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 July 17, 2025.
A couple of hours from now I’ll be in Kensington. Doing the Kensington Walk. St Mary Abbotts, that gorgeous and full of interest parish church will be one of our stops. And getting a cameo role in St Mary Abbotts, G.K. Chesterton. And why not because G.K. Chesterton was Kensington bred and born. And indeed he got married in St Mary Abbotts.
Nobody could turn a phrase like G.K. Chesterton. He gave us what’s maybe the pithiest line ever about London. And even better, he married it to Paris.
“London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.” — G. K. Chesterton
Right. So. Chesterton. Our man G. K. Bears repeating, Gilbert Keith Chesterton sure had a way with words. The guy could drop a sentence that lands like a stone in a still pond—ripples for days. “London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.” Beautiful. Perplexing. Perfect.
I’m thinking we should take it for a walk, what do you say?
First things first. When Chesterton calls London a riddle, he’s not throwing shade. Far from it. He’s tipping his bowler hat to the mystery and the muddle. The glorious tangle. London isn’t a city you solve—it’s a city you wander. You don’t crack it open like a puzzle box. You lose yourself in it. Happily. Repeatedly.
Think of it: streets that twist like a detective novel. No grand plan. No grid system. Not like New York or Paris, where you can navigate by logic or numbers. No, London was built on top of itself. Roman roads under medieval lanes under Georgian squares under Victorian sewers. It’s not so much a city as it is a palimpsest with a postcode.
Paris, on the other hand—well, Chesterton calls it an explanation. A declaration. A thesis. Paris is designed. Haussmann came along in the 19th century and said, “Let there be boulevards.” And there were boulevards. Straight lines. Symmetry. Paris looks like someone sat down with a ruler and a glass of wine and said, “Let’s make it beautiful—and logical.”
And it is beautiful. And logical. Paris explains itself to you. It welcomes you with uniform architecture and elegant signage. The Seine cuts the city in two like a line of verse. The Eiffel Tower, like a punctuation mark, tells you exactly where you are. You can look at a map of Paris and nod and go, “Ah yes. I get it.”
But London? Oh no. London doesn’t care if you get it.
London will send you down a street that turns into an alley that becomes a courtyard that spits you out at a pub that Charles Dickens drank in. It’ll whisper history at you from the cobblestones. Then throw up a glass tower next to a medieval church and say, “Figure that out.”
That’s the riddle.
Now, you walk through Paris and you feel like you’re in a story. Walk through London and you feel like you’ve wandered behind the scenes. London doesn’t present itself. It doesn’t explain. It hints. It teases.
Let’s take an example. You’re walking along the Thames. On the Parisian Seine, you might pass lovers, painters, a jazz trio. On the Thames, you pass a floating police station, a 12th-century palace ruin, and a brutalist power station converted into an art gallery. It’s not always pretty—but it is interesting. And you’re always thinking, “Wait, what? What’s that doing here?”
That’s London. It asks questions. Constantly. And it doesn’t always answer them.
And the people? Well. You get on the Métro in Paris and it’s all sighs and Sartre and matching coats. London’s Tube? It’s a silent communion of people pretending not to notice each other while the train goes mind the gap, mind the gap every 30 seconds. Glorious.
But oh, the layers. You walk through Clerkenwell, and it’s Italian cafés and medieval wells and radical printers and gin palaces, all elbowing each other on the same street. In Paris, stories are arranged. In London, they’re stacked. It’s less like a museum and more like a bric-a-brac shop run by a time traveller.
That’s the romance of the riddle. You have to live London to know it. You’ve got to take wrong turns and stop for tea and accidentally find yourself in the courtyard of the Charterhouse. You’ve got to ask, “What on earth is this building?” and then discover it’s the oldest surviving synagogue in Britain, right next to the trendiest cocktail bar in Shoreditch.
Paris gives you the answers in cursive. London scrawls its clues in graffiti and fog.
Even the weather conspires in London’s mystery. Paris is a city of blue skies and golden hours. London? London is low light and drizzle. It doesn’t show off—it broods. It’s not Instagram, it’s film noir.
And I’ll tell you something else. Chesterton wasn’t being unkind to Paris. He loved it, too. But he knew London. He got London. The heartbeat beneath the traffic. The secrets in the soot. The way you can walk down the same street a dozen times and see something new every single time.
Because London, dear friend, London Walker, never finishes telling you who she is.
So next time you’re in London, don’t try to solve it. Don’t demand an explanation. Just walk. Look up. Get lost. And when you find something odd or old or oddly old, smile and say: “Ah, the riddle continues.”
Because that’s London. And that’s why we love her.
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.