Top of the morning to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Friday, December 12th, 2025.
And here you go, here it is, your daily London fix.
And here we go.
To Venice.
It’s December 12th, 1889.
Andiamo.
To Venice.
To death in Venice.
Death… in Venice.
There are worse opening cues for
a poet’s last scene.
Winter dusk on the Grand Canal. Lights trembling on black water.
A great poet on his final night,
in rooms high up in
the Ca’ Rezzonico.
And upstairs,
you can almost hear it,
the soft footfall of history arriving for him.
Browning.
Robert Browning.
Londoner to his marrow,
breathing his last in
the most operatic city in Europe.
Let’s spool back.
Back to Camberwell, 1812.
A London not yet swollen to bursting. The Browning household overflowing with books.
His father,
a Bank of England clerk with
the soul of a scholar,
turning their home into
a private Alexandria.
Browning grows up inhaling poetry as naturally as he breathes.
The city is changing around him, stretching outward,
knitting together.
And the boy is changing too,
racing ahead,
gobbling languages,
stalking ideas,
possessed
of a fierce curiosity that will
one day burst into
those dramatic monologues.
London builds him.
You can see the scaffolding.
British Museum Reading Room. Fitzroy Square lodgings.
Hatcham lanes.
The intellectual markets and
back alleys of
early Victorian letters.
He’s young,
ambitious,
slightly brooding.
A poet sharpening his quill
on the flint of the city.
There’s something deeply London about the very form he invents:
the psychological monologue,
the mask,
the inner voice.
If Dickens gives you the streets, Browning
gives you what’s going on
inside the houses.
And inside the heads.
And then Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Barrett,
invalid,
genius,
virtual prisoner of Wimpole Street. Their love story
begins with letters and
vaults straight into the stratosphere. They marry in Marylebone.
Secret.
Breathless.
A London morning that feels like
a Victorian heist film.
St Marylebone Parish Church.
Vows whispered.
Then she goes back to
her father’s house,
gathers her things, and
the two of them scarper to Italy. London shrinking behind them, Florence opening ahead.
Browning becomes an expatriate Londoner.
An expatriate Londoner
but always a Londoner.
The Italian sun nourishes him, and Elizabeth too,
but London tugs like a heartbeat.
After her death in 1861,
he returns for good,
now famous,
now lionised.
Maida Vale – Little Venice – is
his last great London base.
Warwick Crescent.
The Brownings were
the Bloomsbury set before Bloomsbury.
Henry James dropping by.
Literary salons buzzing with admiration.
Browning pacing the room,
reading aloud,
doing voices.
Victorian London adored a man who could perform his poems and Browning
could perform the wallpaper off
the walls.
But it’s that Venetian ending that
gives the life its final sweep. December 1889.
He’s staying with his son Pen and daughter in law in the Ca’ Rezzonico, the old palace leaning
into the Grand Canal like
a grande dame in a fading ball gown. Browning is not bed-bound.
He dines,
he jokes,
he writes letters,
he fusses over proofs.
He’s 77 but his mind’s
a furnace.
His last volume,
Asolando,
is being published
that very day in London.
After dinner,
he complains of breathlessness,
sinks back and slips away.
Quietly.
Not alone.
His son at his side.
A poet who spent his working life dramatising the crises of others
ends his own life without drama. Death in Venice, indeed.
The city claims him for a night,
then gives him back.
The journey home reads like
a Victorian funeral epic.
From Venice to Trieste by boat.
Train through the continent.
Across the Channel.
Into London.
Into the Abbey.
Poets’ Corner.
He might have joined Elizabeth
in Florence
but her little Protestant cemetery
had been closed to new burials
for 28 years.
So here he lies.
She in Italy.
He in Westminster Abbey.
Their marriage a London ignition
but their resting places parted
by a continent.
On the day he dies,
the very book just published
contains a few lines
that now feel like prophecy.
From Epilogue:
One who never turned his back
but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break…
That’s the Browning stride.
Chest out.
Eyes blazing.
Always forward.
London in that stride, I think.
The London of get on with it.
The London of chin up.
The London of ambition
and appetite
and character.
What did he give us?
The monologues.
The voices.
The wicked little revelations.
A whole inner London of motives, secrets,
delusions,
confessions.
He opened poetry’s windows.
Let life in.
Let psychology in.
He gave English literature characters as vivid as Dickens
but trapped inside their own heads instead of trapped in Chancery
or Clerkenwell.
And the lines.
Ah yes,
the lines.
Half the English-speaking world quotes Browning
without knowing it’s quoting Browning.
Grow old along with me.
The best is yet to be.
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.
God’s in his heaven.
All’s right with the world.
Victorian optimism, yes,
but with iron in the spine.
Browning wrote like a man
who’d fought with life and
found it worth the battle.
So today,
December 12th,
we mark not his tragedy
but his flourish.
The final shot of a cinematic life. Browning in Venice.
Browning coming home.
Browning taking his place
among the poets of the capital
that made him.
A London boy who walked out
into the world and
came back immortal.
Roll credits.
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.