London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good morning to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Sunday, September 7th, 2025.
As always, first off the mark, the London Calling Book Club Corner. Going to add a new strand to it today. I thought, the Book Club Corner is chaired by London Walks guides. Telling us about what they’re reading. How about if we get them to tell us about their favourite London book.
And to get this new venture underway, all-star guide, Adam.
Here’s Adam.
[Adam voicer follows]
Thanks Adam. Couldn’t agree more with you about Len Deighton. He can really do the business with that pen of his.
Ok, moving on. Main course.
This one’s a little different. Think of it as a letter. A letter to the walkers who are gathering today, Sunday, at Hadley Wood Station. Yesterday was the baptism – the very first time The Ultimate London Walk set off. We did the opening stages, the first two walks in what will be a 14-stage journey across London, spliced together over the weeks ahead. Today is a repeat of yesterday’s performance, a second bite at the cherry. For you, today’s walkers, it’s the start of the great adventure. For Charlie, it’s déjà vu – he was there yesterday, guiding the very first steps.
So – picture it. You step out of Hadley Wood Station. Four things hit you in quick succession. Like the opening shots of a film.
First thing. Straight across the road: forest. A dense hillside of green, a solid wall of it. And set into that hillside – like features on a green giant’s face – two dark mouths. Railway tunnels. One devours trains racing into London. The other spits them back out again. They roar through with purpose. With inevitability.
And it’s perfect, isn’t it? Because today’s walk is a countryside walk. A nature walk. A walk in the woods. But also meadows and fields and streams and ponds. Not forgetting the tithe barn and the duck house. Nature’s curtain goes up before you’ve even taken ten steps.
Second thing. Directly across the street from where Charlie and Ann will be gathering the troops, there’s a sign. It says Enfield. And underneath the name – the beast. Not the full coat of arms, no stag, no motto, none of that heraldic frippery. Just the beastie. The Enfield beast.
Now, the name Enfield is old. Shows up in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Enefelde. Most likely means “Ægen’s open land” – from an Old English personal name plus feld, meaning open country. Nothing mythical about it. Just, “that’s Ægen’s patch of countryside.”
But heralds – medieval spin doctors – couldn’t resist. They loved their picture puns, their canting arms. So when they came to design Enfield’s emblem, they invented a creature no one had ever seen before. Head of a fox. Talons of an eagle. Chest of a hound. Body of a lion. Hindquarters and tail of a wolf. A mash-up, a fantasy beast stitched together from half the bestiary. The Enfield beast.
So the name came first, the beast came later. But over time the beastie stuck. It became the visual shorthand for the borough. And there it is, glaring down at you in crimson silhouette – claws out, beak ready, tail lashing. A medieval in-joke turned civic logo. A beastie that says: “You’ve arrived. You’re in Enfield now.”
Third thing. Look to your right. Limes. That’s the café. Established in 1936 – the very year Sir Nigel Gresley was knighted, as it happens. And what a sight. Deep green frontage with gold lettering. Handsome. Inviting. And lime – the greenest of fruits – couldn’t be more apt. Because today’s walk? It’s green, green, green everywhere. Woods and fields and meadows and water. Limes the café is your colour-coded overture.
And it’s not just looks. Limes has the outside tables for a sunny morning, the loo the station doesn’t supply, and breakfasts worth arriving early for. A Full English if you want marching power. Or scrambled eggs with salmon and mushrooms on toast if you want to be nimble. Yesterday I thought: “Next time, I’ll be in here half an hour before the off, fuelling up, watching those trains flash in and out of the tunnels.” It’s that kind of place.
Fourth thing. Just to your left as you come out of the station, fixed onto the wall, is a display case. Quiet. Easy to miss. But it tells you that here, in Hadley Wood, lived a man whose name is written in steam and steel. Sir Nigel Gresley. The railway engineer behind the Flying Scotsman. The genius who gave us Mallard, still the fastest steam locomotive ever built. One hundred and twenty-six miles an hour. On rails. With steam. In 1938. And that record still stands.
Now – let’s hang with Sir Nigel for a moment. Born Edinburgh, 1876. Apprenticed at Crewe. By 1911, Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Great Northern Railway. Then the 1923 Grouping arrives, and he’s top man at the London and North Eastern Railway – the LNER. His great canvas.
And what did he paint on it? Locomotives that weren’t just machines, they were sculpture. The Flying Scotsman, the first authenticated 100-mile-an-hour train. The A4 Pacifics – streamlined, futuristic, beautiful. Mallard, the record-setter. July 1938, Lincolnshire. A record that hasn’t been broken.
He was knighted in 1936, the year Limes opened its doors. He was also, by all accounts, a gentle man. Loved wildlife. Kept a pet goose that followed him around. (When they raised his statue at King’s Cross there was a row about whether the goose should be included. It wasn’t. But the goose lives on in the stories.) He died in 1941, in wartime, but his legacy? Still steaming. Still alive. Poetry in steel.
And here’s the symmetry: you start today at Hadley Wood with a plaque to Sir Nigel. You end the day back in central London, King’s Cross, where his statue stands. Bookends. Beginning and end.
So there you are. Four things outside Hadley Wood Station. A forest. A beastie born of a name. Limes the café, green and gold, breakfasts worth their weight in sausages. And a quiet plaque to a giant of engineering.
And the bonus today? Unlike yesterday, you’re getting not just Charlie but Dr Ann as well. Two guides for the price of one. A world-class double act. Charlie, as you know, is top drawer. And Dr Ann – well, some Doctor. A distinguished career at University College London Medical School. Lives locally. Years of first-hand, lived experience in these parts. The two of them together? Think of a world-class tag-team wrestling pair. Except – and here’s the important bit – they’re the real deal. No fake showbiz hoopla. Just knowledge, charm, wit, insight. The genuine article.
That’s what awaits you today. And that’s the curtain-raiser. Now – shall we walk?
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.