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, November 18th, 2025.
And here it comes,
here’s your daily London fix.
This one’s date specific.
Today’s date – November 18th.
It’s one of those dates, November 18th.
A red letter day.
One of those rare dates
that seems to come with its own
twenty one gun salute.
And let’s put a year to it – 1852. November 18, 1852,
the morning London wakes up knowing it is about to witness something vast, ceremonial, unforgettable.
There’s a tremor of expectation in the air, the kind you feel before a great curtain goes up.
Because this is the day of the Duke of Wellington’s state funeral…
and London is bracing.
The streets have that odd, silvery hush, as if even the horse chestnuts along the Mall are standing to attention.
But before we join the procession,
we need the man.
Arthur Wellesley.
Dublin born in 1769,
a boy so forgettable his own mother thought him destined for nothing.
A quiet, awkward lad
on the fringes of Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Not a prodigy. Not a spark.
Just a drifting, slightly melancholy boy who played the violin
and seemed unlikely ever to do anything that would make the world lean forward.
Until he joined the army.
And something,
somewhere between India and Flanders, clicked.
Unlike Napoleon, who was trained as an artillery officer with a head full
of geometry and ballistics,
Wellington learned his craft on horseback,
boots muddy, eyes sharp.
Supply lines, discipline, timing, terrain. His military genius wasn’t flamboyant.
It was precise. Cool-headed.
He saw battlefields
the way a conductor sees a score.
Not noise, but structure.
He grew into the lean, long-faced, slightly hawkish man we see in portraits. Controlled to an almost icy degree. Sharp, dry, occasionally short tempered. Fiercely dutiful. Intensely methodical. He could ride up to a ridge,
glance at the lay of land,
and know exactly where
the French would crack.
And yes, he shared a mistress with Napoleon.
Giuseppina Grassini.
The Italian contralto
with a voice that made Europe swoon. Bonaparte had her first. Wellington later. And Grassini,
with operatic insouciance,
gave us
one of history’s great side comments: “the Englishman had more staying power.” Which is wickedly funny, not least because Wellington
wasn’t English at all. Irish born and bred. But let’s never let facts spoil a good epigram.
Then Waterloo.
Napoleon the artillery mathematician. Wellington the terrain whisperer.
Two men who never met face to face
but collided across smoke, mud,
cavalry charges and cannon fire. Waterloo wasn’t merely a battle.
It was a hinge. Europe swung on it.
And Wellington, improbably,
decisively, won.
He came home a hero. A giant.
The man who stopped Napoleon.
But, as happens,
civilian life proved trickier.
He became prime minister and
promptly made himself unpopular
by opposing the Great Reform Bill. London rioted.
Crowds gathered at Apsley House,
his palatial home at Hyde Park Corner. They hurled stones, smashed windows, and made their feelings abundantly clear.
So the Duke installed iron shutters.
Londoners, masters of satire,
pounced immediately.
The Iron Duke they called him.
Not for his battlefield steely resolve.
For the shutters. Iron shutters, Iron Duke. A joke that stuck to him
like a label on a travelling trunk.
Now back to the morning of
November 18th, 1852.
The city is packed.
More than a million people
line the route.
Think of that.
A million bodies in a pre Tube,
pre microphone, pre loudspeaker city. From the Strand to Ludgate Hill the pavements are so dense
you could walk across the crowd
without touching the ground.
The funeral car appears.
A gothic titan of a thing,
all cast iron and carved wood,
hauled by six immense black horses whose hooves
send vibrations through the streets. Soldiers in full dress.
Old Peninsular veterans
leaning on sticks.
Foreign envoys
glittering with braid.
MPs in sombre black.
The royal family.
It is less a procession
than a national self portrait.
And the whole immense column
moves towards St Paul’s.
Inside the cathedral,
the air is thick with grandeur.
Medals gleam.
Feathers tremble.
Sabres ring softly
as men shift their weight.
The coffin is carried
beneath the great dome
and lowered into the crypt,
placed
in a monumental black sarcophagus
that looks as though it has grown
from the very rock.
There he remains.
Opposite Nelson.
Two national giants.
One who commanded the seas,
the other who commanded the earth.
What of the man’s private life?
Married to Kitty Pakenham.
A tender but
sometimes strained marriage.
Wellington was dutiful, not romantic. Reserved, not demonstrative.
But he cared for his sons.
Beneath the frost there was warmth, though it didn’t come easily.
He ate simply.
Dressed impeccably.
Hated fuss.
Trusted few.
Loved order.
He was occasionally irascible,
but almost never irrational.
He died at Walmer Castle
on September 14th, 1852.
Died of a stroke.
Old age.
Decline.
A quiet ending for a man who once
held the fate of Europe in his palm.
Walk through London and you find him everywhere.
The equestrian statue at
Hyde Park Corner.
The Wellington Arch.
The statue by the Royal Exchange. Apsley House,
Number One London,
still filled with portraits, uniforms, silver, and that unmistakable profile.
Streets, barracks, pubs, rail stations,
even boots bearing his name.
The man has become topography.
And the Wellesleys? Still around.
The dukedom survived.
The line continues.
So picture that red letter morning
once more.
A million Londoners
holding their breath.
Horses stamping. Drums thudding.
A cathedral swallowing a giant.
The takeaway?
Some men leave legacies.
Wellington left a landscape.
A shape across the city that still echoes
every time November 18th rolls round with its twenty one gun salute in tow.
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.