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 Thursday, October 2nd, 2025.
And what’s this? Is this the London Calling Book Club Corner I see before me?
Sure enough, it is.
And that’s Adam, like the 7th cavalry cresting the ridge, bang on time, coming to the rescue. The Book Club Corner’s back in business. Adam’s got a recommendation for us.
Here’s Adam.
[Adam’s short recording follows]
Ok, moving on.
Queues for Covered Buses: A Centenary Ride from Elephant to the Sun
“Queues for Covered ‘Buses.” That was the headline in The Telegraph, October 3rd, 1925. And the piece itself? A little gem.
“Considerable public interest was shown yesterday in the four new covered omnibuses which the London General Omnibus Company put into service on Route 100 between the Elephant and Castle and Epping Town…”
Picture it: Elephant and Castle, a century ago, October 2nd, 1925. A brand-new sight pulls in – not just another London double-decker, but the first with a roof over the top deck. A small crowd gathers, curious, a little sceptical. And when that bus sets off, it does so fully laden: 28 passengers upstairs, dry for the first time in London’s bus-riding history. Three more follow at half-hour intervals, and by half past ten the queues are still there, Londoners waiting to try the novelty.
A century ago. The moment the covered-top double-decker was born.
From Four Buses to a Fleet of Thousands
From those four pioneers, the London bus has grown into a red leviathan. Today, Transport for London oversees a fleet of about 8,800 buses. Of those, more than 6,000 are double-deckers – the true descendants of that little convoy from 1925.
And those buses knit the city together on a staggering scale:
The Passenger Army
Now let’s talk people. London’s buses carry about 1.8 billion passenger journeys a year. Break that down and you get about 5 million journeys every single day. That’s five million pairs of shoes walking up the steps, five million hands grabbing a pole, five million tickets beeped and screens tapped.
Think of the morning crush at Piccadilly, the school run in Camden, the night bus rattling down the Holloway Road at 2 a.m. Multiply it by five million, and you’ve got London’s bloodstream.
Distances Beyond Imagination
But here’s where it gets really fun. 300 million miles a year. What does that actually mean? It’s too big to picture – unless we start taking measurements in the sky.
From Queues in 1925 to Crowds Today
So back to that morning in 1925. Londoners queuing at the Elephant, craning their necks, waiting for their turn to ride under cover. They couldn’t know what they were starting.
Today, the covered-top double-decker isn’t a novelty. It’s London’s trademark. Tourists photograph them. Filmmakers use them as shorthand for the city. They’re woven into the rhythm of London life – as everyday as rain, as familiar as Big Ben.
But underneath that familiarity are numbers so vast they belong on an astronomical chart, not a bus timetable. 8,800 buses, 675 routes, 19,000 stops, 1.8 billion passengers, 300 million miles. The numbers tell you what London’s buses really are: a transport system the size of a solar system.
Seeing It Straight
Constable once said we don’t truly see until we understand. So here’s the understanding: when you see a red bus trundling past, multiply it by 8,800. Multiply its daily run by three trips to the Moon. Stretch its annual distance to the Sun and back. Stack its passengers five million deep, day after day.
That’s London’s bus network. That’s what grew from those four pioneers at the Elephant a century ago.
So next time you hop on the 100 or the 24 or the 73, pause for a second. Remember the queues for covered buses in 1925. And remember that you’re stepping into a machine that, multiplied by thousands, could take you to Mars nine times over.
That’s not just a bus ride. That’s a cosmic commute.
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 familiarand the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note… come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.