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 October 8th, 2025.
And, yup, right on cue, here’s your daily London fix.
My personal daily London fix yesterday knocked my socks off. I did a private Little Venice Walk in the morning. Followed that up with lunch at arguably the most magical cafe in London. For the record, the constellation of great places to have lunch in Little Venice is the most dazzling constellation of luncheon venues in the London firmament. On every count, not least the variety of places and their extraordinary settings. That’s what being a place where three canals meet will do for you.
So that pushed the boat out for an autumn days of days.
Then yesterday evening, well, we turned up trumps. We got to go high in the sky in the City, wrangled an invitation to a sky box that’s pretty much off limits to the public. Yup we got to go top side at The Cheesegrater, London’s Easy Does It skyscraper. Here’s the tale.
By definition it was a City of London evening. And sure enough it began underground. Monument Tube Station. We came up gasping for air and straight into history. Because right there, as you emerge blinking into daylight, streetlight, whatever, you’re standing next to a 17th-century skyscraper. The Monument. 202 feet of Portland stone, Wren and Hooke’s elegant column marking the spot where the Great Fire of London started. It was the tallest freestanding stone column in the world when they built it. A 17th-century skyscraper indeed – the Cheesegrater’s great-great-grandfather.
From there, Mary – top-flight, blue-badge, all-the-letters-after-her-name professional guide – took charge. She knows the City like a cat knows its territory. “Right,” she said, “before we go up the newest skyscraper in town, we’ll have a look at the tiniest attraction in London.”
And she meant tiny. On the side of a nondescript building, halfway up Philpot Lane, two little mice. Bronze. Barely the size of your thumb. A miniature tableau of rodents in mid-brawl over a bit of bread or cheese. The story goes they commemorate two construction workers who fell to their deaths during the building of the old Monument-adjacent structure. Their mates said they’d been fighting over who’d stolen whose sandwich. Turns out the real culprits were mice. London: a city where tragedy, folklore, and whimsy share the same paving stone.
From the smallest to the most beautiful – next stop, Leadenhall Market. If the Cheesegrater is glass-and-steel futurism, Leadenhall is a Victorian dream in colour and iron. Think scarlet girders, gold trim, curving glass roof – a grand arcade that smells faintly of history, oysters, and warm bread. It’s been here in some form since the 14th century; the current incarnation was by Sir Horace Jones, who later gave us Tower Bridge. Step through its light and shadow, and you’re walking through one of the best-preserved corners of old London. And then – just beyond it – you look up and there it is.
The Cheesegrater.
Or, if you’re being formal, 122 Leadenhall Street. Designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners – that’s Richard Rogers’ firm, he of Lloyd’s Building fame – and completed in 2014. Its official height: 224.5 metres, 48 storeys. But nobody calls it 122 Leadenhall. Everyone calls it the Cheesegrater. Supposedly, City planning chief Peter Rees coined the nickname when he saw an early model and quipped, “It looks like something you’d grate parmesan with.” And like so many of London’s architectural nicknames – the Gherkin, the Walkie-Talkie, the Scalpel – it stuck.
And that shape! That glorious backward lean, that slant towards the sky. It isn’t just stylistic bravado. The building had to slope – to preserve protected views of St Paul’s Cathedral from Fleet Street. London planning rules are strict about that. You can’t plonk a tower in the middle of a view corridor to Wren’s dome. So Rogers’ team pulled a magician’s move: instead of straight up, they went diagonally back. The result: from certain angles, you still see the dome of St Paul’s haloed by sky – and from others, you see the City’s steel future tipping its hat to its stone past.
We stepped inside and whoosh – the Cheesegrater’s lift is a show in itself. Glass-walled, high-speed, riding the outside of the building like something out of Blade Runner. Up we went, the City falling away below, the Lloyd’s Building – Rogers’ earlier masterpiece – gleaming beside us like a spaceship in dock. And then we arrived.
Up there, on those lofty floors, London opened out in all directions. To the south, the Thames glinting like a ribbon of mercury. The Shard standing sentinel on the far bank. Westward, the soft blur of St Paul’s, the dome perfectly framed against the evening light – exactly as the planners intended. North, the hills of Hampstead and Highgate faint in the distance. And to the east, the serried ranks of Canary Wharf, the modern City’s rival sibling.
The light was doing that thing only London light can do – the slow-golden-to-lavender fade of an October evening. Glass catching fire one moment, then cooling to silver. A magical hour to be up there – high above the hum and clatter – as the City flickered on.
And for all that high-tech sheen, there’s something almost modest about the Cheesegrater. It’s not flash like the Walkie-Talkie, not voluptuous like the Gherkin. There’s a rigour, a simplicity, even an honesty in its exposed bracing and open frame. Rogers used to say he wanted his buildings to wear their structure on the outside – “like the skin on a skeleton.” That’s exactly what you see here: the engineering isn’t hidden; it is the aesthetic.
Down below, the building gives something back. The 30-metre-high public atrium is open to everyone – cafés, art, space to linger. You can’t just wander into the upper floors (those are private offices), but at least the base belongs to Londoners. It’s a fine example of how the modern City tries to soften its edges – to make glass and steel play nicely with street life.
Standing up there, I thought of The Monument again. Wren’s slender column and Rogers’ great slanted wedge – both monuments in their own way. One to a disaster that shaped the old City; the other to a skyline reshaped for the new.
And when we finally descended – back through that buzzing atrium, out into the ancient warren of lanes – the Cheesegrater’s great glowing slope still loomed above us, all amber and steel and reflections. We’d started the evening at a 17th-century skyscraper and ended it in a 21st-century one.
London had bookended the centuries for us – from Wren to Rogers – in a single, magical walk.
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.
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from – – 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, , the former Editor (and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And , 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.