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 Monday, January 12th, 2026.
And here it is.
Here’s your daily London fix.
Hey, it’s Monday morning so what do you say we get this week off to a breathtakingly bonkers start.
Step this way, ladies and gentlemen, for Lost and Found – London’s Museum of You Cannot Be Serious.
Picture the scene.
A Tube train pulls in.
Doors sigh open.
People surge forward.
Coats flap.
Phones glow.
A thousand private lives spill onto the platform.
And there, on the seat,
left behind like yesterday’s newspaper,
is a stuffed gorilla.
Not small. Not subtle.
Not the sort of thing you could easily overlook.
A gorilla with heft.
A gorilla with presence.
A gorilla that surely required two hands, some planning,
and possibly a conversation beforehand.
And yet.
Someone stood up.
Someone walked away.
Someone thought, presumably,
Yes. I have everything.
Did nobody say anything?
Did no fellow passenger feel the civic duty to intervene?
“Excuse me… terribly sorry… I think you may have left your gorilla behind.”
Or did everyone do that very London thing?
Eyes down. Silence.
A collective agreement that this was absolutely none of their business.
Eventually, someone must have picked it up.
Carried it, with dignity,
to a member of staff.
Taken a breath.
And said the words that echo through Lost Property folklore:
“This gorilla was abandoned.”
Welcome to London’s Lost Property Office.
For decades, this quietly astonishing institution lived on Baker Street, at number 200.
Sherlock Holmes territory.
You can still see the lettering on the building if you look closely,
badly faded now, like a ghost sign advertising a vanished trade.
It was a fitting address.
The office even ran a tracking system nicknamed SHERLOCK,
a private joke for those in the know.
But Baker Street eventually proved too small for what London leaves behind.
Because the scale of it is astonishing.
Every year,
hundreds of thousands of items are handed in from Tube trains,
buses, stations and depots
across the network.
Phones by the tens of thousands. Wallets, keys, bags, cards.
Umbrellas in biblical numbers. Londoners are remarkably consistent about forgetting the same things, over and over again.
And then there’s everything else.
Over the years, staff have logged a roll-call that reads like the inventory of a particularly eccentric theatre prop room.
Glass eyes.
Breast implants.
A bishop’s crook.
Artificial limbs.
Wedding dresses still in their garment bags.
Outboard motors.
Drum kits.
Lawn mowers.
Human skulls.
A stuffed gorilla.
At a certain point, logic quietly leaves the room.
Because how do you forget a glass eye?
Was it removed for cleaning and simply never put back?
And breast implants.
Plural.
That’s not a momentary lapse.
That’s a lifestyle choice.
And the bishop’s crook.
One imagines flowing robes,
a distracted blessing,
a last-minute dash for the doors. Somewhere between benediction and Barking,
the crook goes missing.
The outboard motor raises further questions.
An outboard motor is not something you absent-mindedly tuck under the seat.
An outboard motor has weight.
It has ambition.
You don’t forget an outboard motor unless you’re living in a very particular headspace.
Which brings us back to the gorilla.
At this point, the Lost Property Office stops feeling like an office at all and starts to feel like a government department that Monty Python somehow forgot to invent.
You can almost see the plaque.
MINISTRY OF LOST GORILLAS
Sub-Committee for Mislaid Crooks,
Errant Eyeballs,
Breast Implants,
and Outboard Motors of Uncertain Provenance
Business conducted weekdays.
Tea at eleven.
Gorillas by appointment only.
Because this is what London does.
It bureaucratises the absurd until the absurd gives up and behaves.
A stuffed gorilla is not “remarkable”. It is processed.
It is logged.
It is given a reference number.
It is possibly told to take a seat.
One imagines the form.
Item: Gorilla (stuffed)
Condition: Excellent.
Slightly judgmental expression.
Circumstances of loss:
Unknown
Last seen: Victoria line
Remarks: “Owner failed to disembark with gorilla.”
No fuss.
No raised eyebrow.
No whispered consultation.
Just procedure.
The gorilla is placed on a shelf among its peers.
A bishop’s crook.
Several glass eyes.
A pair of breast implants.
An outboard motor,
still faintly smelling of the open sea and thwarted plans.
Somewhere nearby, a clerk sighs, ticks a box, and reaches for the next item.
Because there is always a next item.
And this is where the Lost Property Office stops being merely funny and becomes oddly moving.
Because behind every object is a moment.
A distraction.
A rush for the doors.
A phone call taken at exactly the wrong time.
A grief too heavy to notice what was left on the seat beside you.
The staff see all of that.
They receive well over a thousand items a day,
each tagged with
the where and when of its disappearance.
Victoria line.
Northbound.
Early evening.
Someone’s life, briefly unmoored.
Not everything can be saved.
Food is discarded.
That’s what happened to the cooked frogs.
Other items are held for a set period. If they’re not claimed,
they’re auctioned or donated.
Only a minority ever make it home again.
That tells you something about London too.
About pace.
About scale.
About how quickly the city moves on.
In recent years, the Lost Property Office itself has moved on.
Baker Street is history.
The operation now lives in East London,
in West Ham, in a larger,
more practical space designed to cope with the volume.
The romance of the old address is gone,
but the work continues.
Quietly.
Methodically.
With infinite patience.
Rows of shelving.
Crates of phones.
Racks of clothing.
Musical instruments waiting for their next act.
Toys waiting for children who may now be teenagers.
Somewhere in there, possibly,
a wedding dress still dreaming of its day.
And somewhere, perhaps,
the gorilla.
Sitting there.
Patient.
Tagged.
Waiting.
Perhaps its owner did return. Clearing their throat.
“I’m here about a gorilla.”
At which point the reply came, without drama:
“Stuffed or live?”
Or perhaps no one ever came. Perhaps the gorilla joined the great, silent population of the uncollected. Auctioned.
Donated.
Rehomed.
Beginning a second life in a different sitting room,
watching a different family,
quietly judging them too.
Which feels right.
Because the gorilla was never really the point.
The point is that this city,
for all its speed and indifference,
still makes space.
It builds shelves.
It labels.
It waits.
It gives us a chance to come back for the things we didn’t mean to leave behind.
Even when those things are ridiculous.
Even when they’re inexplicable.
Even when they’re a gorilla.
London remembers everything,
except what we leave on the seat beside us.
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.