London Walks

On December 18, 1679, England’s leading poet, John Dryden, was attacked and beaten in a dark Covent Garden alley outside the Lamb, the area’s oldest pub. The motive was literary. Dryden was wrongly suspected of having written An Essay on Satire, a venomous anonymous poem that skewered the corruption of the Restoration court and appeared to take aim at the Earl of Rochester. The real author was an...

Published on December 17, 1843, A Christmas Carol emerged from Dickens’s London of fog, gaslight and inequality. This podcast is about the little book that help reinvent Christmas. And about Dickens, his London, and our Dickens's Christmas Carol & Seasonal Traditions Walk.

"sets you up nicely should that come up as a question in a pub quiz"

A lively, cinematic wander into the story of St Martin in the Fields, the church that began life in the fields and ended up beating at the heart of London. From plague pits to Handel, from Nell Gwyn’s funeral bells to today’s world-famous concerts and homelessness work, this is the tale of the warmest, most open-armed church in the city. Architecture. Anecdote. Music. Magic. St Martin’s has it all...

Step off the roaring streets and into a Christmas whispered along the water. On the winter solstice, we explore the Regent’s Canal’s Cinderella stretch, from narrowboats and towpath tales to the transformed world of Granary Square, finishing with St Pancras’s treasure trove of history. A festive London Walk full of stories, atmosphere and discovery.

On the anniversary of Samuel Johnson’s death, we look back at the life of the man who gave the English language its first great map. From Lichfield beginnings to London triumphs, Johnson’s wit, grit and mighty dictionary reshaped literature and defined an age. A portrait of a brilliant, battered, booming voice that still echoes through London’s streets and our own daily speech.

A vivid, fast moving, cinematic look at Robert Browning on the anniversary of his 1889 Death in Venice. A London-born poet who reinvented the dramatic monologue, eloped with Elizabeth Barrett in a Marylebone romance worthy of a thriller and returned in triumph to Maida Vale and ultimately to Poets’ Corner. Lots of juicy Victorian detail, great lines, and the irresistible contrast of a life shaped...

On the second Wednesday in December, the Dickens Pickwick Club gathers at the ancient George & Vulture – an 18th-century warren of port, oak panels, and old City gossip – for its annual feast of camaraderie, Stilton, steak-and-kidney pie, and booming speeches. This year, my turn arrived: I had to deliver the Himself in the guise of Count Smorltork, Dickens’s “famous foreigner” and virtuoso mangler...

A double dose of goodness for you this evening...

This is a lively, fireside wander through the strange and splendid history of the mince pie. It begins in medieval kitchens where the pie was a hefty mix of meat, fruit and spice, travels through the Puritan years when it was frowned upon, and arrives in the present as the sweet little symbol of Christmas we know today. The piece explores how mince pies delight the British, baffle the Americans, a...

Jack’s Christmas Lights Walk begins here for a reason. Villiers Street is the perfect overture: dense with history, glowing with stories, and sprinkled with festive firsts you won’t hear anywhere else. It's London in miniature: short, steep, and overflowing with stories. From dukes and Dickens to Kipling’s fog and railway thunder, this narrow chute between the Strand and the river is a backstage e...

On 7 December 1941, as Japan struck Pearl Harbor, London was deep in its third winter of war: bruised, blacked out, queueing for scraps, shrugging off sirens. In this episode of London Calling we take the city’s pulse on that day. From wardens chastening Noël Coward to milk carts pulled by dogs, from Advent sermons to Fleet Street’s midnight shock, we watch London discover the attack that would ch...

It’s a hotel, a pub, an art gallery, a very special rendezvous, a backstage pass to Westminster, a living scrapbook of political London, a motherlode of history, and a film set all rolled up into one.

A birthday bash that’s yet another chapter in the Literary London Saga.

On the anniversary of his death, a rollicking, street-level wander through the life of John Gay – author of The Beggar’s Opera and Trivia – who turned London’s rogues, highways, alleys, gossip, and grit into art that still sparkles nearly three centuries later.

She was the woman who changed everything. Before her, the English stage was a men-only club – boys playing girls, audiences roaring for comedy but never expecting a real woman to step into the light. And then she did. This podcast tells the story of the first actress on the English stage: the mystery, the daring, the scandal, the thrill of that moment when a woman, for the first time, crossed the...

A vivid, anecdotal wander through the story of Birkbeck, London’s great evening college: born in the age of gaslight, dedicated to workers hungry for knowledge, and still humming with that after-hours magic today. The piece lifts the lid on the college that turned London’s night shift into a lecture theatre, celebrates the characters and breakthroughs it’s nurtured over two centuries, and shows wh...

A festive flourish with extras. Nary a hint here about the extras – you'll have to listen to the piece. But the main course is a little appetiser from Ann, a trailer if you will for her upcoming series of Eating Christmas Walks. This tasty talk's mostly about turkeys and geese. It's Ann so you can expect warmth, wit, history, latest goings on. Basically a generous helping of Yuletide flavour – a p...

A reflective, elegiac tribute to Tom Stoppard, marking his death at 88. The piece traces his journey from a childhood shaped by exile to his life as one of Britain’s most brilliant and beloved playwrights. It honours his delight in language, his dazzling intellect, his late-in-life reckoning with history, and the gentleness that infused his work. It’s a quiet, intimate meditation on a mind that il...

On November 29th, 1814, in a cramped London workshop smelling of hot metal and wet ink, Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Bauer’s steam-driven printing press thundered into life – and the world quietly tipped into its modern age. The Times secretly ran its entire issue on this whirring mechanical wonder, doubling – no, quadrupling speed overnight. Londoners didn’t know it, but the very rhythms of their...

Fade in. Church Row, Hampstead. Late Victorian London. A perfect Georgian house, all calm exteriors and candlelit windows. Inside, one of the most explosive figures of the age paces like a caged star. Bosie: aristocratic beauty, agent of chaos, lover and undoer of Oscar Wilde. This is the widescreen version. A story of forbidden passion, furious fathers, courtroom tragedy and a golden boy on the r...

Step into London at its most dazzling. From designer hotel lobbies to elegant Georgian squares, from grand department stores to quiet, candle-scented churches, the city becomes a forest of firs, each one dressed to the nines in baubles, ribbons, and stories. This is the tale of how Christmas trees travelled from the hearth fires of Germany to the palaces of Hanoverian royals and finally into the h...

The year London got its Christmas back.

On November 25th, 1952, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap opened in a still-sooty, post-war London — and never stopped running. London Calling strolls down West Street to tell the tale of the world’s longest-running play: its famous first night, the legends behind the “Holman performances,” the stars who got their start, the stubborn little clock that’s ticked through seven decades, and why the curt...

Twice, on the same date 281 years apart, the River Thames froze solid – first in 1434, when London’s lifeline turned to stone, and again in 1715, when it became a carnival ground. From famine fears to frost fairs, this is the story of a city brought to a standstill by winter, and how Londoners turned disaster into revelry.