London Walks is the oldest urban walking tour company on the planet. It’s the gold standard of this profession, this craft. Here you can listen to our guides' stories and anecdotes of London.
London told through the creatures that know it best: the rat in the tunnel and the dog on the lead. From the sewers to the parks, from Herbert's scuttling hordes to Ann's faithful pack, this is the secret animal history of the capital – cheeky, vivid, and unmistakably alive.
When Alison leads her Old Palace Quarter Walk into Pickering Place – that exquisite little centuries-old courtyard off St James's Street – a sharp-eyed walker spots a mysterious oval plaque numbered 8100. What is it? Not a relic, not a door number, but a clue to one of London's best-kept secrets: the city's living network of gas lamps.
October 1956: the Bolshoi Ballet lands in London with 80 tons of scenery, KGB minders in tow, and a troupe led by Galina Ulanova and Maya Plisetskaya. Covent Garden reels at their scale and power – 45 minutes of applause, queues in the rain, a stage too small for their vast sets. Meanwhile, across Europe, the Hungarian Uprising explodes. Ballet, politics, glamour, tanks — three weeks that shook London and rewrote the story of British ballet.
October 2nd, 1925: four covered-top double-deckers debut on the Elephant to Epping route, drawing queues of curious Londoners. A century later, their descendants — 8,800 buses, 6,000 of them double-deckers — knit the capital together with 5 million journeys a day and 300 million miles a year. From four pioneers at the Elephant to a red fleet that could lap the Earth 12,000 times or reach the Sun in four months — London's buses aren't just transport. They're a solar-system-sized lifeline, a cosmic commute.
On section 13 you get the best view in London from here on earth...it's unrivalled, it's very high, it's an amazing view
September 30 twice marked history. In 1938, Chamberlain promised “peace for our time.” Eight years later, in 1946, the Nuremberg judges delivered guilty verdicts on Nazi leaders. Hope and reckoning – two dates, one day, history's cruel symmetry.
An exploration of what “Georgian” really means — the look, the feel, and the deeper story behind London's calm, symmetrical 18th-century architecture.
Michaelmas Eve – when the year tips into the dark. The last geese sizzle, the last debts get squared, and the devil, they say, is out spitting on the blackberries. It's a night for charms, for peering into bowls of water to see who you'll marry – or if you'll die – and for hoping St. Michael, sword flashing, is on duty. Because after tonight, the dark takes over.
Dan's taking London's Spymasters out for a spin this afternoon – so we couldn't resist giving you a sneak preview. Picture him in Horse Guards Parade, spinning the yarn of Operation Mincemeat, weaving in the James Bond connection, and – just for good measure – putting us tantalisingly close to unmasking the real 007. Pull up a chair, lean in. Here's Dan.
A night of fire. A very grand historic old house in ruins. And an image that came to define the Blitz
September 25, 1818 – the day London made medical history. Guy's Hospital. A patient is bleeding out. London surgeon James Blundell rolls the dice on an untested idea: take blood from one person, inject it into another. No blood typing, no antiseptic, just urgency, ingenuity, and a syringe. Against the odds, the patient lives. We'll meet Dr. Blundell, part mad-scientist, part visionary, who turned a desperate gamble into the first successful human-to-human blood transfusion. It's a story of risk, luck, science, and the moment London learned life could be borrowed.
The wind howls, the candles gutter… London, 1717: a child is born beneath a sky that seems to know it's witnessing trouble. He will grow up to conjure castles full of ghosts, corridors thick with secrets, and gossip sharp enough to draw blood.
On a hushed September morning in 1939, as war loomed over London, Sigmund Freud drew his last breath in Hampstead. This is the story of that extraordinary passing.
Right, gather round — this one's a bit of a lucky dip. Here's what's rattling about in the bag:
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 Friday, September 19th, 2025. Our warm up act, as always, the London Calling Book Club Corner. In the Chair today, London Walks' Knight errant, Richard […]
The Thames Police, like it or not, became London's undertakers.
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 Monday, September 8th, 2025. London Calling Book Club Corner first. Recovering lawyer Tom Hooper's second day in the Chair. If this were Ascot Tom would […]
What it was about this hugely different cup of tea – The Ultimate London Walk – that caught their eye
That's the curtain raiser. Now, shall we walk?
"there are more things in London than are dreamt of in your philosophy Horatio"
High Barnet is the trumpet call.
This is border country – London nudging into Hertfordshire
Postcodes are the city in miniature: eccentric, irregular, a little chaotic — but if you know how to read them, they reveal patterns, layers, history.
It's walking through the world's memory palace
It's a London no one's ever seen
the manifold, magnificent, mind-bending, maddening mysteries of London postcodes
When Mary's happy Mary dances
"he was the subject of the world's first international manhunt"
Here's a hot London tip
"it took me a year to get an interview with astronaut Neil Armstrong"
Good news for Eliza and Mrs Higgins, the cats who live in St Paul's Covent Garden
One of the most important bits of London you never knew about
London invented smog; the London Plane invented the cure.
Which is why it's called 'the Westminster Abbey of the City'
the corpse said he felt a lot better and would skip his funeral, said he was off to the wine shop
He kept a tent pitched in the back garden of his Kensington house
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