London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good day to you London Walkers.
Wherever you are.
It’s Monday, December 29th, 2025.
And you know what comes next.
That’s right, here it is, your daily London fix.
And I think we’ll take a day off from the Trafalgar Square counter factual hit parade. There is more to come there… but let’s take a breather.
Spring a surprise or two on you.
We’ll get properly stuck in with a wee introduction to one of my favourite places in London. It gets the light tap on the shoulder – hey you’re up – because I did our Mrs Dalloway’s London Walk today and the classy old establishment in question is where we cross the finish line on that walk.
But before we go there – before we get properly stuck in –
let’s have a petite amuse-bouche. A tiny French nibble. A sliver of something tasty to wake up the palate.
The name Bardot. And you know full well why this moment calls for it.
So, yes, the name Bardot.
It sounds glamorous before you even know who it belongs to. All pout and panache. Sunglasses the size of saucers. Hair doing something slightly scandalous all by itself.
And yes, Brigitte Bardot looms large over it. So large she’s practically eclipsed the name entirely.
But Bardot didn’t start out on the Côte d’Azur. It began much further back, much earthier. Old French. A nickname, most likely, from bard or barde – a singer, a poet, a teller of tales. A word with Celtic roots. Someone who holds a room with their voice. Someone people lean in to hear.
There’s another possibility too. Bardot as a diminutive, a familiar little form. A “small bard”. A storyteller in miniature. Which somehow makes it even better.
So when Brigitte Bardot arrives in the 1950s, she doesn’t invent the name. She fulfils it. She becomes the song, the story, the myth. She turns a medieval word for a singer into shorthand for a whole idea of freedom, beauty, rebellion.
Not bad for a little name. And not a bad way to sharpen the appetite.
Bon. Now let’s begin.
Main course time.
In one word, Hatchard’s. London’s oldest and classiest bookshop.
And for sure it’s it’s entirely appropriate to end a Mrs Dalloway walk there. If Clarissa had lingered a few more pages, she’d have been stroking the carpet and losing half an hour to the Biography shelves.
Come on in. Here we go.
Walk down Piccadilly with any sensitivity at all and Hatchards announces itself before you even look up. The sound changes. The air softens. Your shoes stop clattering and start behaving themselves. That carpet. It doesn’t just muffle footsteps, it edits your mood. You cross the threshold and London drops its voice. You lower yours in response. You haven’t been told to. You just know.
This is Hatchards. Established 1797. Oldest bookshop in London. Possibly the most civilised retail space in Britain. A place where commerce has always understood that it must never shove, shout or hustle. A bookshop that behaves like a drawing room.
Clarissa Dalloway pops in here on her walk through London on that fine day in mid-June 1923. She’s buying gloves, flowers, doing errands, feeling the throb of the city and the tug of memory. And of course she comes here. Of course she does. Hatchards is exactly where a mind like hers would pause, recalibrate, breathe. When I end the Mrs Dalloway walk here, it isn’t a gimmick. It’s a full stop that Virginia Woolf herself put in the right place.
Hatchards was founded by John Hatchard in the reign of George III. Think about that. Before Trafalgar. Before Waterloo. Before Dickens. Before gas lighting. Books were being sold on this spot when Piccadilly still felt semi-rural at the edges and the word “Regency” hadn’t yet learned to sparkle. Hatchard was a publisher as well as a bookseller, with strong evangelical leanings at first, but the shop evolved quickly into something broader and grander. By the early nineteenth century it was already a haunt of the great and the good, and the great and difficult.
The roll call reads like a syllabus. Byron. Wordsworth. Thackeray. Disraeli. Oscar Wilde. All passed through. Later you can add Virginia Woolf herself, Henry James, Evelyn Waugh, Ian Fleming. Graham Greene was a regular. So was Siegfried Sassoon. This is not name dropping. It’s foot traffic.
And then there are the royal warrants. Not one, not two, but a cluster of them, worn lightly, never trumpeted. Hatchards currently holds warrants from the King, the Queen, and the Prince of Wales. It has supplied books to the royal household for generations. This matters not because of the monarchy, but because it signals trust. Discretion. Taste. The sense that this is a place that won’t sell you nonsense or shout about the sale.
What makes Hatchards special isn’t just its age or its address. It’s the way it behaves. The staff don’t pounce. They don’t hover. They don’t chirrup. They give you space and, when you need them, they materialise with an uncanny accuracy. Ask a proper question and you’ll get a proper answer. Ask a vague one and they’ll help you sharpen it. There is no upselling here. Only enabling.
The building itself helps. Five floors, each one quietly distinct. Fiction that feels curated rather than dumped. History that leans towards narrative and intelligence rather than doorstop dullness. Biography that understands character. Poetry that hasn’t been relegated to a corner out of embarrassment. Children’s books upstairs that feel like an inheritance being passed on.
And that carpet. I keep coming back to it because it matters. It’s a small act of resistance. In a world of hard floors and fast exits, Hatchards says stay. Linger. Take your time. Books take time. Minds take time. There’s something almost subversive about that now.
Hatchards also understands events. Author talks here don’t feel like publicity stunts. They feel like conversations you’ve been allowed into. When a writer launches a book at Hatchards, it feels like a rite of passage. You haven’t just published. You’ve arrived.
There’s a particular pleasure in browsing here because the shop trusts the reader. The tables aren’t plastered with the same ten titles you’ve seen everywhere else. Yes, the big books are there, but so are the odd ones. The slightly left-field ones. The ones you didn’t know you were looking for. Hatchards excels at serendipity.
And then there’s the simple fact of where it is. Piccadilly. Between Green Park and St James’s. A street layered with clubs, galleries, institutions, power. Hatchards sits among them not as a rival, but as a companion. It belongs to that world. It always has.
When Clarissa Dalloway steps back out onto Piccadilly, she carries more than parcels with her. She carries London. Its voices. Its memories. Its contradictions. Hatchards is part of that psychic furniture. A place where thought is taken seriously but never solemnly.
Ending a walk here feels right because Hatchards isn’t just about books. It’s about the life of the mind as a lived thing. About curiosity as a habit. About the idea that a city is made not just of buildings and events, but of places where people have stood and thought and felt quietly cleverer for having done so.
London has flashier bookshops. Bigger ones. Louder ones. Trendier ones. Hatchards doesn’t care. It doesn’t need to. It has been doing this since 1797 and sees no reason to start fidgeting now.
You leave reluctantly. Everyone does. The door closes softly behind you. Piccadilly rushes back in. The noise, the pace, the glare. But something’s shifted. You’re carrying it with you.
That’s Hatchards. Not just a bookshop. A civilising influence. A pause button. A small, carpeted miracle.
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.