London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Happy New Year, London Walkers.
Wherever you are.
Yes, it’s Thursday, January 1st, 2026.
And here you go. Here’s your daily London fix.
London Calling’s going to get 2026 on its way by reading a famous diary entry. And, yes, you can be sure, it’s a January 1st diary entry. January 1st, 1660. Fitting in more ways than one. Not just the patently obvious way.
It’s also fitting because January doesn’t just usher in the new. It also looks back. As the very name of the month reminds us. January. The name comes from the ancient Roman god Janus.
The god of beginnings, of transitions, of doorways and of endings. Janus was the two-faced god. One face looking ahead, looking forward, looking to the future, the other face looking back, looking at the past. Perfect for the month that sheds the skin of the old year and brings in the new year. That transition, we necessarily look back. And look forward. We take survey.
So, turning to a diary entry dated January 1st, 1660. That’s well and truly looking back. But here’s the thing, that January 1st, 1660 entry was the very first entry in that particular diary. It gets the ball rolling. It’ll roll for nearly ten years. It’ll turn out to be the most famous diary ever written. So it’s immediate future is that decade, the 1660s. But 366 years later it’s still being read. And marvelled at. That’s its ongoing big picture future. And, maybe, who’s to say, some of you who go back with me tonight to January 1st, 1660, having got on that tram, maybe you’ll stay on it, ride it forward into its immediate future, ride it all the way through to its final destination, May 31st, 1669.
Anyway, that’s enough mood music. You’ve guessed of course. The diarist is Samuel Pepys. He’s a Londoner. He’s 26 years old when he dips his pen in an ink well and makes that first entry.
Now I’m not going to read the entry straight through. I’m going pause and comment at various points of interest. And credit where credit’s due. Said commentary here is not original. All of it’s been gleaned from this or that Pepys specialists, some of them professional scholars, others gifted amateurs who’ve taken a keen interest.
Ok, let’s get going. And the first thing to notice about this first entry is that Pepys himself takes stock as it were, he’s looking back, getting his bearings, here I am, this is where my life has got to.
The diary opens, Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold.
First explanatory note, Pepys’ “old pain” refers both to the bladder stone he suffered from and, part and parcel of same, its surgical removal.
We learn from the great Roy Porter that Pepys was, in the parlance of the day, “cut for the stone” on March 26th, 1658.
Thomas Holiyer was the surgeon. Holiyer was a surgeon at St Thomas’s Hospital. But the operation didn’t take place at the hospital. Which was probably one of several reasons why Pepys survived the operation. Hospitals were for the poor. And they were filthy. So Pepys was “cut for the stone” at Mrs Jane Turner’s house in Salisbury Court, the street where Pepys was born 25 years previously. Several people underwent that operation that day. Most of them didn’t survive. Pepys had the good fortune to be operated on first. Which meant that the surgeon’s hands and knives were relatively clean. Not so for the patients that followed. Which pretty much guaranteed infection. Which, running its course, almost always proved fatal. Pepys was bound fast to a padded table. He was held by strong men to keep him still. I don’t know if Pepys’ mouth was gagged. If it wasn’t he would have been screaming in agony when Holiyer cut him open. The incision was about three inches long. The extraction took less than a minute. The wound was not sutured. It took 35 days to recover from the operation. But, going by the diary entry, it was never a complete recovery. Upon taking of cold, Pepys would get a visitation of the old pain. And we also know that the stone was the size of a tennis ball. It was presented to Pepys. He had a special case made to keep it in. Every year he marked the anniversary of the operation.
Back to the diary now.
I lived in Axe Yard having my wife, and servant Jane, and no more in family than us three.
Pepys had married his wife when she was fifteen. She was French.
The diary goes on: “My wife, after the absence of her terms for seven weeks, gave me hopes of her being with child, but on the last day of the year she hath them again.”
In other words, his wife went nearly two months without a period. Pepys was in hopes that she was pregnant. But those hopes were dashed on December 31st when she began to menstruate.
So the diary begins with personal, domestic matters. We then two paragraphs about the condition of the state. There was a great deal of anxiety and unease. Perhaps you could say the ship of state was foundering. It was very unsettled times.
And then he goes back to his personal situation.
My own private condition very handsome, and esteemed rich, but indeed very poor; besides my goods of my house, and my office, which at present is somewhat uncertain. Mr. Downing master of my office. Yes, that’s George Downing. After whom Downing Street is named.
So that’s the scene setter. Pepys has taken stock.
The diary continues:
(Lord’s Day) This morning (we living lately in the garret) I rose, put on my suit with great skirts, having not lately worn any other clothes but them.
Went to Mr Gunning’s chapel at Exeter House, where he made a very good sermon.
Interjection time again. Another great London footnote. Exeter House stood where the Lyceum Theatre stands today. You find that out the hook sets. Whenever you go by the Lyceum you’re going to be thinking, “It’s the Lyceum theatre today but in 1660 Exeter House, as it was called, stood here. And Samuel Pepys rolled up here to hear a sermon on the morning of the day he began his great diary.
And you can top that up with this. Another great diarist was in attendance at that sermon that very morning. John Evelyn. What a small world it was.
And the diary entry continues:
Dined at home in the garret, where my wife dressed the remains of a turkey, and in the doing of it she burned her hand.
I staid at home all the afternoon, looking over my accounts.
Then went with my wife to my father’s, and in going observed the great posts which the City have set up at the Conduit in Fleet Street. Supt at my father’s, where in came Mrs Turner and Madam Morrice, and supt with us. After that my wife and I went home with them, and so to our own home.
Two more quick notes. Someone named Mary on the Pepys Diary blog tells us – here I’m quoting – “Turkeys were introduced into England about 90 years before the date of this first entry in the diary. In later years they became popular enough for large flocks of them to be raised in East Anglia. These flocks were herded, on foot, to London in the weeks before Christmas, their feet being protected in small, leather boots that were made expressly for the purpose.”
How long was the walk to London for those Turkeys. Maybe from as far away as Norfolk. A long enough walk that the birds’ weren’t equal to it. So they were fitted up with small leather booties. Welcome to the 17th century, ladies and gentleman. And that last reference, “the great posts in the City” – posts and chains were apparently part of the City’s defenses thrown up against attack, should hostilities break out. Remember there was a great deal of unrest – and the civil war was very much a living memory. Its last throes had been in 1651, less than ten years before this first entry in Pepys’s diary.
Fair to say, I think, that London gave Pepys material. And Pepys gave London its memory.
On January 1, 1660, Pepys didn’t know he was beginning the greatest diaries ever written. He just knew he had something to say. About his city. About his life. About the glorious mess of being human in London.
Thank God he picked up his pen.
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.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.