London Walks

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.

The atmosphere is unlike anywhere else in London.

the smallest discoveries can be the biggest of all

A mischievous rabbit in a little blue jacket.

the gaming there was worthy of “the decline of an empire.”

That’s not a walking tour possum, that’s an endurance event with a gift shop.

One has even become a little village fish tank.

Whole streets became darker. Literally darker. Britain’s first blackout had begun.

they shaped modern architecture around the world

The handsomest weather vane in London.

The walls had ears. Hitler’s generals never knew.

Everybody recognises Number 10. Almost nobody knows it.

That’s London. Classic London. Reinventing itself. Rewriting the record books.

The Chinese had a name for these Western explorers. ‘The Foreign Devils.’

The geography of his inspiration is remarkably intact.

Turn left at the giant turkey""

Vivid enough, colourful enough for you?

London is one of Europe’s great bird cities.

The quietest park in London was once the noisiest place in Britain.

The smallest Royal Park has one of London's biggest surprises.

The one assaults you. The other quietly welcomes you, invites you, soothes you.

Because every Londoner has a handful of places that reassure them the city hasn’t lost its soul. Burlington Arcade is one of mine.

Beadle and Buddha are distant linguistic cousins.

It’s the oldest and grandest shopping arcade in Britain

Feline goings on from around the world

Marie Stopes taught a nation about sex because her own wedding night went so catastrophically wrong.

If you alter it without consent? You can be prosecuted. Criminally.

the nearest the likes of me is ever going to get to an ancient, ever-so-posh, ever-so-upper-class English gentlemen’s club.

It feels like they’ve opened it up just for us.

How much forest is fourteen million books?

We get you inside it. Inside its grain. Its texture. Its hidden circuitry.

A woman complaining her cat looked “a bit grumpy.”

It’s one of the great hidden literacies of the city.

From rogue to national treasure.

"On that note, let's pull the chain [hearty chuckle follows]"

That’s not transport. That’s teleportation.

London’s going absolutely berserk.

London is a watercolour city.

St Paul’s filled with imaginary loaves.

It's already queued up.

He began by shaping wood and ended by shaping a city.

The flower at full bloom. The village in festival dress.

The organisation that today bestrides world football like a colossus. And England wanted no part of it.

Because London was confronted by something truly alarming. A naked man.

London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Story time. History time. The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition opened yesterday. June 16th. Which is another way of saying that summer has arrived in London. Not officially. Not astronomically. Not according to the Met Office. London has its own calendar. And […]

Hogarth used Barts’ patients as models for some of the figures in the paintings.