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, July 29th, 2025.
And here’s the spin of the roulette wheel. Where’s the ball – aka the pill – coming to stop?
Ah, there it is. We have a winner. Harrow. Or Harrow School to be exact.
Truth be told, this one’s not really random, not really a matter of chance.
Our eldest son paid us a visit last night. He lives in Sevilla, in Spain. It gets a bit warm there in July and August. So he summers in London. Several weeks of which in Harrow. Harrow School. They run a summer school English Language course there for overseas students and Sam is one of their English teachers.
Anyway, this summer’s stint at Harrow School is all winding up for him now – this is his last week – he’ll be off on his foreign travels in a few days – and, well, it occurred to me, why not, let’s do a London Calling episode on Harrow School. For the record, London Walks has a Harrow walk. We’ve haven’t run it now for a few years but I’m thinking maybe we should bring it down from the attic, dust it off, and air it out again. We’ll see.
Let’s start with the name, Harrow. It’s almost always a can’t miss, starting with a London name. And Harrow’s no exception. It’s a London place name I’ve got a lot of time for. It comes from an Old English word and it means ‘the place of the pagan shrine.’ And ‘old’ is certainly one of the operative adjectives. Harrow Road, which winds its way from Paddington to Harrow, is a very old track. How old is very old. Well, some experts say it’s pre-Roman.
Now as for Harrow School. It is of course one of the ancient and great public schools. You mention it in the same breath that you mention Eton and Winchester and Rugby and Westminster. It’s often confusing to foreigners because a public school is of course a private school. What an American would call a public school a Briton would call a state school. But like everything else in this country that doesn’t seem to make sense, if you dig down into the history it makes perfect sense. Let’s dig.
Hundreds of years ago the only people who were formally educated were the sons of royalty and nobility. A nobleman would hire a Greek master and a Latin master and a dancing master and a rhetoric master and a fencing master and these teachers were live-in instructors as it were. They’d live in the nobleman’s house and teach his sons. So the nobleman’s sons – like the king’s sons – were educated privately.
Over a very long period of time you get the beginnings of what came to be known as the middle class. These were people who had some disposable income and they wanted their sons to be educated. But they weren’t wealthy enough to afford the salaries of six individual teachers. And they didn’t have a house big enough to accommodate said teachers. So they clubbed, often under the aegis of the church, to create a school that was a public school their sons could attend. Public as opposed to being educated privately at home.
As the ever quotable John Constable said, we don’t really see until we understand. You know the history – understand the history – voila, we suddenly see in utter clarity that on the face of it confusing term, public school. It makes perfect sense when you know the history.
Personal note. You want your offspring to go to a public school you put his name down when he’s an embryo. Which is precisely what I did in Sam’s case. Put him down for Westminster School. Come the time he sat the exam. The upshot couldn’t have turned out better. We got the call. They said, ‘clearly he’s very bright, we’d like to offer him a place.’ We left it up to him. He wanted no part of it. For two compelling reasons. Compelling to him at any rate. Already at age 11 he was an anarchist and he wanted nothing to do with a school uniform. And he was bone idle. Which he still is. So not surprisingly he was horrified at the idea of a five and a half day school week. Go to school on Saturday morning. What do you take me for? Do I look like a moron? So he demurred. Demurred is putting it politely. Went to the local state school up here. And that state education did him proud. From his state school it was off to LSE, the London School of Economics. He got a good degree. Did just fine. And for us, his parents – well, it worked a treat as well. What parent doesn’t want to be told ‘you’re son is clearly very bright’ and have him be offered a place at a very prestigious public school. But had he gone to Westminster, it would have been financially ruinous for us. That was 20 some years ago but if I tell you that the fees for boarders at Harrow School today come to about £50,000 a year… well, you’ll see where I’m coming from.
But that’s all by way of a preamble. Let’s close right in on Harrow School.
As I said, it’s one of the big ones. The grand old titans of British education. And it is old. Ancient, in fact – founded way back in 1572, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. That’s right. The Virgin Queen herself signed the royal charter that brought the school into being. No pressure, boys.
And where is it? Well, touched on this already. But it needs must be stressed: Harrow School in some lost corner of the countryside like Eton or Winchester. No, Harrow is perched up high, properly high, way up on a hill in Northwest London. That hill’s important –because back then, Harrow-on-the-Hill was a tiny village. Rural. Quiet. But high ground, always good for fresh air, long views, and let’s be honest, keeping the riff-raff out.
And oh, that view. You go up there today and—when the London smog isn’t being difficult—you can see right across the capital. Wembley Stadium to one side. The Shard on the other. Even the Thames on a clear day. Glorious stuff. A view fit for kings. Or prime ministers. Or, if you’re Harrow, both.
The campus itself? Think Hogwarts, but real. Red-brick buildings. Towering chapels. Sweeping green fields where they’ve been playing cricket since before the United States was born. The school’s dotted across the hilltop. It’s not one tight block like some modern campuses. No, this is a rambling, characterful sprawl of cloisters, quads, and history oozing from every drainpipe.
And the dress code? Oh, the uniform! You can’t talk about Harrow without mentioning that famous get-up. Tailcoats. Boaters. Straw boaters, no less. And those ridiculously charming blue ties. It’s like time-travel with better haircuts. You half expect a young Sherlock Holmes to stroll past quoting Latin and twirling a cricket bat.
But interestingly enough, Harrow wasn’t set up for lords and dukes. Not at first. Its founder, John Lyon, was a yeoman farmer. Sturdy local bloke. He wanted the local boys to have a free education — a “Christian education,” that was the idea. He also improved the road from Harrow to London. Sensible chap. Realised they’d need to get somewhere one day. That road, by the way, is still with us. Yes, Harrow Road, whose forbear, as I said, may have been pre-Roman. Ever driven the Harrow Road? You have John Lyon to thank—or curse, depending on the traffic.
Anyway, such were the origins of Harrow School. But, needless to say, it went up in the world.
Over the years, the local lads gave way to the posh brigade. By the 18th century, Harrow had become a finishing school for the great and the good. The fees went up. The accents got posher. The alumni list got very shiny.
And so we come to the roll call of the famous – the old Harrovians. Where to begin?
Well, let’s start with the big one: Winston Churchill. The bulldog himself. He hated school as a young lad, got awful marks, was considered a bit of a dunce. But Harrow? He loved it. Came back often. Even wrote a poem about it—“Happy are the young whose hearts are tender…” all a bit misty-eyed. They’ve still got his old top hat in a glass case up there.
Then there’s Benedict Cumbderbatch. Yes, Sherlock himself. Smouldering cheekbones and all. Learned his lines on those very lawns. And but of course, Lord Byron, the great Romantic poet. The poet. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Rumour has it he kept a bear at Trinity College, but before that, he roamed the fields of Harrow, breaking hearts and reading Virgil.
And let’s not forget Richard Curtis – yes, that Richard Curtis. Four Weddings. Love Actually. Blackadder. All those floppy-haired romantic heroes? Blame Harrow. They’re practically school autobiographies.
Harrow’s old boys – its alumni – it reads like the guest list for a royal wedding: seven prime ministers, including India’s Nehru. He came from Allahabad to Harrow in the early 1900s. Imagine that. A young Indian lad in a tailcoat, walking those freezing corridors. Empires meeting in one draughty classroom.
But Harrow isn’t just posh boys and politics. It’s music, too. The school song—Forty Years On—has been sung by every generation since 1872. Beautifully nostalgic. Haunting even. There’s a line in there: “Follow up! Follow up!” Chanted across the fields at cricket matches like it’s an incantation.
Speaking of cricket—Harrow vs. Eton at Lord’s. Now that is a fixture. Proper tradition. Top hats in the stands. Thunderous applause for a decent leg glance. It’s the Wimbledon of school cricket. A duel of heritage, more than sport.
So, what’s Harrow like today? Still exclusive, still elite. But more global now. More scholarships. More outreach. You’ll find students from all over the world—Asia, the Middle East, Africa. And that’s not to mention the overseas footprint – Harrow International Schools to popping up in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Beijing. The old lion is going worldwide.
And yet, up on that windy hill in London, the old traditions hold firm. The chapel bell still rings. Latin still echoes through the halls. And somewhere, probably behind a mullioned window, a boy is scribbling a poem that might change the world—or at least get him a very high mark. So that’s Harrow. It’s a school, yes. But it’s also a story. A relic, a powerhouse, a dream factory. With boaters. Always the boaters.
Follow up. Follow up.
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.