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 Monday, January 19th.
And here it is.
Your daily London fix.
Usual remit. Very much the London Walks remit.
Surprise me.
Tell me something interesting. Tell me something I didn’t know.
Tell it in an interesting way.
Ok, to get the show on the road, a little Monday-morning throat-clearing.
Courtesy of Ogden Nash.
Out of left field?
You bet.
Ogden Nash.
The master of the crooked rhyme, the sideways grin, the truth told while pretending not to be serious.
He specialised in making gloom feel faintly ridiculous.
“Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.”
Exactly that sort of company.
Born in 1902, dead by 1971.
Two world wars. The Great Depression.
An age that kept urging people to be sensible, upright, and serious.
Nash took one look at that and went sideways.
He wrote light verse.
Though “light” is a bit of a fib.
The poems are sharp, skewed, knowingly off-balance.
Marriage. Children. Animals. Hypochondria. Procrastination.
Mondays very much included.
He doesn’t lecture.
He sidles up.
Mutters something under his breath.
And suddenly the gloom doesn’t seem quite so convincing.
Which makes him just about perfect for a grey January Monday morning.
So here you go.
A Monday morning Ogden Nash poem.
It’s called We’ll All Feel Better by Wednesday.
I love coffee, I love tea,
I love the girls, but they’re mean to me.
I love Saturday, I love Sunday,
But how could anyone ever love Monday?
Let’s make a scientific analysis,
Let’s diagnose this Monday paralysis.
Well, you’ve suffered an overdose of sunburn;
You must blister and peel before you un-burn.
For junk your muscles could all be sold for,
From engaging in games you are now too old for.
You’re bloated from a diet of buns and hamburgers,
Chickenburgers, cheeseburgers, nutburgers, clamburgers.
Your hair may be brushed, but your mind’s untidy,
You’ve had about seven hours’ sleep since Friday;
No wonder you feel that lost sensation;
You’re sunk from a riot of relaxation.
What you do on weekends, you claim to adore it,
But Monday’s the day that you suffer for it.
That’s why Labor Day is a red-letter news day —
Blue Monday doesn’t come until Tuesday.
Ok.
That’s the warm-up act.
Here’s the main show.
I’m calling this one The War Fell Out of the Sky.
And it didn’t happen in London.
Not at first.
It happened on Tuesday, January 19th, 1915.
And it happened in Great Yarmouth
and King’s Lynn.
Coastal towns.
East Anglia.
The edge of the map.
London read about it the next morning over breakfast.
And every single person who read those headlines understood the same thing.
If they can do it there,
they can do it here.
Nobody felt better by Wednesday.
Here we go.
The war fell out of the sky.
Not with a trumpet blast or a marching band.
Not with a cavalry charge or a clash of bayonets.
It came humming. Drifting. Floating.
Like a nightmare that had learned to fly.
January 1915.
Great Yarmouth. King’s Lynn.
People look up.
And for the first time in history, civilians realise something shattering, something irreversible.
Wars are no longer just fought over there.
They can come here.
London doesn’t look up yet.
London reads.
One eyewitness in Great Yarmouth put it perfectly:
“It was as if a new star had appeared.
Then it began to drop fire.”
Let’s start with the monsters themselves.
Zeppelin.
Rigid airships.
Aluminium skeletons wrapped in fabric skin, filled with hydrogen gas.
Immense. Graceful. Terrifying.
How big?
About 550 feet long.
Almost the length of two football pitches.
Bigger than any aircraft people had ever imagined.
Bigger than most buildings.
Crew?
Around 15 to 20 men.
Pilots, engineers, mechanics, gunners, bomb handlers.
Living for days in a swaying, freezing tube above the North Sea.
Armament?
Machine guns mounted in gondolas.
And bombs. Lots of them.
Bombs ranged from 10-pounders to 300-pound monsters.
High explosive. Incendiaries.
A typical raid might drop one to two tons of bombs.
Dropped by hand.
Through open hatches.
Men leaning into the void, timing the release by eye and instinct.
Where did they come from?
Northern Germany.
Naval airship bases along the coast.
Places like Cuxhaven and Wilhelmshaven.
They crossed the North Sea, then the Channel.
A flight of 12 to 20 hours, depending on winds.
Pitch black.
No radar. No GPS.
Just compass bearings, maps, dead reckoning, and the faint glow of cities far below.
They flew at 10,000 feet or more.
Out of reach, they thought.
They were wrong.
But at first, only just.
Now imagine London.
Four months later.
Monday, May 31st, 1915.
No air raid sirens.
No blackout.
No civil defence drills.
You’re in bed.
Or in the pub.
Or stepping out of a theatre.
And then you hear it.
Not an explosion.
A hum. A droning.
A strange, insect-like vibration in the sky.
People come out into the streets.
They look up.
And there it is.
A cigar-shaped shadow sliding across the stars.
Then the bombs fall.
How much warning did London get?
Almost none.
At first, maybe ten minutes, if that.
A policeman on a bicycle.
A hurried knock at a door.
Mostly it was just noise, confusion, disbelief.
Defences?
Almost laughable.
A few anti-aircraft guns that could barely elevate high enough.
Searchlights struggling to catch the moving shadows.
Rifle fire.
Literally men standing in the streets shooting rifles into the sky.
And here’s the terrible irony.
If a bullet hit a Zeppelin, nothing much happened.
Hydrogen doesn’t explode just because you poke it.
Most bullets passed straight through.
The gas leaked slowly.
The airship sailed on.
It made them seem invincible.
Casualties?
The first raids killed a handful.
Then dozens.
Then more.
Over the course of the Zeppelin campaign against Britain, around 500 people were killed, the majority civilians.
Thousands injured.
Homes destroyed.
Streets shattered.
But numbers only tell part of it.
The real weapon wasn’t the bomb.
It was fear.
This is the moment when a page turns in history.
For centuries, wars were fought by armies on battlefields.
Cities were prizes, not targets.
And Britain believed itself safe.
Protected by the Channel.
Shakespeare’s great boast in Richard II:
“This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house…”
The Channel as a moat.
Except now the moat had been jumped.
Casually.
Effortlessly.
From the sky.
Why did the Germans do it?
Two reasons.
First, to terrorise civilians.
To break morale.
To make people feel unsafe in their beds.
Second, to force Britain to divert resources.
Guns. Aircraft. Pilots.
Pulled back from the Front to defend the home cities.
And it worked.
Newspapers the next morning were breathless.
“AIR PIRATES.”
“DEATH FROM THE CLOUDS.”
Eyewitness accounts.
Sketches of the monsters.
Maps of bomb sites.
Lists of the dead.
The German press was triumphant.
Proof of ingenuity.
Proof that Britain was no longer untouchable.
How long between raids?
Sometimes weeks.
Sometimes days.
That unpredictability was the point.
People slept in cellars.
In Tube stations.
Children were kept home from school.
Londoners flinched at every engine noise.
Then, gradually, the balance shifted.
Better guns.
Better shells.
And a crucial breakthrough.
Incendiary bullets.
Suddenly, if a Zeppelin was hit, it did matter.
Hydrogen plus fire equals catastrophe.
One by one, the giants fell.
Burning. Crumpling. Breaking apart in mid-air.
Great fireballs raining wreckage across the countryside.
By 1917, the Zeppelin was obsolete as a terror weapon.
Too slow. Too vulnerable.
But the damage was done.
The idea had taken hold.
This was the first time a civilian population was deliberately and systematically bombed from the air.
London was the laboratory.
What followed is the entire twentieth century written in fire.
The Blitz.
Dresden.
Hiroshima.
Shock and awe.
All of it traces back to that first dreadful realisation.
The sky had become hostile.
The war had learned how to fly.
And if you want to walk this story, not just hear it.
If you want to trace the trail of those floating nightmares through the streets of London.
Then keep an eye out for On the Trail of the Zeppelins, the anniversary walk guided by Kevin Flude.
Kevin is a distinguished former London Museum archaeologist.
And one of the great interpreters of how this city absorbs shock and keeps going.
The walk runs around the May 31st anniversary.
And yes, it will almost certainly run this year.
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.