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.
...a man on a bicycle looking at a sleeping city.
You haven't gone far. But you've gone elsewhere.
That's not ancient history. That's yesterday with better tailoring.
This is not just another Jack the Ripper book.
"Charlie's vital green thread through the capital led us instead…along river paths and bridleways…through woodland…past orchards…along the edges of hayfields…through parks and gardens…"
Circus proprietor. Spy. Listening in.
This is not domestic scale. This is architectural swagger.
The whole thing – Newton in your pocket.
"how much more emotional and vivid a story is when you are standing in front of it, rather than glancing at a screen"
He writes like someone crossing a room full of mousetraps.
"70 million people around the world can claim Irish heritage"
The drawings caused a sensation.
Radio – already powerful – suddenly acquired a cathedral.
A Japanese town run entirely by British civil servants.
aviation was still magical then.
He died while talking about music.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy began as a wildly improbable idea brought to life in London. This is the story of Douglas Adams, the BBC, and the birth of one of the funniest creations in modern fiction.
London. The National Gallery. A suffragette. A meat cleaver. And the Rokeby Venus.
The mini skirt explodes onto the streets of Swinging London in the 1960s. The story begins with French designer André Courrèges, a former civil engineer whose futuristic fashions helped ignite a revolution that London girls turned into a global sensation.
The Blind Beggar shooting was too brazen.
He didn't just paint animals. He gave them emotion.
He didn't know it but at that moment Charles Cross insured his immortality within the pages of history books.
After Selfridge, shopping became a leisure activity.
Now if you know Oxford Street you know the soundtrack. Buses roaring. Taxi horns. Engines revving. Delivery vans edging forward inch by inch like nervous chess pieces. It's noisy, chaotic, gloriously unmistakably London. So imagine this: Oxford Street… without traffic.
Sixty years ago a seemingly innocuous feature in a London newspaper triggered one of the most extraordinary cultural storms of the 1960s. In a quiet interview with the Evening Standard, John Lennon made a remark that travelled from Fleet Street to the American South — and ignited bonfires of Beatles records. In this episode we trace the tiny London tremor that became an international cultural earthquake.
Why is Everest called Everest? At dusk on the world's highest peak, we discover a name, a surveyor, and, yes, a London story. A March 3rd story.
Before January claimed the crown, the year began in March. In this London Walks dispatch we step back into Roman Londinium to see how New Year's Day once fell on March 1st.
Born in Shepherd's Bush and armed with one of rock's great roars, Roger Daltrey helped define the sound of modern London. Today's London Calling marks the birthday of The Who's legendary frontman.
Meet John Tenniel, the London artist who gave the world Alice, the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat. Born on February 28, this quiet Punch cartoonist drew the definitive Wonderland.
It's about the seismic shockwave that followed, and is still being felt nearly a thousand years later.
The Bank of England. did something quietly revolutionary.
a city that understands the fine art of dignified absurdity
By early evening the blue-and-yellow flags will start to appear.
It's one of the most jaw-dropping episodes this city has ever produced.
"the trains are now painted with whiskers and paws"
If we could but look into the seeds of time...
the book came in for praise from a very distinguished quarter
Halfway to heaven on a ladder that looks about as reassuring as overcooked spaghetti.
The city did not just inherit brilliance. In many cases, it saved it.
A medieval city that once feared fire now fears water.
she was in the grip of the most ferocious creative surge of her life.
Painted across the 1860s, it isn't a single memory – it's grief revisited.
© 2020-2026 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
