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, November 25th, 2025.
And here we go, here it is – your daily London fix.
Let’s get the show on the road with a soundscape.
Late November evening,
West End bustle.
Car tyres on wet cobbles,
a distant bus sighs to a stop,
chatter outside the theatre doors,
the muffled trill of a trumpet
from a bar round the corner.
Right then.
Pull your coat close,
tuck your scarf in, and
follow me down West Street.
The lights are warm,
the air’s sharp,
and there she is –
St Martin’s Theatre.
Elegant,
modest,
quietly historic.
Tonight, like every night since 1952, the clock will tick,
the snow will fall,
and someone at
Monkswell Manor will meet their end.
Because this week –
November 25th –
marks the anniversary of
the very first performance of
The Mousetrap.
Seventy-three years ago,
the curtain went up on what
was meant to be an eight-month run. Agatha Christie herself
thought she’d be lucky to see out the year. And here we are –
seventy-three years later —
two monarchs,
umpteen governments,
fashions come and gone –
and The Mousetrap still
hasn’t called it a night.”
Is still playing to packed houses.
Let’s rewind.
London, 1952.
A city of bomb sites and hope.
The ration book’s still in the kitchen drawer.
There’s coal smoke in the air,
milk in glass bottles on the doorstep,
and the buses are still red but
black with soot.
The Festival of Britain
has just tried to cheer everyone up;
the new Queen’s
only been on the throne for months.
And at the Ambassadors Theatre,
just round the corner from here, theatregoers queued up
to see a brand-new whodunnit.
Richard Attenborough,
not yet “Sir,”
played Detective Sergeant Trotter.
His wife, Sheila Sim,
ran the guest house.
Mysie Monte played
the magnificently awful Mrs Boyle,
a role she held for twelve and a half years. Attenborough earned a grand total
of £60 a week.
And the top-price stalls seat?
Seven shillings and sixpence.
That’s about thirty-odd pence
in today’s money.
The play was meant to last a season.
It ran five years without a pause.
And on it rolled.
Ten years.
Twenty years.
Come 1974 – 51 years ago –
it slipped next door
to St Martin’s Theatre.
And just kept going.
It outlasted the GLC,
outlasted rationing,
outlasted black-and-white television.
By its fiftieth birthday in 2002,
the Queen herself turned up
for a special performance.
And then there are the Holman performances.
Oh yes – the infamous odd performances squeezed around injuries,
understudies,
weather events,
and the occasional
West End power outage.
Part of the show’s mythos is that it simply refuses to stop.
When Covid came for it,
that was the first pause
since opening night.
And in case you’re wondering,
“Holman performances” –
now there’s a bit of London theatrical lore for you –
the term “Holman performances”
comes from David Holman,
the show’s long-serving
company manager,
who logged every single performance, every cast change,
every cough in the wings.
Decades of handwritten notes that became
the unofficial chronicle of The Mousetrap. He recorded it all, so when people say “Holman performance,”
they’re really talking about the shows
that just kept going,
whatever the world threw at them.
It’s had its share of famous faces
through the years –
Patrick Stewart did a stint;
Julie Walters understudied;
and hundreds more have slipped through those guest-house doors.
A few of their children have too –
The Mousetrap casts run like family trees, branches of West End stock
that keep sprouting new leaves.
And yet it’s the sameness
that makes it magical.
The clock on the mantelpiece?
That’s the same one from 1952.
The set’s been repainted,
reupholstered,
recarpeted,
but the bones are original.
You can almost smell
the ghosts of the actors
who’ve stood there night after night, delivering lines like “This is the first” – the killer’s calling card pinned to a corpse. Or the detective’s warning:
“Remember, nothing is what it seems.” Lines that still
pull gasps from audiences
who’ve sworn never
to give away the ending.
The ending, of course,
is the great unspoken secret of London. No one ever tells.
There’s a polite conspiracy
between actors and audience –
keep the secret, keep the mystery alive. It’s theatre’s longest-running act of trust.
And the numbers?
Astonishing.
Over 30,000 performances,
10 million tickets sold,
and roughly £75 million in box office over the decades.
It’s toured 60 countries,
translated into 27 languages.
And through it all,
this little corner of the West End
keeps its light burning in the window.
There’s a lovely detail:
when all the way back in 1957
the show broke the record
for longest-running play,
Noël Coward
sent Agatha Christie a telegram.
“Much as it pains me,” he wrote,
“I really must congratulate you.”
Perfect Coward –
arch,
affectionate,
and just a little bit jealous.
And what about London outside?
The city’s changed beyond recognition. The bomb sites became office blocks;
the trams gave way to traffic;
the neon signs grew flashier and
the pavements busier.
But wander past St Martin’s on
a damp November evening and
it’s the same ritual –
couples huddled under umbrellas,
tourists snapping the poster
with its famous mousetrap logo,
a queue forming under the glow
of the lamps.
There’s something about it.
Something reassuring.
The idea that in a world that won’t sit still, one little play has carried on through it all. Thatcher, Blair, Brexit, pandemic –
The Mousetrap just keeps ticking,
like that clock on its mantelpiece.
Will it ever come off?
Probably not.
Because here’s the twist:
if it closes,
the film rights are released.
Christie signed them away on condition that no film could be made
while the play was running.
So if you want to see The Mousetrap
on screen, you’ll have to wait for
the curtain to fall –
and the producers have no intention
of letting that happen.
So it stays.
The world’s longest-running mystery,
still springing its trap night after night.
And that’s London for you –
a city of layers.
Down one street, you’ve got a theatre that’s been reinventing Cabaret
for the twenty-first century.
Round the corner,
you’ve got a 73-year-old whodunnit
that still gets a gasp
before the final blackout.
So if you’re ever near Covent Garden
as the house lights dim,
look up.
That glow
over St Martin’s Theatre window –
that’s not just another West End marquee. That’s time itself,
refusing to pass quietly.
And when the detective steps forward
and the killer is unmasked,
remember:
we Londoners have kept that secret
longer than any mystery in history.
The Mousetrap –
seventy-three years tonight.
London’s longest-running inside joke,
and still going strong.
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.