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 Sunday, July 27th, 2025.
We have lift off, Houston. This one’s the start of a new London Calling series. A series on London street furniture. London street furniture isn’t big and bold and brash. It’s easy to miss. But it’s worth tracking down, worth ferreting out, worth getting to know. Fossils, artefacts, trace evidence – that’s what London street furniture is. Artefacts that can tell us a great deal about bygone London. Fossils that lift the curtain on the London of yesteryear. Trace evidence that’s so much more than detritus from the past. Every piece of street furniture is a raconteur, a storyteller.
And today’s storyteller? The link extinguisher.
Yeah, I know—it sounds like something out of Star Trek. “Spock, engage the link extinguisher!” But trust me, link extinguishers, they’re Georgian and Victorian hardware.
Word picture time. A link extinguisher is a little black metal cone that sits quietly on a post or outside a pub or old lodging house, minding its own business. Not much to look at now. A sort of metal tulip. But once upon a time—oh, it had a job to do. A noble, smoky, smelly, flaring job.
Let’s head back there. Way back. Before gaslight, let alone electricity. Back in the days when the London night was as dark as a coal mine and just as treacherous. And the answer to all that blackness? The linkboy.
He was your human satnav. Your portable streetlight. A London lad—a street urchin —armed with a flaming torch. Except they didn’t call it a torch. They called it a link. It was a bundle of pitch and tow bound up and set alight. Not the most elegant flame, but it did the trick. For a penny or two, the linkboy would light the way for you, guide you home—or to the next gin shop.
And when you arrived? Pitched up at your destination with your ruff askew and your wig on sideways? Cue the link extinguisher. You certainly can’t have some soot-smeared urchin poking a flaming torch into your parlour. And you didn’t want him putting it out in the street. There was no proper refuse collection. The streets were full of garbage and debris. He puts it out in the street there’s every chance something going to catch fire and the fire will spread into your house. So you dunk it. Or rather, you snuff it—right there in the metal cone. Job done.
There they are, still clinging to the brickwork like soot-caked barnacles. You’ll find them – here and there – outside grander Georgian and early Victorian townhouses. A cast-iron nod to the days when arriving after dark meant literally bringing your own light.
Those were the days. And those days are long gone. Link extinguishers have been quietly fading into obscurity. Most people walk right past them – don’t see them – let alone give them a second glance. But not so, London Walkers. They’re on the case. They’ve joined the hunt. The London link extinguisher hunt.
It’s sort of like urban bird watching – except these birds are cast iron, conical, and non-migratory.
And what I particularly like about the link-lit London story is English literature gets in on the act. Including Shakespeare himself. There’s a belter of a reference in Henry IV, Part 1. Enter Shakespeare’s greatest comic creation. Yes, Falstaff. Bluff, bloviating, and balloon-like – a man who never met a roast goose or a flagon of sack he didn’t like. And his sidekick, Bardolph. A drinking companion of epic thirst and epic nasal discolouration.
That booze-blasted, crimson beacon of a nose, Falstaff gives it a broadside: “O, thou art a perpetual triumph, an everlasting bonfire-light! Thou hast saved me a thousand marks in links and torches, walking with thee in the night betwixt tavern and tavern.”
What’s not to like about Shakespeare telling us —400 years ago—that a man’s face could do the job of a flaming torch. That’s how common links were. So common, you could joke about not needing one, so long as Bardolph was red nosing the way.
And it doesn’t stop there. Fast-forward to the 18th century, and we find John Gay—yes, he of The Beggar’s Opera—dropping linkboys and their paraphernalia into verse like a cabbie easing into traffic. In his poem “Trivia: or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London,” he writes:
“Though thou art tempted by the link-man’s call, / Yet trust him not along the lonely wall.”
Tempted by the linkman’s call! Doesn’t that conjure up a foggy, flickering street corner? The hiss of flame. The promise of safe passage. Or maybe not so safe. Because not all linkboys were on the up and up. Some of them were the point men for gangs of thieves. They’d lead drunken gentlemen into dark alleys where accomplices lay in wait. A lit torch and a lifted purse—London, in all its grimy glory.
And as long as we’re at it, peering into the dark backward and abysm of time – conjuring up vanished London – we better let the Blitz have its turn. The Second World War. The Great Meltdown of London ironwork.
To cut a long story short, come 1940, Churchill was desperate for scrap metal. Munitions had to be made. The great cry went up: “We need your railings! Your gates! Your bollards!” Londoners – and everybody else – came across. Not that they had any choice. did just that. Wrought iron railings sheared off, ditto balcony railings – and, yes, no end of link extinguishers. Hacksawed out and hauled away.
That’s why the survivors—those rare remaining cones—are precious. They’re urban fossils. The real McCoy. They’re your link, so to speak, to the days when light came at a cost, and someone had to carry it for you.
So, next time you’re out and about in London, take a good look at the ironwork. You might just spot a little black cone with a story to tell. The merest foot soldier but its devotion to duty second to none.
Or if you don’t want to get all romantic about it, try this for size: you’re looking at an eighteenth-century light switch. A one-way light switch.
Mind how 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 £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.