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 Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025.
Before we push off, let’s call in at the London Calling Book Club Corner.
Who’s that jolly gentleman on the doorstep there, beckoning us, extending a bonhomous hand? But of course. It’s our recovering barrister, Tom Hooper. His Book Club hour come round at last.
Tom regularly guides our Westminster Abbey Tour so it’s no surprise that he’s reading The Flag, the story of Rev David Railton and the grave of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey.
Good on ya, Tom. And thanks for the reminder. That’s another one that goes straight onto my Must Read list.
Ok, moving on. 28 Canal Walks now in the London Walks repertory. Not quite picking one out of the hat here but should you be wanting a bit more information about our Regent’s Canal – Mile End to Limehouse Walk – what that part of London is like, where the walk goes, what you get, what you see, well, here you go. This one’s just the ticket. Roger’s done us proud. Mile End, here we come.
Mile End. Here we are. Mile End. The name alone sounds like a flat tyre – Mile End. Thud. But don’t be fooled. Drop down from Mile End Road, step under the bridge, and it’s another world entirely. The roar of traffic vanishes. The towpath opens up. Water, brick, and sky. The air smells of damp stone, diesel, and green things. A heron lifts off like a monk in slow motion.
And here’s the kicker. We’re about to walk through the biggest park in London almost nobody knows is there: Mile End Park. A mile long, running right alongside the canal. A young park by London standards, though it feels settled now. Hundreds of species of trees, shrubs, wildflowers – a little Eden stitched into the East End.
Its origins? Odd. The Luftwaffe did their bit: bombing flattened swathes of Stepney and Bow. Then Abercrombie’s grand 1943 plan for a greener, more spacious London gave the idea traction. Out of rubble and ruin grew this ribbon of park. And in a way, it harks back to the canal’s earliest days. When it first cut through here in the 1820s, it wasn’t factories and warehouses – it was farm fields. Cows, crops, meadows. Hard to picture now with skateboarders rattling over concrete ramps, but it’s a throwback.
The canal itself is London’s secret artery – eight miles of hidden waterway running from Paddington to the Thames. Conceived by John Nash as a watery bypass for horse-drawn wagons. Coal, timber, bricks, potatoes. All floated instead of rattled. London’s bloodstream.
As we head east from Mile End, the path narrows. Graffiti flares up on the old brick. A narrowboat glides past, chimney puffing, rooftop garden wobbling. Today’s boats are houseboats, fairy-lit, bicycle-clad, often with cats stretched on the roof. But look closely at the stone edges. Those grooves? Cut by centuries of tow ropes. Horses once plodded here, hauling coal-laden barges, their hooves clopping, their breath clouding the air. The ghosts are in the details.
Now – a highlight. The Ragged School Museum. Tucked into an old canal-side warehouse, it’s just reopened after a major refurbishment. This was London’s largest Ragged School, founded in 1877 by Dr Barnardo himself. Imagine it: East End children, barefoot, hungry, crammed onto benches, learning their letters. The canal outside once heaved with industry. Inside, the mission was hope, discipline, a hot meal. Barnardo’s ragged army, given a crack at life.
Back to the towpath. The canal here is flanked by warehouses – some tarted up into lofts, some turned into “co-working hubs.” Once they echoed with coal dust, cargo men, cockney shouts. By the 1960s, the canal was a foul back alley. More dumping ground than transport route. You didn’t stroll here, you scarpered. But London, ever the shape-shifter, has flipped it again. Those same buildings now have floor-to-ceiling windows, yoga studios, million-pound flats. A gin palace then, a gin bar now. Plus ça change.
And then it happens. You turn a corner, and the world opens out. Limehouse Basin. The canal swells like a lung filling with air. After the tunnelled corridor of Mile End and Stepney, suddenly there’s sky, boats, horizon. And what boats! A jumble and a joy: narrowboats, Dutch barges, sailing yachts, seagoing cruisers, even the odd trawler or an ex-navy auxiliary ship. Canoe hire too, so you can potter about in your own floating nutshell.
This was – and still is – where canal trade shakes hands with the sea. Picture it in 1850. A barge from Hackney with ironwork from the Foundry (famous ironwork used in the Houses of Parliament, in Buckingham Palace). Sailing ships full of timber from the Baltic or ice from Norway. Barges full of wine casks from the London Docks. They met here, at Limehouse. Cargo shifted, money changed hands, the pubs and lodging houses heaved. Dickens sniffed around, of course. Limehouse then was part Shanghai, part Wild West. Smugglers, missionaries, opium dens, gin palaces. A heady stew.
Now, the warehouses are sleek flats with nautical names: Admiral House, Clipper Wharf. The missionaries have given way to estate agents, the gin palaces to gastro pubs. But the water still smells faintly briny, whispering the Thames is only a lock-gate away. The lock itself still groans and clanks, same as it did two centuries ago.
And speaking of ships – a word about visitors, past and present. A thousand years ago longships were no strangers here. Viking prows cutting up the Thames, sails like dragon wings, Saxon Londoners peering anxiously over their palisades. Too often for the locals’ liking, those sleek, clinker-built wolves of the sea came gliding along the Limehouse Reach.
And just this summer, history winked. A real Viking longship – the Saga Farmann – fresh from Norway, moored up in St Katharine Docks. She’s there until the Classic Boat Festival, after which she’ll nose downriver to Greenwich. We won’t see her on this walk – wrong season – but knowing she’s been here, knowing she’s sailed the same waters her ancestors once haunted, lends Limehouse a little shiver of continuity. The ghosts row alongside the narrowboats.
And here’s a secret – don’t miss it. Almost everyone does. Beyond the far side of the basin, tucked away, a modest little gate. Step through it, and bang! A spectacular view up and down the Thames. Westwards, the Shard needling the skyline. Eastwards, Canary Wharf’s glass towers rearing up like sci-fi castles. Below, the Thames rolling past with all the majesty of a living thing. Few know this viewpoint. It’s like stumbling into a private box seat at London’s grandest theatre.
So that’s Mile End to Limehouse. Two miles on foot, two hundred years in imagination. You’ve walked through a park born of bombs, past a school that gave East End kids a chance, along a waterway that once carried coal and timber and is now lined with yoga mats and fairy lights. And you’ve ended where the canal shakes hands with the river, the city’s past and present shimmering together on the tide.
London distilled. Brick, water, ghosts, graffiti, wildflowers, yachts, herons – and yes, once upon a summer, even a Viking longship. The Regent’s Canal always manages both things at once: hidden back alley, and stage set for the city’s endless reinventions.
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 familiar and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note… come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.