London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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A very good day to you, London Walkers. London Walkers here in London. And not so far from London. And far-flung London Walkers. Over the briny sea. Getting your London fix. Wishing you were here. Counting the days. Dreaming of coming to London. Anyway, it’s Monday, July 7th, 2025.
Two keynotes today.
One: crowds. London crowds.
And two: this place isn’t a city, it’s a world. Or even a universe. The universe. And that means that everything is always here. Nothing ever dies in London. Nothing ever escapes London’s gravitational pull.
London crowds. Well, I’m thinking of a couple of days ago. Saturday. There I was on the 328. Bound for Kensington. Off to do my 2 pm Kensington Walk. Got to Notting Hill and the traffic seized up. Oh, yes, the bus was moving. Moving about ten feet every ten minutes. In the end everybody baled. That bus was going nowhere slow, let alone at its regular speed – trundling along. As for going somewhere fast, what planet are you on having that daydream? So, we all got off. Some of us walked. I was one of them. It was a very pleasant walk – ten, fifteen minutes, something like that – to High Street Kensington. Walking through stucco-land. One of the minor pleasures of London. Others of course hopped on the Tube. Or tarried there at Portobello Road. It was Saturday, after all. Portobello Market Day.
But I digress. The main point was what brought the bus and the other traffic to a grinding halt. In six words: Pride in London 2025. The annual Pride in London parade. Indeed, the 50th anniversary of the first Pride March. Cue the superlative; The UK’s biggest LBGTQ event. A kind of LBGTQ Mardi gras. Billed – and who wouldn’t concur with this – billed as embracing every Shade: celebrating diversity together. The figures bear that out: 30,000 participants from across some 500 organisations. And the 30,000, was just for starters. They processed, they paraded. The tens of thousands of spectators were the other half of the equation. The parade route from Hyde Park Corner to Whitehall. That’s a long way from Notting Hill. But a parade that big, it slows down and backs up traffic for miles around.
So we 328ers – those of us on that 328 bus – we paraded as well. Got off and walked. So, no question, we could all say, “for sure, we paraded, we were in the Pride in London 2025 Parade.” It’s cut from the same cloth, that, as that notion that a violin retains the “energy” of each performance.
And we’re poking around in here in a bid to try to get the measure of that overarching theme: London crowds. Thinking about London and its crowds, it’s like looking at a cumulus-laden London sky. Clouds all over. Clouds every which way. Clouds coming and going. Clouds ever-changing. Well, London and crowds, that’s the same story. Crowds all over. Crowds every which way. Crowds coming and going. Crowds ever-changing. So on Saturday, I’m also thinking of Naimh – Naimh who works in our office – Naimh and her boyfriend joining some 45,000 other people in Finsbury Park for a Kneecap concert.
And the crowd in SW19 – Wimbledon for Day 6 of the Lawn Tennis championships – will have been in the same league.
But here’s the secret sauce – the London secret sauce – the miracle – madding crowds are the order of play for London. But – miraculously – it’s ever so easy to escape them. London rejoices in any number of secret, hidden places. Hidden places that even the few don’t find, let alone the crowds. Hidden places you can have all to yourself.
Ok, I said we’ve got two keynotes today. One of them London crowds. The other, this place isn’t a city, it’s a world. Or even a universe. The universe. Everything is always here. Nothing ever dies in London. Nothing ever escapes London’s gravitational pull.
So for today, June 7th, I’m looking at a pile of newspapers from June 7th, 1952. They’re all running the same story.
A story headlined, Say Farewell to Trams.
A story that sounds both keynotes. Because a huge crowd of Londoners – thousands of them – lined the streets of London from the Embankment down to the Old Kent Road to say farewell to the last Tram in London. It was a No. 40. Fittingly it came at the witching hour, it had left Embankment at twenty-two minutes to midnight and arrived in New Cross at 12. 11 a.m. It was the culmination of Last Tram Week.
And what did for the trams? Well, it’s an easy guess. Filthy lucre. London Transport was running an annual deficit of some £2 million pounds. Trams were counting for well over half of that deficit. There was a Last Tram Ceremony at midnight. One of the honoured guests at the ceremony was 64-year-old George Harvey. As a 15-year-old lad George Harvey had handed out souvenir tickets on South London’s first electric tram in 1903. And – no surprise this – the papers weren’t behindhand in pointing out that Queen Mary – she was the Princess of Wales at the time – had seen the birth of the tram in 1903 and, 49 years later, this day in 1952, its death. And the royals weren’t looking on from afar back in 1903. They had front row seats. A royal party went along for the ride.
Lady Monkwell accompanied the royal party and told the story in her journal.
She said, “On the journey to Tooting the Princess of Wales was inside the Tram and the Prince of Wales and the two little boys (later King Edward VIII and King George VI) outside. The Prince stood in front of the car and later went on the top with the little boys.”
Lady Monkwell said, “the tramcar was very nicely arranged with chairs and pink cushions. The little blue curtains with which the car was furnished were pinned up so that the Princess should be seen as clearly as possible.”
Well, farewell to trams. But this being London it wasn’t farewell to trams. Nothing ever dies in London. Nothing ever escapes its gravitational pull. 48 years later trams made a comeback. The modern tram system in London is called Tramlink. The trams serve parts of South London. Notably in areas like Croydon and Wimbledon.
Being a north Londoner I’ve been vaguely aware of the existence of trams in distant south London for many years now. But this summer they’ve sharply come into focus for me. Thanks to our entelechy, The Ultimate London Walk.
Anybody for another leg up with that fine word, entelechy? It means, the realisation of potential.
The Ultimate London Walk – our entelechy that’s been nearly 60 years in the making – is the London Walk guide Charley has created that is going to walk all the way across London, in 14 sections, from the northernmost edge of London in Hertfordshire, to the southernmost edge in Surrey.
We get into the home stretch, way down in south London, three tram stations will come into play.
The 12th walk – Anerley to South Norwood – the nearest station to the end of the walk will be Arena Tram. The 13th walk – South Norwood to Addington Hill – the meeting point will be Arena Tram and the nearest station to walk’s end will be Coombe Lane Tram. And the grand finale, the 14th walk, Addington Hill to New Addington – the meeting point will be Coombe Lane Tram and the nearest station to where we end, having walked all the way across London, north to south, having walked from Hertfordshire to Surrey – we’ll complete our journey, The Ultimate London Walk – at New Addington Tram Station.
And so she wrote for this day, Monday, July 7th, 2025.
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 £20 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 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.