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 Wednesday, August 13th, 2025.
Our first port of call. As per usual, a quick stop at the London Walks Book Club Corner. This morning, well, curtain rises, centre-stage, here’s the newest star in the London Walks firmament. Luisa. She’s a doctor. And a distinguished medical journalist. And the platonic ideal of a great guide. Every Sunday she guides – to no end of acclaim, look at her reviews, oh ye of little faith – she guides to great acclaim her Death, Debauchery & Doctors in Soho walk. And happily for us – and for you – she’s putting the finishing touches on a couple of new walks. And the starting touches on a Christmas Special. Cue what she’s reading at the moment. Here’s Luisa.
“It’s 27 degrees outside so to keep cool I’m reading Christmas by Mark Connelly. There are thousands of Christmas books but this is a proper academic look at what he calls England’s greatest cultural export. It traces the evolution of modern Christmas, why it is a time of year for nostalgia and where all our traditions, including carols come from. I absolutely and unashamedly love Christmas. So this will be my first bit of research towards creating a Christmas-themed walk.”
Good on you, Luisa. Everything about that sounds perfect, the book, the walk, the guide. To put it in American, it’s a home run in the ninth inning of the World Series.
Ok, moving on. Today’s the 13th. But I haven’t escaped the gravitational pull of what happened on August 12th, 1827. So that’s what this one’s mainly about. But I can’t in good conscience pay no heed whatsoever to today’s date. So here’s a 13 soupçon for you. You’ll be thrilled to learn this. The irrational fear of the Number 13 is technically termed ‘triskaidephobia.” Hey, you never know. Might come in handy one day.
And how’s this for a smooth as silk transition to August 12th – August 12th, 1827 – the day the great visionary poet and consummate Londoner, William Blake breathed his last.
Where are we? We’re in a tiny room in a tiny court off the Strand. We know the exact address. It was 3 Fountain Court. Long gone now. But can pretty well pinpoint it. With the help of John Roque’s nearly 300-year-old map of Georgian London and William Faden’s 1813 map of Regency London. Fountain Court was a turning toward the river, off the Strand, 50 yards east or so of the Coal Hole Pub. In other words, just before you get to the Savoy Theatre.
You get the flavour of the neighbourhood – and indeed vivid hints of the history – by turning up the cards of the names of the neighbouring lanes and courts and alleys and businesses. Blake would have been under the spell of names like Dirty Lane and Timber Yard and Coral Court and Denmark Court and Stable Yard and MaryGold Court and Greyhound Tavern.
There in the room with him, at his deathbed, was his beloved wife, Catherine. Indeed, his last portrait – Blake of course was a great artist as well as an even greater poet – leave it to Blake to paint the ghost of a flea – Blake’s last portrait, sketched on his deathbed – was of his wife Catherine.
Blake had been seeing angels since he was four years old. And at the very end he was seeing one more angel – Catherine, his wife of nearly forty-five years. Sketching her face one last time, he said, ‘you have ever been an angel to me.’
But Catherine wasn’t just an angel to Blake, she was also Eve to his Adam. The two of them would regularly romp stark naked in their garden, playing at being Adam and Eve. Famously, they had an unexpected caller one day. Blake and Catherine were out in the garden and, yes, au naturel – reading Paradise Lost and play-acting the First Couple. Blake waved to the visitors and called out, “Come here! It’s only Adam and Eve, you know!”
But here’s the thing. Here’s the fun and quite splendid number – or if you prefer, date connection. Blake died on August 12th. According to the Talmud, Adam lived in Eden for a mere 12 hours before his expulsion with Eve.
Ok, let’s back up. Act V of Blake’s life. Let’s walk with him through the valley of the shadow of death. Two years previously he’d begun to have periodic bouts of ‘shivering fits’ and ‘ague.’ In the winter before his death he grew progressively weaker. Four months before he died his told a friend ‘I have been near the Gates of Death & have returned very weak & an Old Man feeble and tottering, but not in Spirit and Life, not in the Real Man, The Imagination, which Liveth for Ever.’
Blake’s liver was failing. He was jaundiced.
We have a precise account of his last hours. A friend said, “he died on Sunday Night at 6 O’clock in a most glorious manner. He said he was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ – Just before he died His Countenance became fair – His eyes brighten’d and He burst out in Singing of the things he Saw in Heaven.”
Another friend said, “I have been at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel.”
Ok, let’s do a wrap. Blake was a Londoner through and through. He was born in Broad Street in Soho. He was the third of seven kids. His father sold stockings. Blake sold nothing – ever – at least not in the usual way. From the get-go he was different. One day he saw God poke his head through a window. Blake was four years old at the time. When he was nine he saw a tree full of angels, ‘bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.’ You and I see leaves. Blake sees cherubim. That’s the gear he’s in. And let us not forget the regular chats Blake had with Milton, Dante and the Archangels.
Let’s cut to the chase. Why is Blake important.
Because he’s the one who saw through the brick and soot to the eternal. He took London—its grinding poverty, its cruelty, its splendour—and refracted it through a mind that could turn a sigh into blood, a tree into angels, a marriage carriage – which, yes, he called a hearse – into a vision of human bondage.
William Blake is a one-man reminder that art doesn’t have to please the crowd, that the best stuff often looks mad at the time, and that poetry can be as dangerous as any loaded musket. He’s the prophet in the city, wandering, wondering, taking notes for us all. He’s buried in Bunhill Fields, the cemetery for non-conformists. Great name, Bunhill. Can you hear it? Yeah, you got it. Bone Hill. Bone Hill Fields. So London, that.
If you wander over to Bunhill Fields – wander, yes, I’m choosing my words carefully – if you wander over to Bunhill Fields do bow your head for a moment. And be sure you whisper a line from London. And maybe – just maybe – listen for the angels in the trees.
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.