London Walks

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...