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 Thursday, December 4th, 2025
You set? Strapped in? Shall we roll?
Here goes.
Best epitaph ever.
His gravestone reads:
“Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought so once, but now I know it.”
Who can resist that? Especially standing in front of a tomb.
Ok, that’s enough suspense. Who? What? Where? When?
We’re in Westminster Abbey. It’s today, December 4th. Today 293 years ago. December 4th, 1732.
And whose tomb is it? John Gay. You read that epitaph and you’re already
You read it and halfway in love with John Gay.
It’s playful,
philosophical,
a wink from beyond the grave.
And beautifully London.
Because if there’s any city that’ll
teach you life’s a jest,
it’s this one.
John Gay knew it.
He lived it.
He wrote it.
And he laughed at it
right up until the
moment he couldn’t.
And look, you go on our Abbey Tour, you must make sure you get Tom or Mary to show you that epitaph.
It just might be the best epitaph in Poets’ Corner.
From Devon to the Big Smoke
Ok, let’s get to know our man a whole lot better. Let’s properly make the acquaintance of John Gay.
We’ll catch up with him first
in Devon.
And then in due course it’s
off to the Big Smoke.
John Gay was born
in Barnstaple, in Devon, in 1685. Pleasant place.
Solid.
Respectable.
But not the sort of spot
where you linger
if you’ve got a head full of stories and an itch for excitement.
London was the magnet,
and in his early twenties,
around 1706,
Gay let himself be drawn
irresistibly into its orbit.
What a London he found.
Coffee houses fizzing with gossip. Theatres blazing with wit.
The Thames heaving with workboats, ferries,
barges,
and the occasional corpse.
Coaches rattling over cobbles.
Street hawkers bawling their wares.
A glorious muddle of
splendour and squalor.
Perfect for a young writer with
sharp eyes and even sharper instincts.
Gay began modestly,
working as a secretary while scribbling verses on the side.
But he had charm,
a ready wit, and
a gift for friendship.
In no time he was circulating with
one of the greatest literary cliques
in history: Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot.
If there were a fantasy league for 18th-century literary salons,
that lot would be your first-round picks.
London on Foot: Trivia
Before Gay set half the city whistling with The Beggar’s Opera,
he made London itself his masterpiece.
In 1716 he published
Trivia,
or The Art of Walking
the Streets of London.
A mock-heroic masterpiece masquerading as
a pedestrian’s handbook,
it’s a hymn to the pavement.
Gay gives us the whole show:
mud,
market cries,
thieves,
overflowing gutters,
and the eternal hazard of chamber pots upended from above.
He dispenses advice like
a genial older brother:
“Where the mob gathers,
swiftly turn aside.”
You can almost hear him chuckle.
The London he captures bursts
with energy.
You can smell the tavern smoke.
You can feel the splash from
a coach wheel streaking
your stockings.
Dickens is the bard of fog.
Gay is the poet of footfall.
Friendly Chap, Occasional Enemy
Gay wasn’t naturally pugnacious,
but satirists poke bears
as part of the job description.
In The Shepherd’s Week
he lampooned
the fashionable pastorals of
Ambrose Philips.
Philips bristled.
The public adored it.
Classic Gay:
annoy the right person,
delight everyone else.
And then there was the government. More specifically
Robert Walpole.
Walpole didn’t appreciate
being mocked in print and
had the memory of an elephant.
He filed Gay under
“men to swat when convenient.”
That file would open again soon enough.
The Rogues Take Centre Stage: The Beggar’s Opera
Then came 1728.
John Gay’s annus mirabilis.
The year he turned London
upside down.
The idea began as a joke.
Swift mused that someone ought
to write an opera about
real Londoners,
not Italianised demi-gods.
Thieves.
Highwaymen.
Pickpockets.
Streetwise girls and
corrupt officials.
Gay didn’t just take the hint,
he made off with it like a thief on market day.
The Beggar’s Opera exploded
onto the stage of
John Rich’s theatre in
Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
What made it special?
It was cheeky.
It was sparkling.
It was subversive.
It ditched ornate arias for
popular tunes people
already hummed.
It held up a mirror to society
and the reflection was unmistakable. Macheath,
the irresistible rogue at the centre,
was read by audiences as a sly portrait of Walpole himself.
They roared with laughter.
Walpole didn’t.
The show was a thunderous hit. Londoners whistled its melodies
in the street.
Coffee houses buzzed with its lines.
It made John Rich so much money that people joked he’d “grown rich by Gay.”
The Blow That Broke Him
Flushed with triumph,
Gay wrote a sequel: Polly.
But this time Walpole struck first.
The government banned it outright. Too seditious, they said.
Too dangerous.
Too obviously pointed at the powerful.
Gay was devastated.
The public,
moved by sympathy and
a taste for rebellion,
bought printed copies by the thousand. But the emotional blow was heavy.
He never fully recovered.
On December 4, 1732,
John Gay died at just 47,
in the home of his beloved patrons, the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry.
Most likely a sudden inflammation, perhaps pneumonia.
Eighteenth-century diagnoses were little more than educated shrugs.
Resting Among the Poets
And now he lies in Westminster Abbey,
his monument inscribed with Pope’s immortal lines. They’re worth repeatiing. They’re always worth repeating.
“Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought so once, but now I know it.”
Why John Gay Matters
Ok, payoff time, summation time.
Why remember John Gay?
Because he wrote London as
London is.
Not prettified.
Not idealised.
Alive.
Messy.
Human.
Trivia remains one of the greatest love stories ever written to the city.
The Beggar’s Opera reshaped theatre, inspired Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, and proved that the underworld sometimes has the best tunes.
Gay understood Londoners.
Their contradictions.
Their wit.
Their resourcefulness.
Their charm.
And he wrapped it all in laughter.
Life’s a jest, he tells us.
Three centuries later, London still laughs with him.
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.