London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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Top of the morning to you, London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s August 9th, 2025.
Ok, let’s see what’s on the Today’s Specials blackboard. Oh, that sounds all right – a Literary Day. I’ll take that. And if that’s the case I think it behooves us to make at least a courtesy call at the London Calling Book Club Corner. Here’s guide Brian:
“Ok the book I’m reading right now is ‘The Old Ways’ by Robert McFarlane. It charts the passage of various roads and tracks across the UK. The author follows ancient paths such as the Icknield Way or the Broomway. He ties in history, stories and etymology. He uses challenging language that makes me reach for the dictionary – yes I’m that old! It’s a very easy and pleasant read and I’m finding it educational and informative. It also seems rather appropriate for a tourist guide to be reading about pathways that have been etched into the landscape by the footsteps of thousands of years.”
And if you’re a bibliophile and fancy banging heads with Brian about books and good reads, well, you’re spoiled for choice. Brian gets around. You can catch him on our Chelsea walk, and the Westminster Abbey tour, and the Marylebone walk, and Notting Hill, and Literary Bloomsbury, and The Blitz.
And I’m going to make it easy for myself this morning.
My goal is for every London Calling episode to have at least two really tasty factoids that are takeaways, that are unforgettable. This one’s about a much-loved British bird, the Blue Tit. And how did this one crash the party. Here’s how. London has so many trees some ecologists have classified it as a forest. And where there are trees there are birds. So, yes, we’ve gone bird watching. Momentarily. We’ve spotted a couple of Blue Tits. And here’s your factoid: that pair of Blue Tit parents will visit their brood with food over 1500 each day. And you thought you had a busy schedule! Had a lot on your plate!
Ok, main course. Our Literary Luncheon.
Meet – and alas – say farewell to Captain Marryat – the fighting sailor who invented the Sea Story.
And left his wake in London.
Ok, here we are — it’s August 9th, 1848. Let’s get our bearings. Picture it: 1848 is the year revolutions shook Europe like a snow globe, it’s the year the Great Famine bit deep into Ireland, it’s the year the word “California” suddenly meant gold. And here – well, up in Norfolk – in a fine old Georgian house, a man was taking his last breath. Not just any man. This was Captain Frederic Marryat – sailor, hero, adventurer, inventor, novelist.
If you’re thinking “Marryat who?”, well… buckle up. You’re going to want to know this chap.
Marryat was born in 1792. And, yes, he was a son of London. He was born at Catherine Court on Tower Hill. You don’t get more London than that. He was of Huguenot descent. That’s very London as well, bearing in mind that London was founded by immigrants, And built and peopled by immigrants. Still is. We touched down here yesterday, didn’t we. The late great all-too-brief prime minister George Canning describing himself as an Irishman born in London. Frederic Marryat’s father was a Wimbledon man. He was a merchant and an MP. He was a Chairman of Lloyd’s and the colonial agent for the island of Grenada. His mother was the daughter of a Bostonian. Yes, that Boston. Boston, Massachusetts. You can see it already, can’t you? Frederic Marryat had salt water in his veins. He was a Londoner but a Londoner up in a crow’s nest, looking out across the world. He was a lively, high-spirited kid. Always getting into trouble. Always running away. Running away with the intention of escaping to sea.
When he was 14 the training wheels came off. He joined the Royal Navy – smack in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars.
And here’s where the first of many “you couldn’t make it up” moments happens. His very first ship? HMS Imperieuse, captained by Lord Cochrane – the real-life model for Jack Aubrey in Patrick O’Brian’s novels. So, before Marryat had even learned the ropes – literally – he was learning them under one of the most daring commanders ever to fly the White Ensign.
He fought the French, rescued drowning shipmates, captured enemy vessels, got fever in the tropics, had his share of close shaves with cannon shot – and lived to tell the tales.
And tell them he did. Marryat is, quite simply, the father of the modern naval novel. You know Patrick O’Brian? C.S. Forester’s Hornblower? Even the salty yarns of Joseph Conrad? They all sail in Marryat’s wake.
His first big success came in 1829 with The Naval Officer. Not the snappiest title, but it was practically an autobiography in disguise. Then came Peter Simple, Mr Midshipman Easy, The King’s Own – rollicking tales of gales, broadsides, and midshipmen getting into scrapes.
His style? Not Jane Austen tea parties. Marryat’s pages smell of tar and gunpowder. You hear the creak of rigging, the snap of sails, the splash of a boarding party’s oars. And because he’d been there, he got it right. His stories have the sea in them.
And make no mistake, Frederic Marryat wasn’t just a pen-pusher. He was an officer – and a good one. He served with distinction in the War of 1812, fighting the Americans at New Orleans and in Chesapeake Bay. Three times he was awarded the Royal Humane Society’s gold medal for saving people from drowning. He invented a lifeboat system. He charted uncharted coasts.
And he was an adventurer ashore too. He travelled widely, from the Canadian backwoods to the West Indies, from the Mediterranean to Burma. In Burma, incidentally, he fought a war, got malaria, and nearly died. The Captain squeezed three lives into one.
And here we come. Next stop. Captain Frederic Marryat’s London connections.
London runs through Marryat’s story like the Thames through the city. As I said, he was born on Tower Hill. He was schooled in Enfield. As a young officer, he strode up Whitehall to the Admiralty to report for duty. In later life, he was a club man — the United Service Club in Pall Mall, where naval and army officers swapped lies over port.
He lived for a time in Camden Place, in the leafy part of Camden Town – long before it was all market stalls and punk T-shirts. He moved in literary circles too: knew that consummate Londoner Charles Dickens, knew Thackeray, the whole gang. The capital was his home port.
You can trace his London in other ways: the publishing houses in Albemarle Street and Fleet Street that brought out his books; the bookshops that sold them; the West End drawing rooms where people read his latest in instalments by the fire.
And when the Navy called him back, he’d set off from the Pool of London, sails cracking as he headed down past Greenwich, down to the Thames estuary and out to sea.
And you say, aye aye, David but he’s not Dickens or Thackeray or Charlotte Bronte, why should I be giving him any of my time? Why is the Captain worth knowing? I’ll tell you why,
Because Marryat’s life reads like one of his own novels. He was a man who knew both sides of the gun deck – the ferocity of battle and the camaraderie of shipmates. He made the sea a literary character in its own right. And he could write – not in a fussy Victorian way, but lean, fast, vivid.
You want a taste. How about this passage. It’s quintessential Marryat. It’s from his Diary in America.
“They say that the British cannot fix anything properly without a dinner, but I’m sure the Americans can fix nothing without a drink. If you meet, you drink; if you part, you drink; if you make acquaintance, you drink; if you close a bargain, you drink; they quarrel in their drink, and they make it up with a drink. They drink, because it is hot; they drink, because it is cold. If successful in elections, they drink and rejoice; if not, they drink and swear;—they begin to drink early in the morning, they leave off late at night; they commence it early in life, and they continue it, until they soon drop into the grave. To use their own expression, the way they drink is “quite a caution.” As for water, what the man said, when asked to belong to the Temperance Society, appears to be the general opinion: “it’s very good for navigation.”
Ok, let’s get to his last innings. This makes sad tellings. Marryat came home from America in 1839. Lived mostly in London and Wimbledon. His marriage foundered, went down in 1843. He moved up to his small farm in Norfolk. Financially he should have been all right. His patrimony was in excess of half a million pounds. A fortune in those days. And he was a best selling novelist. But like Dickens’s Mr Micawber – and indeed Dickens’ father – he spent more than he earned. He was permanently short of money. You can put that down to his extravagance, his carelessness and the ruin of a property he had in the West Indies. He decided he needed a change of scenery. And you can guess where he steered to. He applied for service afloat. The Admiralty slammed the door in his face. He was so overwrought by the rejection a blood vessel broke in his lungs. He was seriously ill for six months. He was just getting better when the worst possible news pitched up. His eldest son Frederick had gone to sea. And went down with his ship the Avenger. It was a shock that proved fatal for Captain Marryat. As I said, he died on this day in 1848. Died up on that little farm at Langham in Norfolk. He’s buried up there, in the churchyard of St Andrew and St Mary. I think we want to put some flowers on his grave. Flowers in the shape of an appraisal that’s also a final send off. A summing up that’s also a bottom line.
Frederic Marryat is worth knowing because he straddles two worlds: the hard-bitten, oak-and-hemp Navy of Nelson’s day, and the London of Dickens, gas lamps, and the early railway age. In him, the Georgian sailor meets the Victorian storyteller.
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.