London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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Cue the usual salutation: a very good morning to you London Walkers. Wherever you are. It’s June 30, 2025. The last day of June. If I may put it this way, that’s a trigger warning of sorts for me. I’ve got the hot air of a newsletter deadline breathing down my neck.
So this one’s going to be a microwave job, so to speak.
Literally story time. I’m going to read you a very fine passage from HV Morton’s The Nights of London.
You almost certainly won’t have heard of HV Morton but there’s every reason for making his acquaintance.
The main reason being: 100 years ago nobody was doing a better job of telling the London story than Henry Vollum Morton.
You could call him the first great travel writer. As I said, the excerpt I’m going to treat your ears to today comes from The Nights of London. published 99 years ago.
Now we should flesh our author out a little bit. And indeed, flush him out. In Charles Connolly’s words, H.V. Morton was a terrific writer, but a terrible man. A pioneering travel writer of genius he may have been – but he was also a philanderer and a racist snob. Let alone an admirer of Adolph Hitler.
H.V. Morton was Victorian by birth. He was born 1892 in Lancashire. He was to the manor born. His father was the editor of the Birmingham Mail. A chip off the block, H.V. Morton’s journalism career got underway at the tender age of 18. He was taken on as a junior at the Birmingham Gazette and Express, where his father was an editor.
Yes, it was rank nepotism but given the riches H.V. Morton’s life’s work yielded up it’s hard to find fault with it.
Two years later – young Morton was barely 20 – he came to London. Caught on as a sub-editor for the Daily Mail.
Before long there was the hiatus of the Great War. But when it was goodbye to all that, it was Hello to the roaring 20s. And sure enough HV Morton’s career takes off like a rocket. He became the star columnist for the Daily Express. His torrents of columns were the caterpillars that became the butterflies of many of his books.
Everything Morton wrote is worth reading, but the Hope Diamond of his journalism career was being sent by the Express to Egypt to cover Howard Carter’s excavation of the boy-Tuking Tutankhamun’s tomb –
arguably the greatest scoop of the 20th century. Morton’s is the eyewitness account of the opening of the inner burial chamber containing the sarcophagus of the youthful, centuries-old pharaoh. But that’s Egypt.
Our patch is London.
So here’s the promised HV Morton taster.
Here he is writing about nightlife in London. It’s classic H. V. Morton – written beautifully and studded with any number of gems – insights that never occurred to you until H.V. Morton lifts the curtain on them.
Here we go. Here’s H.V. Morton.
“Nightlife is the last social habit to be developed by a city. It is only since the growth of the West End, the invention of gas and the establishment of a police force that London has had the opportunity, and, incidentally the audacity, to plunge into the night.
Roman London must have been deadly dull after dark; Saxon London duller still.
The curfew, which announced the official night of Norman London, must have acted as a damper on any gaiety that happened to survive the Conquest.
The law of the Middle Ages assumed that any man who walked the streets at night was bent on evil; which was probably true.
London developed a little patch of vice and villainy on Bankside, but it is not until the Georgian Age that we observe the first Nights of London.
Beyond the walls of the City the West End with its squares had grown up; and it is in this new London that we see for the first time the night hawk sitting behind the yellow windows of St James’s Street staking his estate on a throw of the dice.
I suppose no age devotes itself to nocturnal gaiety till its women dress for dinner.
Mrs. Dick Whittington, I am confident, had no evening gowns. She wore her best gown trimmed with miniver indiscriminately at noon or night; for a ‘riding’ along Chepe or for a State banquet.
In the Georgian Age, however, white shoulders flashed through the tinted dusk of Ranelagh and Vauxhall.
In the new West End, the torches of the link men grew pale in the dawn as a tired beauty was borne in her sedan chair from a rout.
The nightlife of the Georgians was the effervescence of a privileged few.
Behind the wildest party was always the old London problem of getting home, complicated in that age by the solid thought that Dick Turpin might be waiting with his pistols cocked behind a hedge in Mayfair.
Still, that did not deter them. Our forefathers contrived to have a good time by candlelight.
The lights of London grew brighter in the next century until they blazed on a boiled shirt in a hansom cab. We are now almost in modern times.
The London of the Georgians had been naughty; the London of the staid Victorians became wicked; that, at least, was her reputation: and they say that where smoke is there is generally fire.
Night crowds, made up, not of lords and ladies, but of ordinary Londoners, filled the Strand, for years the most famous street in the world.
It handed its supremacy to Piccadilly almost in our own times, and fell into position as a kind of connecting link between the staid old City on the hill and the giddy young West End.
Old man who drink port have told me, when warmed up, how beautiful London was at night in those days of side whiskers and plaid trousers and Ouida.
They have described to me the unforgettable sensation, unknown to this age, of waiting outside a stage door with a bunch of flowers.
The Georgian night was sustained by port; the Victorian by champagne: this was the age of Clicquot.
A series of sharp explosions and a barrage of corks went up in the Strand restaurants every night as grandfather leaned single-mindedly toward his favorite ballet girl,
Nowadays, the nights of London, through which we shall journey in the following pages, are free to all men. The cheap restaurant, the tube train, the omnibus, have packed the West End at night.
The desire to extract just a little more from life than Nature intended, confined during the 18th-century to the quality, and, during the 19th, to the man with money, is now shared by the millions of London.
The bright lights call them night after night, if only to saunter for an innocent hour in the slow, exciting crowds.
This, then, is our stage. It is an interesting one. By day we can say that London obeys a master; by night she is her own mistress.”
Well, that was 1920s London. Let’s usher in the usual sign-off with a bit of the very latest London news. Today’s the first day of the Wimbledon Championships, the most prestigious tennis tournament in the world. It’s going to be the hottest ever start to the tournament. Tempertures could hit a scorching 36 degrees Celsius. And there’s a second reason this one will go in the record books: for the first time in its 148-year history there’ll be no line judges. That’s right, technology has crashed the party: electronic line calling has crossed the line, shown the door to human line judges.
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.