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 Sunday, September 21st, 2025.
First stop, the London Calling Book Club Corner. In the Chair today, Claire. Claire’s read – a book that’s practically bespoke for a guide:
London The Autobiography. 2,000 Years of the Capital’s History by Those Who Saw It Happen. Claire says, “I just read one event, one date at a time and it’s riveting.”
Claire’s another star turn in the London Walks line-up. Not just us saying that. Take a look at her reviews, oh ye of little faith. The proof of the promenade is proffered in the panegyrics. I’m going to highlight her Inside Covent Garden Walk because everybody’s favorite West End church, St Martin in the Fields, is one of the interiors they visit on that walk. And – nice touch this – Clair shows them St Martin in the Fields’ Hidden Treasure – something most people who touch down at St Martin in the Fields don’t get to see. Very London Walks, that. London Walks reaches the parts and so on. Anyway, that hidden treasure – tucked away in a forgotten corner of the crypt – is the most extraordinary grave monument in London. The grave monument to Henry Croft, London’s first pearly king. And look, carpe diem, because this is the last fortnight of Still Suited and Booted – the Pearly Kings and Queens Exhibition St Martin in the Fields rolled out earlier this month. One of the reasons you go with a guide. They know what’s on, what you should catch if you want to get the most out of your visit to this or that London neighborhood.
Anyway, in the circs. I thought, yes, it’s not just high time, it’s the best possible time to do a piece on that quintessential London phenomenon –London’s pearly kings and queens.
You’re out and about in London, flaneuring in that wonderful French words, there are two subsets of Londoners that, if you’re lucky enough to spot one or more of them, well, it’s like glimpsing chandeliers in a forest. Those two subsets are: Chelsea Pensioners and London Pearlies. Both of them because of their eye-catching, show-stopping attire. The Chelsea Pensioners are elderly veterans – former British soldiers – who see out their days in the old soldiers’ home in Chelsea, Christopher Wren’s magnificent Royal Hospital. And of course there’s no missing them because of their scarlet coat with gold braid, the uniform the British soldier was clad in 350 years ago when the Royal Hospital came into being. For the record, it’s a highlight of our Chelsea Walk.
But I digress. We’re doing the Pearly Kings and Queens today. Come along then, lads and lasses, I’ve got a story or two to tell. And sights to show you. Let’s meet the Pearlies.
Picture it: a shimmer moving through a London crowd – black cloth turned to Milky Way by a thousand mother-of-pearl buttons – and then the grin, the wink, the rattle of a tin for “a good cause, luv.” That’s the Pearly Kings and Queens: Cockney royalty, street-level philanthropists, living folklore. They’re as London as Bow Bells on a foggy morning and as bright as a shop window at Christmas.
Where did they come from? From the markets – from the costermongers, the street traders who sold apples and eels and everything in between. The costers had their own codes and leaders and a habit of trimming their working clothes with found pearl buttons. Enter Henry Croft, an orphan who grew up in a workhouse and later swept the streets. In the late 1870s he stitched an entire suit with mother-of-pearl to catch the eye and drum up alms for charity. It worked. Londoners stopped, stared, and gave – and a movement was born.
By 1911 the idea had organised itself into a society; titles spread to boroughs; families took on the mantle and passed it down. There were Pearly Kings and Queens for places like Islington, Hackney, Shoreditch – a proper people’s pageant with purpose. Today you’ll still see the titles, the family lines and, yes, more than one Pearly organisation carrying the flame (the Original Association, the London Society and friends – London, after all, runs on a touch of friendly rivalry).
And as for those suits! They’re not costumes; they’re autobiographies in buttons. Hearts for charity, doves for peace, anchors for hope; names and boroughs spelled out on backs and brims. Every button is sewn by hand; every suit is the work of years, not hours. Peek closely at a Pearly jacket on parade and you’ll read a life in civic symbols and family pride.
What do they do? Fund-raise, unfailingly. The Pearlies are London’s extrovert charity machine. Their big day out is the annual Costermongers’ Harvest Festival – a glorious knees-up that begins in Guildhall Yard with bands, a maypole and Morris dancers, Chelsea Pensioners, even the odd donkey and cart, before a procession to St Mary-le-Bow for the service. The offerings go to frontline charities such as the Whitechapel Mission. If you’re in town in September, put it on your list; it’s London with its heart on its sleeve.
Why do they do it? Because the instinct for mutual aid is old East End muscle memory. When Henry Croft started rattling his tin, he wasn’t playing dress-up; he was turning spectacle into support for hospitals and the poor. Contemporary estimates put his lifetime fundraising at several thousand pounds – serious money for the time – and the Pearlies have kept that tradition ticking ever since.
Now, a little treasure-hunt for you – touched on this right at the outset of this podcast – yes, there is, indeed, a Pearly monument under Trafalgar Square. Slip into the Café in the Crypt at St Martin-in-the-Fields and wander the brick-arched corridors. Tucked away you’ll find Henry Croft himself, life-size and buttoned from topper to toe, a funerary statue that once stood on his grave and was moved here after vandalism. It’s a modest miracle of London memory: the King of the Pearlies keeping quiet watch beneath the city he charmed.
And right now St Martin’s is properly pearled-up. The crypt is hosting “Still Suited and Booted,” a free photography exhibition marking roughly 150 years of the Pearly story – a chance to get close to the suits, the faces, the families, the whole button-bright tribe. If you’ve only glimpsed a Pearly on a postcard, this show will put wind in your London sails.
The cast list, the “important players”? Start with Henry, obviously – the founder, the template, immortalised in stone down in the crypt at St Martin’s. Then think in families rather than individuals: Pearlies are hereditary, titles handed down like a precious suit itself. You’ll meet Kings and Queens of Finsbury, Highgate, Islington and the rest – a borough map stitched in shell – and behind every title is a crew who do the graft: collections on street corners, visits to hospitals, the long slow work of community.
They pop up at big civic moments, too. You may have clocked Pearlies at jubilees and weddings; they even sparkled in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, a wink to the city’s working-class swagger. The point is they belong to London’s public life – and London, let’s face it, loves a bit of theatre with its kindness.
Best way to see them? Twofold. First, make a date with that Harvest Festival procession – Guildhall Yard to Bow Bells – and sing along to “Knees Up, Mother Brown” with the rest of us. Second, do the Trafalgar Square double: meet Henry Croft in the crypt and then wander the exhibition while you’re there. You’ll come away with button-spots dancing before your eyes and, more importantly, a sense of a city that looks after its own – loudly, cheerfully, and in fabulous gear.
That’s the Pearly Kings and Queens in a nutshell: charity stitched to showmanship, Cockney chutzpah with a conscience. The buttons are bright, but the idea is brighter: if you want to get Londoners to open their hearts, start by catching their eye.
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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.