London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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Cue the routine but nonetheless genuinely meant salutation to you, London Walkers, wherever you are. It’s Monday, June 9th, 2025.
And we’ve got an anniversary walk, hoving into view.
This Wednesday morning, June 11th, the centenary walk, Mrs Dalloway’s London. It meets at 9.50 am just outside exit 4 of Westminster Underground Station.
Why that time? And why that place?
That place because exit 4 is directly across the street from Big Ben.
And that time so we can hear Big Ben strike ten, at precisely the hour Mrs Dalloway hears it at the start of the novel.
It’s a deservedly famous passage.
“There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.”
It’s the best possible start to a Mrs Dalloway’s London Walk.
Mrs Dalloway isn’t there, across the street from Big Ben, when she hears it strike ten, hears the leaden circles dissolve in the air.
But she’s close by. She’s at Victoria Street. Right by the great west front of Westminster Abbey. She’s on the kerb, waiting to cross Victoria Street.
And here’s the thing, I move heaven and earth to get our timing right, so we’re standing right there, on the kerb at Victoria Street at 11 am. When, wait for it, Big Ben strikes again. And, yes, that 11 am ringing of those great bells also figures in the novel.
You could say those famous bells punctuate the novel. We hear them again and again. They’re always herald an announcement of sorts, a development, a turn in the novel. Which is what you’d expect given that the first title Virginia Woolf chose for the novel was The Hours.
Now what about the walk? What happens on it? Where do we go? What do we see? Why do we do it on a Wednesday in the middle of June? Why is it special?
Well, to start with, we do on the two successive mid-June Wednesdays. So it’ll take place this coming Wednesday. And Wednesday. And why is that? Because we want to walk where Mrs Dalloway walked on the same day of the year that Mrs Dalloway walked. We know from internal evidence that Mrs Dalloway goes for her walk on a Wednesday in the middle of June in 1923. So our walk will take place on the 102nd anniversary of Mrs Dalloway’s walk. In 1923, the two mid-month Wednesdays in June were June 13th and June 20th. And truth be told, we don’t know which of those dates was the date in question. A very close reading of the novel tends to incline toward the second Wednesday. I’ll shed some light on that when we do the walk. But to be on the safe side, we run it twice. The two Wednesdays in mid-June. It’s taken about five years but the walk has finally found its several positions – not just the two Wednesday in mid-June – in the calendar. More on that in a few minutes.
Anyway, yes, so what are our aims? What do we do? Why do the walk? And especially why do it on either of these next two Wednesdays?
My goal with the walk is four-fold. The big, overriding aim is to increase your understanding and appreciation of the novel.
A second aim is to do a reconstruction of the London of 1923. Mrs Dalloway’s London. Virginia Woolf’s London. It’s been a century and change since Mrs Dalloway went on her walk. Needless to say, the London of 1923 is a ghost of our London, the London of 2025. Mrs Dalloway sees buildings that have been swept away. Well, we get to see those buildings on the walk because I’ve done my picture research. I bring along big laminated A2 prints of Devonshire House, for example; and Bath House. They were part of the furniture of Mrs Dalloway’s London. They’re no longer with us. But we see them, just as Mrs Dalloway saw them, thanks to those finds I made in the picture archive. It’s part of the reconstruction of Mrs Dalloway’s London, the reconstruction of the London of 1923.
A third aim is to people the streets and buildings with the characters of the novel.
So while in the main we walk in Mrs Dalloway’s footsteps. We also walk for a time with the character Peter Walsh. We see what he saw.
And we’re privy to what he thought about what he saw. We take the measure of his observations, his thoughts, his remarks. Ditto Richard Dalloway, Mrs Dalloway’s husband. It’s partly by following his path in reverse that we’re able to establish – this is informed, best guess territory – we’re able to establish which house in Westminster was almost certainly the house that Virginia Woolf had in mind as the Dalloway’s house. And again, I’ve done some very satisfactory primary documents research with that house. Census returns. Photos of the MP who was living there at the time. Etc. So we know exactly how many rooms were in the house. We know how many servants the family had. We know the ages of the occupants, where they were born. Etc. It’s literary detective work. And it’s fun. It’s yielded up some quite splendid finds.
In that same vein, the routes of Clarissa’s daughter Elizabeth and her teacher Miss Kilman. And indeed, the point in the park where Mrs Dalloway meets Hugh Whitbred.
I wheel out the internal evidence in the novel that pretty much dictates that ‘it would have right here where they met.’
And finally, there are some things in the novel that don’t quite add up. I clear up some of those peculiarities.
And the walk is anecdotally – biographically and indeed historically – very rich indeed. For example, the Westminster Abbey tale about the doctor who saw Virginia Woolf the day before her, Virginia Woolf’s suicide. And Virginia Woolf’s daily word production. Compared with, say, Graham Greene’s or P.G. Wodehouse’s. That in itself explains why the novel is easy to summarise but difficult to read.
The walk explores the world of 1923. Stark facts and figures that drive it home why that game changer of a novel is, among other things, a PTSD – Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – novel.
But it’s not all serious. It’s fun to find out, for example, what Virginia Woolf with the money she earned from the novel.
Now why are these two walks on these two Wednesdays in mid-June in 2025 doubly special. Because this year, 2025, is the centenary of the publication of Mrs Dalloway.
And that brings us to Hatchard’s, London’s oldest and classiest bookshop. On her way to Mulberry’s, the florist’s in Bond Street, Mrs Dalloway makes a slight detour. She goes to Hatchard’s. Stops and looks at the books in the window.
“But what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchard’s shop window? What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread open: Fear no more the heat o’ the sun Nor the furious winter’s rages’
Famous lines of course from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.
But here’s the thing that’s so exciting about doing the walk this month. Hatchards, to mark the centenary of the publication of the novel, have got a Mrs Dalloway’s window. We’re of course going to go there, going to see it.
And it gets better. It gets better because the Hogarth Press published the novel. Its print run was 2,000 copies.
And what do you know, The Hatchards Library has produced a special limited edition – yes, 2,000 copies – of Mrs Dalloway to mark the centenary of its publication. My copy, which I’ll be bringing along, is copy No. 1600. If the print run hasn’t sold out, well, it makes a brilliant – and very affordable – gift for a friend who’s a bibliophile. Or indeed for your own library shelves.
I normally bring two copies along on the walk. This year I’ll be bringing four. My two working copies. The Hatchards Library Limited edition copy. And my replica copy of the first published edition. Complete with a facsimile of the original cover, created by Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell, for the Hogarth Press.
And inside, the text itself is taken from the original Hogarth Press edition and retains the original features of punctuation and spelling.
What else? Well, crossing St James’s Street. There’s White’s Club. And in the novel we learn on a table behind the big bow window of White’s were copies of the Tatler Magazine. So sure enough, I went to the well, got a copy of the Tatler Magazine for that week in June in 1923. We’ll look at that. And I also unearthed copies of the Times newspapers for those two weeks. And they yielded up some jaw-dropping discoveries. I bring along reproductions of the Times from those days in June. To say nothing of the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf. Standing in Green Park, looking at Devonshire House as she knew it, and listening to Virginia Woolf, she’s there, talking to us. It’s a shiver up the spine moment.
That walk, it’s as close as you’re going to get to Virginia Woolf and her world, her day, her experience, her London.
See you Wednesday. This Wednesday or next Wednesday.
But not so fast. Please don’t go away. I’ve got just a bit more housekeeping to do.
I mentioned that it’s taken five years for the walk to find its natural place in the London Walks calendar. We’re there now, though. It’ll always run on these two Wednesdays in June. But it’ll also run on the anniversary of the day in May, 1925 that the novel was published. And I think we’ll run it on Virginia Woolf’s birthday, And, sigh, run it on that day in March when she put on her fur coat and wellies, got her walking stick, walked to the river Ouze, put her stick down, put heavy stones in the pocket of her coat and walked into the river. Every time I shudder at the thought of Leonard finding the note she’d written, and rushing out to look for her. And finding her stick on the river bank.
Last point. The area this walk traverses is enormously rich, historically, biographically, architecturally, etc. But this walk is unlike any other walk that I guide. It’s very tightly focused on the novel. I do of course diverge now and then, do some light guiding that’s not related to the novel. But there’s a lot that I don’t do that I would do if it were a normal London Walk instead of a peripatetic seminar on one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. But I go some way, I hope, toward making that up to my walkers. I wrote the chapter on Secret Westminster in the London Walks books. We’ve had our designer produce a PDF of that chapter. It’s a professionally produced PDF. I send it to my walkers when I get home. It covers quite a bit of the material that I wasn’t able to get to on the walk because of our tight focus on the novel. And, hey, the only other way you’re going to get that chapter is forking out a tenner to buy the book. So that makes amends, I hope. Makes amends in two ways. It covers some of the stuff that normally gets guided but had to be left out because Mrs Dalloway has centre stage. And, hey, if you think about it, it adds up to a healthy discount on the cost of the walk.
Ok, this time we are going off the diving board. See you this Wednesday. Or next Wednesday.
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 £20 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 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.