London Walks

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.