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 Thursday, February 12th, 2026.
And here it is.
Here’s your daily London fix.
You’re minding your own business.
Cup of tea.
February drizzle doing its thing against the window.
And then – bang – a headline.
Cholera.
Not in a Victorian novel.
Not in a museum display case.
Not in a footnote about the 1850s.
Now.
A tabloid splashes it across the page.
A man in his eighties.
Suspected case.
First of its kind in Britain for 125 years, they say.
Now pause.
Before we run for the nearest hand sanitiser, a little perspective. Modern Britain does not have endemic cholera.
We have sanitation, treated water, surveillance systems, epidemiologists with spreadsheets and PhDs.
Official confirmation and context matter.
Headlines can sprint faster than laboratory reports.
But.
The word itself – cholera – that’s dynamite.
Because in London that word has history.
Deep, foetid, river-scented history.
This was the blue death.
Mid-19th century.
London swelling, bursting,
roaring with people.
And what did all those people produce?
Waste. Gallons of it.
Where did it go?
Into cesspits. Into drains.
Into the Thames.
And from the Thames?
Back into your glass.
That was the system.
In 1832 cholera hits London hard. Then again in 1848.
Then in 1854 it descends on Soho like a scythe.
Imagine it.
You’re living in a narrow street near Broad Street.
You wake up fine.
By afternoon you’re wracked with cramps.
By evening you’re violently ill.
By morning you’re gone.
Skin tinged blue-grey from catastrophic dehydration.
Hence the nickname.
The blue death.
Londoners blamed “miasma” –
bad air.
Foul smells rising from filth.
And to be fair, the smells were foul enough to kill optimism at fifty paces.
But one man wasn’t convinced.
Dr John Snow.
Not the one with the sword and the wolves.
A real London doctor.
Quiet. Precise. Observant.
He did something radical.
He counted.
He plotted the addresses of the dead on a map.
Dot after dot after dot.
And what did he see?
A cluster.
A tight, damning constellation around one public water pump in Broad Street.
The enemy wasn’t the air.
It was the water.
Snow persuaded the local authorities to remove the pump handle.
It’s one of the most famous unscrewing jobs in history.
The outbreak was already waning, but symbolically – intellectually –
it was seismic.
It marked the birth of modern epidemiology.
Today you can stand on Broadwick Street and see the replica pump. There’s even a pub named after John Snow.
That’s London for you.
Nearly died of it.
Now we drink to it.
But cholera didn’t just give us a pub sign.
It gave us sewers.
Enter Sir Joseph Bazalgette –
hero in top hat and whiskers.
The man who built the great Victorian sewer network
after the “Great Stink” of 1858 made Parliament gag.
Massive brick intercepting sewers. Miles of them.
A cathedral to sanitation beneath our feet.
That’s why a cholera headline today feels like a ghost rattling chains.
Because for London,
cholera isn’t abstract.
It’s ancestral memory.
Now here’s where it gets properly Soho.
If you want to feel that history in your bones,
don’t just read about it.
Walk it.
On Sunday afternoons Dr Luisa – surgeon, author,
a woman with a forensic eye and the storytelling instincts of a born guide –
leads one of London Walks’ all time great excursions – the deliciously titled: Death, Debauchery & Doctors in Soho.
And cholera is right at home there.
Because Soho was the frontline. The cramped courts.
The shared pumps.
The desperate households.
Luisa doesn’t give you an essay. She gives you people.
The mother who lost three children in a week.
The sceptical officials who clung to miasma theory.
The doctor who dared to argue.
You stand where it happened.
You look at the streets differently.
That’s the thing about diseases. They reshape cities.
Cholera forced London to modernise.
To engineer.
To think scientifically.
To build for the future.
So when a modern headline shouts “cholera” in block capitals,
it’s not just a health story.
It’s a historical echo.
We live in a city that once feared the water in its own cup.
Now we turn on a tap without thinking.
That transformation is astonishing.
So yes – read the news carefully. Wait for official confirmations. Keep calm and carry on,
as the mugs say.
But also take the opportunity.
Because if the word “cholera” has jolted you,
that jolt connects you straight back to Victorian Soho,
to the blue death,
to the pump handle,
to the birth of modern public health.
And on Sunday afternoon,
you can walk those streets with Dr Luisa and see exactly how close London once came to drowning in its own ignorance.
That’s not just history.
That’s 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 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.