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 Saturday, January 31st, 2026.
And here it is.
Here’s your daily London fix.
Same city. Different century.
January the thirty-first, 1823.
It’s winter in the city. The kind of cold that creeps up from the cobbles and settles in the bones. Coal smoke in the air. The Thames sliding past, dark and heavy, carrying barges, secrets, and the refuse of a global empire.
London is the biggest city on earth. The nerve centre of trade, money, shipping, insurance. And let’s not dodge it. Much of that wealth has come, directly or indirectly, from slavery.
And on this day, 31 January 1823, London does something extraordinary.
It decides to fight back against itself.
A meeting in a tavern
Picture the scene.
We’re near the Strand, one of the busiest arteries in the city. Coaches rattling past. Porters shouting. Printers’ shops humming with activity.
Inside the King’s Head Tavern, a group of men gather round a table. Not radicals with pitchforks. Not dreamers. These are serious people. Organised people. Men who understand how Britain works.
They found what becomes known as the Anti-Slavery Society.
This matters. A lot.
Because Britain has already abolished the slave trade in 1807. No more ships legally carrying enslaved Africans across the Atlantic under the British flag.
But slavery itself? That’s still very much alive. Plantations in the Caribbean. Sugar, coffee, cotton. Enslaved men, women, children. Bought, sold, punished, worked to exhaustion.
Many people had assumed that ending the trade would improve conditions. It didn’t. Planters simply worked enslaved people harder.
London abolitionists know this now. They’ve read the reports. They’ve heard the testimony. They’ve seen the figures.
So they escalate.
Take a bow London as headquarters of conscience
Yes, this is where London comes into its own.
The Anti-Slavery Society isn’t just a moral gesture. It’s a machine.
Committees meet again and again in rented rooms and private houses. Pamphlets are printed in their thousands and pushed into circulation. Petitions flow through the city, then outward to the provinces.
This is the city that understands paperwork. Pressure. Persistence.
Clergymen preach abolition from London pulpits. Lawyers draft arguments. Merchants argue, sometimes bitterly, across dining tables. Newspapers take sides.
You can feel it spreading. From taverns to chapels. From the Strand to the City. From Westminster to the docks.
London is noisy about this. Argumentative. Restless.
Exactly as it should be.
And you can depend on it, it was a long grind.
A quick win it wasn’t.
There were fierce opponents. Powerful ones. Plantation owners. Investors. MPs with Caribbean interests. People who insist slavery is essential to prosperity.
And London hears all of it.
Debates rage in Parliament. Speeches echo through the Commons chamber. Outside, the city waits, grumbles, organises some more.
What’s striking is how modern this feels.
This is campaigning London. Leaflets. Networks. Messaging. Relentless repetition. Keeping the issue alive when others would rather change the subject.
For ten years, the pressure builds.
Ten years of meetings, letters, sermons, editorials, petitions stacked so high they physically sag under their own weight.
And then, in 1833, the breakthrough.
From tavern table to statute book
The Slavery Abolition Act passes through Parliament.
Slavery is abolished throughout most of the British Empire.
It’s not perfect. Compensation goes to slave owners, not the enslaved. Freedom is staggered and controlled. But the legal ownership of human beings is ended.
And it happens here.
In London.
In buildings that still stand. In chambers you can still walk past. The law is signed within sight of the Thames that once carried slave-produced goods into the heart of the city.
This is why January 31st 1823 matters.
Because it marks the moment when London stopped murmuring and started organising.
And let’s poke around.
What did London feel like back then?
Try to imagine the city in those years.
Gas lamps flickering into life at dusk. Streets ankle-deep in mud and horse droppings. Coffee houses buzzing with gossip and argument. The river thick with traffic.
This is not a polite city. It’s a city that rubs ideas together until sparks fly.
A city where moral reform doesn’t happen quietly. It happens through debate, friction, exhaustion.
London doesn’t just host history. It hounds it.
And here’s why this story still matters
It’s tempting to tidy this tale up. To make it neat. To turn it into a victory lap.
Don’t.
What makes it powerful is the effort. The sheer grind of persuasion. The refusal to let the issue drop.
London’s abolitionists didn’t win because they were nice. They won because they were organised, stubborn, and very good at using the city they lived in.
They understood London’s strengths. Its presses. Its pulpits. Its Parliament. Its ability to amplify an idea until it could no longer be ignored.
That’s the London lesson.
Change doesn’t arrive on horseback. It arrives by committee.
So today, January the thirty-first, let’s remember that table in a tavern. Remember the pamphlets. The meetings. The sermons. The petitions.
Remember that London, for all its noise and contradiction, once decided that slavery was intolerable and set about dismantling it.
Slowly. Imperfectly. But decisively.
This is London at its best.
Not glamorous. Not tidy. But determined.
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 a former Member of Parliament, three terms at Westminster, bringing first-hand experience of power, policy and political theatre to the very streets where it all played out.
It includes two barristers, three doctors, two geologists, a distinguished museum curator and a former Time out Editor.
It includes authors, historians, national journalists, a former London Museum archaeologist, and university professors (one of them an eminent Cambridge University paleontologist).
It includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre actors, and two professional photographers. And last but not least, the creme de la creme of top flight professionally qualified Blue Badge Guides, including 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 here’s the clincher. We’re playing at home.
London Walks is London-based. Period.
We’re not an impersonal, faceless platform run from halfway round the world. There’s no chatbot. No call-centre script. When you contact us, you reach a real person. A Londoner. Someone who actually knows the streets you’re about to walk.
That’s not a detail. That’s the difference.
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.