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 Wednesday, August 20th, 2025.
London Calling Book Club Corner to get us started. It’s Corinna’s turn today. Corinna of the Highgate Walk fame – that’s her local patch. And for good measure of Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare and Dickens fame. Here’s Corinna. “I recently read UNTOLD LONDON by a neighbour, Dan Carrier, which describes walking round London with the sort of interesting and amusing anecdotes which we guides love to tell. The other book is SHAKESPEARE, THE MAN WHO PAYS THE RENT, as told by the wonderful Judi Dench with great on- and back-stage stories. I loved her Juliet in 1960!”
Ah, many thanks, Corinna. In full agreement about the Judi Dench book. And I’ll certainly track down and read the Dan Carrier book. That sounds right up my street.
Ok, moving on.
It’s Blue Plaque day on London Calling.
Go pretty much where you will in London, but let’s say Bloomsbury or Chelsea for starters, you’re strolling down a Bloomsbury or Chelsea street – and there it is. That splash of cobalt blue. Round as a full moon. A little civic drumroll on a brick façade. The blue plaque. London’s memory bank, writ large in enamel and baked clay.
They’re wonderful. They’re much loved. They’re quintessentially London. Instantly recognisable. Hugely imitated. Paris has them. Dublin too. Even Sydney. But London invented them.
The first one went up in 1867 – 158 years ago, if you’re counting – and it was stuck on the house of the poet Lord Byron’s mate, a certain Napoleon III.
Yes, the French Emperor. Only problem: the house got demolished, plaque and all. Gone. Poof. Typical London – we start the greatest commemorative tradition in the world by cocking it up.
The scheme was dreamed up by the Royal Society of Arts. Bless ’em. The idea was simple: link people to place.
Famous names to their front doors. Make London’s streets talk.
Later, responsibility passed to the London County Council, then the Greater London Council, and finally, in 1986, English Heritage picked up the torch.
They’re still running the show today.
Go on, pop the question. How many plaques are there in London?
Answer, well over 1,000. About 1,200 at the last count. You made a point of seeing each and every one of them. At a rate of one a day. It would take you over three years.
But a very agreeable three-year quest it would be.
I mean, London’s blue plaques. What’s not to like.
Each one a story. A door into history. They honour everyone from Charles Dickens to Jimi Hendrix. From Karl Marx to John Lennon. From Emmeline Pankhurst to Sir Alexander Fleming. Writers, actors, revolutionaries, scientists, singers, politicians, sports stars, painters. London’s full cast list, spelt out in blue.
And here’s another cobalt blue burning question about those precious azure doubloons in London’s memory bank. How do you get one? Well, you don’t apply. English Heritage doesn’t want your agent or your great-aunt pestering them. Instead, anyone can nominate. Then the fun begins. There are rules. The person has to have been dead at least twenty years. Gives history a chance to decide if they really mattered, not just if they were a flash in the pan. The building has to survive – no plaque if the house is gone. And there’s a bit of rigour. A panel checks. Were they really significant? Did they make a mark in their field? Did they live in that house long enough to matter? If all that checks out, then – bingo – the blue circle goes up.
And they’re not cheap. Each one costs about £1,000 to make and install. They’re ceramic, fired at over a thousand degrees Celsius, just like fine china. Weatherproof. Hard as nails. The design hasn’t changed much in over a century. The lettering, the layout, the shade of blue – all carefully controlled. That crisp white lettering against deep blue. Like an old-fashioned London street sign gone to finishing school.
Do they get nicked? Occasionally. Hendrix’s went missing once. So did one to Charlie Chaplin. They tend to “walk” in the dead of night – collectors, you see. But mostly they survive. Some do need TLC. Pollution, frost, pigeons – London weather can be a bit of a trial. English Heritage has a maintenance crew who climb ladders and keep them spruced up.
And the rhythm? About a dozen new plaques go up each year. Steady as she goes.
And the most recent? Well, this year’s crop includes everything from pioneering Black publishers to groundbreaking scientists. It’s always eclectic. The scheme makes a point of broadening the cast – more women, more diversity, more of the city’s hidden stories.
Now as for the back stories? Where do we start? How’s about Sigmund Freud’s plaque in Hampstead – he only lived there a year before dying, but that year he had the famous couch with him. Or Jimi Hendrix’s plaque in Mayfair – on the very same street where George Frideric Handel lived two centuries earlier. Music history in stereo. Or how about Mahatma Gandhi? He’s remembered in Barons Court – lived in a humble digs while studying law in London.
And the pace of history shows through. The first plaques were plain, uncoloured. Later, they were brown. Then, in 1921, the modern blue design was standardised. So, what you see today is a century-old visual brand.
And yes, there’s something deeply London about them. Other cities might build statues. We pin up plaques. Modest. Discreet. You walk past, glance up, and suddenly – you’re in conversation with the past. Dickens scribbling away in Bloomsbury. Marx plotting in Soho. Hendrix tuning up in Mayfair. Florence Nightingale, Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill. They’re all still there. Because of those blue moons riding high, serenading us from London walls.
So next time you’re out on a London wander, keep an eye peeled. Look up. There’s London’s greatest book, written not on paper, but on brick and stone. A thousand little chapters. All beginning with the words, in white enamel letters: So-and-so lived here.
And that’s the magic, isn’t it? A city where even the walls can talk.
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.