London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good morning to you, London Walkers.
Wherever you are.
It’s Saturday, February 28th, 2026.
And here it is.
Your daily London fix.
So what have we got today?
John Tenniel,
the London artist who illustrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was born on this day,
February 28.
In today’s London Calling podcast we meet the quiet Victorian genius who gave the world the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and Alice herself.
And to push the boat out, here’s a London riddle for you.
Mention the name John Tenniel and most people blink politely
and reach for the biscuit tin.
But say the Mad Hatter.
Say the Cheshire Cat.
Say Tweedledum and Tweedledee. And suddenly the penny drops with a clatter loud enough to wake the dormouse.
Because the man
who fixed Wonderland forever in the world’s imagination
was a quiet Londoner
who almost nobody remembers
by name.
Sir John Tenniel
was born on this day,
February 28, in 1820,
at 22 Gloucester Place,
New Road, Bayswater.
London born. London bred. London to the marrow of his bones.
And he would, in due course,
die here too,
in West Kensington in 1914,
three days shy
of his ninety fourth birthday.
He was the third son of a fencing and dancing master of Huguenot stock,
which already sounds faintly
like the opening of a Victorian novel.
The family lived
in what the Victorians
politely called genteel poverty
in Kensington.
Not destitute, not comfortable. That uneasy middle ground
where the wallpaper is respectable but the purse is thin.
Formal schooling was limited. Tenniel’s real education
came at home
under the formidable eye
of his athletic father,
who taught him fencing,
riding, dancing
and the other gentlemanly arts.
It sounds healthy enough.
Until the day it went badly wrong.
At the age of twenty
Tenniel was fencing with his father when the protective button flew off the foil.
The blade struck his eye.
The injury blinded him in the right eye for the rest of his life.
Let that sink in.
Blinded, in one eye,
a future artist. Blinded by his own father.
And here’s
the quietly astonishing part.
He never told his father the truth. He concealed the full extent of the damage in order to spare the old man any guilt.
You begin to get the measure of John Tenniel.
Reserved. Stoical.
Not much given to theatrical self advertisement.
As a young Londoner
he preferred reading,
sketching and going to the theatre rather than sporting about.
He haunted galleries
and museums,
copying what he saw.
He had, by all accounts,
a near photographic memory.
He could study an image,
go home,
and redraw it from recall.
A useful trick if your working life is going to involve producing hundreds upon hundreds of illustrations on tight deadlines.
He passed through
the Royal Academy Schools,
found the teaching a bit crusty,
and gravitated instead to
the Clipstone Street Art Society near Fitzroy Square.
That was more his speed.
Live models.
Working artists.
Real London creative energy.
Early on he flirted with high art. Big historical subjects.
Medieval romance.
In 1845 he even submitted
a vast design
for the new House of Lords fresco scheme.
He was good enough to win prize money,
though not the final commission. Still, the cheque paid for a continental trip.
Munich.
The Nazarene painters.
Serious artistic credentials were being assembled.
But London, as so often,
had other plans.
In 1850 Tenniel was hired
by Punch magazine,
that great Victorian
comic powerhouse
headquartered in Bouverie Street. At first he contributed
decorative bits and pieces.
Initial letters.
Small cuts.
But the fit proved perfect.
Over time he became Punch’s magisterial political cartoonist, eventually producing more than two thousand major cartoons across half a century.
Week after week,
year after year,
Tenniel quietly shaped
how Victorian Britain saw itself.
And yet, by temperament,
he was no clubland backslapper. Colleagues called him Jackides.
At the famous
Punch round table dinners
he mostly sat,
smoked his monogrammed churchwarden pipe,
and said very little
while the others argued and laughed.
A private man.
Taciturn.
Impeccably mannered.
Some thought he looked
like Don Quixote.
There was tragedy too.
In 1854 he married Julia Giani. Two years later she died of tuberculosis
aged just thirty one.
Tenniel was devastated and never remarried.
Instead he settled into a life of disciplined work and
quiet routine in Maida Hill.
And then, in the 1860s,
along came
a certain Oxford mathematician with a taste for nonsense.
Charles Dodgson,
better known to the world
as Lewis Carroll,
had seen Tenniel’s work
in Aesop’s Fables
and wanted him
to illustrate a curious new children’s book.
Tenniel agreed.
With some misgivings.
The partnership was not exactly champagne and roses.
Carroll fussed.
Intervened.
Micromanaged. Tenniel,
dignified to his fingertips,
endured it with thinning patience. But the result was magic.
Because if the true test of an illustrator is this question,
can you imagine the characters
any other way,
then Tenniel passed with flying colours.
Alice with her unruly hair and pinafore.
The March Hare.
The Mock Turtle.
The Duchess.
The Jabberwock.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
The whole marvellous menagerie. Ninety two illustrations
across the two Alice books.
And they stuck.
Permanently.
Globally.
Irrevocably.
He had, quite simply,
drawn the definitive Wonderland.
Meanwhile his day job at Punch continued to make him one of the most recognisable visual commentators in Britain.
His famous cartoon
Dropping the Pilot,
depicting Bismarck
leaving the German ship of state, became one of the iconic political images of the nineteenth century.
Honours followed.
Gladstone knighted him in 1893. He moved easily among
London’s political and social elite, though he never quite lost that
air of the reserved Bayswater boy who preferred a quiet dinner
to a noisy club.
In old age his eyesight failed completely.
The man who had given the world its most vivid dream imagery
was gradually
losing the ability to see.
There is something almost unbearably poignant about that.
He died in West Kensington on February 25, 1914.
Cremated at Golders Green.
Ashes buried at Kensal Green. London to the last.
And so here we are,
back at February 28,
the birthday of the man who made Wonderland visible.
It is one of those delicious London ironies.
The name John Tenniel
may not stop traffic.
But his creatures live everywhere. On nursery walls.
In films.
In the global imagination.
The quiet Londoner
who preferred to sit and smoke while others talked
ended up drawing some of the most unforgettable faces in literary history.
Which just goes to show.
In this city,
sometimes the man
nobody much notices
turns out to be the one
who changed
what the whole world sees.
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 a former Member of Parliament, three terms at Westminster, bringing first-hand experience of power, policy and political theatre to the very streets where it all played out.
It includes two barristers, three doctors, two geologists, a distinguished museum curator and a former Time out Editor.
It includes authors, historians, national journalists, a former London Museum archaeologist, and university professors (one of them an eminent Cambridge University paleontologist).
It includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre actors, and two professional photographers. And last but not least, the creme de la creme of top flight professionally qualified Blue Badge Guides, including 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 here’s the clincher. We’re playing at home.
London Walks is London-based. Period.
We’re not an impersonal, faceless platform run from halfway round the world. There’s no chatbot. No call-centre script. When you contact us, you reach a real person. A Londoner. Someone who actually knows the streets you’re about to walk.
That’s not a detail. That’s the difference.
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.