London Walks

A mouldy dish. A sharp eye. A discovery in Paddington that changed medicine forever.

Albany Street: a perfectly ordinary London street with an extraordinary amount of history packed into it. Scratch the surface and out tumble grand terraces, soldiers, workhouses, artists, rogues and the great restless churn of London life.

Four men cross a London road. The camera clicks. And one ordinary zebra crossing walks straight into history.

How do you save a dying patient when medicine’s answer is to take blood out? James Blundell did something revolutionary. He put blood back in.

Thomas Moore wrote one of the immortal lines about London. The delicious twist? He was in Venice when he wrote it.

W. G. Grace was a giant of Victorian cricket, a legend in his own lifetime. Then I came across his grave and read the names above his own, and suddenly the great cricketer became something else: a father.

A palace of glass. Victorian dinosaurs. Six million visitors. And a fire that lit up the London sky. The extraordinary story of Crystal Palace, where the monsters survived but the palace didn’t.

There were 175 people in that room in the Royal Academy. 174 of them - including me – were standing. You were stretched out on the floor, your camera two inches off the floor. What had you seen that nobody else had clocked? What were you photographing?"

On September 20, 1912, a handful of poets sat down to dinner. By the time the evening was over, they had the beginnings of a literary movement, a new generation of poets and a name: Georgian Poetry.

A skinny, clothes-mad schoolgirl from Neasden became the face of Swinging London. On her birthday – Happy Birthday, Twiggy! – this is how Lesley Hornby became Twiggy, and Twiggy became an icon.

London is one of the great theatre cities of the world. So why don’t more people want to walk it? Adam makes the case for two hours of greasepaint, gossip, gorgeous buildings and, just possibly, the history of everything.

Every time that blood-pressure cuff tightens around your arm, an eighteenth-century Teddington clergyman is standing invisibly beside you. Meet Stephen Hales: scientist, inventor, pie improver, painter of posts and a man whose reputation once stood second only to Newton’s.

On September 16, 1969, Biba hit Kensington High Street. Step inside the dark, decadent world of Barbara Hulanicki and the trendiest store in Swinging London.

On September 15, 1964, the Daily Herald set and a new Sun rose over Fleet Street. But it wasn’t yet the brash red-top Britain came to know.

There’s a new woman in Trafalgar Square. Tschabalala Self’s vivid blue Lady in Blue has taken possession of the Fourth Plinth, and she’s already changing the conversation.

On September 13th, 1940, the Luftwaffe bombed Buckingham Palace, bringing the Blitz to the King and Queen’s own front door and giving the Royal Family an unexpected bond with bomb-battered London.

A red light. A London street in Bloomsbury. A Hungarian physicist steps off the kerb and has an idea that will change the world. This is the extraordinary London moment when Leó Szilárd saw the possibility of the nuclear chain reaction.

One fabulous diamond. One audacious plan. And one of London’s most extraordinary heists.

Tucked away on Kensington Church Walk is Fable and Mirth, a tiny cabinet of wonders created by sisters Neely and Sarita. We step inside to meet them and hear the story behind one of Kensington’s most individual little shops.

William Morris wanted to change the world, beautified the homes of the rich and somehow ended up on everything from nuclear submarines to egg cups.

From Kensington boy to master of concrete: the story of Sir Denys Lasdun, the man who gave London a National Theatre that one future king called a nuclear power station and John Betjeman greeted with a gasp of delight.

It all comes down to one little letter – the letter S.T

In 1962, somebody dug a hole beside the Thames at Blackfriars. And London opened a trapdoor into its past. Down there, waiting beneath the city for eighteen hundred years, was a Roman ship.

Hampstead was doing health and wellness when the rest of London was doing gin, smallpox and open sewers.

September 4, 1666. London was an inferno. The fire was still advancing. This wasn't just the worst day of the Great Fire. It was the worst day in London history.