London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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The usual salutation. A very good afternoon to you, London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Tuesday, May 6th, 2025.
This one’s going to be fact-rich. And ever so colourful.
And, yes, it’s a tour of sorts.
London buses. Do you fancy taking a historical ride on some London buses?
I suggest we go all the way back to the beginning. Hop on a Shillibeer and see where it takes us.
Yes, that’s right. A Shillibeer. That’s what London’s first buses were often called.
And what in the world was that about, you ask? Where’d that word come from?
It’s the usual London thing, isn’t it. London names are like an x-ray of the past. They preserve the history.
Londoners said “I’m going to hop on a Shillibeer” because that was the unofficial name they’d given to buses. They called buses Shillibeers out of gratitude to George Shillibeer, who introduced buses to London.
And what a great London story the George Shillibeer story is. He couldn’t have been more London. He was born in Tottenham Court Road. In 1797. He was baptised at St Mary’s in Marylebone. He did a short stint in the navy but it wasn’t right for him. Packed it in. Came back to London. Hatchett’s, a coach-making firm in Long Acre – in Covent Garden – took him on. That’s where he got his professional start. There in Long Acre he learned how to build coaches. He was in the eye of the storm there, Long Acre was the beating heart of London’s coachbuilding industry. And then, out of left field, a move no one could have predicted. George Shillibeer moved to Paris. A coach-building firm there took him on. He was commissioned to build some unusually large horse-drawn coaches of “novel design”. The aim was to design a coach capable of transporting a whole group of people, perhaps two dozen, at a time. What I’d like to know is, did George Shillibeer speak French? My hunch is he didn’t. So how all that happened is a tantalising little mystery.
Anyway, Paris was about to steal a march on London. And this consummate Londoner – George Shillibeer – was the linchpin. His design worked and in 1827 Paris inaugurated its omnibus service. Big coaches – horse-drawn big coaches designed by a Londoner – carrying Parisians to and fro along boulevards and avenues. It was revolutionary.
And George Shillibeer knows a good idea when he sees one. And especially when he was instrumental in making it happen.
He’s got the bit between his teeth. He comes home to London.
Sets up shop in Bury Street in Bloomsbury. Partners with John Cavill, a coach builder and livery stable keeper.
On July 4th, 1829 Shillibeer rolls out London’s first bus service. It operates between Paddington and Bank, via the New Road, as it was known then. Today it’s Marylebone Road and Euston Road. The first advertisements advertised the service as being “upon the Parisian mode.” It ran to a strict timetable. There was no need to be booked. It could be hailed anywhere along the route. Passengers were assisted on and off by a blue-uniformed conductor. In their blue uniforms they looked like midshipmen. And in fact most of them were old mates of Shillibeer from his days in the Navy. The journey cost a shilling – which was a lot of money in those days. It took about an hour to get over the ground. The coach was a heavy 20-seater. It was wide so it couldn’t go along narrow London streets. But it was very stable. It was pulled by three horses. And sure enough Shillibeer borrowed the Parisian name for his bus, he called it an omnibus. Omni meaning ‘all’. The bus for all.
In time of course that got shortened to bus.
For the record, the same thing happened to the French word ‘cabriolet’ – it got shortened to cab.
But this is fun. The word bus – in its earliest incarnation – is Dutch and it meant a fishing boat.
In his poem Jure Divino, Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe weighs anchor at that old meaning:
Neptune, an old Dutch skipper, born at sea,
And naturalised to all that’s wild and watery;
In Holland’s Buss, for herrings fished, and cod,
And knew the seas, as carriers know the road.”
Well, Shillibeer’s bus fished for customers. And it netted them. Lots of them.
And the idea just took off. By 1832 there were 400 horse buses operating in London. Lots of competition for Shillibeer. And as it happens, a lot of the competitors made a better fist of it. Drove Shillibeer out of business. So now he’s just a footnote in London history. A historical footnote and a small London street. Shillibeer Place in the northwestern corner of the Marylebone district. It’s where Shillibeer’s carriages and horses were stabled. So if you’re a history of London transport spotter, Shillibeer Place has got to go onto your checklist. It’s sacred ground in the London transport story. Let’s fast forward 60 years. Fast forward and all aboard for some horse-drawn bus transport statistics. In 1890 the biggest bus company – the London General Omnibus Company – was operating 660 omnibuses. In case you’re wondering, the London bus fleet today is pushing up toward 9,000 buses. In the first six months of 1890 the General Omnibus Company carried over 55 million passengers. They traversed over 9 million miles. They had nearly 10,000 horses. Each bus covered about 80 miles a day. At that rate a London General Omnibus Company driver would drive round the world and then some every year.
All good meaty London historical factoids. But my favourite bit of the whole saga is how colourful it all was.
Colourful names. And brightly coloured buses. Whereas today, well, at no little risk of belabouring the obvious, the herd all looks the same – the famous red bus. That red, as fond as I am of it, it’s like a school uniform. The identifying feature is a number. Each London bus route is identified by its number.
Different story in 1890. Bus services had their own identifying colour. And an identifying, sometimes colourful name. For example, at St John’s Wood you could catch the light green Atlas. At Brompton you could catch the Favourite. Its livery was dark blue. In Pimlico you’d hop on the Royal Oak and Victoria. It would maybe be the most familiar to you because its livery was a bright red.
But they were a full palette of colours, 1890s omnibuses. Yellow, chocolate, light green, dark green, white, brown, dark blue, brown and pink, red and white, brown and blue, white and brown, green and yellow…
A kaleidoscope of colours. You’d be hard put not to give in and become a bus spotter.
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.