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, November 20th.
And, yes, here it is – your daily London fix.
This one’s an anniversary piece. Let’s peel those months off the calendars. 81 years of calendars to be exact. That’s 972 months.
Off they come. Back, back we go. Back to Monday, November 20th, 1944.
Rub your eyes at what you’re looking at.
Which is exactly what Londoners would have been doing that night.
Rub your eyes and then picture the scene.
Aside here: you know something, this one’s going to be fun to impress your friends with. Catch them off guard with a dazzling bit of trivia. You can say to them, “did you know, it was exactly 81 years today that…” and then you’re off to the races while they gape in astonishment.
Anyway, yes, picture the scene. The November 20, 1944 scene.
London after five years of blackout. London with its ribs showing.
Streets gashed by blast waves, walls propped up with timber braces, churches open to the sky. A city that still smelt of smoke and brick dust, a city that had learned how to navigate its own brokenness in the dark.
And then, suddenly, without so much as a whisper of warning… light.
It didn’t come back as a triumphant blaze. No great chorus of bulbs shouting we’re back. The City of Westminster and the Corporation of London were far too cautious for that. And the war was far from done. But at some quiet moment that Monday evening, someone threw a switch and brought in the new moonlighting. A soft silver wash, modest by peacetime standards, but after half a decade of blackout it might as well have been the Northern Lights.
Piccadilly was the first to glow. Imagine walking into that. You’ve spent years padding along by feel, torch in hand, pavement familiar underfoot but invisible. And then, on an ordinary Monday in November, the lamps blush to life above you. Thin, pale, rationed light, yes, but light all the same. The shapes of buildings reappear. Faces emerge from the gloom. And the city, still bandaged and bruised, steps into view.
And not just Piccadilly. The Telegraph reporter, out on his evening rounds, suddenly finds Fleet Street, the Strand, and Piccadilly Circus all caught in this new wash. Three of the world’s most famous streets, newly visible after years of living like ghosts. And the public hadn’t been told. Which was, frankly, a stroke of genius. No build-up. No municipal puff. Just a surprise gift in the tail end of a hard year.
And what a surreal gift it must have been. Not a restoration of the old London. Not even close. The lamps didn’t erase the wounds. If anything, they revealed them. The pale illumination caught the jagged edges of bomb sites, the empty pockets where buildings once stood shoulder to shoulder. You’d see the sudden void where a house had been, the boarded fronts, the windows patched with paper, the scaffolding holding up a wall that didn’t quite trust itself to stand. The light wasn’t pretending the Blitz hadn’t happened. It was shining straight onto the scars.
Still, imagine the thrill of simply being able to see again. The reporter says you could read a newspaper under the lamps. That alone is astonishing. Five years of moving through a city that didn’t want to be seen, and suddenly you’re standing under a lamp on Fleet Street, flicking through the headlines like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Down by the Savoy in the Strand, he catches one of those perfect London micro-scenes. The commissionaires. Those big confident chaps with braided shoulders and voices that can bounce off a taxi meter at fifty paces. For five years they’d been forced to hail cabs with torches like nervous fire wardens. But not that night. That night, they plant their boots on a visible pavement, stick out an arm, and hail a taxi like proper Strand royalty. Five years waiting to do that tiny, normal thing.
And the spread of the lighting is almost festive. Trafalgar Square gets it. Whitehall gets it. Haymarket, Bond Street, Park Lane, Marble Arch, Charing Cross Road. Part of Soho blinking awake like a cat deciding it might, actually, get out of bed. Vauxhall Bridge Road too, catching the glow like a signal flare.
But here’s the thing: those newly lit streets weren’t pristine. They weren’t suddenly healed. Park Lane had blast damage. Soho had gaps where buildings used to lean companionably against one another. Whitehall still bore scorch marks on stone. And yet, for one night, Londoners could stroll through the wreckage and see where they were going. The light didn’t hide the hurt. It illuminated it. Gave it contour. Let Londoners see the state of their own city properly for the first time in years.
And that made the whole experience oddly moving. You can imagine people suddenly clocking just how changed their familiar routes were. The corners that had vanished. The silhouettes redrawn. The gaps in the skyline that hadn’t been visible in the blackout. The light must have been both comforting and saddening. A reunion and a reality check in the same moment.
And still, the sheer lift of it. Couples strolling arm in arm, no longer tethered to a torch beam. Soldiers on leave seeing the city’s wounds but also its stubborn life. Children pointing at buildings they’d never realised had colours and angles and windows. Buses pulling up to stops where you could actually see the conductor grinning.
The City Corporation promised more moonlighting in the coming fortnight. Even dangled the delicious idea of full peacetime lighting, but held that back for Peace Night. That phrase alone must have made hearts beat a little quicker. Peace Night. Somewhere in the future, but not impossibly distant now, the city would blaze again.
But in November ’44, nobody needed blaze. The silver wash was enough. It was proof the darkness wasn’t permanent. Proof that the city hadn’t vanished, only hidden itself. And now, tentatively, shyly, battered but unbowed, it was stepping back into visibility.
It wasn’t a return to the old London. It was a return to being seen. And that, after five long years in the dark, was miracle enough.
And a footnote. You want a walk that’s a good fit with this piece. Try The Blitz Walk. Or Westminster at War.
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.