London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good Boxing Day to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
Yes, it’s Friday, December 26th, 2025. Boxing Day,
And here it is, here’s your daily London fix.
Another holiday. So let’s do something a little different today. Go off piste. A bit of fun. Something unexpected. A bit of London as it might have been. A bit of counter factual history.
I got the idea from yesterday’s Christmas Day Charles Dickens’ London Walk. It meets by the famous Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square. And I usually start it by quoting something Dickens said in Sketches by Boz. “What inexhaustible food for speculation the streets of London afford.” Speculation’s a very interesting word. Very old word. It’s got a proto-IndoEuropean root – spek – meaning to observe. It means intelligent contemplation. Intelligent contemplation based on close observation.
So we get underway with some close observation there in Trafalgar Square. Close observation spurred on by another pole star of my guiding career: the great painter John Constable’s bit of wisdom that “we don’t truly see until we understand.” Anyway, I want my walkers to truly see the National Gallery, and St Martin in the Fields and Nelson’s column and what Trafalgar Square was like in Dickens’s day. It looms large – it’s hugely important – in the Dickens story. And one of the avenues that we pursue is Trafalgar Square as it might have been. When Trafalgar Square was on the drawing board a couple of hundred years ago there were any number suggestions advanced about what it should look like. And in particular what the centre piece should have been. We all know Nelson’s column won that race. But very few people know what the other contestants were. And that list just might be the most astonishing roll call in all of counter factual history. So I give my walkers a quick run through of: the Trafalgar Square that never was but might have been. One suggestion was plant right there, right in the middle of the square, a perfect copy of Egypt’s Great Pyramid. And here’s where here and now – today – gets in on the act. I thought, yes, you can describe that, get them to see it in their mind’s eye. But what if you could actually show it to them. A visual. Step forward AI. And that’s by way of saying, ‘yup, I’m well and truly blooded. I’ve done a little bit of experimenting with AI picture generation but this time I’ve taken the training wheels off. I wanted to see if it could give me a picture of Trafalgar Square as it would have looked if the Great Pyramid had won the race. And instead of Nelson’s column we’d have the Great Pyramid there, smack dab in the middle of London. Luxor on Thames and all that.
Now in the event AI wasn’t fully equal to the task. I wanted it to show the Great Pyramid but in such a way that we could also see the National Gallery and St Martin in the Fields. Just wasn’t possible. The Great Pyramid’s too big. If you’ve got it in front of you it would block your view of what’s beyond it, in this case the National Gallery and St Martin in the Fields. And what I was after was people being able to see how the Great Pyramid would dwarf the National Gallery and St Martin in the Fields. But in the end, the image generator came through for me. It put the Great Pyramid behind those two great London buildings. Plopped it down on that stretch of ground between the Covent Garden Piazza and Trafalgar Square. And it’s, well, fascinating. And deeply quirky. So I had my image. The Great Pyramid come to London. All that was missing was the storyline to accompany it. And that’s what this podcast is going to serve up. And there’s more where this comes from. Because the Great Pyramid wasn’t the only suggestion tabled for what should go in Trafalgar Square. I’m thinking I’m going to run the deck, with an extraordinary visual for every single one of these pieces. Watch this space. Anyway, here’s the Great Pyramid in Trafalgar Square story. The London that might have been but never was. Except here on London Calling.
Here we go.
Right then. Let’s hoist the Great Pyramid out of the Giza sand, sling it across the Med, tow it up the Channel, swing left at the Thames Estuary and plonk the thing down slap bang in Trafalgar Square, right where the fountains gurgle and pigeons hold committee meetings.
Because that really was one of the ideas. No joke. No late night pub whimsy. A full-blown, straight-faced Victorian proposal. Instead of Nelson’s Column, a pyramid. Not a dainty one. Not a symbolic one. The real thing. Great Pyramid of Khufu proportions. The daddy.
So what would that actually look like?
Brace yourself.
The Great Pyramid stands 481 feet high. That’s not a typo. Four hundred and eighty-one feet. Nelson’s Column, with Nelson included, tops out at about 170 feet. So our pyramid would be nearly three times taller. It would loom. It would bully the skyline. It would make the National Gallery look like it had popped out in its slippers to fetch the milk.
The base of the Great Pyramid is a perfect square, 756 feet on each side. Trafalgar Square from north to south is roughly 360 feet. East to west, about 300. In other words, the pyramid wouldn’t just sit in the square. It would eat the square. The fountains would vanish under limestone. The lions would be somewhere inside the casing stones, entombed like unlucky pharaohs. You’d have to tell tourists, “Yes, the square’s still here. It’s just underneath Egypt.”
And the National Gallery. Poor thing. All that confident neoclassicism. Those columns saying, “I belong to a great imperial capital.” The pyramid would reply, “That’s adorable.” The Gallery’s façade is about 100 feet high. The pyramid would rise nearly five times higher, its sloping face cutting the sky at a merciless angle, turning Trafalgar Square into something that looks like a set from a Cecil B. DeMille epic directed by an architect with delusions of grandeur.
St Martin-in-the-Fields? Elegant spire. Perfect proportions. Christopher Wren on a good day. The pyramid would simply dwarf it. The spire would barely scratch the pyramid’s flank, like a cocktail stick leaning against a mountain. From certain angles, St Martin’s would look as though it had wandered into the wrong city and was now trying not to make eye contact.
And then there’s the weight.
This is where things get properly ridiculous.
The Great Pyramid weighs around six million tonnes. Six million. That’s roughly the weight of 16 Empire State Buildings, or about 1,200 fully loaded aircraft carriers, or every black cab in London stacked on top of every other black cab in London, multiplied by a number so large your brain refuses to cooperate.
Each of its 2.3 million stone blocks weighs between two and fifteen tonnes. Picture a single Routemaster bus carved from limestone. Now picture two million of them. Trafalgar Square’s Victorian plumbing would weep quietly and resign.
And height isn’t even the half of it. The pyramid’s volume is about 2.6 million cubic metres. You could fit Westminster Abbey inside it and still have room left over for a decent pub, a few gift shops and a slightly disappointing immersive experience.
Stand at the bottom of the pyramid in Trafalgar Square and look up. Your neck would give up. The slope rises at just over 51 degrees. No steps. No handrail. Just smooth, inexorable stone climbing into the London sky. On a grey day it would disappear into the cloud. On a sunny day it would blaze pale gold, reflecting light into places Trafalgar Square has never known. Tourists would need sunglasses. Pigeons would need counselling.
Now imagine walking round it. You wouldn’t stroll. You’d trek.
One side alone is longer than two football pitches laid end to end. Circumnavigating it would feel less like crossing a square and more like orbiting a small geological event.
And what would it mean? Because Victorians always cared about meaning.
The Great Pyramid is a tomb. A monument to power, eternity, god-kings and cosmic order. Dropping it into the heart of London would be the most gloriously unhinged statement imaginable. It would say: Britain doesn’t just rule the waves. Britain has borrowed eternity for the afternoon.
Nelson’s Column, by comparison, is modest. A single hero on a stick. Very British. Plucky. Upright. A pyramid is something else entirely. It doesn’t point. It squats. It broods. It implies that time itself has been defeated and neatly stacked in courses of limestone.
And here’s the kicker. The Great Pyramid is astonishingly precise. Its base is level to within a fraction of an inch. Its sides align almost perfectly with the cardinal points. You’d have north, south, east and west nailed down with pharaonic certainty in the middle of London traffic chaos. The M25 would feel inadequate.
So picture it at dusk. The square hushed. The pyramid casting a shadow that reaches Whitehall. The National Gallery half in light, half in ancient darkness. St Martin’s bells ringing, dwarfed but defiant. And Londoners, as ever, taking it in stride. “Bit big, isn’t it?” “Shame about the fountains.” “Still, keeps the rain off.”
It didn’t happen, of course. We got Nelson instead. And he’s splendid. But once you’ve imagined a Great Pyramid in Trafalgar Square, you never quite unsee it. A chunk of eternity dropped into the everyday. A reminder that London, at its most ambitious, has always been just a little bit mad.
And thank goodness for that.
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.