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 Saturday, September 20th, 2025.
We’ll check in first at the London Calling Book Club Corner. In the Chair today, Sam. My private nickname for Sam – well, it was private until this moment – my private nickname for Sam is Perfect Ten. A throwback to the way judges used to score artistic gymnastics performances. A row of tens on those judge’s cards, that was absolute perfection. And that’s what Sam’s reviews are – every single one of them – tens of ten out of tens. And thus a nickname came into being: Perfect Ten. And look, I’ve got Sam in the Chair today – and I’m not making any bones about this – because of Secret London Gardens – The Four Seasons, his new four hander series of walks that gets underway on September 30th.
Anyway, Sam gives a ten to Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel, Caledonian Road.
A London novel par excellence, Caledonian Road is, Sam tells us, a belter, a feast between covers. Particularly for anyone who wants to get a feel for, get a purchase on today’s London – what this place is all about in the third decade of the 21st . It ranges across and explores, life, social tensions and different groups in our town. Well written, it takes us on a fascinating journey in the company of memorable, masterfully drawn characters right across the spectrum of London’s social panorama. From professors to old ladies in social housing to home counties aristocrats and Russian oligarchs. And for good measure gangs and the London underworld. All in and around North London.”
Thanks for that, Sam. Sounds a corker.
Ok, moving on.
Put a candle in the window. It’s Saturday, September 21st in London Town.
London Town in 1777. So, yes, we’ve done some time traveling. And ‘put a candle in the window’ gets it right. It’s what September 20th, 1777 feels like. Because it’s the day Samuel Johnson lit a kind of everlasting candle for London.
It was this day, 248 years ago, that the great littérateur uttered the immortal words ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.’
It’s the most telling, the most famous remark ever made about London. You can get the measure of it by putting other famous London sayings up on the catwalk next to it.
Shelley’s remark, for example, “Hell is a city much like London — a populous and smoky city.”
Or William Dunbar’s “London, thou art the flower of cities all.” Or Benjamin Disraeli’s “London is a roost for every bird.”
Or Hilaire Belloc’s “Oh, London is the place for me! A little bit of London goes a long way.”
All very well in their own right. But none of them can – forgive the expression – hold a candle to “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.’
They’re not in the same league.
Now, hand on heart here, personal confession: until today, for me, Dr Johnson’s famous utterance was free floating. I knew it of course. Everybody knows it. I knew who said it. Dr Johnson. I knew who he said it to, James Boswell, his young Scottish acolyte and eventual biographer. The Sancho Panza to the great man’s Don Quixote. And I knew that Dr Johnson was in London when he lit that everlasting candle for London. But that was it. That was all I knew.
But now I’ve got a date – September 20th, 1777. Which from here on out makes this day in September – September 20th – ‘put a candle in the window’ day.
Because – don’t you see – we can now background that famous utterance. Anchor it. Bring it home. Knowing that it was this day in 1777 – it was also a Saturday, I’m pleased to note – knowing that Dr Johnson said those words on Saturday, September 20th, 1777, we can now supply the forms of things unknown…we can turn them to shapes…we can give to airy nothing a local habitation and a shape. We can put a candle in the window.
So here goes. What was London like on the day Dr Johnson lit the everlasting candle for London? And in particular, what was Dr Johnson’s London like? We don’t know for sure where the great man and his young sidekick were when their conversation took the turn it took. But we can make an educated guess.
Let’s place them – Johnson and Boswell – somewhere that rings true. Johnson was living at 8 Bolt Court, just off Fleet Street. He’d moved in the year before, and Bolt Court was exactly his kind of place: narrow, tucked away, a little dark, a little shabby, but within a minute’s walk of the intellectual aorta of London.
Step out of Bolt Court and you’re in Fleet Street – lined with taverns, coffee houses, printing shops, and law offices. The air smells of ink and roasting coffee and horse dung. Carriages rattle past, bells chime from St. Dunstan-in-the-West, apprentices shout. And just a short stroll away, you’ve got the Cheshire Cheese tavern – one of Johnson’s haunts – with its low ceilings and sawdust floors, serving beefsteaks and punch.
This is Johnson’s world: the courts and alleys and pubs where London’s news is born, the clubs where its talk is distilled, and the parlours where it is argued over until two in the morning. Johnson is a founding member of The Club – a constellation of wits that includes Edmund Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick (recently retired from the stage), and the odd upstart politician.
And London itself in 1777? A city of perhaps 750,000 souls, the biggest in Europe, a sprawl from Whitechapel to Westminster, still mostly low-rise, smoky from thousands of coal fires. Lord North is Prime Minister, wearing a worried look as the American war rumbles on and British fortunes begin to falter. London’s coffeehouses are buzzing with talk of Saratoga, rebellion, the king’s speeches, stocks rising and falling, gossip from Covent Garden, and the latest scandal – perhaps William Dodd’s recent hanging at Tyburn for forgery, which Johnson himself had tried to prevent with a petition to the king.
Boswell confides that he fears London’s spell might fade if he lived here full time. And Johnson – poor, gout-ridden, widowed for 25 years, yet more alive to London than anyone – thunders back:
“No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
There it is – the line that turns a smoky court off Fleet Street into a shrine for every London-lover since. A line that’s part rebuke, part blessing, part rallying cry.
So yes – put a candle in the window. Every September 20th, let’s remember that moment. Remember Johnson and Boswell, animatedly talking in Bolt Court. Or out walking along Fleet Street. Or in a London tavern or club. There they are. And we’re there with them. We’re eavesdropping. Catching snatches of their conversation. And then we hear those words. The first time anyone has heard them. Hear them coming from the man who first said them. Originated them. Talk about a frisson. Talk about looking at one another with a wild surmise. And being privy to that conversation, to those immortal words, well, it goes without saying that we remember the city that inspired that remark – the taverns, the clubs, the carriages and criers, the gossip and the grime – and remember the man who could see all of it, the whole bewildering higgledy-piggledy metropolis, and still say: this is life. This is London. You get tired of this place you’re in trouble. Because you’re tired of life.
And so the candle – the eternal flame – burns on. Every time someone quotes that line, they’re back there with Boswell and Johnson – back in that shadowed court off Fleet Street, where the air smells of ink and ale and the taverns are warm with talk. That candle still shines in every Londoner who loves this place, in every traveller who steps off a train or plane and feels the city rush to meet them.
And maybe that’s what we’re doing, you and I – every time we walk these streets, every time we duck into an alley or cross a square, we’re tending the flame. We’re part of the conversation still, nodding along with the old doctor.
“This is London,” he tells us. “This is life.”
And 248 years later, we’re still not tired. Not of London. Not of life.
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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 familiarand the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note… come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.