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, August 17th, 2025.
London Calling Book Club Corner first. Let’s hear from Judith, the artist who lives in Camden Town. In Camden Town’s legendary Inverness Market no less. So Judith couldn’t be more local. And sure enough, she guides our Saturday morning Camden Town walk. Here’s what Judith’s been curling up with: “Hello David! I’m reading: Dorothy Richardson, The Tunnel (London: Duckworth & Co, 1919). It is but a small part of her huge Pilgrimage series. I keep being startled by comparisons of the Victorian London she depicts, and ours. How about the image on p.151? Two of Miriam’s friends went out at night on bicycles around Russell Square – in their knickers. Quoting from the book now: ‘We came home nearly crying with rage at not being able to go about, permanently, in nothing but knickers.’”
Thanks, Judith.
Ok, main course.
London does it again. There’s no quit to this place. Are you prepared? Always remember, Be Prepared.
That’s got a familiar ring to it, doesn’t it?
It’s the Boy Scout motto, isn’t it. Like millions of other boys I was a Boy Scout. Just as millions of girls were Girl Guides. And I think you could say that even as an eleven-year-old words sometimes made an impression on me. Sometimes they were like a meteor streaking across the night sky. I wondered about them.
Be prepared was certainly a combination of words that I wondered about. Even as an 11-year-old I knew it was something of an odd fish. Be prepared. Didn’t just streak across the sky. It was a little bit flaky.
But you know what the great artist John Constable said. That astute observation of his, it’s a spar I cling to in the storm-tossed waters of this roiling sea we’re all awash in: what Constable said was, you don’t truly see until you understand.
So sixty some years later I learn that Be Prepared is the Boy Scout motto because its initials are an acronym of Baden-Powell’s name. And Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell was of course the founder of the Boy Scout movement.
And I’ve been prepared for this day ever since I found that out. This day because it’s Baden Powell’s birthday. He was born on August 17, 1857.
And the clincher is, he was born in London. Born in Paddington. At 6 Stanhope Street, to be exact.
Be Prepared. Bit of an odd Fish. But then Baden-Powell was a bit of an odd fish.
Ok, so you’ve been prepared. Here we go.
Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell.
The founder of the Scouts. Lord Baden-Powell of Gilwell. The man in the funny hat, the walrus moustache, the glint in his eye.
But here’s the thing. Forget Mafeking. Forget Kenya. Forget the Boy Scouts’ Jamborees. Let’s start at the beginning. Let’s start in London. Because B-P – we’ll call him that, his friends did – was a Londoner. Born and bred.
The year? 1857.
The place? Bears repeating: Paddington.
Homing in. Not the station. Not the bear. Paddington the neighbourhood. Stucco terraces, canal boats, the railway smoke in the air. That’s where the adventure began.
His father? The Reverend Baden Powell – Oxford don, big player in the Victorian science-and-religion debates. But Dad died when Robert was just three. Which left Mum with ten children. Ten! And not much money. So the boys grew up scrappy, inventive, full of get-up-and-go.
And Robert – he had get-up-and-go by the bucketload.
London was his playground. Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens. They weren’t lawns and flowerbeds to him. They were fields of adventure. He’d creep about in the bushes, stalk ducks by the Serpentine, play at being a scout long before there were Scouts with a capital S.
Then came Kensington. That’s where the family moved after Paddington. Imagine the scene: a house groaning with Baden-Powell children. Robert – the 8th of the lot – fighting for space at the table, plotting escapades, sketching in the margins of his schoolbooks. Chaos, noise, mischief. Just what you need if you’re going to grow up into the sort of man who invents the Boy Scouts.
School? Charterhouse. But here’s the twist – in Robert’s day, Charterhouse was still in London. Smithfield. Right by the meat market. So picture it: you’re trying to concentrate on your Latin verbs… and through the window comes the bellow of butchers, the lowing of cattle, the clatter of knives. Education, Victorian-style.
When Charterhouse later moved out to leafy Godalming, Surrey – Baden-Powell found his real classroom. The woods. The fields. The streams. He taught himself to track rabbits, light fires, cook over an open flame. The school rules said “No fires in the woods.” Robert said: “Fires in the woods.” The rules said “No climbing the walls.” Robert said – well, you can guess.
But London was always home base. Kensington. Hyde Park. And years later, London was where he became famous.
Fast forward to the Siege of Mafeking, 1900. Baden-Powell holds out for 217 days against the Boers. London goes absolutely bananas. “Mafficking,” they called it – the wild street celebrations when the siege was lifted. He comes home a hero. The Illustrated London News can’t print enough about him. Boys in London parks play “Mafeking” with sticks and stones.
And then – the movement. The Scouts. The very first Scout office? Victoria Street, SW1. Number 116. Just down from Westminster Abbey. Imagine it – letters piling in, boys from all over Britain desperate to join. London as Mission Control for a worldwide movement.
And home life? 9 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. Smart townhouse. Robert and his wife Olave – Lady Baden-Powell – at the centre of it all. Just round the corner from Kensington Gardens, where he’d once played as a boy. Lovely symmetry, that.
I sometimes go there on my Kensington Walk. Fascinating street, Hyde Park Gate. We go there we of course see Baden Powell’s house. But we also see the house where Winston Churchill died. And the house where Virginia Woolf, the house she grew up in. And that’s just for starters. It’s a short street, Hyde Park Gate. The only short street in London that has seven blue plaques.
Now, as long as we’re at it, a quick hop out of town: Gilwell Park, Epping Forest. 1919. Baden-Powell makes it the training ground for Scout leaders. Mud, tents, cooking fires. Exactly his sort of thing. Today? Pilgrimage site for Scouts the world over.
Back in the capital, London gave him the big stages: Olympia, Alexandra Palace, Wembley. Imagine it: thousands of Scouts, all in shorts and scarves, parading before the Chief Scout. London, the imperial capital, saluting its most unlikely general.
And the anecdotes! He drove round London in a little car called the “Jam Roll,” painted in camouflage. He kept a tent pitched in the back garden of his Kensington house – preferred sleeping out there to a feather bed indoors. Even as an old man. The neighbours thought him dotty. The Scouts thought him perfect.
And the moustache. Oh, the moustache. London cabbies used to shout: “Oi, guv! Where’s the broom gone from under yer nose?” Baden-Powell would roar with laughter. He loved a joke at his own expense.
So yes. Mafeking, the camps, the jamborees, the world movement. But don’t forget: London. Paddington. Kensington. Victoria Street. Hyde Park Gate. London was his cradle, his headquarters, his home.
Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell. Londoner. Adventurer. Dreamer. Dodger of rules. Teller of stories. Founder of the Scouts. The man who gave millions of boys and girls a taste of independence, mischief, and belonging.
And it all began – in Paddington. In Paddington on this day in 1857.
(pause)
So – next time you’re strolling through Kensington Gardens, and you see the boys with their sticks, the girls with their tents… think of Robert. Think of the little London lad with the twinkle in his eye and the fire in the woods.
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.