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, January 6th, 2026.
And here it is, here’s your daily London fix.
Quickie for you today. A heads-up. It’s about a new walk that’s hoving into view. George Orwell in London. Subtitled Two Legs Good. The walk that uncovers the story behind the warning label on our age. And no better time to introduce it. Because today’s Twelfth Night. Epiphany. And, at no little risk of belabouring the obvious, what Orwell saw – and showed to us – was an epiphany. As is the walk. It’s an epiphany about Orwell and his London. The skeletons rattling round in the cupboard. A lot of them still very much with us in the Animal Farm that’s our Brave New World.
Ok, any questions? When does it go, you ask? Good question. Ask and thou shalt receive. It goes on a bright cold day in January when the clocks are striking 14:30. That’s this Friday, January 9th, 2026. And it’ll go again on February 15th. Same time: when the clocks are striking 14:30.
What else is of moment?
Well, it’s common knowledge that all guides are equal. But some guides are more equal than others.
Take a bow, David Poyser, who created the George Orwell walk and will be guiding it.
Cue one of Orwell’s most quietly devastating observations:
“England…resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons… A family with the wrong members in control.”
This David Poyser-guided walk of Orwell’s London is, in its way, a family outing. A family outing with the right member in control.
Which is by way of saying, it’s a walk that’s been shaped by someone who knows how to tell a London story.
David Poyser, your guide, has form. Serious form. He’s a former London Mayor. That’s London civic life from the inside. But he’s also a storyteller by trade. He spent more than twenty years as an award-winning television producer, which means he knows instinctively how to pace a narrative, where to linger, and when to deliver the line that makes everything click.
This is not box-ticking history. It’s scene-setting. Character-driven. London as lived experience.
David’s Dickens walks trail clouds of glory and rave reviews. David’s a creator par excellance. He’s devised walks on Brexit. On Bizarre London. Even on Tom Lehrer, which begins among the pigeons in the park with a communal rendition of Poisoning Pigeons in the Park and somehow ends at the Royal Society of Chemistry singing The Elements. If that doesn’t tell you something about his range and his nerve, nothing will.
For good measure he’s twice been to tea at Buckingham Palace. And he’s worked at the heart of Europe in Brussels and Strasbourg. He understands institutions, power, language, and how stories are shaped, bent, polished, and sometimes abused. Tot it all up and you’ve got an uncannily good match for a George Orwell’s London Walk.
Coda time. George Orwell in London – Two Legs Good is a walk about one of the sharpest minds of the twentieth century, told in the city that sharpened him. It goes at 2.30 pm on January 9th. Meeting point is Great Portland Street Underground Station.
And it’ll go again on February 15th, same time, same striking of the clocks.
This one got underway with that big crash of cymbals. Let’s hear them again to close it out. This is the walk that uncovers the story behind the warning label on our age.
Once you’ve been there, heard it, heard the skeletons rattling in the cupboards, London will never look the same again.
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.