London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good day to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Sunday December 14th, 2025.
And here it is, your daily London fix.
If you want Christmas with a megaphone,
Oxford Street’s over there.
If you want Christmas whispered, follow me down to the canal.
Because this is Regent’s Canal in December. One Winter Solstice Day.
Yes, the shortest day of the year.
By four o’clock the light has already checked out. Given up the ghost.[pause, let people look]
And the canal loves that.
The canal has always preferred the margins.
The edges.
The quiet bits of London where the city loosens its tie.
Welcome to the Cinderella stretch of the Regent’s Canal.
Forget the pavement, the sidewalk (as Americans say), the street, the beaten path.
This way instead.
The towpath.
As we put it when we trail that December 21st Canal Walk:
Unseen, untrodden, unexplored, unknown London beckons.
A secret interstice of the city.
The London of a couple of centuries ago, still breathing quietly alongside the present.
And at Christmas time, and especially on Winter solstice Day – down the home stretch this stretch comes into its own.
And why is that? Here’s why.
Because canals didn’t do Christmas the way streets do.
No bunting.
No switching-on ceremony.
No public performance.
Christmas on the canal was quieter.
Harder.
More earned.
Two hundred years ago this was working London.
Narrowboats easing through water as black as ink.
Locks clanking open in the cold.
Horses hauling tons of coal and grain along this very path.
Breath steaming.
Hooves crunching frost.
And Christmas?
Christmas was something you squeezed in between jobs.
The canals didn’t stop.
Coal still had to move.
Grain still had to arrive.
London still needed feeding and warming.
Families lived aboard boats smaller than your kitchen, smaller than your bathroom.
And yet they still made Christmas happen.
Picture it.
A cabin lit by a single lamp.
Brass polished until it glows.
A sprig of holly wired above the stove.
Paper chains.
Maybe an orange if you were lucky.
The kettle singing.
Ice forming at the edges of the cut.
Those cabins were tiny, but they were fierce little worlds.
[pick up pace slightly]
Boat people took pride in colour.
Roses and castles painted onto cans and doors.
Reds. Blues. Greens.
Colour as rebellion against winter.
Colour saying, you don’t get everything.
Look at the canal now.
In December the water turns dark and reflective.
Anything you hang on a boat doubles itself.
A lantern.
A candle.
A string of fairy lights.
The canal quietly improves Christmas by reflection alone.
This is secret London.
Tunnels.
Bridges.
Locks.
Infrastructure with personality.
Tow ropes once biting into brick, leaving scars you can still see if you know where to look.
Horse dips where animals were watered and washed. And indeed rescued. If a dog or a passing iron horse – a steam engine powered train powered by and frightened the horse, caused it to rear and maybe slip and plunge into the canal.
And half a century later, Air Raid Protection gates, when this quiet strip became part of London’s wartime nervous system.
And always, stories.
There was a life-and-death struggle played out right here.
The workhorses of the canals versus the iron horses of the railway.
Flesh and blood versus steam and steel.
The towpath was the frontline.
The railways won, of course.
Faster. Louder. More ruthless.
But the canal didn’t die.
It slipped into the background. Cinderella after midnight.
Forgotten.
And that, paradoxically,
is why it feels so alive now.
Listen as we walk.
Footsteps on the footpath.
Water slapping hollow against lock gates.
Sometimes, if it’s cold enough,
the crack and shatter of ice under a bow.
In the old days, men were paid simply to break ice so boats could keep moving.
Imagine doing that the week before Christmas.
And then there’s the fog. Or the gossamer mist that passes for a fog these days.
Canals love fog. Bridges loom like silhouettes. Lamps glow softly.
The world narrows to a ribbon of water and brick.
If you wanted to invent a ghost story, you’d start here.
There isn’t a named Regent’s Canal Christmas ghost,
but canals remember everything. Horses that slipped.
Children who fell.
Watchmen listening to water breathe through long winter nights.
At Christmas,
when London quietens, those memories feel closer.
Today’s canal Christmas is different, but the spirit survives.
A wreath tied to a tiller.
Smoke curling from a stove chimney. Fairy lights glowing behind cabin windows like something private, something cherished.
No carols.
No crowds.
Just Christmas under its breath.
And December 21st matters.
It’s the hinge.
The turning point.
The shortest day, the longest night. Come the next day,
the light begins to return.
Slowly.
Almost imperceptibly.
A minute at first.
But the canal notices.
The canal always notices.
And then we arrive at the future.
Final thought, to see London,
you have to hear it.
So hear this. Granary Building.
Once upon a time,
this was the trans-shipment point for grain.
Cargoes brought down from the north by rail,
tipped and transferred into
waiting canal barges.
Iron horse handing over to workhorse. Industry layered neatly on industry.
And now look.
A hub of the fashion world.
Home of the buzz.
The centrepiece of a complete transformation of the area. Warehouses reborn as studios and schools.
The canal no longer feeding London’s stomach, but its imagination.
More shape-shifting still.
Where once there was hard industry, now there’s a splendid nature reserve. Reeds.
Birds.
Quiet.
An industrial past turning into an ecological future.
And mind’s eye transformations as well.
Stand here, on the solstice,
and you can see all the layers at once. The past hauling coal through ice.
The present strolling with hands in pockets.
The future rewilding itself along the water’s edge.
And just when you think the canal has given you enough,
it delivers that final, glorious
“well I never”.
Off the towpath and into
St. Pancras Old Churchyard.
The Hardy Tree.
JC Bach.
Resurrectionists.
Dickens everywhere you look.
Then down St. Pancras Road,
more Dickens,
that astonishing RAF St. Pancras tale. And finally St. Pancras International itself.
Betjeman standing guard.
Poetry in brick and iron.
All of it connected.
All of it revealed by walking.
“Walking is man’s best medicine,” said Hippocrates.
And Elizabeth von Arnim had it exactly right.
Walking is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things.
That’s what this Cinderella stretch of the Regent’s Canal does.
It shows you a London you won’t have seen before.
A London of tunnels
and bridges
and narrowboats
and locks.
A London that fed the city,
warmed it,
moved it.
A London that survived the railways, the blitz,
the motor car,
and a thousand winters.
So you go on that Winter Solstice Day Regent’s Canal Walk,
notice the details.
The way brickwork holds the last warmth of the day.
The way a single boat-light feels like a promise.
The way the water keeps going,
even in the dark.
Christmas doesn’t need noise.
Sometimes it just needs a canal,
a solstice,
and a story.
And Regent’s Canal has plenty of those.
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.