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, December 27th, 2025.
And here it is, here’s your daily London fix.
Anyone for another dose of counterfactual history? Trafalgar Square as it might have been. Yesterday, it was that gloriously daft idea of planting an exact replica of the Great Pyramid in Trafalgar Square. Pretty special bit of showmanship, that. In a single bound it’d take central London back 4600 years.
Today we’re going to head north-northwest some 1400 miles. And fast forward 2600 years. A mere 2,000 years. Fast Forward to Imperial Rome. To the mighty Colosseum.
You heard right, the Colosseum. Gladiators fighting to the death, animal hunts, mock sea battles. 80,000 spectators baying for blood.
Imperial Britain thought big. Somebody seriously proposed, “London’s the capital of the greatest empire the world has ever known. Let’s big Trafalgar Square up with an exact replica of Imperial Rome’s greatest structure, the Colosseum. We’ll show the march of civilisation by making it a Colosseum of Arts rather than an arena of death and barbarism. That was the big idea. A very big idea indeed. Here you go. Let’s take a tour of that big idea. Welcome to the Colosseum. The Colosseum in London not the seen better days one in Rome.
Step this way. Here we go.
Right then. Take Rome.
Take its greatest architectural show-off.
The Colosseum.
Now pick it up, brick by brick,
arch by arch, scar and all,
and drop it into Trafalgar Square. Not a polite homage.
Not a classical nod.
An exact replica. Same footprint. Same height. Same swagger.
And then, because this is London and London never quite knows when to stop,
pop a statue of Nelson on the top.
That was the idea.
A Colosseum of the Arts.
Instead of gladiators and lions, painters, sculptors, musicians, actors.
Culture where blood once flowed.
A civilised upgrade, you might say. Though the building itself would still look like it could happily host a small war.
So what would it have been like?
First, the size.
The Colosseum in Rome is vast. Oval in plan,
roughly 615 feet long and
510 feet wide.
Trafalgar Square, as we’ve seen,
is nowhere near that generous.
So the Colosseum wouldn’t just occupy the square.
It would muscle into it.
It would shove the fountains aside. It would nudge the lions into awkward new careers as architectural details.
It would say to the National Gallery, “You’re with me now.”
In height terms,
the Colosseum rises to about 160 feet.
That’s already almost level with the top of Nelson’s Column shaft, without Nelson.
Stack Nelson on top of it and suddenly you’ve got a hero
gazing down from
a classical drum the size of a small town.
From certain angles
he’d look less like a naval commander and more like
the world’s most imperious roof ornament.
And the bulk of it.
That endless repetition of arches. Eighty of them,
marching round in relentless rhythm.
The National Gallery’s tidy, composed façade
would suddenly be facing a wall of Roman muscle.
All those arches saying,
“We invented spectacle.
You’re just borrowing it.”
St Martin-in-the-Fields would again find itself outgunned.
James Gibbs’ elegant church,
all balance and restraint,
would be dwarfed by a building designed to seat eighty thousand roaring Romans.
Its spire would poke up beside the Colosseum like a polite cough in the middle of a drumroll.
Now imagine the experience of it.
You approach from Whitehall and instead of open space
you’re confronted by an enormous curving wall of honey-coloured stone.
Not smooth. Pocked. Weathered. Dramatic.
The kind of building that doesn’t just sit there but looms.
You don’t cross Trafalgar Square any more.
You arrive at it.
You pass through one of those arches.
Suddenly you’re inside.
The noise of London traffic drops away and
you’re in a vast oval space ringed by tiers.
In Rome, you’d smell dust and history.
In London, you’d hear rehearsals, arguments about funding,
someone tuning a violin,
someone else asking where the toilets are.
The original Colosseum could hold around 80,000 spectators.
Wembley numbers.
In Trafalgar Square.
On a Saturday afternoon.
The mind reels.
A performance space that could swallow the entire West End and still ask for an encore.
And the symbolism.
Because Victorians adored symbolism almost as much as they adored big buildings.
The Roman Colosseum was about power.
Imperial confidence.
Rome telling the world
it was eternal and entertaining
while doing so.
A Colosseum of the Arts would say something similar,
but with better lighting and fewer deaths.
Britain as cultural empire.
Britain as the place where the world comes to be dazzled.
Less sword and sand,
more opera and oil paint.
But the building itself would never quite let you forget its origins. Those arches once echoed with the roar of crowds baying for blood. Now they’d frame queues for exhibitions and matinees.
There’s something deliciously cheeky about that.
London recycling Rome’s most brutal monument and saying,
“We’ll take it from here, thanks.”
And then there’s Nelson.
Because of course there’s Nelson.
Perched on top of the Colosseum, he’d be higher than ever before. One-armed, indomitable,
surveying an arena of the arts
rather than the chaos of battle. Trafalgar Square would become a vertical argument.
At the base, a Roman amphitheatre. On top, a British naval hero.
Two empires nodding to each other across centuries.
From certain viewpoints,
Nelson would appear to stand on the very rim of history.
Rome below. Britain above.
Tour guides would have a field day.
“On your left,
ancient imperial architecture repurposed for modern culture.
On your right,
a small church trying its best.”
And the practicalities.
Because London loves a practical complaint.
What about the pigeons? When Trafalgar Square had pigeons.
They’d thrive.
Eighty arches times several ledges equals avian paradise.
The lions would become footnotes. The fountains would be demoted. Trafalgar Square would no longer be a square at all.
It would be an arena.
A place you enter,
not a place you pass through.
And yet, imagine it at night.
The arches lit from within.
Music spilling out.
The stone glowing warm against a dark London sky.
Nelson silhouetted above it all,
one arm, one eye, entirely unfazed.
It didn’t happen, of course.
We kept the open space.
We kept the column.
We kept the pigeons in check, more or less.
But once you picture a Colosseum of the Arts in Trafalgar Square,
you feel the tug of it.
The sheer theatrical audacity. London declaring itself heir not just to empire,
but to spectacle itself.
A mad idea.
A magnificent idea.
Exactly the sort of idea London has always toyed with,
even when it knows better.
And frankly, you can’t help thinking it would have made a cracking venue.
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 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.