London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good day to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Monday December 8th, 2025.
And here it is – fresh out of the oven, piping hot – your daily London fix.
What do you say, shall we go downtown? Head right down into the thick of it, the very epicentre of London and its environs. Take a little stroll down to Villiers Street. And a little stroll down Villiers Street.
Villiers Street is where
gets underway.
A cracking place to start anything, frankly.
You come out of Embankment Station,
gather at the foot of the gentle slope,
and you know at once you’re
in for a treat.
Because Villiers Street is
one of those London corridors
where history has been
packed in like theatre props in
a backstage cupboard.
Open the door and
everything comes tumbling out.
And at Christmas, well,
you’re getting two shows.
Villiers Street being its usual rich, quirky,
surprising self plus
Jack’s stories about
the Christmas Lights traditions
that flickered to life right here.
That’s your cherry on the sundae.
But let’s go to the top.
Stand on the Strand with your back to Villiers Street.
Straight ahead,
across the traffic,
is Coutts.
Bankers to royalty,
ghosts of Angela Burdett Coutts everywhere
if you tune your ears right,
Charles Dickens hovering in
the background.
To your left,
the grand façade of
Charing Cross Station and,
knitted into it,
the Charing Cross Hotel.
Known these days –
a bit of rebranding, this –
as The Clermont, Charing Cross.
The first major English building
to use artificial stone facing.
Florid French Renaissance style.
High pitched roofs
that aren’t decorative fluff at all
but allow for two extra floors squeezed in under those steep slopes. A hotel so successful
half the Victorian innkeepers of London
tried to copy it.
Just in front sits the Eleanor Cross, that Victorian fantasy of
a medieval memorial,
pointing the way towards Trafalgar Square and
the start of Northumberland Avenue.
Now turn around.
Face downhill.
Villiers Street runs away from you like a water chute.
Immediately on your left is
York Place,
formerly Of Alley.
The street sign spells it out
because London never forgets
an oddity.
Of Alley was
the Duke of Buckingham’s
little linguistic flourish.
George Villiers,
Duke of Buckingham.
When he sold up in the 1670s,
he made the buyer promise that
any redevelopment would
bake his name into the street plan.
So we get George Court,
Villiers Street,
Duke Street,
Buckingham Street and
this peculiar remnant, Of Alley,
the middle of his name
left hanging there
like a whispered syllable
from three and a half centuries ago.
And before Buckingham,
before all the swaggering courtiers, this was where the
Bishops of Norwich
had their London townhouse,
right down by the river.
Deep time in a tiny alley.
A few steps further and
a wave of warm, winey air hits you. Gordon’s Wine Bar.
No other city has
anything quite like it.
A warren of candlelit vaults,
low arches,
tables that wobble companionably. Topside,
in a cramped flat under the eaves,
the great author Rudyard Kipling
wrestled his pages into shape.
When he was living here
he was smitten with
a monumental case of writer’s block. London wrapped itself in a fog
thick enough to stump a lighthouse. Kipling stood at his window peering into a world made of cotton wool. Then, without warning,
the fog opened a little gap.
Kipling saw Villiers Street below, ghostly.
A man was standing on
the opposite pavement.
Then the man’s throat bloomed red.
A suicide, he’d cut his own throat.
A dreadful, sudden ending.
It shocked Kipling to his bones but,
in that strange alchemy of
the creative mind,
it cleared the blockage.
The words came roaring back.
Villiers Street can be merciless,
can be generous.
Sometimes in the same minute.
Just beyond Gordon’s are
the steps down into Watergate Walk. Go down those steps and
you’re in a narrow passage
running along the north side of Embankment Gardens.
To your left,
there are steps down into
Gordon’s itself
and, when the bar is open,
knots of drinkers spilling out,
glasses in hand,
chatting under the lamps.
To your right,
the quiet greenery of
the Embankment Gardens.
Walk a little further and
you come to steps
that take you up
to Buckingham Street,
linking you back into
Buckingham’s grand old street plan. And right there,
on your right hand side,
you can reach out and touch it –
or walk through it,
is the ancient Water Gate
to York House.
That centuries old Water Gate is
the last architectural survivor
of the Duke’s riverside mansion.
In its heyday the Thames lapped
right up against it.
Now it sits well inland because the great engineer Joseph Bazalgette
pushed the river back to
build the Embankment and
London gained
this ribbon of Gardens as a bonus.
It was said Bazalgette put the river in chains. More prosaically – and more importantly – he designed London’s Victorian-era sewage system. It was a superb design. Parts of it are still with us today. It was the greatest civil engineering project to ever come London’s way. And what’s most of all to the point, it was instrumental in eliminating the cholera outbreaks that killed thousands of Londoners. Cholera was called the Blue Death. The severe hydration from the disease gave the skin a blueish-gray tint. Along with sunken eyes and cold, clammy skin. Joseph Bazalgette, full honours to him, condemned the Blue to Death. And carried out the Death sentence with his sewage system. Anyway, to see the Water Gate marooned
in its lawn is to understand,
in a single glance,
how much London has shifted
under your feet.
Back on Villiers Street proper,
you’re entering a different century. The west side clatters
with trains crossing the
Hungerford railway bridge,
the ironwork humming
like metallic weather.
The great 18th century novelist
Tobias Smollett
would not have recognised
a note of it.
His London was the shouting,
the clamour,
the hustle and bustle of riverside life. This whole slope smelled of
tar and tides and wharf ropes,
of baskets of fish fresh off the boats, of animal dung and, yes,
human as well.
Hungerford Market was
just along here.
Sir Edward Hungerford
set it up in the 1680s
on the remains of his house,
which had burned down
a few years earlier.
The plan was to rival
Covent Garden with
fruit and vegetables.
It never quite managed that
but the place buzzed.
In the 1830s
Charles Fowler rebuilt it as
a two storey market,
meat and fish below,
produce above.
Then came
the bazaar and art gallery add ons. London,
being London,
rewarded the effort with
a fire that wiped out the extras.
And by 1860
the whole thing had been swept aside to make room for
Charing Cross Station.
One world gone,
another beginning.
And tucked into that older world
was the little porter’s lodge
right there,
right by the steps that lead down
to Water Gate Walk.
In Smollett’s day,
one Hugh Hewson lived there.
He was the porter.
A porter who became a celebrity.
Because he was said to be
the model for Hugh Strap,
the loyal companion of
Roderick Random in
Smollett’s great picaresque tale.
And this will come as no surprise, Smollett was playing at home here. This was his backyard. He lived near Charing Cross, close to Villiers Street.
Which, if you think about it,
means that on this short
stretch of pavement
you brush past Smollett,
Kipling and, in Gordon’s,
the unmistakable shadows of
G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who drank
and wrote
and debated among the barrels.
Keep descending.
The Gardens run alongside you on your left now,
green,
serene,
a kind of exhalation after
the cramped pointillism
of the upper street.
The railway arches brood
on your right.
And dead ahead,
at the very foot of Villiers Street,
sits Embankment Underground Station.
Walk straight through it,
from the Villiers Street entrance
to the river entrance,
step out and there before you is
the Embankment road and
beyond it the Thames,
wide-shouldered and unhurried,
the footbridges arching across
like outstretched arms.
And that’s your overture.
A hundred yards,
half a millennium.
Medieval bishops, Elizabethan, Jacobean and
Restoration dukes,
Victorian engineers,
literary giants,
railway thunder,
Christmas Lights.
Which is why starting
Jack’s Christmas Lights Walk here
is such a delight.
You get Villiers Street on
its own terms and
then you get Jack’s tales
of how London
lit itself up for Christmas,
some of which spark right here.
I won’t spoil the surprises.
That’s Jack’s business.
But I will say this.
Villiers Street is
one of London’s great
compression chambers.
A backstage staircase.
And at Christmas,
with the lights flickering and
the river glinting,
it’s pure magic.
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.