London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Good morning, London. And Good Whatever – good morning, good afternoon, good evening – to the rest of the world. And to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Friday, October 3rd, 2025.
And off we go. Off we go to October 3rd, 1956. Off we go to London. To Bow Street. To Covent Garden. To the Royal Opera House.
Ok, that’s the time and place. Here’s what went down.
They came with eighty tons of scenery.
Eighty tons! Think about that for a second. It’s October 1956. Britain is still ration-scarred, still half in the grey austerity of post-war life. We’ve only just got beyond powdered egg.
And into this land of Spam and smog roar the Russians – the Bolshoi Ballet – hauling more tonnage of sets and costumes into Covent Garden than this country had sent for for the entire Festival of Britain.
Eighty tons. For a month’s dancing. Swan Lake and Giselle weighed down with enough lumber and velvet to rebuild Westminster Abbey.
And that’s just the cargo. What about the cargo of expectation, of politics, of sheer Cold War drama? Because you can’t talk about the Bolshoi in London without hearing the rumble of tanks in the background. October 1956: the Soviet Union’s dancers take the stage in Covent Garden on the 3rd… and on the 23rd, Soviet tanks roll into Budapest. Swan Lake at Covent Garden, gunfire in Hungary.
Now tell me that’s not theatre.
So picture it. Wet pavements, Bow Street gleaming under the lamps. The queue curls round the Opera House like a serpent. They’ve been camping for days. Literally. Sleeping bags, blankets, sandwiches. They want tickets — there are 53,000 seats in total across the whole run and the demand is double that. The papers report pensioners and clerks sleeping rough for ballet. For ballet! Not even the Cup Final can boast this kind of devotion.
And backstage? Oh, the comedy of logistics. The Bolshoi had sent men months in advance to measure Covent Garden. And what did they find? Our stage was a doll’s house compared to theirs. In Moscow, the Bolshoi Theatre’s proscenium is nearly seventy feet wide, the stage runs back 128 feet. At Covent Garden? Forty-two feet wide, fifty-six deep. Half the size. No wonder they’d shipped eighty tons of scenery – and then had to saw it down, rejig it, wedge it in. Imagine cramming an elephant into a Mini and still expecting it to dance. That was the backstage reality.
And then front of house: chandeliers blazing, the great and the good in their boxes. Prime Minister Anthony Eden, his wife Clarissa. Dame Margot Fonteyn in the stalls. Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh. It’s the hottest ticket in town, possibly in the world.
The curtain rises. And London gasps. Because this isn’t dainty, polite English ballet. This is something else entirely. If Sadler’s Wells is cucumber sandwiches, this is vodka shots slammed on the table. The leaps are higher, the arms wider, the drama more ferocious. Swan Lake isn’t just danced, it’s attacked. The corps de ballet doesn’t look like twenty women in tutus; it looks like a wave, a force of nature.
And the stars. Maya Plisetskaya – arms like wings, so fluid you’d swear she was about to take flight. And Galina Ulanova, the grande dame. At rehearsal she looked grandmotherly, in her cardigan, shuffling across the stage, whispering to the conductor. You’d think she was somebody’s retired aunt. And then – she started. And in a heartbeat she wasn’t Ulanova the pensioner, she was Juliet, 14 years old, radiant, headlong in love. Antoinette Sibley, watching from the stalls, said: “I’ve never forgotten it.” That was Ulanova’s genius – transformation. Ordinary woman one moment, legend the next.
And then that ending. Forty-five minutes of applause. Forty-five. Think of it. The opera house echoing with cheers until the ushers begged people to go home. Londoners had never seen anything like it.
But here’s the rub. This was not just a troupe of dancers on holiday. This was Moscow’s finest export, the velvet glove of Soviet diplomacy. And in the wings, KGB minders. Every dancer shadowed. No slipping out to the pub after rehearsal. No sightseeing bus trips round Westminster. If they saw London at all, it was through the window of a coach, with a “cultural attaché” breathing down their neck. Defection was the fear – defection was always the fear. Every smile, every bow on stage, had a shadow standing just behind it.
And it nearly didn’t happen. British newspapers at the time wondered whether the Kremlin would cancel the visit altogether. The Hungarian situation was simmering already. By the time the company had unpacked its trunks, Budapest was crackling. Strikes, leaflets, protests. Then the eruption on October 23rd. The Hungarian Uprising. Crowds tearing down Stalin’s statue. Soviet tanks rolling back in. And here in London? The Bolshoi still pirouetting onstage. It was surreal. In the stalls, you’d clap until your palms hurt, and then the next morning you’d open your paper and see the photographs: Hungarian youths with Molotov cocktails, Soviet tanks smashing their city to rubble. Swan Lake and blood in the streets, side by side.
That’s the paradox of October 1956. The Kremlin showed us their bright face – the silk, the sequins, the peerless grace of their dancers. And behind it: the clenched fist.
Still – let’s not forget the artistic earthquake. British ballet was never the same again. John Cranko sat in that audience and went away changed. Kenneth MacMillan would never choreograph the same way. The Bolshoi raised the stakes: suddenly, male dancers had to leap higher, lifts had to be more daring, storytelling more visceral. Peter Wright’s Giselle, MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet – both carry the fingerprints of the Bolshoi season. Even Dame Ninette de Valois, who built British ballet, admitted the Russians had shifted the balance.
And for Londoners – oh, the glamour of it. The whispers about “26 blonde spies” when their plane was diverted to a military base. The hush in rehearsals as Ulanova transformed from cardiganed matron to Juliet before your very eyes. The sight of Margot Fonteyn slipping into the stalls to watch her rivals, taking notes. The drama of that queue in Bow Street, three days in the rain for a ticket. And above all – that applause that wouldn’t end, echoing through Covent Garden like a storm.
And the story didn’t vanish into the night. British filmmakers were there with their cameras. The 1957 film The Bolshoi Ballet captured that Covent Garden season – in Eastmancolor no less. So the memory of those nights didn’t just linger in Londoners’ hearts; it was preserved on celluloid, the Russians frozen forever in a London autumn, leaping across a stage half the size of their own but filling it as if it were Red Square itself.
They brought eighty tons of scenery, but what they left behind weighed more. Influence. Memory. Celluloid. A night London still talks about seventy years later. For three weeks we had the Bolshoi – Swan Lake in Covent Garden, tanks in Budapest — and the whole world knew: this wasn’t just ballet, it was history en pointe.
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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.