London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good day to you London Walkers.
Wherever you are.
It’s Sunday, December 28th, 2025.
And sure enough, here it is, your daily London fix.
And, yes, it’s another dose of
counterfactual history? Trafalgar Square as it might have been.
And you can take it from me, this one’s a corker.
So Strap in.
Picture the scene. Trafalgar Square. Pigeons with opinions.
Buses wheezing past.
The National Gallery doing its level best to look Italian without actually being Italian.
St Martin-in-the-Fields standing there like a well-bred Anglican who’s wandered into the wrong party.
South Africa House. Canada House. Whitehall opening out like a ceremonial runway towards Parliament.
And plonked right in the middle of it all: the Acropolis.
Not a hint of it. Not a nod.
Not a “classically inspired” colonnade. An exact replica.
The whole rocky shebang. Parthenon, Erechtheion, Caryatids, the lot.
And, because this is Trafalgar Square and we can’t help ourselves,
a statue of Admiral Lord Nelson perched proudly on top.
It’s so mad it almost makes sense.
Let’s run the numbers.
Because once you start doing that, the idea goes from charmingly eccentric to magnificently unhinged.
Trafalgar Square measures roughly 110 metres north to south and
about 100 metres east to west.
Call it 11,000 square metres, give or take a fountain.
The Acropolis plateau in Athens is about 270 metres long and
150 metres wide.
That’s around 40,000 square metres. Nearly four times the footprint of Trafalgar Square.
In other words,
the Acropolis doesn’t fit.
Not even close.
It wouldn’t sit politely between the fountains. It would sprawl.
It would bully. It would loom.
It would eat the square for breakfast and still be asking what’s for pudding.
The Parthenon alone is about
69.5 metres long and
30.9 metres wide.
That sounds manageable until you remember it sits on a stepped base, on a hill,
with space to breathe all round it. Drop that into Trafalgar Square and suddenly the National Gallery looks like a supporting act.
St Martin-in-the-Fields would be dwarfed,
its elegant spire reduced to the architectural equivalent of clearing your throat.
Now add height.
The Acropolis rises about
150 metres above sea level in Athens.
Trafalgar Square sits roughly 25 metres above sea level.
To make this work properly,
you’d need to build an artificial rock rising the height of a 40 or 50 storey building in the middle of central London.
Think less “monument” and more “urban geology experiment”.
And then, because we’re British and incapable of stopping once we’ve started, we put Nelson on top.
Nelson already looks faintly absurd where he is.
Let’s be honest.
A one-eyed, one-armed admiral balanced on a Corinthian column like a decorative finial.
It’s heroic, yes. It’s iconic, yes.
It’s also a bit… phallic.
Always has been.
Londoners have just learned not to stare.
Now imagine Nelson on the Acropolis.
Tiny by comparison.
A maritime demigod standing on a Greek sacred rock, gazing down Whitehall as if daring Pericles to have a go.
The symbolism alone would have caused diplomatic nosebleeds across Europe.
Would it have been admired?
Oh, absolutely.
For about five minutes.
The Victorians would have marvelled at the engineering.
Punch would have had a field day. French cartoonists would have sharpened their pencils and never put them down again.
Berlin would have laughed.
Rome would have sniffed.
Athens would have choked on its coffee.
And then there’s the small matter of the Parthenon Marbles.
Things are already,
shall we say,
a bit tense on that front.
Imagine the scene.
Britain announces,
with a straight face,
that it’s building a perfect replica of the Acropolis in Trafalgar Square.
A noble tribute to civilisation.
Art. Democracy. Western values. And then someone pipes up:
well, if we’re being artistically authentic,
shouldn’t the marbles go on the British Parthenon?
You can hear the collective intake of breath from here.
It would have been the most spectacular own goal in cultural diplomacy history.
An act of such jaw-dropping chutzpah that it might actually have looped back round into genius.
Or madness. Or both.
But here’s the thing.
There is something wonderfully, unmistakably British about the idea.
This is a country that put an Egyptian obelisk on the Thames Embankment and called it Cleopatra’s Needle. A country that filled stately homes with fake ruins.
A country that built Gothic follies, Roman baths, Chinese pagodas and mock medieval castles
because someone thought they’d look nice after lunch.
The Acropolis in Trafalgar Square is that instinct turned up to eleven.
It’s not dull.
It’s not predictable.
It’s splendidly demented.
And imagine the view.
Standing outside the National Gallery,
you look up and there it is.
Pentelic marble gleaming through London drizzle.
Columns catching the weak winter sun.
Nelson silhouetted against the sky. You turn, and there’s Whitehall rolling away towards Parliament,
the British state quite literally under the gaze of ancient Athens.
Would it have worked?
Almost certainly not.
Would Britain have been the laughing stock of Europe?
Without question.
Would it have been magnificent? Undeniably.
And that’s the joy of these Trafalgar Square what-ifs.
They remind us that London was once a place where people seriously proposed doing utterly bonkers things,
wrote them down,
debated them,
and occasionally nearly went through with them.
A British Acropolis.
In Trafalgar Square.
With Nelson on top.
Mad as a box of Parthenon friezes. And all the better for it.
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.