London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good evening to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Sunday December 7th, 2025.
And we’re off to the races,
here’s your daily London fix.
Where are we?
We’re in London on the morning
of December 7th, 1941.
Short days,
long nights,
fog off the Thames,
and that ever present tang of
coal smoke.
The city’s in its third winter of war.
It’s tired.
Dog tired.
But it’s also resolute,
standing there like a
battered prizefighter leaning
on the ropes, refusing to go down.
If you want to take the pulse of London on that day of all days,
you start with sound.
London in late 1941 has two basic registers:
silence and sirens.
And rest assured, the silence isn’t the peaceful sort.
It’s the sort that follows
destruction.
Streets where whole terraces once stood now stretch open and raw,
like missing teeth in a grin.
The sirens, when they come,
are almost routine by now.
A nuisance.
A reminder.
The Luftwaffe isn’t what it was,
not after the pounding it took in 1940, but it can still sting.
So Londoners wake that Sunday
under a pewter sky,
kettle on,
the wireless murmuring.
The headlines that morning are occupied with Russia.
Everybody’s talking about the
Eastern Front.
The Germans pushing,
the Soviets freezing, and
Churchill crossing his fingers
that the Red Army can hold.
For London, the Soviet Union has become an unlikely comrade.
If Stalin collapses,
Britain’s on her own again.
Look around you on this morning stroll. You’ve got buses lumbering past
piles of bricks.
You’ve got barrows on Berwick Street laden with knobbly,
mud clinging vegetables
because nothing’s wasted now,
not even the ugly carrots.
You’ve got the habitual queue outside the butcher,
a little semicircle of impatience. Someone’s always trying to jump the queue.
Londoners tut,
but they’re philosophical.
Rationing may be grim,
but it’s shared.
Fairness is the capital’s new religion.
And above all,
you’ve got the wardens.
Men and women in tin hats
with clipboards,
like the world’s sternest librarians. They’re everywhere.
Checking blackouts,
inspecting shelters,
ready with sharp instructions.
They’re the civic antibodies
keeping this wounded city from infection.
One warden on Charlotte Street famously stopped Noël Coward
at his own front door
for carrying a torch with too bright a beam.
Coward cheerfully dimmed it.
When the wardens speak, you obey.
By late morning, the churches fill.
It’s Advent.
Ministers give sermons about patience, endurance,
the light that’s coming.
Even the atheists of Soho slip in.
Not for the theology, mind,
but for the warmth.
And then,
the ordinary oddities of
wartime London.
A milk cart drawn not by a horse but
by a pair of enormous dogs.
A man pedalling a bicycle with no tyres,
the wheels wrapped in rope.
A pub at opening time pouring
pints of watery mild because
the proper stuff’s run out again.
A troop of American journalists
at the Savoy
tucking into their Sunday roast,
loudly predicting that
the Yanks will be in the war by Easter. Churchill, hearing that,
probably muttered:
I should be so lucky.
And then comes nightfall.
It drops like a curtain.
Thick.
Heavy.
By four o’clock the city’s already
a ghost.
Headlights hooded.
Windows blacked out.
Shapes and silhouettes
moving like extras in a film noir. London after dark in 1941 is
theatrical.
Men in trilbies.
Women in turbans.
The rustle of coats.
The hiss of a match.
A kiss in a doorway.
If you want atmosphere,
you could bottle this stuff.
Now we come to the axis point,
the hinge,
the moment the world tilts.
Word of the attack on Pearl Harbor won’t reach London until
after midnight.
Time zones.
The news travels by wire,
then by whisper,
then by wildfire.
Imagine the foreign correspondents in their smoky Fleet Street offices, clattering at their typewriters
when the first scraps of information arrive.
Japanese forces,
attack on American naval base,
heavy losses.
The correspondents sit back,
stare at each other,
and know instantly:
this is it.
The global switch has flipped.
But most Londoners are asleep.
Sunday night.
Long week ahead.
The streets are quiet save the river’s lap and the occasional distant thump
of an anti aircraft battery testing itself. Somewhere in Downing Street, Churchill’s working late.
He always does.
The night is his natural habitat.
He’s in the Map Room
when the call comes in
from Washington.
Roosevelt on the line.
The tone is grave, but
the camaraderie is unmistakable. Churchill later wrote that he
went to bed that night and
slept the sleep of the saved.
Britain,
after two years of solitary defiance,
is no longer alone.
Come Monday morning,
London wakes to the headlines.
JAPAN ATTACKS UNITED STATES. WAR IN THE PACIFIC.
The city reacts the way
London reacts to everything:
with shrugs,
with jokes,
with sudden bursts of optimism.
In the Tube,
a woman says to her friend:
Well, that’s that then.
We’ll win now.
Another replies:
I’d have preferred the Americans
came in for the dancing,
but this’ll do.
There’s relief, certainly.
Excitement even.
But there’s also a sobering recognition. More war.
More fronts.
More years.
Victory has just come a long step closer,
but the path to get there has lengthened. Londoners understand that instinctively. They’re connoisseurs of hardship now.
Still, something intangible shifts.
On December 7th, 1941,
before the news,
London is fighting
with its back to the wall.
On December 8th,
that wall’s still there,
but the city’s standing a little straighter. A great ally has entered the fight.
And London,
that soot blackened old metropolis, feels history move beneath its feet.
That’s the pulse of London on
that extraordinary day.
A city bruised but unbowed,
cracking jokes in queues,
clutching its ration books,
dodging rubble,
singing in shelters.
A city that has just learned,
without yet knowing it,
that the tide is turning.
The day of infamy across the Atlantic becomes,
for London,
a night of deliverance.
And in the grey half light of
the following dawn,
you can almost hear it,
floating above the rooftops,
mingled with the distant clang of church bells and
the rumble of a double decker:
the city breathing just a little easier.
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.