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, January 18th.
And here it is.
Your daily London fix.
Fresh out of the oven. Served up piping hot.
Today’s peg is a birthday.
January 18th, 1882.
A. A. Milne.
Yes, that A. A. Milne.
And yes, today has a name.
It’s Pooh Day.
January 18th is one of those days when small, good things quietly happen.
Somebody rereads a line or two.
Someone quotes Pooh to someone else.
A child is read to.
A grown-up smiles at a sentence they thought they’d outgrown.
And in a few places, people go to a bridge.
They lean over the railings.
They drop two sticks into the water upstream.
Then they hurry to the downstream side to see which one appears first.
Poohsticks.
No parades.
No banners.
Just a gentle, global nod to Winnie-the-Pooh and the world he inhabits.
All because January 18th is the birthday of A. A. Milne.
But stay with me.
Because this is not a nursery.
And it’s not sentiment.
It’s London.
Milne was born on this day, January 18th, 1882, in Kilburn, north London.
A scholarship boy.
Not upper-class.
Not conventionally Anglican.
Not especially keen on hierarchy.
His father ran a small private school.
A remarkable place.
H. G. Wells briefly taught there.
And one of the pupils was Alfred Harmsworth – later Lord Northcliffe.
Now pause on that name.
Harmsworth is arguably the most important journalist in the history of journalism in this country.
The founder of the popular press.
The man who understood mass readership before anyone else did.
The man who changed newspapers forever.
And the man who said, chillingly,
“What this country needs most is a daily hate.”
Daily hate.
And here’s the London counterpoint.
London does this to you.
“They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace—”
That apostle of daily hate was educated at the school run by the father of A. A. Milne.
The man who would go on to create Winnie-the-Pooh.
Christopher Robin.
Piglet.
Eeyore.
Tigger.
A world built not on rage, but kindness.
Not on outrage, but gentleness.
Not on hate, but love.
If Harmsworth thought the nation needed a daily hate,
Milne – quietly, without slogan or sermon –
gave us something else entirely.
A daily love.
Time for a little something.
And not just for children either.
For all of us.
That’s London for you.
Same city.
Same school.
Two utterly different ideas of what the country ought to be fed each morning.
Milne absorbed his father’s values early.
Brains mattered more than money.
Sympathy for the underdog.
Fresh air.
Manual work.
A deep distrust of class distinctions.
“I am a Bear of Very Little Brain,” he would later write,
“and long words bother me.”
As a child he was given an unusual degree of freedom.
By Victorian standards, extraordinary freedom.
He and his brothers were allowed out on their own.
Walking.
Cycling.
Anywhere.
In London or in the country.
That independence never left him.
At eleven he won a scholarship to Westminster School.
Joined his beloved brother Kenneth there.
Westminster mattered.
It’s where the wit is sharpened.
Where cleverness is worn lightly.
Where Milne fell for cricket, for Jane Austen, and for light verse.
“It was natural to be interested,” he later said.
“It was easy to be clever.”
Mathematics took him on to Cambridge.
Writing took over completely.
He edited Granta.
Then came Punch.
And here’s the thing – being funny is one of the hardest arts there is.
For Milne, it came naturally.
Before the First World War he was everywhere.
Read everywhere.
Loved everywhere.
Then the war.
Despite strong pacifist convictions, Milne volunteered.
Commissioned into the Warwickshire Regiment.
Signals officer.
He was on the Somme.
A nightmare of mental and moral degradation, as he later put it.
Invalided out with trench fever.
But he was glad he had seen the reality.
It gave him, he believed, the moral right to speak against war later.
After the war came success on success.
Plays.
Essays.
Light verse.
By the mid-1920s he had three reputations already –
essayist,
playwright,
social observer.
And then – almost incidentally – came the children’s books.
Now here’s the lovely London grace note.
Winnie-the-Pooh did not come from nowhere.
The original Winnie was real.
A Canadian black bear called Winnipeg.
She lived at London Zoo.
She’d been brought over from Canada during the First World War by a Canadian officer and left at the Zoo when he went to France.
She stayed.
For twenty years.
Gentle.
Good-natured.
Famous for it.
Children could feed her.
One of them even rode on her back.
That child was Milne’s son, Christopher Robin Milne.
Edward Bear was renamed Winnie, after the Zoo bear.
“Pooh” came from elsewhere.
The forest came later.
Sussex came later.
But the spark – the original act of observation – was London.
Regent’s Park.
Railings.
Keepers.
A real animal, carefully watched.
Which tells you something important about Milne.
He was never “locked in the nursery”, as one critic sneered.
He was locked into observation.
Into accuracy.
Into getting the tone exactly right.
“Isn’t it funny how a bear likes honey?
Buzz! Buzz! Buzz!
I wonder why he does?”
The children’s books were never meant to eclipse everything else.
Milne later called them an intermezzo.
Four trifles for the young.
History, of course, had other ideas.
The plays faded.
The essays slipped from fashion.
But the bear from London Zoo walked straight into the language.
We all know what it means to sound like Eeyore.
Or bounce like Tigger.
Or pause, thoughtfully, like Pooh himself.
Born on this day, January 18th, 1882.
Pooh Day.
A man who, without ever setting out to,
gave the world a daily love.
“I do like a little bit of butter to my bread.”
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.