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 Friday, August 15th, 2025.
First call. The London Calling Book Club Corner. David Gollancz on the chair again. This is his third book.
David says, “Always at my elbow: London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew. A unique survey of London in the mid-19th century, through the lives and in the words of every kind of poorer people: East End Jewish peddlers, teenage crossing-sweepers in the City and West End, women traders in the markets. Mayhew and his agents interviewed hundreds of people and reported them verbatim, which brings the people and society of the time to vivid life. A rich source for my Gamechangers tour.”
Mayhew’s such an interesting character. He did what nobody else would have dreamed of doing. When the great unwashed came into view he didn’t avert his eyes and walk by them. He stopped and talked to them. Got to know them. Found out about them. How they lived, where they came from. What they made of the world. What their London was like. So consider this a marker. A Henry Mayhew podcast is in the making.
Today though we’re going to drill down a whole lot deeper. If we were a deep diver and we were doing Mayhew we’d probably stop at 1849. Look around. Gather up some stuff. And head back up to the surface, head back up to August 15th, 2025. But no, we’re going way deeper than 1849. We’re going down to 1775. This day – August 15th – in 1775. Something happened in London on August 15th, 1775 that was important. But it’s one of those hidden in plain sight numbers. Nobody today – bar one or two narrowly focused historians – has the foggiest about what went down, here in London, exactly 250 years ago today.
And the reason nobody sees this is they can’t take their eyes off the Everest of that day and age: what happened on July 4th, 1776.
But you know something, what went down today, just 11 months earlier, it’s part of the same mountain range. Part of the Himalayas that lead inexorably to the Everest of July 4, 1776, lead inexorably to the world changing American Declaration of Independence. If July 4th, 1776 is Mount Everest, August 15, 1775 is Lhotse. And that’s right Lhotse not well known at all, even though it’s the fourth highest mountain. But it deserves to be known. So we’re going to climb it today.
Boots, crampons, ice axe, helmet, harness, rope, carabiners, gloves, sunglasses ready? We’ve got some climbing to do.
And here the metaphor gets a bit wonky. Because it’s London in mid-August, 1775. The place is a bit drowsy in the high summer heat. Coaches are trundling along Cheapside. There’s dust in the air on the Strand. London’s got its usual horsy smell. Down on the river barges are slumbering at their moorings. It’s the dog days of summer. And London’s trimmed for them. Parliament’s not sitting. The grandees have to their country seats. Or to Bath to take the waters. Or to Brighton to try out that newfangled “sea bathing” crazy.
Yes. Dog days. But under that summer torpor, London’s sitting on a powder keg.
Why? Because over in the American colonies, muskets have fired at Lexington and Concord. King George’s redcoats have had their first taste of what’s coming — and they didn’t much like it. The colonists? Well, they’ve got the smell of gunpowder in their noses and the bit between their teeth.
And back here – today, the 15th of August – is a turning point. A hinge of history. Word is filtering in — by ship, by dispatch rider — that the rebellion isn’t just a local dust-up. It’s spreading like spilled ink across a map.
And here’s the kicker: on this date, in Whitehall, the royal mind is made up. The King’s ministers — in all their periwigged certainty — agree that the colonies aren’t just “restless.” They are, and I quote, “engaged in open and avowed rebellion.” The paperwork for the Royal Proclamation of Rebellion is moving along the corridors. Within days, it will be signed and posted. And then in due course, nailed to doors from Boston to Charleston.
As for the mood in London? It’s split right down the middle.
You put into a coffee house in Fleet Street on August 15th, 1775 you’l hear Ithe arguments in full flow. At one table: City merchants, faces grim, worried about their investments. “You shut down colonial trade, gentlemen, you cut your own throats,” one says, slapping his palm on the table for emphasis. Over by the window: Whig sympathisers, muttering about “taxation without representation” and “damned fools in Westminster.” And in the corner: loyalists, puffing on pipes, declaring the colonists a pack of ingrates who need to be brought to heel.
Now, let’s remember — this is London in the Age of Coffee Houses. The Starbucks of the 18th century, except instead of frappuccinos you’ve got small, bitter cups of coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in, and instead of Wi-Fi you’ve got gossip, pamphlets, and the latest news off the post chaise from Dover. Coffee houses are the social media of their day, the echo chambers, the public square. On August 15, they’re buzzing.
And outside? Well, the city’s still the city. If you strolled down to Covent Garden, the apple sellers would be hawking their wares, the flower girls calling out their blooms, the pickpockets eyeing the pockets of distracted gents. The theatres are gearing up for the autumn season — Sheridan’s The Rivals has been the talk of the town earlier in the year. Garrick is still the name to conjure with at Drury Lane.
And what about August 15 specifically? Bears repeating, this is the hinge moment — the calm before Westminster makes it official: our colonies are in rebellion, and we will put them down.
Picture this: at the Tower of London, the Yeoman Warders go about their routines — guiding the occasional visitor, guarding the regalia, maintaining the ancient rhythms. Little do they know the Tower will soon be storing muskets and powder for the war effort. Along the river, shipwrights at Deptford are hammering away on new naval vessels — the lifeline that will carry troops across the Atlantic.
But here’s what always gets me when I touch down in 1775. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the distance between London and Boston isn’t just measured in miles — it’s measured in weeks. A message takes six, sometimes eight weeks to get across the Atlantic. So while Londoners are talking on August 15 about the skirmishes in April, the reality in America has already moved on. The colonies are fortifying, arming, organising. By the time the Proclamation of Rebellion reaches them, they’ll have been in full-scale war for months. It’s like trying to play chess by correspondence when your opponent moves three times before you even get their first letter.
And the personalities! George III — often painted as a tyrant by the Americans — is in Windsor this summer, hunting, reading dispatches, and firmly convinced he’s defending the constitutional order. Across the city, radical MPs like Charles James Fox are sharpening their tongues, ready to lambast the government when Parliament reconvenes.
By nightfall on August 15, the taverns are full, the lamps are lit along the Strand, and the Thames smells of low tide. The city’s heartbeat is steady, but history’s drum is quickening. Nobody knows yet that this colonial war will drag on for eight bloody years, that France will join in, that the map of the world will tilt. Nobody knows that within a generation, those same coffee houses will be buzzing with talk of revolution in France.
But on this day, here in London, August 15, 1775, you can feel it — the air thick with argument, commerce still churning, culture still blooming… and just beneath it all, the low rumble of an empire shifting in its seat, not yet realising the ground under it is starting to give way.
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.