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 Saturday, September 13th, 2025.
And let’s tweak that intro ever so slightly. It’s London Calling from the South China Sea.
Fairly idyllic setting. Blue sea. A couple of sailboats. Golden sandy beach. And then the greenest of jungles. Lots of palm trees. But, like Shakespeare’s Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I’m putting “a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.” Faster than 40 minutes. A lot faster. Because I’m by the South China Sea. But at the same time I’m also in London. And in Utah. And in Mississippi, and New York City, and Boston and Oshkosh, Wisconsin. And the Driftless Hills of Southwestern Wisconsin. And Fort Sumter, South Carolina. The Driftless Hills being where I’m from and where my brother still lives. The other four – not Utah or Fort Sumter but the other four being where my best American pals lives. Needless to say, I wrote to my pals and my brother, expressing my dismay. How deeply worrying it all is.
David, my pal in New York, wrote back, saying amongst other things that he’s reading Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest. About Lincoln and Fort Sumter and America’s Road to Civil War. And, well, I’m now also reading The Demon of Unrest. It’s my third Erik Larson book this year. This Spring I read Dead Wake, his riveting and deeply disturbing account of the final voyage of the Lusitania. And I’ve just finished The Splendid and the Vile, his gripping read about 1940 and Churchill and London and the Blitz.
And of course sitting here 48 hours after that shooting in Utah, the title of Larson’s Fort Sumter book – The Demon of Unrest – couldn’t be more unnerving. You keep hoping that history is over but you know damn well it isn’t. And then of course that old Chinese curse – may you live in interesting times – also comes to mind. And I realised just how gingerly I was making my way through what the professional reviewers had to say about the book. This, for example, “an all-too prescient tale of tension and tragedy, clashing egos, miscommunication, power and betrayal.” Even more succinct, the Los Angeles Times: “a riveting re-examination of a nation in tumult.” Ditto Publisher’s Weekly: “A mesmerising and disconcerting look at an era when consensus dissolved into deadly polarisation.” Reading observations like that – and the final bar of Erik Larson’s three epigraphs, a July 26, 1864 Journal entry by one Mary Boykin Chestnut: “Is any thing worth it? This fearful sacrifice – this awful penalty we pay for war?” Reading remarks like that at this juncture in American – and indeed world history – it’s like walking through a minefield.
Ok, that’s something of a preamble. As well as being something in the way of a diary or journal entry.
Moving on. A tasty little factoid. A London factoid. A makes a connection factoid. A couple of days ago This is London took a good look at the City of London’s coat of arms: the griffin. That was in the piece entitled Decoding London – Sentinels of the City. Anyway, Alison listened to the piece and wrote in with this wonderful tidbit: “The Fuller’s Brewery logo is a griffin standing proudly and clutching a barrel of beer in its claws. It serves as both a coat of arms-style emblem and a brand mark, symbolising, strength, guardianship and tradition. With the griffin protecting the beer.”
The immediate connection of course is with Alison’s Charming Chiswick Walk. Part of the charm of Chiswick being Fuller’s Brewery. But there’s also a pleasing connection with Alison’s St Albans Tour, which something tells me is going to get another look-see here, at London Calling, in the next day or two.
Ok, this one’s aready a plethora of great reads. But what the hell, let’s go whole hog. Make a quick stop at the London Calling Book Club Corner.
There to greet us today, Citlali. Citlali, consummate Londoner who for good measure is Mexican. Citlali who guides the Ripper and Harry Potter and Disastrous London. And what’s Citlali reading? Well, let’s ask her.
She says, “I recently finished The Last London by Ian Sinclair. About fast moving change in London, particularly around gentrification and development.”
Ah, yes, Ian Sinclair. It comes as no surprise, this, but you’ve got impeccable taste in London authors, Citlali.
Ok, main course. This is the second installment of my What I love About London series. What makes it the greatest city in the world. And makes it a great privilege – practically heaven-sent – to live here, call this place home.
And you want a crystallisation of this one, well, here it is in six words: Paris is only two hours away.
Let’s catch a ride on this ever-so merry merry-go-round.
Here’s a fact that’ll stop you in your tracks: Paris is two hours from London. Two. Hours. Not by plane – by train. That’s the Eurostar doing what it does best: 300 km/h across Kent, under the Channel, across northern France, and boom – Gare du Nord. It’s the sort of fact that reframes the world. Suddenly the Eiffel Tower is as close as the Cotswolds.
Now imagine the equivalent if you’re in Pittsburgh. Two hours in a car gets you to Cleveland, or Erie, or maybe Columbus if you’ve got a heavy foot. Two hours on a train? You’ll barely have cleared the western suburbs. Amtrak’s Pennsylvanian wheezes along once a day – takes nine hours to reach Philadelphia. Nine! By then the Londoner has had a Parisian lunch, browsed a bookshop, maybe even caught a matinee, and is halfway home again.
Same deal with Kansas City. Two hours in a car? You get to Topeka or Columbia. By train? You can take the Southwest Chief – if it’s running on time – and after two hours you’re in nowhere-in-particular Kansas. You certainly aren’t in St. Louis sipping a beer and back by nightfall. America, in short, is built for the car and the plane. Europe is built for the train.
And that shapes how people think. A Londoner can, on a Friday morning, text a friend: “Shall we do lunch in Paris?” and make it happen — there and back. The American equivalent would be texting: “Want to fly to Chicago for lunch?” – and then immediately giving up when you picture the Uber, TSA queue, boarding scrum, delayed flight, and missed connection.
This isn’t just about convenience; it’s about psychology. Europe shrinks the map by stitching cities together with high-speed rail. The TGV gets you from Paris to Lyon in under two hours, Madrid to Barcelona in two and a half. It changes your sense of what’s possible. Weekend in Brussels? Day trip to Lille? Sure — and be back in time for Match of the Day.
What’s more, the journey is pleasant. You walk onto the train, no security theatre, no shoes-off shuffle. You sit, open your laptop or book, maybe wander to the café car. No turbulence, no seatbelt sign, no middle seat neighbour with a cold. The Eurostar is basically a moving living room.
There’s luck in this – Britain and France are only 31 miles apart at the Channel’s narrowest point – but also vision. The Channel Tunnel was a decades-long dream, finally realised in 1994, and the high-speed lines on either side were political decisions. Britain, which had been dragging its feet, finally built High Speed 1 from London to the coast, slashing the time from over three hours to just over two. A piece of infrastructure that changed how two capitals relate to one another.
And the ripple effect is profound. Businesses plan meetings in Paris without an overnight stay. Students hop over for a weekend. Londoners suddenly have another city’s museums, cafés, and shops as part of their mental universe. It makes London feel less like an island capital and more like the western terminus of a continental network.
For an American, two hours means “close enough to drive.” For a European, two hours means “close enough to catch a train and be home for supper.” That’s a cultural gap as wide as the Atlantic itself. Which is why this little nugget – Paris, two hours away – isn’t just trivia. It’s a manifesto for how geography, technology, and planning conspire to make a city feel bigger, or smaller, than it really is.
————————————————-
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.