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 Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026.
And here it is.
Here’s your daily London fix.
You won’t have heard of John Charles Brooke.
Nor will you have heard about the way he died.
But once you do, once it lodges in the mind, you never see that bit of London in quite the same way again.
That, in a nutshell, is one of London’s great party tricks.
The familiar made strange; the invisible made visible;
London changing shape once you know what happened here.
This is London beneath the London we all know and take for granted.
On the evening of February 3rd, 1794, at the entrance to the pit of the Little Theatre, Haymarket, John Charles Brooke and 14 other Londoners were crushed to death. Not stabbed. Not poisoned. Not struck down by plague or fire. Simply pressed, pinned, suffocated by a crowd trying to get into the theatre.
Walk down Haymarket today and there’s nothing to warn you. No plaque. No memorial. No whispered hint in the paving stones. Just theatres, restaurants, traffic edging through, people heading out for a good night.
And yet once you know, the place acquires a shadow.
You start imagining bodies packed tight, breath squeezed out of lungs, excitement tipping suddenly into panic.
People say this all the time about the London that London Walks serves up.
I’ve walked this street for years.
And then someone tells them a story.
And suddenly they realise how little they knew, how little they’d really seen.
John Charles Brooke himself was an unlikely London figure.
Born in 1748 at Fieldhead in Yorkshire, the younger son in a respectable but unglamorous family, he arrived in the capital as a teenager, apprenticed to an apothecary in Bartlett’s Buildings, Holborn.
Mortar and pestle London.
Pills and potions.
He hated it. Two years was enough. What he wanted instead was heraldry.
Genealogy. Coats of arms. Pedigrees.
The long memory of families and institutions.
And London, bless it, made room for him.
To secure the good favour of the Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal, Brooke drew up a pedigree of the Howard family. Not a neat little scroll. A monster. Nine yards long. One thousand coats of arms. Imagine it unfurling across a room like a heraldic carpet, colour and quartering marching back through centuries. London has always had a soft spot for obsessive brilliance.
By 1773 Brooke was Rouge Croix pursuivant. a junior officer of arms.
By 1778 he was Somerset herald. He lived permanently at the College of Arms, immersed in manuscripts, seals, correspondence.
He became a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, haunted its meetings, wrote endlessly, exchanged drawings and genealogies with like-minded obsessives across the country.
He was industrious. Energetic. Solicited for work at every opportunity.
Some admired him deeply.
Others found him vain.
One contemporary dismissed him as a coxcomb and accused him of cutting leaves from a manuscript at the British Museum.
London has always been generous enough to accommodate both brilliance and grudges.
Brooke never married.
His life was his work.
He planned books that would have reshaped English genealogy:
a new edition of Sandford’s Genealogical History;
a great baronage after Dugdale’s method;
a genealogical history of Domesday tenants;
a history of the West Riding of Yorkshire. His papers piled up.
His future looked secure.
And then came that star-crossed London night exactly 232 years ago. February 3rd, 1794.
That night on the town. That night for a spot of theatre-going.
The Little Theatre was fashionable, compact, intimate.
A crowd magnet.
Too many people arrived at once. The pit entrance narrowed.
Pressure built.
Those at the front could neither move forward nor retreat.
The physics of crowds took over. Bodies compressed.
Air vanished.
Among those trapped were Brooke and his colleague Benjamin Pingo, York herald.
Two men steeped in lineage and ceremony, undone by something brutally modern and entirely London:
the press of a popular crowd.
Fifteen people died.
No villain. No conspiracy.
No melodrama.
Just London being London.
Dense. Popular.
Pressing human beings together until the human frame gives way.
Brooke was forty-five.
He was buried three days later at St Benet Paul’s Wharf. Directly over the way from the College of Arms.
No accident, that. St Benet Paul’s Wharf has served as the official church of College of Arms since 1555.
A monumental tablet was raised there, its epitaph praising his piety, judgement, and lack of vanity.
It’s a quietly London ending: a quiet professional commemorated by other quiet professionals, while the city roared on above them. The church itself would later be destroyed in the Blitz and rebuilt. Even the memorial landscape shifted.
And here’s the thing.
People often say, after a walk through Marylebone or Soho, that the most unsettling part isn’t the sex or the scandal or the death.
It’s the realisation of how much they’d missed before they went on the walk.
Streets they thought they knew suddenly feel unfamiliar.
Alleyways appear where none had existed before.
Buildings they’d walked past a hundred times start whispering.
I’ve lived in London all my life, they say.
And I’d never been down that street.
That’s exactly what happens with Brooke and the Haymarket. You haven’t discovered a new place. You’ve discovered a new way of seeing it. You’re not just walking anymore. You’re imagining. You’re seeing with your mind’s eye.
The heroic cholera doctor in Soho.
The alley you didn’t know existed in Marylebone.
The crush at a theatre door in 1794.
Different stories. Same effect. London tilts.
John Charles Brooke spent his life excavating the past,
layer by layer, pedigree by pedigree. In the end, the city he served claimed him in one compressed, terrible moment.
A man devoted to ancestry undone by a crowd with no memory at all.
Once you know it, you can’t unknow it.
And the next time you pass through the Haymarket, you’ll feel it.
Just slightly. A tightening.
A pause. A flicker of awareness.
The familiar made strange.
The invisible made visible.
London changing shape once you know what happened here.
The London you thought you knew, metamorphosing before your eyes.
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 emeritus now, but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains and mentors our guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks aristocracy of talent includes a former London Mayor. The former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. The Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. The former Chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes a former Member of Parliament, three terms at Westminster. 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 palaeontologist.
It includes Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre actors. 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.
As that travel writer famously put it, if this were a golf tournament, every name on the leaderboard 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.
Good walking.
And good Londoning.
See you next time.