London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good evening to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Monday December 15th, 2025.
And we’re off to the races. Here we go. Here it is, here’s your daily London fix.
St Martin in the Fields is the church that refuses to behave like a church.
There.
There you go.
There you have it.
That’s your opening line.
St Martin in the Fields is the church that refuses to behave like a church.
Because it’s true.
And because St Martin’s has always been a bit of a renegade.
A frontline outpost.
A place with a foot in two worlds.
Or three.
Or five.
It’s London’s great multitasker.
A church that’s really a village.
A concert hall.
A refuge.
A beacon.
A kind of civic living room
right on the lip of Trafalgar Square.
Walk toward it and you feel it
before you see it.
The bustle.
The music drifting out.
The clatter from the café down in the crypt.
It’s like wandering into a film set where the extras haven’t yet been told the director’s arrived.
The place just lives.
So.
Beginnings.
Let’s roll the clock right back.
Back to Roman times.
This spot was outside the city walls. Literal fields.
A rural outpost where travellers, soldiers,
plague dodgers
and the odd wolf might pass.
The church is dedicated
to St Martin of Tours.
Patron saint of soldiers.
And beggars.
And travellers.
A good choice for a church
whose first job
was to look after people
who were neither here nor there. Travellers on the margins.
That liminal energy
has never left the place.
Leap forward to 1222.
Big church council.
The Bishop of London squares up to Westminster Abbey,
who’d tried to muscle in on
St Martin’s turf.
The Bishop slaps them down.
That’s how important this little church in the fields already was.
And then the Plague.
Grim days.
St Martin’s ministers to the victims lying outside the wall.
It’s also the parish that performs the burials
when London’s coming apart at the seams.
If churches had military ribbons,
St Martin’s would jingle when it walked.
Now as for the building we see today…
That crisp,
elegant,
white-stone beauty.
That’s 18th century.
That’s James Gibbs.
A Scot with a flair for theatrical entrances.
He gives St Martin’s its iconic look. The Corinthian portico like a Roman temple.
And that steeple
rising out of the roofline
like a divine microphone stand. London’s first great portico plus steeple combination.
A showstopper.
A prototype.
A design that gets copied across the English-speaking world.
You’ve seen echoes of it in Boston. In Philadelphia.
In Baltimore.
They’re all nodding to St Martin’s.
Inside,
it feels like the moment before a Handel chorus.
Clear.
Bright.
Expectant.
A room that thinks music might break out at any second.
Talking of which.
Famous people.
Captain James Cook worshipped here.
The man who sailed off the known map.
Who probably steered by stars he’d glimpsed walking out of St Martin’s on a cold London night.
He married here too.
And for the record, his statue is just a stone’s throw away. Diagonally across Trafalgar Square and through Admiralty Arch, there it is, on the left, when you start down the Mall.
And Captain Cook is just for starters.
Fast forward to the 20th century, there’s Neville Chamberlain.
He sat in these pews.
Thought his thoughts.
Worried his worries.
Young Thomas Chippendale scurried past St Martin’s
on his way to his workshop.
And then there’s Nell Gwyn. Actress.
Orange seller.
Wit.
The sunshine in Charles II’s cloudy sky.
Her funeral procession paused at St Martin’s in 1687
and the bells tolled for her.
All London mourned her.
But she wasn’t buried in the church. No.
She went on to the parish’s burial ground.
And here’s the key London factoid. That burial ground wasn’t beside the church at all.
It lay a few minutes east,
on what’s now Charing Cross Road. Think the area around today’s National Portrait Gallery and St Martin’s Place.
That was once St Martin’s parish graveyard.
The resting place of generations of Londoners.
Nell Gwyn among them.
Back to the church.
Let’s talk character.
St Martin’s is generous.
Sociable.
London’s equivalent of someone who offers you the last biscuit without making a fuss.
Elegant, yes, but never aloof. Historic but not stuffy.
A place that feels like someone’s arms are already open.
And a great deal of that is thanks to the Reverend Dick Sheppard
in the early 20th century.
He threw the doors wide open and said, in effect,
if you’re lost,
lonely,
hungry,
scared,
broke or broken,
come in.
Rest.
No questions asked.
St Martin’s became the city’s warm heart.
And it still is.
The church runs some of London’s most important support for people who are homeless or on the edge of homelessness.
The advice.
The meals.
The emergency help.
The Connection at St Martin’s.
A whole network of care
woven quietly into the fabric of the place.
Today it’s also a world-class concert venue.
Those lunchtime concerts.
Little miracles in the middle
of a London workday.
Free or nearly so.
Bach or Handel or Mozart floating through the air like acoustic honey. Outside it’s bus engines and sirens and pigeons ricocheting off Nelson’s Column.
Inside it’s serenity.
A musical hush that feels almost physical.
And down below.
The café in the crypt.
A triumph of London repurposing. Brick vaulting.
Soft lighting.
The murmur of conversation. Coffee cups clinking.
And under your feet the tombstones of long gone parishioners.
They don’t seem to mind.
St Martin’s has always been good at mixing past and present without anyone spilling their drink.
As for mentions in books…
In poems.
Writers can’t resist the place. Dickens passes through its orbit constantly.
TS Eliot scribbles lines just round the corner.
John Gay slips it into Trivia.
It’s in the bloodstream of London literature.
And films.
Oh yes.
Directors love that silhouette.
You catch glimpses of it in Skyfall, The Imitation Game,
all sorts.
It’s cinematic because it looks like the idea of a church.
A clean, classical line
that tells you instantly,
you’re in London now.
Proper London.
Then the bells.
Always the bells.
Rising over the chatter of Trafalgar Square.
The buskers.
The arguments.
The bus exhaust.
Somehow cutting through it all with a kind of gentle authority.
A reminder of the heartbeat of the place.
Why is St Martin in the Fields so loved?
Because it never forgot
its original purpose.
A church on the edge of things.
For people on the edge of things. Travellers.
Strays.
The overlooked.
The overwhelmed.
It hasn’t drifted from that mission. It’s grown into it.
So here’s your closing shot.
Stand under the portico.
Look back at Trafalgar Square.
The lions.
Nelson.
The fountains.
The swirl of the city.
Then look forward through the doors.
Calm.
Warmth.
Light.
History behind you.
Sanctuary ahead.
And above you that steeple, pointing like a conductor’s baton just before the downbeat.
Listen.
There it is.
The city’s heart.
Beating.
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.