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 Tuesday, January 14th, 2026.
And here it is.
Here’s your daily London fix.
The Division Bell
Listen.
That sound is Big Ben.
Yes, it’s the time.
And in Mrs Dalloway, that matters utterly.
Virginia Woolf originally intended to call the novel The Hours.
She dropped the title, but she never dropped the idea.
The book is built out of time passing. One London day.
Hour by hour.
Toll by toll.
So when Big Ben strikes,
the novel doesn’t just mark time.
It advances.
And Woolf gives us that line again and again.
Almost a refrain.
“Out it boomed. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.”
Time made audible.
Then dissolving.
Now, where are we standing? Ok, I want you to imagine where we’re standing at the start of my Mrs Dalloway’s London walk.
We’re standing just outside Exit 4 of Westminster Underground Station. Right there. Right here.
On Bridge Street.
Directly across the street from Big Ben.
From the Queen Elizabeth Tower itself.
We can see it and hear it.
Stone, clock face, authority, time made visible.
Mrs Dalloway,
when she hears Big Ben strike ten o’clock at the beginning of the novel, is standing somewhere else entirely.
She’s on a kerb on Victoria Street, immediately west of the great west front of Westminster Abbey.
A couple of hundred yards west of us. From there, she would hear Big Ben clearly enough.
London carries sound.
But she would be much less certain of seeing it, if she could see it at all.
That difference matters.
Clarissa experiences Big Ben primarily as sound.
As time moving through the air. Through her thoughts.
We experience it as sound and sight together.
Time you can hear and time you can look at.
And in the novel,
Big Ben does not issue instructions.
It does not summon.
It does not command.
It works on the mind, not the body.
Each strike loosens a memory,
adjusts a mood,
shifts the inner weather of a character. The hour turns.
Thoughts turn with it.
Ten o’clock means ten o’clock.
Time advances.
Life moves on.
The Hours, indeed.
Only after the leaden circles dissolve in the air do we move.
We turn from the tower, stay on this side of Bridge Street, and step straight into St Stephen’s Tavern.
And what we come to see in here is not Big Ben at all.
This is something entirely different.
This is a Division Bell.
If Big Ben measures time,
the Division Bell claims it.
If Big Ben keeps the hours,
the Division Bell interrupts them.
If Big Ben works inward,
the Division Bell works outward.
Clarissa’s husband, Richard Dalloway, is a Member of Parliament.
He walks from his house to Westminster.
Clarissa stays behind, thinking, remembering, arranging her party. Richard enters the machinery of the state.
And because the Dalloways lived within roughly half a mile of the House of Commons, their house would almost certainly have been fitted with one of these.
A Division Bell.
When the Speaker calls a division,
the House divides.
Literally.
Members leave the chamber and walk through one of two lobbies.
Aye or No.
For or against.
They are counted.
Their names are recorded.
Democracy is done on foot.
Once a division is called,
MPs have eight minutes to get back to the House of Commons.
Eight minutes.
So Parliament devised a system.
From the mid-19th century onwards,
a network of Division Bells was installed.
Not modern mains electricity.
This is the world of the telegraph. Low-voltage electrical signalling. Battery-powered.
Perfectly adequate for ringing bells.
When a division was called,
a switch completed the circuit and the bells rang simultaneously.
Inside the Palace of Westminster.
And beyond it.
In MPs’ houses. In clubs.
And in nearby pubs.
St Stephen’s Tavern is one of the great survivors.
And it’s important to be absolutely clear about the choreography.
Nobody ever came into this pub because the Division Bell rang.
They left because it rang.
An MP might be here mid-drink,
mid-meal, mid-conversation.
And suddenly the bell sounds.
Sharp. Unmistakable. No poetry.
No metaphor.
Glasses down. Hats on. Out the door. Across the street. Into the lobbies.
Clarissa, back at the house,
might hear that bell too.
A jolt in the domestic day.
A reminder that her husband belongs, in part, to something larger than their marriage.
Public duty cutting across private life.
At its height, there were about a dozen external Division Bells scattered through this neighbourhood.
A small ring of parliamentary authority encircling Westminster.
Today, MPs carry phones.
Alerts buzz.
The bells are largely redundant.
But this one remains.
Still wired. Still capable of ringing.
A physical remnant of a London where time spoke in one voice and duty in another.
Big Ben keeps the hours for everyone.
The Division Bell keeps time only for Richard Dalloway.
Two bells.
Two kinds of time.
One city.
And standing here,
you can still hear the difference.
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 a former Member of Parliament, three terms at Westminster, bringing first-hand experience of power, policy and political theatre to the very streets where it all played out.
It includes two barristers, three doctors, two geologists, a distinguished museum curator and a former Time out Editor.
It includes authors, historians, national journalists, a former London Museum archaeologist, and university professors (one of them an eminent Cambridge University paleontologist).
It includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre actors, and two professional photographers. And last but not least, the creme de la creme of top flight professionally qualified Blue Badge Guides, including 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 here’s the clincher. We’re playing at home.
London Walks is London-based. Period.
We’re not an impersonal, faceless platform run from halfway round the world. There’s no chatbot. No call-centre script. When you contact us, you reach a real person. A Londoner. Someone who actually knows the streets you’re about to walk.
That’s not a detail. That’s the difference.
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.