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 Friday, February 20th, 2026.
And here it is.
Here’s your daily London fix.
Most theatre nights entertain.
A very few alter the long course of history.
February 20th, 1817, at Drury Lane… was one of the latter.
A packed house at Drury Lane. Candlelight flickering.
Playbills rustling.
And somewhere
in the velvet darkness
of that February night,
the future is quietly
clearing its throat.
“If we could but look into the seeds of time…”
Shakespeare gives us the line in Macbeth.
And rarely has it felt more uncannily apt.
Because on this particular evening, London theatre-goers were watching something that, in the longest of long historical shadows, would one day cast its longest shadow across the life of Abraham Lincoln.
They did not know it.
Could not have known it.
But history, like London,
loves a hidden back staircase.
Let’s set the stage properly.
The venue was the great Theatre Royal, Drury Lane,
a playhouse that has stood on this site since 1663.
Today’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane goes back to 1812, though it has been many times knocked about, remodelled, added to and improved — rather like London itself. The 1812 theatre rose phoenix-like from the ashes of the great fire of 1809. Theatre fires and Drury Lane have long been on intimate terms.
And what’s there now?
Big West End musical muscle.
The full modern razzmatazz.
In fact, playing there tonight: Hercules –
the musical inspired by
the Disney animation
inspired by the ancient Greek myth. What classical civilisation would have wanted.
Which gives us, incidentally, a major American connection right there on the modern stage.
Because transatlantic theatrical traffic at Drury Lane is nothing new.
Which makes the historical irony all the more delicious.
Not a single one of those audience members tonight,
an audience that will include a lot of American visitors,
will have the faintest inkling that one of the eeriest Anglo-American theatrical footnotes unfolded on that very patch of London ground.
Enter our man.
Junius Brutus Booth.
London-born and theatre-bred.
Born in 1796,
he grew up in the tough, competitive world of the British stage.
Not a minor talent, either.
Booth was ambitious, intense, and already developing the kind of Shakespearean presence that made managers sit up and take notice.
By 1817 he had set his sights on the biggest game in town.
Edmund Kean.
Now Kean was no mere jobbing thespian.
He was electric. Volcanic.
The sort of actor who made audiences lean forward in their seats and occasionally forget to breathe. When Kean played Iago,
London talked about it for weeks.
So when Booth stepped onto the Drury Lane stage opposite Kean in Othello,
eyebrows across the capital shot north.
This was not officially billed as a prizefight.
Nobody rang a bell or posted odds outside the theatre.
But let’s not kid ourselves.
The theatrical world absolutely saw it as a clash.
The young aspirant versus the reigning king.
Booth as Othello.
Kean as Iago.
Locked together in Shakespeare’s most lethal duel.
The reviews, when they came in, were politely… measured.
Booth showed promise.
Power in places.
Serious ambition.
But he did not steal the show, did not dethrone Kean.
The great man remained firmly in possession of the London crown.
In plain English,
Booth did not flop.
But nor did he conquer the capital.
And here, my fellow London aficionados, is where
Shakespeare’s seeds of time begin to stir.
Because Booth’s great role –
the part he carried in his theatrical bloodstream –
was Othello.
And in that play comes one of the most harrowing moments in all Shakespeare.
Desdemona asleep.
The air thick with dread.
Othello summoning the terrible resolve to do what he is about to do, and to justify it to himself.
As you know, he’s going to kill his beautiful young innocent wife, Desdemona. He’s going to smother her.
Nerving himself, he says:
“It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul…”
In other words: this is why I must do this dreadful thing.
Now here’s the secondary chill.
The real life historical chill.
Within a few years,
thwarted in London,
Booth makes his great life decision. He turns his back on the London theatre world and sails for America.
And with the long hindsight of history,
it is hard not to hear a ghost of that line in the decision.
It is the cause…
Westward he goes.
Not crowned in London.
A brilliant, bruised aspirant seeking his stage elsewhere.
And that lights the fuse.
In 1838, in Maryland,
his son is born:
John Wilkes Booth.
And 27 years later, on the night of April 14, 1865,
the family drama reaches its darkest curtain call at Ford’s Theatre in Washington D. C.
Abraham Lincoln is in the theatre that night. In a private box. Watching Our American Cousin.
A comedy.
John Wilkes Booth slips through the door into Lincoln’s box, puts a pistol to the back of Lincoln’s head, and pulls the trigger.
The trigger was pulled in Ford’s Theatre in Washington.
But in a very real sense, the pistol was unholstered that night at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, here in London.
And – whisper it – the storied old London playhouse has, after a fashion, form in these matters.
Because this was the theatre where, in 1800,
James Hadfield fired at George III during a performance.
And earlier still, in 1716,
there was an attempt on the life of his grandfather, George I.
Properly eerie.
Now, to be crystal clear,
no serious historian would claim that Lincoln’s assassination somehow began at Drury Lane. History is not that tidy and we mustn’t get carried away with our own dramatic lighting.
But…
If we could but look into the seeds of time.
Because had Junius Brutus Booth decisively conquered London –
had he unseated Kean and planted his flag firmly in the West End –
the entire trajectory of the Booth family would have been different.
Instead, London proved only a partial victory.
America beckoned.
And the Booth dynasty put down roots across the Atlantic.
It is one of those delicious,
slightly eerie London footnotes.
A moment when the capital, very lightly, very indirectly, and at very long range, has a small but decisive role in a world-historical event.
Night after night, modern audiences file into Drury Lane.
Coach parties.
American tourists.
Londoners out for a big musical evening.
None of them, settling into those plush seats,
has the foggiest that,
in the most oblique and ghostly way imaginable,
a thread in the story of Lincoln’s assassination passes through this very spot.
History does love its quiet stage directions.
As for Junius Brutus Booth himself, he remains one of those fascinating hinge figures.
Not a London failure.
Not quite a conqueror.
A gifted, driven, slightly combustible actor who found his true arena in the New World.
And Edmund Kean?
He stayed the London phenomenon, the volcanic presence who,
on that February night in 1817,
still ruled the boards.
But Shakespeare, as ever, had the last word.
“If we could but look into the seeds of time
And say which grain will grow and which will not…”
On that night at Drury Lane, the audience saw two actors.
What they did not see was one of those seeds of time budding,
did not see the long, dark historical shadow quietly forming in the wings.
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.