London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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And a very good evening to you, London Walkers, wherever you are.
It’s Wednesday, June 4th, 2025.
Sometimes you start haring after something in London and before you know it you’ve triggered a rockslide. Or even an avalanche.
Happened to me today. It all started innocently enough. For some reason – more or less out of the blue – I started to think about the London Underground’s old Lost Property Office. It was at 200 Baker Street. Pretty much next door to Baker Street Station. I remember it well. It was quintessentially London – in its own way a London landmark of sorts. It was old-fashioned, slightly tatty, out at elbows, faintly quirky, remembered affectionately by every 20th-century Londoner. You went by there you always thought, what an extraordinary place, imagine the deluge of stuff that goes in there, it’ll range from the hum-drum to off-the-charts bizarre. How do they organise it, store it, keep track of it? I’ll bet they’re a bunch of characters, the people who work there. You’d have to be a character to work there. And you always wondered about what they talked about over a pint after a day’s work. What you wouldn’t have given to be a fly on the wall, hear some of the stories they had to tell. Anyway, they were there from 1933 to 2019. So they had a very good innings. There was a temporary relocation to South Kensington. And now they’re permanently out east, in West Ham.
The London Transport Museum though has kept the flame alight of the goings on at 200 Baker Street. The museum does a good job of telling the story of the Lost Property Office. As does Emily Kearns in her book Mind the Gap.
Whichever way you look at it – big picture or specificity – it makes for a great London yarn. Big picture: well, 350,000 items a year being handed in to the Lost Property Office in the 1950s. Umbrellas, predictably enough, being the most common currency of lost property on the Underground. But needless to say, the freak show is out at the other end of the scale. Let’s take stock. Item: a wedding dress. Item: a lawyer’s robes. Item: a 14-foot boat. Items: several urns containing cremation ashes. Item: a briefcase containing £10,000. Item: a park bench. Item, a stuffed eagle. Item: two human skulls in a bag. Item: a jar of bull’s sperm. Item: a lawnmower. Item: a Samurai sword. Item: a box of 144 condoms. Items: various breast implants. Item: a kitchen sink.
That carried me along very nicely. But it turned out to be the start of an avalanche. A huge organisation like Transport for London – it’s like a fun house. Any number of doors you can open. So I opened a couple. Bingo! One of them takes me to the TFL Chatty Cabins initiative.
Cue the TFL press release: Transport for London (TfL) has relaunched its Chatty Cabins initiative on the IFS Cloud Cable Car, in support of Marmalade Trust’s upcoming Loneliness Awareness Week campaign to help encourage Londoners to come together and spark new conversations. The Loneliness Awareness Week Campaign runs from Monday June 9th through Friday, June 13th.
Well, it sounds all right doesn’t it. Good for TFL. And good for Marmalade Trust. And good for me. A few more brushstrokes added to my personal portrait of the city I love.
I hadn’t heard of Loneliness Awareness Week. Nor had I heard of the Marmalade Trust. And for that matter, the acronym IFS in front of Cloud Cable Car also didn’t compute, so to speak. IFS wasn’t on my radar, I hadn’t the foggiest what the initials stand for.
Turns out Marmalade Trust is a charity. And finding that out was when the London avalanche that was tumbling me along switched on the afterburner.
God knows why, but I suddenly was on fire with curiosity: I wonder how many charities there are in London.
Never crossed my mind to run that one through the abacus. But it did today. And now I know: there are 6,186 registered charities in London.
And you can top that up with 10,230 London micro charities.:
Had I heard of micro-charities? Is the Pope a Buddhist?
Anyway, sure enough, AI did yeomanlike service with that one; A micro-charity is a type of non-profit organization that operates on a smaller scale than traditional charities. They typically have a smaller income, often under £10,000 per year, and may be involved in local or niche causes. Microcharities often rely on a combination of small donations and volunteer efforts to achieve their goals.
Tot em up. That’s getting on for 17,000 charities in London.
London. It isn’t a city. It’s a world. Or even a universe.
And the final surge of the avalanche, that acronym IFS in front of Cloud Cable Car.
IFS stands for Industrial and Financial Systems. It’s a Swedish enterprise software company that provides solutions like ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), EAM (Enterprise Asset Management), and FSM (Field Service Management).
Acronyms, acronyms, acronyms. A deluge – an avalanche – of acronyms. Turns out acronyms were rare as hen’s teeth before the 20th century. That’s puzzling, isn’t it. Why, come the 20th century, is there suddenly – as I allowed to use the word – an avalanche of acronyms?
Worldwide there are way over a million acronyms. And that gets even hairier when you bear in mind that there are only 17,576 possible three-letter acronyms using the English alphabet.
And on that note I’m now going to go and see if I can make my head stop spinning.
Cue Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway:
“Life, London. This moment of June.”
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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 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.