London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Ok today’s London fix begins with a woman in a drawing room in St James’s Square imagining a machine that does not yet exist.
Which is a bit like somebody in the reign of William IV sitting down with a quill pen and inventing Spotify.
Or Excel.
Or your iPhone.
Or perhaps all three before breakfast.
Because the woman in question is Ada Lovelace.
Daughter of Lord Byron. Countess of Lovelace.
London society figure. Mathematical genius. Visionary.
And, depending on which historian you ask, the world’s first computer programmer.
And the setting for our tale is one of the grandest addresses in London: St James’s Square.
Now St James’s Square is not merely posh.
London has plenty of posh.
St James’s Square is concentrated, vintage, high-octane posh.
It is old aristocratic London. Cabinet ministers. Dukes. Diplomats. Fortunes.
Liveried footmen.
Carriages rattling over the cobbles.
A faint aroma of cigar smoke, sealing wax and political conspiracy.
And if you stand there today, just a couple of minutes south of Piccadilly, you can still feel it.
The square has plane trees the size of cathedrals. Tall Georgian houses with cream façades and black railings. Windows that seem to stare down at you with immense inherited confidence. You half expect a footman to emerge carrying dispatches marked “URGENT – EMPIRE MATTERS.”
Or perhaps a monocle.
And there, in this world of rank and privilege and chandeliers and very expensive soup, lived Ada Lovelace.
Born Augusta Ada Byron in 1815.
Her father was Byron, the rock star poet of the Regency age. Mad, bad and dangerous to know. A man who blazed through London society like a human fireworks display. Affairs. Debts. Scandal. Emotional hurricanes.
The full Regency package.
Ada barely knew him. Her parents separated when she was an infant. Byron left England forever shortly afterward.
Her mother, Lady Byron, was determined the child would not inherit Byron’s poetic volatility. So instead of encouraging romantic flights of fancy, she pushed Ada toward mathematics and logic.
Which may be the most Victorian sentence ever constructed.
“Quick, the child may become poetic. Fetch algebra immediately.”
And Ada took to it brilliantly.
Now here’s where London enters the story in earnest.
Because early Victorian London was the world capital of almost everything.
Finance. Science. Empire. Industry. Innovation.
The city was roaring into the machine age.
Railways were beginning to spread like veins across the country. Factories thundered. Steam engines hissed.
Iron bridges rose.
New inventions appeared almost weekly.
London was becoming modern before people had quite worked out what modern meant.
And in the middle of this whirling, smoky, intellectually electric city was a curious mathematician and inventor named Charles Babbage.
Babbage lived in Dorset Street, just north of Marylebone.
And he had an idea so audacious it made other Victorians blink.
He wanted to build a mechanical brain.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
A gigantic calculating machine made of brass gears, cogs, shafts, wheels and punched cards.
The Analytical Engine.
Imagine a steam-age computer.
A locomotive made love to a clock and produced a thinking machine.
That was Babbage’s vision.
Most people who encountered the idea probably reacted the way people react today when someone explains cryptocurrency at a dinner party.
Polite nodding. Slight panic. Quiet reaching for wine.
But Ada understood it.
More than understood it.
She saw beyond it.
The two met at a London soirée in 1833.
Ada was just seventeen. Babbage demonstrated part of an earlier calculating machine. The Difference Engine.
Guests gathered around this glittering mechanical contraption while the candles flickered and servants circulated with drinks and London carriage wheels clattered outside in the dark.
And Ada got it immediately.
She saw that these machines might do more than arithmetic.
That was the leap.
That was the lightning strike.
She realised that if numbers could represent other things – musical notes, letters, symbols – then such a machine could manipulate not just sums but ideas.
She wrote that the Engine “weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”
There it is.
One of the great prophetic sentences in history.
The Victorian computer visionary comparing programming to embroidery.
And she wrote it while living in the very heart of aristocratic London.
That’s the wonderful contrast.
Outside: St James’s gentlemen’s clubs. Pall Mall. Horse Guards. Dukes rumbling about in carriages. Officers in polished boots. Top hats gliding through the fog.
Inside: a woman imagining the digital future.
And London itself was the perfect incubator for such ideas.
This city has always had that quality.
The old world rubbing shoulders with the impossible future.
Roman walls beside glass skyscrapers.
Medieval alleys carrying fibre-optic cables.
Christopher Wren churches standing in the shadow of the Gherkin.
And in Ada’s day, coffee houses, salons and scientific societies buzzed with invention.
London was thick with intellectual cross-currents.
The Royal Society.
The Royal Institution.
Public lectures. Demonstrations. Arguments. Eccentrics.
Wonderful eccentrics.
Victorian London specialised in eccentrics.
Men who electrified frogs.
People building pneumatic railways.
Chaps attempting to photograph ghosts.
And somewhere among them moved Ada Lovelace, glamorous, aristocratic, mathematically gifted, discussing machines that would not truly exist for another hundred years.
She died tragically young in 1852. Only thirty-six.
The same age, incidentally, at which Byron died.
One of those eerie London-history echoes.
And for decades afterward, much of her work faded into obscurity.
But then the twentieth century arrived.
Computers arrived.
And suddenly people looked back and realised: good lord, she saw it coming.
Today there’s a programming language named ADA in her honour.
And every time you tap a screen, write an email, stream music, doomscroll social media or lose three hours looking at photographs of bulldogs wearing hats, somewhere in the deep ancestry of all that sits Ada Lovelace in St James’s Square imagining a machine weaving algebraic flowers.
How’s the London Walks theme song go?
London calling.
Story time. History time.
Future time.
And perhaps that’s the final thing to say about Ada Lovelace.
She reminds us that London is not just a city of the past.
It’s a city where the future is forever being dreamt up.
Sometimes in laboratories.
Sometimes in garages.
Sometimes in cafés.
And sometimes in grand drawing rooms in St James’s while the candlelight flickers and the carriages roll by outside.
See you tomorrow.