London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good afternoon to you, London Walkers.
Wherever you are.
It’s Sunday, February 22nd, 2026.
And here it is.
Here’s your daily London fix.
I’m just back from my Sunday morning Hampstead Walk. And as it happens, this one’s about Hampstead.
Well, the main bit is about Hampstead.
But first, a floater that’s just come my way. A floater that interested me no end and that in the end I thought, you know what, that’s going to get a mention in one of the podcasts. And just generally, where that’s coming from is I’ve always thought of myself as a sort of Everyman. That’s a good pair of boots to be wearing if you’re a guide. I’ve always been supremely confident about the stuff that I churn out on my walks. The reason being, if I’m an everyman and I find something interesting, well, it follows from that that other people will also find it interesting. Anyway, what is this floater that’s captivated me. It’s a word. And isn’t it the case that most words are like Wordsworth’s daffodils. They’re commonplace. And you take them for granted. But it sometimes happens that one of those daffodils has something about it that makes it anything but a run of the mill daffodil.
So this floater I’m banging on about is an English word that I thought, mistakenly, was just an ordinary daffodil of a word.
Today – I’m repeating myself here – is February 22nd. Four days ago was Ash Wednesday. The first day of Lent. And Lent is our daffodil of a word. I never thought about the word lent. Always took it for granted. It was just a word. In the same sense that NFL commentators describe a nothing special player as ‘just a guy.’ Well, turns out, Lent isn’t just a word.
Take a good look at it. What other word can you sort of see in the word Lent. Accordion the word Lent out, that might help. Yes, you got it, you can see the word length. Lent. Length. They’re cognate.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives as the first definition of Lent, “the season of spring.” The OED tells us taproot of the word Lent is the Germanic base of the word long, on account of the lengthening of days in spring. So simple. So obvious when you finally see it. And so delightful. Lent is here. Spring is coming. The days are lengthening.
Ok, let’s get to our main order of business.
And, well, put it this way… steady the teacups.
Because trouble – genteel, well-articulated, Hampstead-grade trouble – is brewing on the Heath.
Not one row.
Two.
Separate fronts.
Same battlefield.
And if you listen carefully,
you can almost hear the rustle of Barbour jackets being firmly zipped.
Picture the scene.
Hampstead Heath on a bright winter morning.
The wind doing its usual hooligan act.
Dog walkers in convoy.
Runners bounding past as if late for an appointment with destiny.
From Parliament Hill
the great view rolls out beneath you –
St Paul’s floating on the horizon like a perfectly iced cake.
Timeless. Immutable.
Except – and here’s the rub –
some very determined people are beginning to mutter:
maybe not so immutable after all.
Because in recent days
two quite different but
oddly connected disputes
have flared up around the Heath. Each on its own
would raise eyebrows.
Together they tell us something much bigger about modern London.
Let’s take the first.
The café wars.
For decades the little Heath caffs have been part of the landscape. Unfussy.
Slightly steamy.
Heroically indifferent to interior design trends.
Places where muddy boots are not merely tolerated but practically expected.
But now change is in the air.
New leases.
New operators.
Whisper it softly –
the possibility of duck-egg blue creeping across the Formica frontier.
Some locals are perfectly relaxed about this.
Others are reacting as if
someone has proposed
replacing the bathing ponds
with an infinity pool
and a juice bar.
Petitions have been signed.
Legal sabres discreetly rattled. Feelings,
as they say in the more excitable corners of North London,
are running high.
And just when you think
that’s the main event…
…along comes Act Two.
Because hot on the heels
of the café kerfuffle
lands a rather bracing press release from the Heath & Hampstead Society –
and the tone is, shall we say,
not exactly lullaby material.
The Society,
founded in 1897 and not given to frivolous pronouncements, is
warning that a wave of proposed high-rise developments
across a two-kilometre swathe of Camden could – their word – “utterly destroy” the iconic views from the Heath.
Utterly.
That is not Hampstead language deployed lightly.
The concern centres on multiple planning proposals around
Gospel Oak, Haverstock,
Kentish Town –
names which, to the untrained ear, may sound merely geographical but which in planning terms are loaded dice.
The fear is cumulative impact.
Not one tower.
Not one awkward newcomer on the skyline.
But a slow-motion forest of height that,
taken together,
could begin to nibble away at that famous Parliament Hill panorama.
And here is where it gets interesting.
Because on the surface
these two stories – cafés and skyscrapers –
seem unrelated.
One is about chicken and chips.
The other about urban massing and sightlines.
But scratch the Hampstead surface and the same deeper anxiety is visible in both.
Who, exactly, gets to change London?
And how much change is too much?
The Heath has always occupied a curious position in the London psyche.
Wild but not too wild.
Democratic but ringed with extremely expensive postcodes.
A place where the city loosens its tie but does not quite remove the cufflinks.
People feel proprietary about it.
They always have.
Back in the nineteenth century campaigners fought tooth and nail to keep the Heath
from being swallowed by development.
The very fact you can stand on Parliament Hill today and
see that great sweep of London
is the result of Victorian vigilance and more than a little civic stubbornness.
Fast-forward to 2026 and –
well – here we are again.
Different actors.
Same underlying drama.
On one front,
the worry is that beloved scruffy cafés might be polished into something suspiciously curated.
On the other,
the fear is that the skyline itself – that great democratic view –
might slowly thicken
with glass and steel
until the magic is diluted.
Now, to be clear and
scrupulously fair,
there are arguments
on the other side in both cases.
The City of London Corporation, which manages the Heath,
says long-term café leases encourage investment and stability.
Developers and planners
point out – not unreasonably –
that London does, in fact,
need housing, renewal,
and growth.
These are not cartoon villains twirling their moustaches.
This is London doing
what London has always done.
Negotiating.
Arguing.
Fretting about the future while standing in a very long queue for tea.
But what makes this moment fascinating –
and very Hampstead –
is the intensity of the emotional weather.
Because when you start threatening either the look of the Heath or the feel of the Heath,
you are not merely adjusting infrastructure.
You are tugging at memory.
At habit.
At that deeply rooted
London instinct which says: improve things if you must…
but for heaven’s sake
don’t make them bland.
Stand on Parliament Hill
at sunset and you begin to see why the temperature rises so quickly.
The view is not just a view.
It’s a civic possession.
A shared inheritance.
A great open-air theatre in which the city performs itself every single day.
And the cafés
scattered across the Heath
play their part in that theatre too. They are the interval bars.
The warming rooms.
The places where the human stories gather after the wind has done its worst.
So yes –
loins are being girded in NW3.
Battle lines,
politely but unmistakably,
are forming.
Whether this all settles into sensible compromise
or escalates into full-blown Hampstead operetta
remains to be seen.
But one thing is certain.
When the Heath stirs…
London should pay attention.
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 a former Member of Parliament, three terms at Westminster, bringing first-hand experience of power, policy and political theatre to the very streets where it all played out.
It includes two barristers, three doctors, two geologists, a distinguished museum curator and a former Time out Editor.
It includes authors, historians, national journalists, a former London Museum archaeologist, and university professors (one of them an eminent Cambridge University paleontologist).
It includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre actors, and two professional photographers. And last but not least, the creme de la creme of top flight professionally qualified Blue Badge Guides, including 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 here’s the clincher. We’re playing at home.
London Walks is London-based. Period.
We’re not an impersonal, faceless platform run from halfway round the world. There’s no chatbot. No call-centre script. When you contact us, you reach a real person. A Londoner. Someone who actually knows the streets you’re about to walk.
That’s not a detail. That’s the difference.
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.