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.
And here it comes, your daily London fix.
It’s Thursday, November 27th, 2025.
Thanksgiving in the land of my ancestry.
Well, my not so many generations back ancestry. So Happy Thanksgiving, my fellow Americans, one and all.
But this is the land of my distant ancestry. Well one of the lands. And as it happens another one of those this side of the Atlantic ancestral lands also comes into the tale that I’m serving up today. Yes, Germany. My ever-so English last name is just a bit of camouflage. I grew up saying yeah, not yes. That’s right – branded on the tongue I was. Anyway, do those two ancestral strands give the game away? Alert you to what this one’s about? Yes? No? Well, come along – I’ll get you to a very pleasant clearing in these woods.
London first. Always London first.
Picture it.
London in deep December.
Our breath blooming in the cold.
A whiff of woodsmoke on the air.
And inside a thousand warm rooms, something is glowing,
twinkling,
preening.
Something that’s become
as essential to Christmas as
carols,
crackers,
mince pies and
a queue for the 38 bus.
The Christmas tree.
The centrepiece.
The show-off.
The sparkling diva of the season.
But like all divas,
it’s got a backstory.
A long one.
A twisty one.
A story that begins long before
tinsel,
baubles, and
dogs in Santa hats.
So gather round.
The lights are about to go down.
And the first act starts
not in Victorian England,
but in the deep, ancient forests
of Europe.
Step into the world of winter solstice. Thousands of years ago,
long before Britain was Britain,
people looked at the natural world
and tried to make sense
of its great vanishing trick.
Leaves dropped.
Fields emptied.
Everything went brown,
grey,
dormant.
Except for a few stubborn,
evergreen things.
Fir.
Spruce.
Holly.
Ivy.
Plants that kept their nerve
while the rest of nature dozed.
For early Europeans,
evergreen boughs were
symbols of persistence,
life,
hope.
So they cut them and carried them inside. Hung them over doorways.
Arranged them on altars.
Not as decoration, but as insurance.
As if saying:
we believe the sun will return.
Fast forward to the Middle Ages.
Things get wonderfully theatrical. Mystery plays roll through towns.
One of the favourites is
the Paradise Play,
the story of Adam and Eve,
performed each year on December 24th. Central to the set was a Paradise Tree.
A fir tree hung with apples.
Red,
glossy,
impossible to ignore.
The thing looked marvellously Christmassy long before
anyone used the word.
After the play,
people
occasionally set up
their own little Paradise Trees at home. Call it the prototype Christmas tree. Rough around the edges,
but conceptually spot on.
Now we leap to
the German-speaking lands
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These people know how to do winter. They also know how to do conviviality. They decorate fir trees with apples,
nuts,
gingerbread shapes,
gilded fruits.
Some of them add light.
Not electricity.
Candles.
Naked flames clipped to branches.
It sounds like madness,
but it was also magic.
Imagine that warm,
flickering glow,
dancing over glass ornaments,
catching on silver thread.
A fairy tale come alive…
provided you had a
bucket of water nearby.
By the seventeenth century
the idea has spread.
The custom wends its way into
princely courts.
By the eighteenth century
it’s arrived in Britain,
via German communities in London
and royal households with
German connections.
But here’s the thing.
It’s fashionable only in the tiniest circles. A curiosity.
A novelty.
Britain as a whole is still on
Team Mistletoe.
Enter Act Three.
The showstopper.
The game changer.
The royal couple
who did more for the Christmas tree
than any other humans in history:
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
It helps that Albert was German.
It helps even more that
the Victorians were mad for
domestic cosiness.
The nation was ready for
a bit of indoor enchantment.
In 1848,
The Illustrated London News printed
a drawing of the royal family
around their Christmas tree.
A fir bristling with candles,
sweets,
toys,
little flags.
A proper Victorian confection.
The public saw it and swooned.
If it’s good enough for the Queen,
it’s good enough for Mayfair.
And if it’s good enough for Mayfair,
then give it a minute
and it will find its way to Manchester, Margate,
and Motherwell.
The Christmas tree went viral
long before social media.
One woodcut did the job.
By the 1860s
London was thick with them.
Every respectable home had a tree. Department stores had trees.
Churches had trees.
Shopkeepers
put trees in their windows
to lure customers.
The whole city took to the idea
with gusto.
And because the Victorians
couldn’t leave anything alone,
they set about improving it.
They invented tinsel.
They introduced glass baubles
from Germany.
They invented the tree stand,
saving countless firs from
the indignity of leaning.
They even created
that most British of Christmas traditions: a slightly wonky angel
perched proudly at the top.
By the twentieth century
the Christmas tree was utterly bedded in. The world wars only
deepened the affection.
Trees became symbols of resilience.
A reminder of home.
Then the Americans added electricity and the whole thing
surged into a new age of sparkle.
Neon snowflakes.
Miles of lights.
Trees the size of modest cathedral spires. One can imagine
some of the early candle users
blinking in disbelief:
what have we created.
And then came
one of the loveliest chapters of all.
In 1947 Norway sent Britain a gift.
A tall, straight, noble Norwegian spruce, a thank you for British support
during the war.
It was erected in Trafalgar Square
in a little blaze of ceremony.
The public adored it.
The Norwegians saw the reaction
and thought:
alright then,
let’s make this a thing.
And they’ve done so every year since. That towering, elegant fir
has become the beating heart
of London’s Christmas.
A gift tree.
A gratitude tree.
A diplomatic evergreen.
Not many capitals
can say their most famous Christmas tree is a gesture of international affection.
And that is how the mighty forest
of London Christmas trees came to be. From ancient evergreen boughs in
winter huts
to a national passion
that now fills hotel lobbies,
department stores,
Georgian squares,
grand churches and
the centre of Trafalgar Square.
A story built on tradition,
invention,
royal PR,
Norwegian goodwill and
the British love of a good sparkle.
Which brings us to now.
To London in December.
To the trees that tower,
shimmer,
glisten and
glow.
And to the woman who knows
exactly where to find
the very best of them.
Cue London Walks guide Claire.
Claire’s done what the
early evergreen worshippers did.
She looked at the city
in deep winter and said:
show me the light.
She’d tracked down
the magnificent,
the secretive,
the theatrical,
the exquisite.
She’s stitched them into a walk so festive it practically hums.
So if you want to see
the capital’s Christmas trees
at their glorious, dazzling best,
treat yourself to
Claire’s Christmas Trees Walk.
It goes December 4th,
December 6th,
December 11th,
December 13th,
December 18th and
December 20th.
The trees are ready.
The stories are ready.
Claire’s ready.
London is about to twinkle.
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.