London Walks

Five hundred consecutive daily podcasts. Half a million listens. And now a change of gear. London Calling isn’t going away. Far from it. We’re trading seven daily editions for one longer, richer, more varied Saturday programme. The sidecar isn’t being abandoned. I’m simply climbing back onto the motorcycle. Come along for the ride.

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.