retail space.
You could lose a small marching band in Harrods.
That deep, confident green.
That unapologetic gold.
Colours chosen not to whisper quality but to announce it from across the street.
Look up. Properly.
Terracotta. Faience.
Art nouveau flourishes.
Retail architecture with an ego.
Inside,
more than 12,000 light bulbs. Enough sparkle to be seen from Harvey Nichols,
which watches all this with a slightly clenched smile.
And as for Below Stairs. Way Below.
Harrods goes deep.
Cellars. Wine vaults.
Staff corridors.
A subterranean world humming away unseen.
There were tunnels under Brompton Road.
A private lock-up for shoplifters. Even its own artesian well.
Self-sufficient.
Independent.
Very on brand.
London loves secret cities under its streets.
Harrods has one.
And as for the Food Halls…
If Harrods were allowed only one boast, this would be it.
Marble floors.
Mosaic ceilings.
Bronze detailing.
Tiles designed by W. J. Neatby. Pyramids of fruit like Renaissance still lifes.
Fish laid out like jewels.
Cheese counters that induce existential doubt.
You don’t rush the Food Halls. You promenade.
You buy something small and feel oddly triumphant.
This is where London reassures itself that it can still do splendour.
And that brings us to Faces, Fame, and Symbolism…
Harrods attracts everyone. Oscar Wilde.
Noel Coward.
Alfred Hitchcock.
Charlie Chaplin.
The Queen Mother.
Diana.
Harrods supplied food to the Titanic.
It once sold exotic animals. Lions. Alligators. Monkeys.
If you had the money and the nerve, Harrods would find a way.
It also becomes something else. A symbol.
In 1983, the IRA targets Harrods deliberately.
A bomb on Brompton Road kills six people and injures around a hundred.
Harrods is not just a shop.
It is visible enough,
British enough, to be attacked.
That tells you something.
And here’s the clincher. Harrods Endures
Ownership changes.
House of Fraser.
The Al Fayed years. Arguments over royal warrants and reputation.
Through it all,
the building remains.
The theatre continues.
Harrods exists because it was built on nerve and timing. Because someone in Eastcheap spotted coming footfall in 1851 and took a leap.
Because trust was earned when it mattered.
So go in. Wander.
Look up. Look down.
Think about what’s under your feet.
Think about what used to be sold here and what never would be now.
You don’t need to buy anything.
Just being there is enough.
That’s Harrods.
And that’s London.
Come in. Just for a look.
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.