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 Sunday, January 11th, 2026.
And here you go, here it is.
Here’s your daily London fix.
It’s often said the Irish built London.
Brick by brick, road by road, institution by institution.
Irish hands, Irish heads,
Irish money, Irish ambition.
From docks to hospitals to canals to culture.
And if that’s true, then no Irish contribution to the making of London looms larger
than that of Sir Hans Sloane.
Sir Hans Sloane was born in County Down.
Of Scottish extraction,
planted in Ulster.
Died in Chelsea.
And left London a gift so vast,
so enduring,
so quietly revolutionary that we barely stop to notice it.
The British Museum.
Today’s the anniversary of his death.
January 11th, 1753.
Two hundred and seventy-three years ago.
Chelsea Manor House.
He was 92.
Old, deaf,
partially paralysed,
almost incapable of conversation. But his life’s work was complete. And London would never be the same again.
Let’s rewind.
Hans Sloane was born in 1660 – Restoration year –
the year Charles II returned
and England tried to steady itself after the beheading of a King, a Civil War and the interregnum.
As a boy in Killyleagh, County Down, he developed what one friend called a “strong inclination to the works of nature”.
Plants. Shells. Natural oddities.
He nearly died as a teenager from a lung complaint and spent years coughing blood.
It slowed him down.
But it also sharpened him up.
By the time he was 19 he was in London.
He lodged by Apothecaries’ Hall, studied chemistry, anatomy, botany. Chelsea Physic Garden became his outdoor classroom.
He fell in with serious minds:
John Ray, Robert Boyle.
Men who taught him that careful observation mattered more than grand theory.
Paris followed.
Then Montpellier.
Then Orange, where his Protestant faith allowed him to
take his medical doctorate.
He learned to catalogue,
to compare, to cross-reference.
To check what others had said before claiming anything for himself.
Back in London he met Thomas Sydenham, the great physician,
who effectively took him by the hand and
ushered him into practice.
Patients followed.
Reputation followed.
Then came Jamaica.
In 1687 Sloane sailed as the personal physician to the Duke of Albemarle,
newly appointed governor.
The duke governed.
Sloane collected.
He tramped the island,
notebook in hand,
recording plants, animals, weather, earthquakes, diseases.
Tireless. Methodical.
Curious about everything.
And Jamaica gave him something else too.
Chocolate.
Or rather, cocoa.
He tried cocoa the local way.
With water.
Found it bitter.
Too much medicine,
not enough pleasure.
So he added milk and a little sugar and, entirely by accident, did Britain a very great service.
Though generations of British dentists have never quite forgiven him.
A century later, the Cadbury brothers picked up the idea and ran with it.
Back in London, Sloane promoted his milk chocolate not as a sweet indulgence but as a health-giving drink.
Something strengthening. Restorative.
Suitable even for the delicate. Chocolate was fashionable at court. Queen Anne drank it.
And one of the physicians quietly encouraging the habit was Sir Hans Sloane.
Chocolate was already known in England, but Sloane civilised it. Gave it milk, manners, and a medical certificate.
Not a bad sideline for a man who also gave us the British Museum.
But let’s get back to Jamaica.
On a rather more sombre note
when the Duke of Albemarle died suddenly,
Sloane embalmed the body,
waited months for passage home,
and finally returned to London
with hundreds of specimens,
most of them unknown in Europe.
That voyage made him.
Back in Bloomsbury he married Elizabeth Langley,
wealthy widow of
a Jamaican planter.
It brought him money,
security, and a direct connection to the machinery of empire.
That matters.
His fortune was entangled with colonial exploitation and
enslaved labour.
There’s no dodging that.
What matters just as much is what he did next.
Hans Sloane built one of the most successful medical practices in London.
He treated the poor for free every morning.
He gave money back to hospitals. He championed inoculation.
He promoted quinine.
He believed in careful diagnosis, not fashionable theory.
Queens and kings came calling. Queen Anne. George I. George II. Sloane became a baronet, president of the Royal College of Physicians, president of the Royal Society after Isaac Newton.
But titles weren’t the point.
Collecting was.
Books. Manuscripts. Fossils. Shells. Plants. Animals. Coins. Artefacts. Drawings. He bought entire collections. He catalogued obsessively. He labelled, indexed, cross-referenced. He opened his doors to scholars and the curious.
By the early eighteenth century his collection had a name.
It was known across Europe as Sloane’s Cabinet of Curiosities.
And it was already world famous.
People came from all over the continent to see it.
From Paris, Stockholm, Leiden. Scholars arrived clutching letters of introduction.
Princes came.
Natural philosophers came.
If you cared about understanding the world,
you made a point of getting yourself to London and knocking on Sir Hans Sloane’s door.
This was London’s intellectual wonder of the age.
Long before Bloomsbury.
Long before the Great Court.
Long before the phrase “national museum” meant anything at all.
By the 1740s the collection had outgrown him.
When Sloane retired to Chelsea, his house filled up completely.
Every room. Every cupboard. Books and specimens everywhere.
And Sloane knew what that meant.
So he planned.
Carefully. Patiently. Legally.
He wrote a will.
Then revised it.
Then added codicils.
His wish was clear.
The collection must stay together.
It must serve public learning.
It must not be broken up or sold off piecemeal.
There was, however, a deal.
Sloane was not naïve.
He knew the value of what he had assembled.
Tens of thousands of pounds.
Some put it at eighty or even a hundred thousand. An astronomical sum in those days.
What he asked for was modest by comparison.
In return for his entire Cabinet of Curiosities, the state would provide £20,000 for his family, for his daughters’ security and future.
Parliament did the sums.
They knew perfectly well they were getting a huge bargain.
And they took it.
On June 7th, 1753, just a few months after Sloane’s death, an Act of Parliament established the British Museum.
The founding collections were Sloane’s.
His books. His manuscripts.
His plants, animals, fossils, shells. Combined with the Cotton and Harleian libraries, they became the intellectual bedrock of a national institution.
Free to all.
For study.
For curiosity.
And the idea is still alive.
Every Wednesday afternoon, London Walks quite literally walks you back into Sloane’s world with our British Museum Tour.
The big picture.
The hidden connections.
The stories that turn the most important museum on the planet – world’s greatest treasure chest – into something intelligible, human, and thrilling.
And quite often we go further still with a VIP, small-group guaranteed Friday Night Late Tour.
Fewer people.
We’ve got the British Museum practically to ourself.
Quieter galleries.
Time to linger.
To look properly.
To experience the museum in something like the spirit of Sloane’s original Cabinet of Curiosities.
And for those who want the most focused encounter of all,
people regularly book a private British Museum tour with one of our star London Walks guides. Tailored.
Supremely intelligent.
Thrillingly alert to connections others miss.
Led by someone who knows exactly how to unlock the place.
And here’s the final kicker.
For more than a century, Sloane’s natural history specimens lived inside the British Museum.
As they grew, they burst their Bloomsbury confines.
In the nineteenth century they moved west, to South Kensington.
That move created the Natural History Museum.
Same roots. Same cabinet.
Different buildings, a century apart.
The state paid £20,000 for a collection worth many times that and got two of the greatest museums on earth into the bargain.
One of the all-time great deals.
So next time you find yourself in the British Museum café, sipping a hot chocolate, maybe quietly, with the faintest hint of a smile, raise your cup to Sir Hans Sloane.
Born in Killyleagh, County Down.
Died on this day, in Chelsea.
January 11th, 1753.
And London – indeed, the world – is still living,
learning, and walking in his footsteps.
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.