London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good day to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Christmas Eve, Wednesday, December 25th, 2025.
And here it is, served up piping hot, your daily London fix.
London Dopamine, I call it.
London does this effortlessly. Does it without even trying. This mini episode is a perfect case in point.
It was last Saturday evening. A friend and I had gone to Casa de Malevo, that Argentinian restaurant in Connaught Street. Just up from Marble Arch. That in itself is pleasing. There are literally thousands of restaurants. The lower end estimate is 11,000, higher end 18,000. 89 different national cuisines.
Apart from Argentina itself and a handful of other major cities in the world you’re going to draw a blank if you suddenly fancy some Argentinian nosh. But not London. It always comes up with the goods. It’s all here. Anyway, we dined well. Parted company. Tom headed west, I headed east. On my way to Edgware Road to catch a 98. Get to Connaught Square. And there it was, a blue plaque.
Hmmm, wonder who that was. Gotta check that out. Four days later one of the outcomes of that encounter is this podcast.
Ok, that’s the drum roll.
Curtain up.
She taught the world to dream on tiptoe.
That’s not a metaphor you argue with.
It’s a statement of fact.
Before Maria Taglioni,
ballet dancers bounded and stamped and showed off their strength.
After Maria Taglioni, they floated. They hovered.
They seemed to defy gravity,
and for a few magical moments persuaded audiences that human beings might actually be able to fly.
And yes, improbably and wonderfully,
that revolution in beauty and movement has a London address.
Connaught Square.
Marble Arch. Proper London.
Maria Taglioni was born in Stockholm in 1804.
Born into ballet royalty.
Her father, Filippo Taglioni,
was one of the great choreographers of the age.
Her mother was a dancer too.
This was a family business.
But here’s the thing.
Maria did not start out as a prodigy. No effortless miracle child.
Quite the opposite.
She was considered awkward, stiff, badly proportioned.
Not promising. Not a natural.
So her father did something extraordinary.
He rebuilt her from the ground up.
For six months in Vienna he trained her for six hours a day.
Relentlessly. Painfully.
He didn’t teach her tricks.
He taught her control, line, poise, musicality.
He taught her restraint.
Above all, he taught her to rise, to lift, to lengthen.
To make the effort invisible.
And out of that grind came something the world had never seen.
In 1832, at the Paris Opéra,
Maria tal-YOH-nee Taglioni danced La Sylphide. A story of a supernatural spirit,
a woodland fairy,
unattainable and otherworldly.
She appeared in a simple white muslin dress.
No heavy ornament. No display.
And she danced almost entirely en pointe,
on the very tips of her toes,
not as a stunt, but as a language.
A way of being.
Paris went mad.
This was the birth of Romantic ballet.
The ballerina as an ethereal creature. Weightless. Pure. Untouchable. Women in the audience wept.
Men fainted.
Critics reached for new vocabulary because the old words wouldn’t do. And every ballerina who came after her,
whether they know it or not,
is dancing in her shadow.
tal-YOH-nee Taglioni became the most famous dancer in Europe.
She toured endlessly.
Paris, Vienna, Milan, St Petersburg. Crowds followed her.
Fans collected souvenirs.
There’s a famous story of a pair of her pointe shoes being cooked and eaten by Russian balletomanes as an act of reverence.
Devotion can get strange.
And then there’s London.
Because London adored her.
She danced at Her Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket,
the great operatic and ballet stage of the West End.
This was London in the 1830s and 40s.
Gaslight. Horse traffic. Fog.
Silk dresses brushing past coal dust. And inside the theatre,
Maria (Tal-yoh-nee). Taglioni,
pale and serene,
seemingly untouched by the city’s grime and roar.
London critics were rapturous.
She was described as poetry made visible.
As music embodied.
As a creature who seemed scarcely to belong to the earth at all.
And when she was not performing, she lived very respectably indeed.
Connaught Square.
If you don’t know it,
Connaught Square sits just north of Hyde Park,
tucked behind Marble Arch.
One of those elegant,
restrained Georgian squares that whispers rather than shouts.
White stucco terraces.
Tall windows. Iron railings.
A place that has always attracted people who want proximity to power and greenery without fuss.
Maria tal-YOH-nee Taglioni
lived at number 14.
You can stand there today.
The square still has that composed, almost hushed quality.
Traffic murmurs nearby,
but inside the square there’s a sense of withdrawal, of privacy.
You can imagine her returning from rehearsal,
from performance,
stepping down from her carriage, lifting her skirts,
ascending the steps.
The woman who floated across stages now climbing stairs like everyone else.
There is something deeply human about that.
She was, by all accounts,
a serious, reserved woman.
Not a diva in the modern sense.
No scandals.
No flamboyant public affairs.
She married a Count,
zheel-BEAR duh vwah-ZAN
Gilbert de Voisins,
though the marriage was unhappy and ended in separation.
Her real devotion was always to her art.
London was part of her working life, not just a stopover.
This mattered.
Britain in the mid nineteenth century was hungry for continental culture, and Taglioni embodied the very highest form of it.
She influenced British dancers, British choreographers,
British taste.
She helped cement ballet
as an art form
London took seriously,
not just decorative entertainment.
Eventually, age did what it always does.
She retired from the stage in 1847. But she didn’t vanish.
She taught.
She coached.
She passed on that impossible discipline that produced effortless beauty.
Later she became a ballet mistress at the Paris Opéra,
shaping future generations.
And then, quietly,
she faded from public view.
Maria tal-YOH-nee Taglioni died in Marseille in 1884, aged 80.
No longer the sylph, no longer the apparition.
Just a woman who had lived long enough to see her revolution become tradition.
But here’s the thing.
Every time you see a ballerina rise onto pointe and appear to hover. Every time ballet reaches for that sense of otherworldliness,
that dream of escape from gravity and flesh,
you are seeing Maria tal-YOH-nee’s Taglioni’s legacy at work.
And in London, that legacy has a front door.
Connaught Square. Marble Arch. W2.
She taught the world to dream on tiptoe.
And for a time, she came home from doing exactly that to one of the calmest, most self-possessed squares in the city.
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.