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 Monday, November 17th, 2025.
And here we go, here it is – your daily London fix.
This podcast is a broad church affair.
Want a single bit of rubric that encompasses, that arches over all of them, I suppose it could be GET TO KNOW YOUR LONDON. Or that line that we already use, This is London.
And regular listeners will know that some of these podcasts cluster together. Taken together they make up a series.
One of those series got underway a couple of months. It’s the London Boroughs series. For administrative purposes Greater London is divided up into 32 boroughs. And I thought, yeah, why not, let’s do a podcast on each of the 32 boroughs. That’s right down the pike Get to Know Your London stuff. I started with the borough I live in Camden. Camden’s very central and it’s got a lot going for it so that one in fact morphed into three podcasts. The second one I did was on Brent, Camden’s next door neighbour. And, yes, you’ve guessed right, here’s a third helping in the London Boroughs series. In the spotlight today, Islington. Now how in the world do you introduce Islington? That’s a tall order. But not an impossible order. Say hello to Islington.
And here’s the thing about Islington:
it’s never been one
to stay quietly in the corner. Oh no. Islington’s the guest at the London party who talks too loud, laughs too long,
and somehow ends up
leading the conga line.
A bit raffish, a bit radical,
a bit posh round the edges
but never dull.
The name itself is a time capsule. Islington. Back back it goes.
Back to Giseldone,
that’s what they called it
back in the year 1005 –
the hill of Gisla. Who was Gisla?
No one knows.
A Saxon landowner, perhaps.
Or maybe she was a local matriarch
who bossed the men about and
left her name stamped on the place. Either way, Gisla’s hill became
Isledon, and eventually Islington.
She’d never have dreamed
that her patch of green hills
north of London would one day
be home to Arsenal Football Club,
the Marx Memorial Library,
and a chapel famous for rock concerts.
She time travelled forward
a thousand years my god
would she be rubbing her eyes.
Anyway, for centuries
Islington was a rural dream.
Think pastureland, dairies,
babbling streams.
Londoners came here
for clean air and fresh milk.
There were ponds and windmills.
Cows grazed where buses now belch. The city’s grand folk used to take afternoon jaunts out to Islington
for picnics and pleasure gardens.
Even in Shakespeare’s day,
people spoke of
“taking the air at Islington.”
You can still feel
a ghost of that open countryside
if you know where to look –
along the Regent’s Canal, say,
or by the leafy calm
of Canonbury Square.
Fast forward to the Victorian age
and the fields
have given way to terraces –
endless brick terraces,
marching south toward Clerkenwell
and Finsbury.
The railways arrived,
the canal cut its way through,
and Islington became proper London. Not Mayfair or Belgravia London –
more boots and beer
than ballrooms and butlers –
but solid, industrious, bustling.
And that’s the genius of the place. Islington doesn’t just
reflect London’s story, it performs it.
It’s been rich and poor,
posh and political,
high-minded and half-cut.
Georgian elegance rubs shoulders
with 1960s council estates;
radical bookshops
sit beside champagne bars.
You can buy a vintage typewriter
or a vegan doughnut
within the same ten metres.
The borough, as we know it,
dates from 1965,
when Islington joined hands
(not altogether willingly)
with its southern neighbour, Finsbury. Together they became the London Borough of Islington –
motto We Serve.
A touch ironic, perhaps,
for a patch that’s produced as many rabble-rousers as servants.
John Wilkes, for instance –
eighteenth-century firebrand
and libertine, born in Clerkenwell, champion of free speech
and foe of royal pomposity.
A century later came John Stuart Mill, philosopher and reformer,
also born in Islington.
You can almost smell the whiff of revolution in the air.
The borough’s
seen its fair share of characters since. Kenneth Williams, sharp as vinegar,
born in Bingfield Street.
John Lydon – Johnny Rotten himself – grew up on Benwell Road,
within spitting distance
of the Arsenal ground.
The punk poet of Finsbury Park.
Add Mark Strong, Sadie Frost,
Leona Lewis, Helena Bonham Carter… it’s practically a casting call
for a very eccentric dinner party.
Speaking of Arsenal,
the club’s cathedral –
the Emirates Stadium –
looms like a modern coliseum
on the old railway lands at Holloway. Once upon a time,
match days meant Highbury,
that elegant art deco jewel of a ground now reincarnated as flats.
But the faithful still come,
red scarves flapping,
from every corner of the earth.
If you want to understand
north London pride,
listen to the roar
when the Gunners score.
It’s tribal, it’s electric, it’s pure Islington.
Yet this isn’t just football and flair. Islington has soul.
It’s the borough of
ideas, art, and argument.
The Regent’s Canal
threads through it like a thought,
linking old wharves and new cafés.
The New River –
not actually new, and not quite a river – still winds its quiet way,
a seventeenth-century
feat of engineering
that once brought
drinking water to a thirsty capital.
And then there are the treasures.
Upper Street,
that mile-long catwalk of restaurants, theatres, and people-watching.
On a Saturday night it’s a carnival – laughter spilling from pubs,
the smell of curries and cocktails,
and the buzz of a borough
that never learned to sit still.
At the other end
of the emotional spectrum
lies Bunhill Fields.
A little acre of eternity
where London’s radicals and romantics lie side by side –
William Blake, Daniel Defoe,
John Bunyan.
Nonconformist ground for nonconforming souls.
Nearby stands the Charterhouse,
with its medieval cloisters
and almsmen still in residence,
and St John’s Gate,
the great stone entrance
to the old Priory
of the Knights of St John,
now home to the Museum of the Order. Dickens himself worked there for a spell, as a young reporter.
Just down the road,
the Marx Memorial Library
keeps the red flag flying
in Clerkenwell Green,
while a few streets away
Sadler’s Wells dances
to a different rhythm altogether – London’s temple of dance
since the seventeenth century,
when it began as a spa and
pleasure garden.
A few centuries and
several rebuilds later,
it’s still
one of the finest theatres in the world.
Islington’s
full of delightful oddities like that. Joseph Grimaldi,
the original white-faced clown,
is buried in Joseph Grimaldi Park. Canonbury Tower,
once home to Sir Francis Bacon,
still pokes its Tudor head
above the rooftops.
And the Union Chapel in
Compton Terrace?
A working church by day,
a world-class concert venue by night. Where else in London
can you listen to a folk singer
in the pews
of a Gothic revival masterpiece
while a vicar quietly
serves tea and biscuits in the corner?
The borough’s shape is compact –
14.9 square kilometres,
1.5 of which are green space. That’s about ten percent,
which feels about right:
enough for picnics and parks
but never enough to get lost.
And though it’s small, it’s dense:
over 220,000 people
packed into those few square miles,
a heady mix of accents,
backgrounds, and ideas.
Sixty-odd percent white,
about a quarter black or Asian,
and a good sprinkling
of everything else.
You can eat the world’s cuisine here without crossing a street.
Islington’s always been
a bit of a social experiment –
and sometimes a paradox.
In the 1980s it became
shorthand for the “champagne socialist” – left-wing politics, right-bank account. Tony Blair lived here.
So did Boris Johnson.
So did George Orwell.
A borough of opinions, you might say – often contradictory, never dull.
Even its architecture tells a story. Georgian terraces whisper
of past gentility.
Victorian warehouses turned lofts
speak of reinvention.
Post-war estates remind us
f the city’s grit and graft.
Caledonian Park’s clock tower
keeps watch over it all,
a proud survivor
from the days
when the “Cally” cattle market
drew farmers from miles around.
Islington’s a borough that’s
forever re-writing itself.
It was rural,
then urban,
then trendy,
then diverse, and now
it’s all those things at once.
It’s a kaleidoscope.
A living contradiction.
A place where Karl Marx wrote
and Kate Moss shops.
Where Blake dreamt of angels and Arsenal dreams of trophies.
If London is a grand novel,
Islington’s the chapter you dog-ear.
It’s the bit with the best dialogue,
the wildest characters,
and the occasional burst of poetry.
It’s stylish but not smug,
clever but not cold. It’s a little scruffy,
a little sparkling,
always surprising.
And somewhere under all the bustle,
if you stand still for a moment –
perhaps by the canal on
a Sunday morning,
or in the hush of Bunhill Fields –
you can almost sense her.
Gisla.
The woman who lent her name
to a hill
that became a borough,
that became a world unto itself.
She might smile at
what her little corner has become:
loud, proud, funny,
infuriating, endlessly alive.
Gisla’s hill still rises –
in spirit, if not in height. And that, as Islington would tell you with a wink,
is something worth serving.
And yes, last but not least, London Walks does a slew of Islington Walks. There’s Sue’s Merrie Islington.
And at least three Canal Walks –
The Regent’s Canal – Islington to Mile End;
and The Regent’s Canal – Islington to Kingsland Road.
And The Regent’s Canal – King’s Cross to the New River.
And Philip’s Hip, Happening, Handsome, Hi! Highbury.
And his, Philip’s, Islington Between the Wars.
And his Highbury – Grand Houses and Grander Stadiums.
And his Fables, Fashions & Feasts.
And his The Arsenal Story.
And his Up the Cally – Where History Misbehaves.
Yes, you got it in one –
Philip’s local.
And finally,
Spoilt for choice.
It’s practically a Chinese menu.
But it eloquently attests to just how much is there,
how rich the historical and cultural sporting pickings are in Islington.
Islington – we govern by serving.
Best kind of serving…
Serving up.
London repasts don’t come any richer than what’s on offer in N1.
Good on you, Islington! You go!
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 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.