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 Monday, November 10th, 2025.
Ok, Ready, Steady go, here’s your daily London fix.
Let’s start with a bit of London magic. Back we go. Three centuries and some change. November the 10th, 1697. Somewhere off Smithfield, in a place called Bartholomew Close, a baby lets out his first yell – a sound halfway between laughter and protest. You could say it set the tone for his life. The boy’s name: William Hogarth. The man who would go on to draw London – and to strip it bare.
William Hogarth was London through and through. Born, bred, and never really left it. He understood the city as only a true Londoner can – loved it, loathed it, laughed at it, drew it, immortalised it. When you look at Hogarth’s work, you’re not looking at 18th-century art, you’re looking at the living, wheezing, brawling, drinking, cheating, scheming city itself.
And it all started not with art, but with trade. His father, Richard Hogarth, was a schoolmaster and a Latin textbook writer – clever, cultured, not rich. He tried to run a coffee house where only Latin was spoken. Great idea in theory. In practice? A disaster. It went bust, and poor Richard ended up in a debtors’ prison for a time. Little William would visit him there. Those early memories – the stench, the humiliation, the grinding unfairness – they never left him. You can see them decades later in his engravings of ruined lives and moral chaos.
Young Hogarth started as an engraver – a trade, not an art form then. He decorated silverware, designed shop signs, and made illustrations for books. But he had ambition. He was cheeky, street-smart, restless. He wasn’t content to copy. He wanted to show things, to tell stories, to get under the skin of London life. And he did.
By the 1730s, Hogarth had invented something new – the pictorial series, what he called “modern moral subjects.” Imagine a comic strip before comics existed, or a Netflix series before streaming was even a dream. A set of paintings or engravings that told a story from start to finish. His first big hit? A Harlot’s Progress.
It was 1732. London was booming, bawdy, corrupt, and cruel. Hogarth’s heroine, poor Moll Hackabout, arrives in the city full of hope, fresh from the countryside. Within six scenes she’s seduced, kept, abandoned, diseased, and dead. It was savage, shocking, and completely gripping. Everyone wanted to see it. Hogarth’s prints sold like hot pies at a fair. He’d hit the nerve of his age – the hypocrisy, the appetite, the hunger and the ruin.
He followed it with A Rake’s Progress – the male version. Tom Rakewell, rich and foolish, drinks, gambles, debauches, loses everything, ends up mad in Bedlam. Again, London recognised itself. The gambling dens, the coffee houses, the brothels, the madhouses – they were all real, all familiar. Hogarth held up the mirror, and London, startled, couldn’t look away.
And Marriage à-la-Mode? A masterpiece. A satire of arranged marriage, greed, social climbing, and moral rot among the fashionable elite. He shows us the lot – the young nobleman marrying for money, the rich merchant buying status, the lovers, the quack doctors, the duel, the death, the ruin. All told with wit so sharp you could shave with it.
Hogarth was a visual storyteller. He drew life as it was – the whores, the drunkards, the pickpockets, the dandies, the gin-sodden mothers. And he did it with such energy, such biting humour, that you can almost hear the noise of the streets: the cries of vendors, the clatter of carriage wheels, the church bells, the dogs barking.
One of his most famous works isn’t a series but a single punch to the gut: Gin Lane. It’s London in the 1750s, rotting from drink. In the centre, a drunken mother lets her baby tumble to its death. Around her, madness, violence, decay. Across town, in the companion piece Beer Street, everything’s prosperous, cheerful, healthy. Hogarth’s message? Stick to English beer, avoid the foreign gin. A public health warning, 18th-century style.
And let’s not forget The Four Stages of Cruelty. Hogarth at his most moral and merciless. It starts with boys torturing animals, ends with a murderer dissected before a jeering crowd. Hogarth believed cruelty began small – a pin in a cat, a kick to a dog – and grew into something monstrous. His art was an education by shock.
But for all his moralising, Hogarth wasn’t a preacher. He was a London realist. He knew life was messy, funny, tragic, ridiculous. His people are full of movement – half-drunk, half-damned, but alive. And he loved them. He said, “I have generally endeavoured to treat my subjects as a comic writer does his, to make them rather objects of good-natured ridicule than of bitterness.”
He could be combative though. Oh yes. He quarrelled with critics, lampooned other artists, fought off pirated copies of his prints (he helped get the first copyright act for artists passed – known as the “Hogarth Act”). He was fiercely proud of being self-made, English, and his own man. He didn’t want to be a court painter. He wanted to be a London painter.
He married Jane Thornhill, the daughter of the grand Sir James Thornhill – court painter and muralist of St Paul’s Cathedral’s dome. Her father initially disapproved, but Hogarth’s fame and success won him round. They had no children, but by all accounts it was a happy marriage – Jane outlived him by many years.
Hogarth lived and worked in Leicester Fields, where the National Gallery now stands, and later in Chiswick, where his house still stands – a delightful pocket of old London charm, just a few steps from the Thames. He died there in 1764, aged sixty-six. They buried him in St Nicholas Churchyard, Chiswick. His tombstone bears a verse written by his friend, the actor David Garrick:
“Farewell great painter of mankind!
Who reach’d the noblest point of art;
Whose pictur’d morals charm the mind,
And through the eye correct the heart.”
Why does Hogarth matter? Because he was the first artist to really get London – to show its splendour and squalor in the same frame. He was Dickens before Dickens, Chaplin before Chaplin – a moralist with mischief in his eye. His art speaks to every age, because hypocrisy, greed, folly, and vice don’t go out of style.
And maybe that’s the best birthday toast we can give him: to William Hogarth, born November 10th, 1697. The man who made London look at itself – and laugh, and wince, and learn.
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.