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 morning to you, London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Saturday, May 24th, 2025. Something out of left field for you today. A few weeks ago the noted Portuguese architect Joao Borges da Cunha was in London for a book festival. A book festival that featured his book of poems about one of the Jack the Ripper victims. The book’s called M.J.K. One Hundred Talks on Mary Jane Kelly. There can’t be many books that have had a more remarkable genesis. Here’s what the author says about the book’s conception moment. “In the late spring of 2019 I suffered an accident that put me in a deep coma for days. The details of the event are yet to be clearly explained, since I developed a retrograde amnesia, which doesn’t let me remember the previous moments and thus fully recall it. However, the raw facts go like this: I woke up in the middle of the night, in the seaside house where I had travelled for the weekend, went outside and fell out of a nearby three-storey balcony on the asphalt in the street. When I came out of the coma, I was diagnosed with a gash in the carotid artery on the right side of my neck. It immediately came to my mind that what caused Mary Jane Kelly’s death – she was the last victim of the so-called Whitechapel murders in 1888 committed by ‘Jack the Ripper’ (a sobriquet never mentioned in my book) was precisely the same injury, in her case as a result of a savage attack by a fellow human being. Of all the canonical Ripper murders, Mary Jane Kelly’s is considered the most gruesome, and also puzzling. During the long weeks I passed in bed following my mishap, Mary Jane Kelly invaded my thoughts and kept me company. She talked to me about herself and her experience. Talked in poems. That’s the genesis of the book.”
Well, wow. A Portuguese architect who falls, is badly injured, comes out of a coma, realises one of his injuries is the same as that inflicted on the last of Jack the Ripper victims, is then somehow put in touch with her, she talks to him, tells him about her experience, talks to him in poems. One hundred poems. In short, a Portuguese architect who’s also a poet who does his versifying in English. Versifying about – he would say ‘by’ – a Jack the Ripper victim. I had to know more. Caught up with Joao. And it proved to be a fascinating, wide-ranging discussion. Lisbon, London, Jack the Ripper, what happened, why, he, Joao is not a lettuce, etc.
Here’s the interview.
[Interview with Joao follows]
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.