London Walks Podcasts - David's Podcasts


To see London you have to hear it

Date post added: 7th June 2021

“it opens doors of meaning and understanding”

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Bayswater – “that diamond of London place-names”

Date post added: 5th June 2021

“London place-names are an x-ray – they show you the past”

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My Favourite Interview – Hampstead Artist Matt Phillips

Date post added: 4th June 2021

“trying to capture how they’re feeling”

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David on Memorial Day

Date post added: 31st May 2021

“you’re looking at where those kids lived”

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The Dark Side of the London Moon

Date post added: 24th May 2021

“99 percent of London is the dark side of the moon to most visitors”

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“We never closed…we never clothed”

Date post added: 22nd May 2021

“It was a strip club so ‘We never closed’ became ‘we never clothed'”

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Famous Londoners, Epiphanies & Serious History – a David podcast

Date post added: 20th May 2021

“his out-of-control penis”

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Come Ashore – this is Hampstead & Hampstead Heath

Date post added: 17th May 2021

“I love the fact that I have a personal connection with the saving of Hampstead Heath”

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David on Downing Street

Date post added: 10th May 2021

“double-faced traitor whose name was a synonym for infamy”

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This Sunday is David’s Virtual Tour of Kensington – here’s how it opens

Date post added: 21st April 2021

“we’re going to go to Paris very briefly and we’re going to go to The Cotswolds – very briefly”

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David recommends – Part II (the perfect route across Regent’s Park)

Date post added: 11th April 2021

“I’m looking at a secret waterfall”

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David’s Recommendation – Part I

Date post added: 11th April 2021

“a row of seven astonishing mansions’

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Where to eat in Kensington

Date post added: 2nd April 2021

“the best toasted sandwich this side of Tuscany”

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Let’s meet a Londoner – actor William Wilde, runs Hornets today

Date post added: 29th March 2021

“I got two years probation for running the toughest gang in the neighbourhood and causing chaos”

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Universal flux – David tucks in

Date post added: 19th March 2021

“Like Shackleton, you have to find your way back”

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“She lost her virginity in a graveyard”

Date post added: 10th March 2021

“he purchased 15 women…he was the last person to see Shelley alive”

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When a neighbour floods your cellar with urine – David reports

Date post added: 3rd March 2021

“the second-largest house in London”

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David’s Charles Dickens Manuscript Discovery

Date post added: 7th February 2021

“that’s like panning for gold and finding a gold speck in the pan”

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What’s in a London name? David finds out

Date post added: 18th January 2021

“if you’ve got a taste for London quirky and quixotic…”

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The best house in London

Date post added: 30th December 2020

“London houses are like baseball cards”

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God’s Assassin

Date post added: 27th December 2020

“I’ve been face to face with God’s assassin”

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David on Dickens (No Christmas Dickens in this one, that’s for sure)

Date post added: 22nd December 2020

“the sun, blood-red on the eastern marshes behind dark masts and yards, seemed filled with the ruins of a forest it had set on fire”

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Swapping Stories – James Bond, the naked actress at the door, etc.

Date post added: 13th December 2020

“she had over 500 love affairs”

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Cartoonist savages Boris Johnson, 10-year-old girl bests the City of London

Date post added: 4th December 2020

David Cameron wearing a condom over his head

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Tombs, Secret Doors & Hidden Gardens – David on Westminster Abbey

Date post added: 1st December 2020

A tiny chalice of light in green – an English oasis.

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This is why you go on walking tours (well, it’s one reason, a helluva good reason)

Date post added: 2nd November 2020

“I was selling coffee and waffles…I make my own chocolates…it may be the healthiest drink on the planet”

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October 31 is a membrane “they” can pass through, get in amongst us.

Date post added: 30th October 2020

“the ancient world didn’t like its corpses. It feared them, was repelled by them. We’re different.”

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Let’s meet a Londoner!

Date post added: 25th October 2020

“Night strangles the traveling lamp….we die three times”

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Let us now praise famous guides – Charles Chilton, the legendary BBC producer

Date post added: 20th October 2020

“What kind of accent do you call that?” “It’s the accent of the capital of the British Empire.”

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The Perfect October Afternoon in London

Date post added: 12th October 2020

You can’t walk those streets without thinking ‘this is what it must be like for a beetle to go for a walk up on the counter of an ice cream parlour.”

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And if I speak of paradise

Date post added: 9th October 2020

“it’s like mountain flowers in the spring”

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The Wall Street Journal

Date post added: 7th October 2020

“we work all day every day and at the end of the day – at the end of every day – we’re £450 poorer than we were when we woke up”

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Favourite moment, favourite memory on a favourite walk

Date post added: 6th October 2020

“I’d like you to know Mr. Guide that my husband is a cavalry officer and he’s at the back of the group there”

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How to sort the wheat from the weeds – Part 2

Date post added: 5th October 2020

“how do you ensure you’re not getting something nearly worthless for a £400 opportunity costs bill?”

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Trouble at Mill

Date post added: 4th October 2020

“all the elements that made it a goer for English sensibilities: snobbery, money, eccentricity, bitchiness, the foreign factor…”

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London’s history crystallised in a single word

Date post added: 28th September 2020

“it was a frisson moment – a shiver up the spine moment – for Sir Christopher Wren and that small gathering standing on those smouldering ruins”

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How do you sort the wheat from the weeds – Part I

Date post added: 28th September 2020

“Noma has been crowned ‘the best restaurant in the world’ four times. Macdonalds will never be crowned ‘the best restaurant in the world'”

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When David met Boris Johnson

Date post added: 26th September 2020

“possessor of the least inhibited tongue in Europe”

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“If you understand 9 Buckingham Gate you understand the world”

Date post added: 25th September 2020

“he wore six overcoats and two pairs of trousers”

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“like school for grownups – all the good bits and none of the bad bits”

Date post added: 22nd September 2020

“The word that crystallises that phrase ‘bring some order to that chaos of sensory impressions’ is meaning”

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Virginia Woolf Bombed

Date post added: 12th September 2020

“I could just see a piece of my studio wall standing: otherwise rubble where I wrote so many books.”

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A London Battlefield

Date post added: 12th September 2020

“The sky shook London like a rug”

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London, October 1940

Date post added: 11th September 2020

“London can take it”

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Swimming the English Channel

Date post added: 4th September 2020

“the epitome of remaining elegant and refined while causing chaos”

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The Great Fire of London – the moment they realised…

Date post added: 4th September 2020

“those two moments were like hearing the worst possible news in the doctor’s consulting room”

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Where the Fire of London really started

Date post added: 2nd September 2020

“the monster was out of its cage”

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The Great Fire of London – Pudding Lane, the spark, the first two hours

Date post added: 1st September 2020

“‘pish, a woman could piss it out’…it was, of course, the greatest understatement in London’s history, the biggest London misjudgement ever”

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The Great Fire of London – what was London like?

Date post added: 31st August 2020

“It was a street plan that might have been designed to aid and abet a catastrophic conflagration.”

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Panegyric for June, Jean and Joan – the 3 Js, late, great London Walks guides

Date post added: 30th August 2020

“she was gap-toothed, she was bawdy, she was a tremendous character. She was cremated on a beach in Bali.”

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The poet, the swans, the sorrow, the beauty… In Hampstead

Date post added: 16th August 2020

“in Hampstead’s rush-dark pond where a lone swan sings without a sound”

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Shakespeare and London – David explores the interface

Date post added: 11th August 2020

“when Mark Antony drank horse piss”

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London placenames are x-rays. They show us the past.

Date post added: 9th August 2020

“the name Kensington, it may well be the best, the most appropriate London placename of them all”

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David introduces Hampstead – “a cutlass clenched between your teeth”

Date post added: 8th August 2020

“Hampstead is London’s skybox… from there they could see forever”

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Let’s visit a 312 year old house – and its famous resident

Date post added: 6th August 2020

“dogs, cocks, pianofortes and insipid men”

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London Walks Smorgasbord

Date post added: 4th August 2020

“the London Walks guide who sounds like – when he wants to – legendary American sports announcer Howard Cosell”

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Where do London Walks guides get their information?

Date post added: 2nd August 2020

“I’ve been to 1200 tapas restaurants so you don’t have to”

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Day One of the London Walks Resurgam – David reports from the front lines

Date post added: 1st August 2020

“London Walks is haemorrhaging red ink”

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David Cracks Open a “Nondescript Corner” of Kensington

Date post added: 18th July 2020

“five centuries in the palm of your hand”

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Secret Westminster

Date post added: 14th July 2020

“the mentality, the genus loci of Westminster is insular”

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London Walks History – The Day Trips

Date post added: 7th July 2020

“Always drink upstream from the herd…we had to slip the surly bonds of the coach…fastly superior”

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“Do you ever cross paths with famous people on London Walks?”

Date post added: 6th July 2020

“Simon took an American megastar on a tour and she liked it so much she asked for a second helping – booked Simon for the next day”

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You’re directly above Kensington Palace – 80 feet up, looking down

Date post added: 5th July 2020

You go on a virtual tour of Kensington – the wealthiest borough in London (indeed the wealthiest district in the country) – you best strap yourself in because “Sights & Secrets of Virtual Kensington” takes you through the looking glass: to the Cotswolds and the Egypt of the pharaohs and San Francisco and Docklands and […]

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“What do we see on the Kensington tour?”

Date post added: 4th July 2020

“you’ll see a Victorian mortuary and Brigitte Bardot and a bear being skinned and 1930s workmen on a girder 80 storeys up and a Civet Cat and the prettiest girl in London and World War II bomb damage and Hugh Hefner’s shoes and the four great biblical rivers and Ascot hats…and that’s just for starters”

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The History of London Walks – Part I, the 1960s

Date post added: 29th June 2020

“Keith was fed up with the banality of typical London tourist fare”

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Hampstead – David guides it (well, part of it)

Date post added: 25th June 2020

“Hampstead’s great advantage as a spa town… in the end proved to be its great disadvantage”

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Mary’s parents both had close calls during the Blitz

Date post added: 24th June 2020

“darkness visible”

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Hampstead Tube Stop – David gives us a little tour

Date post added: 22nd June 2020

“it’s the deepest station in the system – world-class marathon runners train by running up those 320 stairs ten to twelve times a session”

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In the Beginning – David serves up a London tour de force

Date post added: 17th June 2020

“The Mississippi drains a continent. Small beer really. The Thames drains time itself.”

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Brussels, dawn, October 12th, 1915 – David takes aim

Date post added: 5th June 2020

“a woman in central London being executed by a firing squad”

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Schitt’s Creek without the Roses – David on Kensington

Date post added: 13th April 2020

David gets in on the act– comes crashing in – on Kensington. This is his first podcast – shocking in places – but you’ll learn some good stuff.

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