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 Wednesday, September 24th, 2025.
Travel day so this one’s a quickie. Coming your way from K.L. Tomorrow’s will be punted out from London Walks GHQ in West Hampstead. Anyway, off we go.
London Calling Book Club Corner first.
And let’s keep guide Andy Hallett in the crease for a second day running. I asked the guides about their favorite London book would. Andy weighed in as follows: “the London book I most admire and enjoy is ‘The Lodger, Shakespeare on Silver Street’ by Charles Nichols. It puts Shakespeare in the very human context of Silver Street (we visit the site on my Shakespeare and Dickens Walk) in bustling Jacobean London, where he was merely ‘one Mr Shakespeare’, renting the room upstairs. What’s he writing? Perhaps the greatest of all his plays, the mighty ‘King Lear’.
I’m keeping pretty good company with this one. Jonathan Bate, the eminent Shakespearean scholar, author of ‘The Genius of Shakespeare’ – also considered a classic in its field – calls Nichols’ book ‘the most absorbing work of Shakespeare biography I have ever read…’.
Andy say, “I couldn’t agree more, it’s totally inspiring. And one of my all time favourite books – it inspired my MA. I think about it, talk about it, visit the site, that corner of Silver and Noble street, Muggle Street (or Monkswell Street) every time I do the Shakespeare and Dickens walk.”
And that makes three of us, Andy. That by and large was my take on the book as well.
Ok, main act. We did a London death yesterday – Freud crossing the River Styx, with Dr. Schur playing Charon, ferrying him over with those final doses of morphine. Nothing for it but to balance that out with a London birth today. It’s September 24th, 1717. A baby boy, Horace Walpole, arrives in the family house in Arlington Street, St James’s. His father is Sir Robert Walpole, soon to be Britain’s first Prime Minister. Which means little Horace grew up in power’s front row.
That said, Horace Walpole was no dull politician’s son. He was a man of letters, a wit, a collector, a dreamer. If Georgian London had an It Boy, it was him. He was everywhere: Parliament, society drawing rooms, theatres, coffee houses. He’s one of those people who make you wish Instagram existed in the 18th century, because his feed would have been scandalously good.
But here’s the thing that nails his place in history: Horace Walpole invented Gothic. Literally. Walpole built Strawberry Hill House, his “little plaything house” on the Thames at Twickenham, starting in the 1740s. It was a confection of pointed arches, mock battlements, painted glass, secret doors – a fantasy castle that launched a style craze. Visitors flocked to it. They wrote rapturous letters home. Londoners copied it. Georgian taste, which had been all about Palladian order and classical calm, suddenly went spooky and picturesque.
And Walpole didn’t stop at the architecture. In 1764 he self-published a strange little book called The Castle of Otranto and pretended it was a found medieval manuscript. It had haunted castles, ghostly apparitions, family curses, giant helmets falling from the sky – all the furniture of Gothic literature. Without Walpole, there’s no Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, no Bram Stoker’s Dracula, no Netflix binge of The Haunting of Hill House. The whole spooky-castle industry owes him royalties.
But Walpole was more than the father of Gothic. He was the king of gossip. His letters – more than 3,000 survive – are the 18th century’s social media feed. They’re full of political scandal, theatre reviews, sketches of London life, and the kind of society gossip that would make Tatler blush. He could be waspish, generous, cruel, hilarious – sometimes all in the same paragraph.
He once described a dull evening in society as “like a funeral where one has not even the satisfaction of weeping.” Of a political enemy, he wrote: “He loved his country, as long as it did not stand in the way of his advancement.” As for the King’s mistress, the Countess of Darlington, with her “enormous figure” and “two fierce black eyes, large and rolling beneath two lofty arched eyebrows, two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck that overflowed and was not distinguished from the lower part of her body…” well, welcome to the freak show.
The letters are a time capsule of 18th-century London society. If you want to know how it felt to be in London as Handel’s music was new, as coffee houses buzzed, as Parliament fought and schemed – read Walpole. He’ll take you there. He’s gossipy, yes, but he’s also a brilliant observer.
Walpole never married – he was too busy building castles and writing letters, perhaps. He died in 1797, aged nearly eighty, leaving behind Strawberry Hill as his great monument. Over the years it decayed, was sold, altered – but it’s still there, gloriously restored. If you go, you can still wander through the rooms he invented, still see the fanciful chimneypieces, the painted glass catching the Thames light.
And there’s something delicious about the fact that the man who made England fall in love with mock-medieval gloom was himself so sparkling and camp. He called Strawberry Hill his “toy,” his “castle of my own whims.” You can almost picture him leading his guests through the house with a flourish, like a Georgian showman, waiting for the gasp as they entered each room.
So why remember Horace Walpole? Three very good reasons. One, because he changed the way Britain saw its own history – turned the Middle Ages from mud and misery into romance and moonlight. Two, because his letters give us a ringside seat on Georgian London, served with wit and sting. And three, because he reminds us that personality can shape culture: that a clever, eccentric, endlessly curious man or woman with good taste and a sense of theatre can leave a mark that lasts centuries.
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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 familiarand the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note… come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.