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, January 3rd, 2026.
And here it is, your daily London fix.
He leaned over a hole in the ground and looked into eternity.
Not metaphorical eternity.
Not poetic eternity.
The real thing.
Silence, darkness, gold, and a king who’d been dead for more than three thousand years and had no intention of being forgotten quietly.
It was January 3, 1924.
On that day, in the Valley of the Kings,
Howard Carter finally reached the innermost heart of the greatest archaeological discovery ever made.
He opened the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun.
And the man who did that was a Londoner.
Born in Kensington.
Died in Kensington.
From Brompton terraces and drawing rooms to the most dazzling dead end in human history.
London has always been good at producing obsessives.
Carter may be its most extraordinary.
Howard Carter was born on
May 9th,1874 at 10 Rich Terrace, Brompton, Kensington.
Solid, respectable London.
Not aristocratic splendour,
not grinding poverty either. His father was an artist, a painter of animals and birds,
and that mattered.
Young Howard learned
to look properly. To see.
To notice detail.
He wasn’t university trained.
He didn’t come up through academic channels.
What he had was an eye like a hawk and patience bordering on mania.
As a teenager he was sent to Egypt to copy wall paintings
for the Egypt Exploration Fund. Pencil, paper, heat, dust.
He was good at it. Very good.
He stayed.
He learned archaeology the hard way,
in the field, arguing with superiors, offending colleagues,
refusing to compromise.
Carter was not easy.
He was awkward, stubborn, frequently abrasive.
But he was relentless.
By the early twentieth century, Egyptology thought it had finished with the Valley of the Kings.
The great tombs were known. Looted in antiquity,
cleared in modern times, catalogued, published. Tutankhamun barely rated a footnote.
A boy king. Minor league.
Carter didn’t believe it.
He became convinced that Tutankhamun’s tomb was still there, buried beneath rubble and ancient workmen’s huts.
Enter Lord Carnarvon.
Aristocrat. Enthusiast.
Deep pockets.
He funded Carter’s obsession
year after year. Season after season. Failure after failure.
The sceptics laughed.
Colleagues rolled their eyes.
Money ran out.
And then, in November 1922,
the miracle. Steps cut into the rock. A sealed doorway.
Carter sent the now-famous telegram.
“At last have made wonderful discovery in Valley.”
That’s the bit everyone knows.
What’s less remembered is how slow, careful, and agonising the work that followed actually was. Archaeology isn’t a smash-and-grab.
Carter catalogued thousands of objects.
Stabilised fragile artefacts.
Mapped everything. Took his time. It took more than a year to reach the burial chamber itself.
Which brings us back to
January 3rd, 1924.
That was the day Carter and his team opened the massive quartzite sarcophagus.
The lid weighed several tons and had to be raised inch by inch.
No flashbulbs. No crowds.
Just a handful of witnesses and an almost unbearable silence.
Inside was not a body but another coffin.
And inside that, another.
And inside that, another still.
Layers of protection.
Russian dolls of death. Tutankhamun
had been sealed away like no other king.
Imagine that moment.
Carter, the Kensington-born draughtsman,
standing in a chamber untouched for over three millennia,
knowing he had outwaited tomb robbers, rivals, sceptics, and time itself.
And yet triumph did not bring peace.
The years that followed were bitter. Arguments with Egyptian authorities.
Legal disputes.
Accusations of arrogance and imperial entitlement.
Carter never completed the full scientific publication of the tomb. Illness crept in.
Hodgkin’s disease
drained his strength.
Friends fell away.
The world moved on.
Eventually, he came home.
Howard Carter died on March 2nd, 1939 at 49 Albert Court, Kensington Gore.
Top floor.
Right behind the Albert Hall.
Stand at those windows and you look straight out at
the Albert Memorial,
all gilt and splendour,
gold catching the light even on a grey London day.
I can’t help picturing him there. Frail. Disillusioned.
Standing at that window,
looking out at one of London’s grandest set pieces.
All that gold outside.
And yet I’d bet anything that what he was really seeing wasn’t Kensington at all.
I’d bet he was back in the Valley of the Kings.
Back to January 3, 1924.
Back to the moment the sarcophagus lid rose.
Back to the silence,
the weight,
the sense that he had crossed a threshold no one else ever had.
A hole in the ground that opened onto eternity.
I was thrilled when I worked out exactly where that flat was.
Thrilled in that peculiarly London way,
where history suddenly snaps into place behind a modern façade.
I asked the concierge who lived there now.
“An English couple,” he said. “They’ve just moved in.”
I asked him to do me a favour.
Ask them if they knew who had lived in that flat nearly a century ago.
And if they didn’t, tell them.
Think of it. A housewarming. A dinner party. Glasses clinking.
And then the host says, “And would you like to know whose flat this was?”
I went back a couple of weeks later. Same concierge. Same question. Had he told them? Did they know?
“They didn’t know,” he said.
“They were thrilled. They said if you ever stopped by again,
they wanted me to thank you profusely.”
Which feels exactly right.
You can buy a flat in London. You don’t always realise you’re buying a story with it.
Howard Carter spent his life uncovering wonders
that other people had walked past without seeing.
Even at the end, even in Kensington,
he was still doing it.
You just have to know where to look.
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.