London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good evening London Walkers. Wherever you are in this wide world of ours.
It’s Friday, December 19th, 2025.
And here it is, your daily London fix.
A bit of news first.
And give yourselves a pat on the back – London Calling is breaking the story: you heard it here first.
Earlier today something extraordinary came our way and thus your way. We’ve made a show-stopper of a signing. A former Member of Parliament. Tom Levitt was the MP for High Peak for 13 years – from 1997 to 2010. He’s now crossed the floor into authorship and guiding. He’s the author of The Business of History: Tales and Lessons from Two Centuries of British Commerce. He’s also a consultant on responsible and sustainable business. His first walk – it’ll take place in late January – will be called The Business of History.
The trailer introduces it like this:
Victorian London was a hotbed of entrepreneurs, many fired by moral conviction as much as commercial ambition. Through the streets of the city, Tom brings the era to life via the stories of 18 of the 32 iconic companies featured in his book.
It’s a warts-and-all account of the titans of business across two centuries, packed with the secret sauce of every great walk: it changes the way you see London.
That’ll get Tom blooded. And then it’s hold on to your hats. Because his next walk will be Insider’s Westminster – See Power Unmasked with a Former MP.
We’ve said it before but it bears repeating: London Walks guides are in a league all of their own.
Ok, moving on. Speaking of politcians, one of the great Victorian Prime Ministers, Benjamin Disraeli famously described the Strand as ‘the first street in Europe.’ And sure enough it figures in the Christmas Day Charles Dickens London Walk. In a sense it’s the backbone of that walk. The walk begins at Trafalgar Square, the Western end of the Strand. And when we cross the Strand we look along toward the Eastern end, St Mary le Strand, where Dickens’s parents got married.
And the length and breadth of the Strand – and the alleyways just off it – the Adelphi Theatre of course, right there on the Strand – those are London locations that are pivotal in the Dickens story. So I thought today we’d touch down on the Strand – stop by one or two of those pivotal points – and bring to the fore a Victorian actor now largely forgotten but hugely important – crucially important – to the Dickens story.
And to get Charles Matthews into play – what you need to know about him – is that before Charles Dickens ever put London on the page, Charles Mathews put it on its feet.
You could hear him before you saw him.
A ripple of laughter.
A sharp intake of breath.
The sense that something dangerous and funny was about to happen.
Then on he’d come,
hat on, coat off,
face alive like quicksilver.
And within minutes
he was not one man at all, but six. Eight. Ten.
Charles Mathews was the actor Dickens admired more than any other.
That alone tells you a great deal. Dickens did not worship tragedians. He did not care for grand posing.
He wanted speed. Truth. Observation.
Characters that leapt.
Mathews gave him that.
This is early nineteenth-century London.
Gaslight. Mud. Horse dung.
Playbills slapped onto walls. Theatres everywhere.
Loud audiences. Immediate verdicts. You succeed tonight or you don’t succeed at all.
Mathews thrives.
He is born in 1776, in Richmond, then half-country, half-capital.
Close enough to hear
London breathing,
far enough to watch it.
His father is a bookseller and publisher,
prosperous, respectable,
surrounded by words and argument. No theatrical bloodline.
No stage destiny.
He’s educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School,
trained for business,
for clarity,
for precision.
Instead, he listens.
He listens to how people betray themselves through speech.
How they borrow phrases.
How they pretend.
How they climb. How they slip.
Before the public stage,
there were private theatricals. Drawing rooms.
Clubs.
Audiences close enough to see every twitch.
This is where Charles Matthews learns the great rule:
intimacy beats bombast.
Then London opens.
Charles Matthew lives around Covent Garden,
the Strand,
the Adelphi corridor.
Walking London.
Talking London.
A city made of voices.
Later, success takes him to Marylebone,
respectable and comfortable,
but he never stops roaming.
He invents his form.
The At Home.
One man, many lives.
Scenes without scenery.
Characters colliding.
Voices changing mid-thought.
The audience howls because they recognise everyone.
This is modern comedy before the name exists.
And Dickens watches.
Young Dickens watches like a thief watches a master pickpocket.
Later he says no actor ever influenced him more.
Not Kean.
Not Macready.
Mathews.
Because Mathews is not telling jokes.
He’s revealing people.
Letting class, anxiety,
ambition leak out through speech. Dickens wants that power on the page.
You can feel Mathews
in Dickens’ prose.
In the speed. In the monologues.
In the minor characters who
blaze and vanish.
In the belief that a city can be a cast.
Now picture the Adelphi.
The Strand outside is chaos. Coaches.
Hawkers.
Damp wool and chestnuts.
Inside, gaslight flares,
the crowd hums,
someone laughs too early.
Mathews comes on.
Alone.
Within moments, the theatre is full.
A pompous official.
A sly servant.
A nervous gentleman
trying to sound important.
Voices overlap.
The audience explodes.
Recognition.
This is why the Adelphi loves him.
It understands pace.
It understands London as a living thing.
Mathews belongs here because he’s doing on stage what the city is doing outside.
But being the show is brutal.
No one to carry the scene.
No hiding place.
The audience always wants more. New voices. New fashions.
New anxieties.
He tours relentlessly.
Britain. Ireland. America.
Carrying London in his head.
He makes fortunes.
Loses them.
Announces farewells.
Returns.
The voice roughens.
The breath shortens.
He can’t stop.
This is how he exists.
Dickens sees this too.
Genius costs.
In 1835,
Charles Mathews dies,
aged 58.
London notices.
Something modern has gone quiet.
But the sound continues.
Dickens writes on.
Performs on.
Later, standing alone on stage, giving his readings, shifting voices,
conjuring crowds,
he’s doing what Mathews made possible.
Different medium.
Same instinct.
One man.
Many lives.
A city speaking through a single body.
Mathews fades.
Dickens endures.
London keeps talking.
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.