London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good day to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Thursday, September 25th, 2025.
First port of call – the London Calling Book Club Corner.
My, David’s, crack of the whip today. I’m reading – well, re-reading, it’s my seventh or eighth sojourn through this great novel in the last three years – I’m re-reading Virginia Woolf’s great game-changer modernist novel, Mrs Dalloway. And to accompany it, Hermonie Lee’s wonderful bigography of Virginia Woolf and Jane Dunn’s equally wonderful biographical study of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell. Rich pickings in both. This, for example, from Hermeonie Lee’s biography. It’s inserted so casually, it’s almost a throwaway sentence. But it’s a throwaway that’s a showstopper. She says, “Not for nothing did Freud, on the only occasion when they met, in 1939, give her, [Virginia Woolf] a narcissus.” The point being the narcissus represents creativity, inspiration, awareness and inner reflection. But it also has associations with death. It shares the same root word in Greek as narcosis, meaning numbing or deadening.
And as for Jane Dunn’s study of the two sisters, I learn that the girls’ much-loved mother, who died tragically young, somehow managed a house of eight children, seven servants and a difficult, very demanding husband.
I guide the house from time to time – it’s in Kensington. And thanks now to Jane Dunn’s book I can in effect take my walkers into the house. Direct their gaze to the two room third floor, the day nursery looking out at us in the street, the day nursery where the children ate most of their meals, took their lessons and played. And off it, the third floor back room, the night nursery, where all four Stephen children and their nurse slept.
Or this wonderfully insightful paragraph. “Vanessa was more than astonished, shocked even, by an analytical intellectual curiosity in her younger sister which did not admit to normal taboos. When she was just eight and Virginia six, the two girls were leaping about naked in the bathroom at 22 Hyde Park Gate when Virginia suddenly enquired which parent her sister preferred, father or mother. ‘Such a question seemed to me rather terrible; surely one ought not to ask it.’ Vanessa recoiled, but answered all the same: ‘Mother,’ I said, and then she, Virginia, went on to explain why she, on the whole, preferred my father.’ She realised even then that whereas her reply had been an instinctive unconsidered matter, Virginia’s had been the result of a certain critical process. Their opposing answers were truthful and important. Vanessa remembered the incident all her life and the sympathies and antipathies that existed already in herself and Virginia were to lay the foundations of their adult lives.”
Truth be told, if I were forced to make a choice – Bloomsbury or Kensington – which is the more important location for understanding Virginia Woolf, that childhood home in Kensington would get my vote.
Ok, moving on. First, a couple of tasty factoids. Fascinated to learn that last year nearly 7,000 Americans applied for British citizenship. And London Mayor Sadiq Khan, whom U.S. President Donald Trump regularly slags off, is cheerfully turning the white house’s aversion into a badge of honour. Mayor Khan is saying – with a twinkle in his eye – the President must have a crush on me, I’m living rent-free in the presidential head.
Oh and the big London infrastructure news is – well, watch this space – it looks like a good-sized stretch of Oxford Street will be pedestrianised in the next couple of years. That happens, it’s going to fascinating to see just how transformative it’ll be. And indeed, to see what it’s like for the streets the traffic gets redirected to.
Ok, main course. Yesterday we did the man who invented Gothic. And, yes, that happened right here in London.
Today I’ve got a London story so dramatic it feels like gothic fiction – only, it actually happened. On this day –September 25th – in 1818. Guy’s Hospital. A patient is bleeding out. No antiseptics, no blood typing, no idea if donor and recipient will even be compatible. And in walks Dr. James Blundell, obstetrician, experimenter, somewhat of a medical mad-scientist (in the best sense).
Blundell had had enough of seeing women die in childbirth. Hemorrhage was this lurking horror that medicine seemed powerless against. So he studies animals. He tries syringes, rush-in transfusions, tests speed, learns that drawing blood quickly, using fresh blood, keeping air out of the system –all crucial. He even figured out that you might pull blood from either a vein or artery, and that certain devices helped regulate the flow.
So on September 25th in 1818 (and look, we don’t have every detail – names, faces partially lost), a donor –probably someone nearby, possibly a husband in one of the hemorrhage cases – gives blood. The donor’s arm is prepared: vein exposed, incision made in the arm. Blundell draws blood into a tumbler via syringe. Immediately, he injects that blood into the patient’s vein. Air avoidance, speed, caution – all vital.
And the patient lives. The heart steadies. The pulse strengthens. Perhaps the breathing steadies. Life has been borrowed, transferred. London just made medical history.
But here’s the scary part. Blundell didn’t have a clue about blood types. None. So every transfusion was like rolling dice. Was the donor’s blood “right” for the recipient? No idea. It just happened that in many of his early human-to-human ones, the “luck” side of science landed. So yes – this first one worked, but had the donor’s blood been very different, it could have failed horribly. He didn’t know why some worked and some didn’t – in his animal trials he saw failures too.
In one of his later cases (1825, treating a woman with uterine hemorrhage), after she got her husband’s blood, observers wrote: “Life seemed to be immediately reanimated as by an electric spark.” That’s the kind of metaphor people used when science seemed magical. It captures the fright, the thrill, the horror, the relief all in one.
And all of that happened at Guy’s Hospital, just a stone’s throw away from Borough Market. Guy’s wasn’t a random clinic – it was founded decades earlier by Thomas Guy, a bookseller / investor. Thomas Guy built it partly with profits (yes, from speculative ventures, including the South Sea Bubble) to care for people other hospitals couldn’t. It’s one of London’s philanthropic monuments.
Blundell teaches there. He lectures there. His classes on childbirth, women’s diseases are among the largest in the city. Guy’s is his stage. The building, the wards, the donor room, the students – this is the heart of medical experiment, in a city hungry for progress.
Blundell wrote in Researches Physiological and Pathological (1824) about principles that sound modern:
This is one of those medical firsts you think, “yeah, that changed the game.” It sits next to Jenner (vaccination), public health reform (sewers, cholera), anesthesia, antisepsis. But this – the transfusion – is particularly visceral: blood, life, death, crossing boundaries.
London in the early 19th century was a place where you could find someone pushing ahead, experimenting, risking something. Blundell did not always succeed. Some patients died. But he documented, refined, repeated. That is the hallmark of turning an experiment into medicine.
When you hear about blood donation today – when someone donates blood, or surgeons prep a unit of blood for transfusion – it’s hard to imagine how radical this all was in 1818. How every step was dangerous, how much was unknown. But Blundell’s gamble paid off. He didn’t have blood-typing, he didn’t have blood banks; he just had courage, craving, science, and a hospital ready to host the experiment.
Next time you see a blood donation bus, or someone gives blood, think of Guy’s Hospital in 1818: the syringe, the donor, the patient, and the first time London believed you could swap blood from one person to another and still call it life.
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from – – 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, , the former Editor (and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And , 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.
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