London Walks

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.