London Walks

I’m going to do a piece on London Walks at home. Or, more precisely, a piece on my home patch, my London.

Possibly the most civilised retail space in Britain.

And plonked right in the middle of it all: the Acropolis.

London declaring itself heir not just to empire, but to spectacle itself.

What if Trafalgar Square didn’t have Nelson’s Column at all, but a full-scale Great Pyramid instead? Not a model. Not a metaphor. Six million tonnes of ancient Egyptian stone plonked right where the fountains are. This piece takes one of the most jaw-dropping, gloriously bonkers proposals in London history and lets it rip, measuring the pyramid against the National Gallery and St Martin-in-the-Fie...

Every Christmas morning since 1864 (with only one modern break), a hardy band of swimmers has plunged into the icy Serpentine in Hyde Park for a 100-yard dash that has become London’s most extraordinary yuletide tradition. Born from Victorian bravado, crowned with the Peter Pan Cup, and often surrounded by ice and applause, this event is part challenge, part spectacle and utterly festive – a cold-...

Maria Taglioni changed ballet forever. In the early nineteenth century she reinvented the art form, dancing en pointe not as a trick but as poetry, creating the illusion of weightlessness and giving birth to Romantic ballet. This lively, story-rich piece traces her extraordinary rise, her London triumphs at Her Majesty’s Theatre, and her surprisingly proper London life in Connaught Square, just of...

A short walk in London is like a wine tasting. Initial impressions give way to lingering flavours, and just when you think you know the city, it surprises you again. From Shakespeare’s great line about “infinite variety” to the quiet delight of London’s blue plaques, this piece explores the city’s knack for offering small, unsolicited gifts – moments of history, genius, and wonder poured out as yo...

On December 22, 1880, George Eliot died quietly in her house on Cheyne Row in Chelsea, brought down not by drama but by a winter cold caught at a London concert. This piece revisits her final days and the life behind the name: the woman who disguised herself to be heard, wrote novels that taught generations how to think and feel, and reshaped English fiction by insisting that ordinary lives matter...

At one o’clock on a this day in 1846, a man lay on a table in Bloomsbury, a surgeon raised a knife, and pain was about to be switched off for the first time in British history.

Saturday stands slightly apart from the rest of the week. It has ancient roots, a planetary name, and a modern reputation as the day when time loosens its tie. Today's podcast is a gentle (and, yes, personal) wander through its – Saturday's – meaning and magic.

Charles Mathews was Dickens’ favourite actor, a one-man phenomenon who turned London into a cast of characters. This podcast explores his world, his Adelphi triumphs, and the birth of modern performance. And a rider, London Walks is also launching a brand-new walk guided by a former MP, bringing a rare insider’s perspective to a very different strand of the London story.

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.