London Walks

Where did London put its dead when the graveyards were full? A journey into a lost world of bones, burial, belief and some of the strangest chapters in the city’s history.

A little red flower. A terrible history. How the poppy became the emblem of remembrance, why we wear it, and how something so fragile came to carry the weight of millions of lives lost in war.

Law, surveying, dispatch riding, art, even a black belt in judo. Brian’s had more lives than a cat. Meet the award-winning London Walks guide who’s done just about everything.

Meet “the Coalbox”, Lady Sibyl Colefax, one of London’s great hostesses. When the King came to dinner, he brought Wallis Simpson. Rubinstein played Chopin. Noël Coward sang.

A book in the dock. A nation on trial. How the 1960 Lady Chatterley obscenity trial became a turning point in British social and cultural history.

An ancient Celtic festival, a Hampstead chapel and the mysterious turning of the year. A journey into Samhain, where summer gives way to winter and the boundary between the living and the dead grows tantalisingly thin.

A closer look at a tank memorial in Whitehall turns a familiar London sight into a story of five men, steel armour and seconds to escape. That’s London: even something you’ve passed a hundred times can send you somewhere you’ve never been.

They called him “the Unknown Prime Minister”. Bonar Law made it all the way to Number Ten, only to have his voice fail him and his premiership cut tragically short. A poignant London story about power, frailty and a man history has almost forgotten.

A London printer. An extraordinary legacy. Luke Hansard gave his name to the official record of Parliament’s debates. Nearly two centuries after his death, every time Parliament speaks, Hansard remembers. And is remembered.

The latest from the wonderful, occasionally baffling world of cats. Ann brings us feline news, curious discoveries and a few surprises from our whiskered friends. There’s never a dull moment in the world of the mews.

The K6 telephone kiosk, a Massachusetts eccentricity, and a rather cheeky transatlantic marriage proposal.

October 26th, 1965. Four lads from Liverpool. One Queen. Four medals. And a little bit of mischief.

London’s black-cab drivers. They're the matadors of this town. They nail it. They don’t just learn the city. They remake their brains to hold it. The Knowledge is memory training at an almost preposterous scale, the intellectual equivalent of memorising the complete works of Shakespeare.

Lambeth is a borough of extraordinary contrasts, where archbishops and radicals, palaces and poverty, royalty and rebellion have rubbed shoulders for centuries. Cross the Thames and discover a London that’s full of surprises, hiding some of its best stories in plain sight.

Three hundred shops and half a million shoppers a day on Oxford Street. Six or seven little shops and perhaps 85 shoppers on Kensington Church Walk. But what this tiny London street lacks in physical size, it more than makes up for in charm. Step inside Fable & Mirth, a jewel of a gift shop, and meet the two sisters who’ve brought a little extra magic to Kensington.

A kingmaker killed in the fog. A fair that gave Cockneys a word for their hair. From bloody battlefields to ancient trees and world-changing ideas, Barnet is full of surprises.

Meet Judith, veteran London Walks guide and Camden Town insider extraordinaire. She’s lived right above Inverness Street Market, in the thick of Camden Town, for half a century. Who better to show us round and tell us its stories?

Poets and palaces. Rifles and spies. The world’s first cash machine and a country house where German generals were secretly listened to. Welcome to Enfield, the London borough that’s full of surprises.

The young John Keats, a cottage on Hampstead Heath, and the remarkable Leigh Hunt, the poet, journalist and troublemaker who opened his door to some of the greatest literary talents of the age.

Tucked away behind its gates, Ely Place is one of London’s strangest survivals, a little world of saints, bishops, strawberries, Tudor power and centuries-old privilege.

A seventh-century queen, two unconsummated marriages, an incorruptible body and a medieval fair. Meet St Audrey, the remarkable woman hiding inside the word “tawdry.”

Parliament is burning, London is watching, and out on the Thames Turner is turning catastrophe into art.

On October 15, 1764, amid the ruins of Rome, a young Londoner had an idea. Edward Gibbon would spend the next 23 years turning it into one of the greatest works of history ever written.

Born near the Tower of London, jailed for his beliefs and determined to change the world. Meet William Penn, the London rebel who founded Pennsylvania, and the twelve stubborn London jurors who helped make legal history.

Bradford may have got his death. But London got his life. Meet Sir Henry Irving, the first actor to be knighted and the man who made the Lyceum Theatre the centre of London’s dramatic world.

A stone’s throw from the quiet waters of Little Venice, Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen were living one of rock ’n’ roll’s most turbulent love stories.

One of London’s greatest art galleries is hiding in plain sight, and everything on the walls is about to disappear.

A Hackney boy who talked to imaginary friends grew up to change the sound of theatre. Harold Pinter taught us to listen to the words, the silences, and especially the pauses.

Before the battlefields, there was Finsbury Park. Don McCullin had a Rolleicord, hard streets, hard men and an eye that missed very little. London taught him where to look.

Lock & Co has been putting hats on London heads for 350 years. Princes, politicians, dandies and ordinary Londoners have all passed through its St James’s Street door, and somehow the old firm is still standing, still fitting, still unmistakably itself.

On October 7th, 1851, a staggering 109,915 people poured into Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition’s busiest day. So much silver changed hands that the takings needed two hackney cabs to carry them to the Bank of England.

Jason Lewis was "burned out with London and needed a bit of a break." Thirteen years, 46,000 miles, two broken legs, blood poisoning, oceans, rollerblades and a crocodile later, he came home to Greenwich.

October 5th, 1962. James Bond walks onto the screen. The Beatles walk into the record shops. Britain wakes up in one decade and goes to bed in another.

Ninety years ago today, fascism came marching into London’s East End. Cable Street answered with barricades, defiance and one unforgettable cry: “They shall not pass.”

Seventy years ago today, the Bolshoi Ballet swept into Covent Garden and London rose to its feet. A dazzling cultural moment, with the Hungarian uprising only days away.

A barge packed with gunpowder, sugar and nuts explodes beneath Macclesfield Bridge, hurling debris across Regent’s Park and waking London with a bang. The story of Blow-Up Bridge.

I crossed Croydon knowing almost nothing about it. Forty-two miles into the London Camino, the borough at journey’s end turned out to be one of the biggest surprises of the lot.

One date. Two extraordinary moments. Eight catastrophic years. September 30 tells one of the darkest stories of the twentieth century.

One mile every hour. For 1,000 hours. Meet Captain Barclay, Regency Britain’s almost forgotten walking phenomenon, prize-fight trainer and human endurance machine.

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.

An ordinary London street, three names, four hundred years and one astonishing reminder that nothing in London is ever quite what it seems.

What makes a young Londoner swap stand-up comedy for gardening? Meet Luke, the comedian who went to ground.

What happens when you look at London history through a cat’s eyes? Ann knows.

Helen Allingham painted the thatched cottages, tangled roses and flower-filled gardens that became our enduring dream of England.

Meet George, the six-foot-six goalkeeper whose summer job in Kensington Church Walk reveals that, beneath the big-city bustle, London is still a village.

When Australia beat England at The Oval in 1882, a cheeky newspaper obituary pronounced English cricket dead and gave the world the Ashes.

John Betjeman loved the London other people wanted to demolish, and when the wreckers came for St Pancras, the poet stood in their way

Long before the Olympic flame reached London, a German gymnasium in King’s Cross was limbering up, stripping off and helping to set the modern Games in motion.

Anniversary of Prince Albert's birth. His death left Queen Victoria inconsolable, changed the colour of a London police lamp and left a remarkable trail through the capital.

The dead poet is George Meredith, the garret is in Gray’s Inn, and the painter is about to run away with his model’s wife.

A navigational error. Nine Londoners dead. Edward R. Murrow at his microphone in Trafalgar Square. And the night the Blitz began.

The railway laureate, an Oxford don, a baby, and infantry...

The more you know about Fragonard, the more beautiful The Swing becomes.

Constant Lambert had wit, genius, glamour, appetite and almost no instinct whatsoever for self-preservation.

One outrageous evening in Covent Garden tells you almost everything you need to know about Restoration London.

Phyllida Law – Ave atque vale

Before the first train steamed into London, its story had begun on a remote island in Lake Huron, with an eighteen-year-old soldier building a fort in the Canadian wilderness.

A house in Kensington and the story of Æthelstan, the warrior king who, 1,100 years ago, forged a kingdom and became the first ruler of all England.

"Had we but world enough, and time…" Meet Andrew Marvell: poet, politician, satirist, Londoner, and the man behind the sexiest poem in the English language. Then follow his footsteps through the London streets he knew.

Hitler wanted him arrested. Mussolini banned him. And in a little Hampstead studio, David Low took on the dictators armed with nothing more than a pencil.

"Less British Museum and more life"

Strangers in London: for a few seconds their paths cross on a Tube escalator, then they disappear into the city.

The dead got into him. Old London got into him.

The woman who put the dirt of Dachau on Hitler’s bathmat.

The people in those vessels are not called bodies. They’re called patients.

The most wonderfully landlocked ship in London.

...they’re old leather boots. Heavy, battered, workaday things. Except they’ve been silver-plated.

Each of those 39 stab wounds a candle blown out.

He created a demonstration of modern life.

the capitalist who financed communism.

Everything you know of your life...

A 100 years ago today London changed colour.

Not bad for the fellow who first walked onto a London stage as Deputy Nincompoop.

Three centuries and change later, London is still saying thank you.

Like Budapest. Two cities separated by a river.