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.
And here it comes, your daily London fix.
It’s Wednesday, November 26th, 2025.
Thanksgiving eve, come to think of it.
Something short and sweet today.
We’re often asked about the Christmas Morning Walk – Christmas Morning, 1660. What’s that all about? The Christmas afternoon Walk – The Christmas Day Charles Dickens’ London Walk. That one’s self-explanatory. It’s all there in the title. Everybody knows what Christmas Day. And who Charles Dickens was. And, yes, London doesn’t need any footnotes. You say London and nobody’s clamouring for “more data please – what are you on about?”
But Christmas Day, 1660 – subtitled Samuel Pepys’ London.
I’m afraid Samuel Pepys is a closed book to quite a few of my compatriots. That comes across in spades when they ask us, “who’s this guy, Samuel Peepees? Yes, they haven’t heard of him, they mispronounce the name.
So what’s coming out of the oven today is something in the way of an advancer for that Christmas Morning Walk.
Christmas Morning, 1660. As I mentioned early: today’s Thanksgiving eve. That first Thanksgiving – over there in Plymouth, Massachusetts – took place in 1621. They were giving thanks for a successful harvest.
Well, fast forward 39 years – and a few weeks – cross the Atlantic in this direction, pitch up here in London, and what do you know they had something to give thanks for on Christmas Morning, 1660. That was the year London got its Christmas back.
So let’s get back there. Let’s do something in the way of a scene setter. A backgrounder. Who was Samuel Pepys. What was London like in 1660? What’s that walk all about?
Let’s weigh anchor. Curtain up. Wake up and smell the smells.
Picture it.
London, Christmas 1660.
The air smells of smoke and wet wool. Church bells ring again for
the first time in years.
After a decade of gloom and godliness, the city’s remembering how to laugh.
Cromwell’s gone.
The King’s back.
The theatres are open,
the taverns are loud,
and the mince pies are once again legal. London’s exhaling.
And the exhale sounds suspiciously
like singing.
For eleven long years under the Puritans, Christmas had been frowned upon.
No feasting,
no dancing,
no carols.
Just sermons and silence.
But now it’s the Restoration.
The monarchy restored,
the joy restored,
and with it, Christmas itself.
Hark ye good times and merry making and good times.
It’s the first proper Christmas
in a generation,
and the city means to make up
for lost time.
You can almost see it.
The inns along Cheapside and
Fleet Street blazing with firelight. Tankards clanking,
fiddlers tuning up,
cooks basting geese.
Rosemary and ivy hanging from every beam.
Housewives kneading spiced dough, servants running errands through
the frost.
The smell of ale, beef, and
plum pudding thick in the air.
Samuel Pepys,
our man in the crowd,
gives us a front-row seat.
Christmas Day, 1660.
He goes to church twice,
dines well,
and notes that his wife has
a new petticoat.
That’s Pepys for you –
equal parts detail and delight.
He’s not just celebrating Christmas.
He’s celebrating freedom.
The theatres have just reopened.
The King’s Company and
the Duke’s Company are
back in business.
The playhouses are full of laughter again – Restoration comedy, saucy and sharp. Charles II himself is
throwing a Christmas court at Whitehall, full of music,
dancing,
and mistresses.
The most scandalous thing
you can imagine after Cromwell’s
grey decade.
In the streets, you hear it too –
fiddlers,
drummers,
carollers.
Children chasing oranges,
sailors swaggering home from the docks, sweetmeats and
ribbons on sale in the markets.
London’s alive again.
And yet –
there’s a softness underneath
all the noise.
The country’s weary.
The years of war and
rule by saints have left their mark.
But for one season,
they let the light back in.
Christmas 1660 isn’t just Christ’s birth – it’s England’s rebirth.
So there you have it.
The year London got its Christmas back.
A city shaking off the dust of
Puritanism,
lighting its fires,
raising its tankards, and
saying in one great voice: enough gloom. Bring on the laughter.
Bring on the music.
Bring on Christmas.
And look, if you want to head back to 1660,
spend Christmas morning that year
with Samuel Pepys, just pitch up at 11 o’clock at the big Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square.
And no need to take it from me. You heard of E. V. Lucas? No?
Well, take this from me. E. V. Lucas is worth getting to know. He was born in 1868. That’s Dickens’ time. Died in 1938. The requisite three score and ten, but gosh he lived through a lot. The second half of the Victorian era, the British empire at its pinnacle, and the British empire on its way out, the Edwardian era, the mother of all catastrophes, as the Germans dubbed the Great War, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, the very eve of World War II. Edward Verrall Lucas – E. V. Lucas as he was always known, was an English essayist, humorist, editor, publisher, biographer and literary man-about-town. One of those quietly ubiquitous early 20th-century figures – not a household name today but in his time he was everywhere. Knew everybody. Had interesting things to say about everybody and everything.
Including Samuel Pepys. E. V. Lucas had a lot of time for Pepys. He got him in his sights and squeezed this off.
“I am inclined to think that Pepys
when all is said is
the greatest of the Londoners –
a fuller, more intensely alive Londoner than either Johnson or Lamb.
Perhaps he wins his pre-eminence
rather by his littleness,
for to be a Londoner in the highest
one must be rather trivial or
at least be interested in trivialities.” So that’s the measure of the man –
the greatest of the Londoners.
But it’s not just Pepys we’re
tracking down,
it’s his London.
And what a London it was.
Pepys’s three score and ten were
the formative years
in the life of our city.
They’re the bridge across –
from mediaeval London to
recognisably modern London,
your London, my London, our London.
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.