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 November 1st, 2025. And here it is, your daily London fix.
Ah, yes, London in November.
The air smells of smoke and wet leaves. The light goes early, and the streets seem to hold their breath. Down by the river, a fog rolls in thick as candle grease, wrapping itself round lampposts and railings. You hear the pop and crack of fireworks in the distance, see the faint orange bloom above the rooftops, and for a moment it feels as though the city itself is remembering something – something that happened long ago, under these very stones.
Remember, remember the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot… We all know the rhyme. But how many of us can honestly say we know the story? Or even what we’re meant to be remembering?
Once upon a time – specifically in 1605 – a man called Guy Fawkes was found lurking in the cellars beneath the Houses of Parliament, surrounded by barrels of gunpowder. Not, as you might hope, for a bit of DIY. No, he and his co-conspirators had planned to blow the whole place sky-high. The King, the Lords, the Commons – the entire lot, in one almighty bang. If all had gone according to plan, we’d have had a smoking crater where Westminster stands today and British history would have taken a very different turn indeed.
It was the early hours of 5 November. The guards, tipped off by an anonymous letter, discovered Guy Fawkes just after midnight. They found him booted, cloaked, and equipped with matches. He was guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder – enough to level half of London. When they asked who he was, he replied coolly that his name was John Johnson, servant to Thomas Percy. They weren’t fooled for long.
Fawkes was part of a gang of thirteen Catholic gentlemen led by Robert Catesby. They were furious at King James I’s failure to grant greater tolerance to Catholics. Their plan was as simple as it was mad: blow up Parliament during the State Opening, kill the King and much of the Protestant establishment, and install a new Catholic monarch. Fawkes, an experienced soldier and explosives man, was the one chosen to light the fuse.
We all know how it ended. Torture in the Tower. Confessions extracted. Fawkes and his fellow plotters tried and condemned as traitors. On 31 January 1606, Guy Fawkes was executed in Westminster – hung, drawn and quartered in the grisly, theatrical way the Tudors and Stuarts so loved. But in one last act of defiance, Fawkes leapt from the scaffold and broke his neck, sparing himself the full horror.
Now, here’s where the story gets interesting. You’d think the whole episode would have quietly faded into the footnotes of history, but no. Within months of the failed plot, Londoners were lighting bonfires to celebrate the King’s deliverance. Parliament passed a law making 5 November a day of thanksgiving. Every year since 1606, Britons have marked it – with fireworks, bonfires, and effigies of poor Guy tossed into the flames.
For centuries, it was called Gunpowder Treason Day, later Bonfire Night. In some places, it was fiercely anti-Catholic, complete with mobs dragging “the Pope” through the streets and effigies being burned with gusto. But over time, the politics drained away, leaving us with the family-friendly festival of sparks and sausages we know today.
If you grew up in Britain in the 1970s or before, you’ll remember the kids wheeling round a shabby old pram, a stuffed figure made of newspaper and old clothes perched inside. “Penny for the Guy!” they’d shout outside the corner shop, hoping to earn enough for a few bangers or a box of sparklers. That’s vanished now, gone the way of the milk float and the Raleigh Chopper. These days, it’s all organised firework displays and health-and-safety fences. The wildness, the mischief, has been tamed.
And here’s the rub: Guy Fawkes Night, that strange blend of rebellion and loyalty, of fire and memory, is fading. The supermarkets are already awash in pumpkins by mid-October. Halloween – once an American import, now a British obsession – has stolen the limelight. And two weeks later, the transatlantic tide rolls in again with Thanksgiving parades beamed across the airwaves. Bonfire Night gets squeezed in between, like the slightly shabby uncle everyone’s fond of but doesn’t quite invite to the party anymore.
But there’s something wonderfully British about the whole thing. No other nation celebrates a failed revolution with such gusto. We mark not the overthrow of government, but its survival. The story is part farce, part tragedy, and entirely irresistible. Guy Fawkes himself has become an unlikely icon –his bearded, moustachioed face reborn in the 21st century as the Guy Fawkes mask, symbol of rebellion from Anonymous hackers to global protest movements. The man who failed to blow up Parliament has become the face of defiance worldwide.
And the locations still whisper the tale. Westminster itself, of course – the cellars under the Lords where the plot was foiled.
The Tower, where Fawkes was tortured. Holbeach House in Staffordshire, where Catesby and others were gunned down. Walk those streets on a damp November evening and you can almost smell the gunpowder ghosts.
Which brings us neatly to the present. If you want to hear it properly told – complete with fire, fury, ghosts, and a few laughs along the way – award-winning Blue Badge guide Simon will be doing his ever-popular Guy Fawkes Walk later today, Saturday, November 1st and again on the 4th of November. He’ll take you through the very heart of the Gunpowder Plot, from Westminster’s corridors of power to the murky alleys where the conspirators hatched their doomed plan.
And you can be sure, Simon will wheel out that marvellous line from an article in the current issue of the London Review of Books:
“Ghost hunters and parapsychic investigators sometimes invoke the ‘stone tape’ theory of haunting, which holds that the residual energy of violent historical events can be recorded by material structures and replayed under certain conditions, like a cassette.”
If that’s true, says Simon, then London’s an entire archive of such recordings. And one of the strongest tracks on the tape is right there beneath the Palace of Westminster. The original cellar where Fawkes was caught went up in the fire of 1834, but the new basements – deep under the modern Parliament –still have their stories. Security guards talk about sudden draughts that seem to move against the air-conditioning. The faint smell of sulphur. Footsteps when no one’s on duty. Once, a light was seen bobbing in a locked corridor, as if a man with a lantern had just passed by. Every year before the State Opening, the Yeomen of the Guard still search those cellars—a ritual echo of that long-ago November night. They never find him, of course, but perhaps they hear him. The scrape of a boot, the strike of a match. The fuse that never caught.
And up at the Tower, the ghost story turns darker. It bears repeating, Fawkes was taken there after his arrest – tortured until even his signature gave up the ghost. The Tower’s walls have absorbed centuries of agony, and if any place in London can “play back” its history, it’s that one. Yeomen Warders tell of a man with a lantern seen pacing the battlements when the wind’s from the east, his face pale as wax, his hands bound. Others speak of a sudden blast of heat, the smell of smoke, the feeling that something – someone – is about to ignite.
Simon says that’s the charge of 1605 still humming under London’s stones. The gunpowder never exploded – but the energy, the outrage, the audacity of it all – somehow it’s still there. The capital’s fuse was lit, and maybe it never quite went out.
So, this year, before you stand in a muddy field watching rockets streak the sky – or sit inside watching Netflix while the neighbours’ fireworks pop off outside – pause for a moment and remember what you’re celebrating. A plot that failed. A government that survived. A man who lit a fuse that never burned.
And maybe, just maybe, raise a sparkler to Guy himself. Because though he didn’t manage to blow up Parliament, he’s been setting off explosions in the British imagination for more than four hundred years.
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 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.