Telling the Story of London
From haunted churchyards to Christian heritage walks - how the Square Mile's tour guides keep history alive
Against the white limestone of St Paul’s Cathedral, Louise Grainger, 60, stands out. The chair of the City of London Guides Lecturers Association - commonly known as the City Guides - refers to herself as Red Bowler, proprietor of Red Bowler Tours. On her walks around the most historic part of London, and on the brisk early afternoon of 12th November, she wears a carmine overcoat and her identifying bowler.
It’s to ensure she remains visible to tour parties, Louise explains, because leading people across busy streets without losing a member of the tour group can be tricky. But the colour choice also seems like a nod to London’s schmaltzy aesthetic tics: pillar boxes and Routemaster buses, not to mention Paddington Bear’s hat.
Administered by the City Corporation but accredited by the Institute of Tourist Guiding (ITG), the City of London badge is awarded by the Lord Mayor. It’s a distinguishing award which identifies holders as official guides to the City, the first part of London founded. The City was settled in around AD50, seven years after the Romans invaded Britain, and out of this Square Mile - as the area is affectionately and factually known - grew modern London. For many people, it’s synonymous with rapacious profit, pace, and drive - it boasts 33 times more workers than residents. But to those whose trade it is to tell the City’s stories, this area amounts to so much more.
‘Most people think of the City as the Square Mile, the financial centre, and it is all those things, but it’s also home to St Paul’s Cathedral, to the Museum of London, the Guildhall Art Gallery; it has a lot of big cultural points in it as well,’ Louise insists, sitting at a table so polished it appears nearly reflective in a wood-panelled Chapter Room of St Paul’s Cathedral. As a senior City Guide, Louise is a familiar face within the building, which was designed and built in 1715 by Sir Christopher Wren. To the guides, the cathedral symbolises what the City really is: a historic mass with enough weight to anchor, rather than rival, modern development.
‘Finance is crucially important, absolutely central, but there are things about it that people don’t understand,’ Louise says. ‘As a City Guide it’s our job to open up that world a bit more.’
The City Guides are a professional organisation run by volunteers. From Monday to Friday, guides lead a daily walk at 11am from the City Information Centre, but despite membership of the association, individuals remain freelancers, as tour guides across London tend to be. For that reason, the group does no official work to monitor the demographic of people attending walking tours. But Louise insists it’s ‘really, really broad. Anyone aged from ten to a hundred.’
In recent years, the City Guides have themed tours around instances of national dialogue - from Black History tours, to Silver Sunday events for older people, and Culture Corridor walks during the later stages of the pandemic, to bring people from surrounding areas like Tower Hamlets back into the City and reacquaint them with London as spaces began to reopen.
But in this ancient setting, cobblestones and narrow alleys can be an issue. All City Guides must undertake disability awareness training, though Louise acknowledges there is more to be done: ‘We’d love more diversity. We say our walks are for everybody. We try to be as inclusive as we possibly can.’
Louise Grainger, 60, chair of the City of London Guide Lecturers Association
Louise Grainger, 60, chair of the City of London Guide Lecturers Association
Inside the larger Chapter Room in St Paul's Cathedral - Louise's unofficial office
Inside the larger Chapter Room in St Paul's Cathedral - Louise's unofficial office
Meet the Storytellers
This is Christ Church Greyfriars Church Garden, the fourth stop on Philip Wright's Dark Side of the City Tour. The original church stood here on Newgate Street, near to St Paul's Cathedral - although these elegant ruins are all that remains.
This important place of worship burned down in 1666 during the Great Fire of London. The rebuilt version, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, was largely destroyed by Blitz bombing on 29th December 1940, when its roof was struck by a firebomb.
Within these walls, a verdant garden blooms, designed to encourage biodiversity within the area.
The churchyard may or may not be haunted - it certainly has some famous residents.
'Mad Maid of Kent' Elizabeth Barton is buried here, for starters. She was an English Catholic nun who fell foul of King Henry VIII after warning against his marriage to Anne Boleyn.
Sites visited during Philip Wright's Dark Side of the City tour
Sites visited during Philip Wright's Dark Side of the City tour
Ben Virgo, 51, standing in St Mary Woolnoth, outside Bank Station.
Ben Virgo, 51, standing in St Mary Woolnoth, outside Bank Station.
The church is a favourite of Ben's. 'We’re not taught about many of the people who were our great heroes,' he says. 'William Wilberforce actually sat in this building, and listened to John Newton preach from that pulpit.’
The church is a favourite of Ben's. ‘We’re not taught about many of the people who were our great heroes,' he says. 'William Wilberforce actually sat in this building, and listened to John Newton preach from that pulpit.’
Performing - or Preaching?
Of course, not everyone leading tours in the Square Mile belongs to the City Guides. Others, like Ben Virgo, 51, run tours that appeal to a more specific audience. As director of Christian Heritage London, Ben’s tours are about revealing the City’s prominence in British Christian identity.
'It's somewhere between acting and preaching'
‘All over, when people are looking for an illustration of how Christianity has changed the world, they start talking about London,’ Ben says, ‘because they start talking about William Wilberforce, and John Wesley, and people who, because of Christianity, brought history change.’
Ben’s first degree was in Classics, so his knowledge of the City’s Roman past is robust. His familiarity with Latin, Greek, and archaeology stands him in good stead: ‘I have the opportunity to tell all these facts about Christianity from a historical perspective.’ But the work of a tour guide, Ben feels, is less about giving a lesson and more about pulling back the curtain on a sense of living history. While Louise considers the practice equivalent to ‘promenade theatre’, for Ben, it’s ‘somewhere between acting and preaching’.
‘I frequently give a tour starting at St Paul’s Cathedral, walking down Cheapside to Bank, which is one tube stop, and I’m telling story after story, and it takes about two hours to get here,’ he explains.
‘Everyone is interested in stories. And I think we all see ourselves in terms of story. In London, we are walking through a story.’
Social Media and Tours
For younger tour guides, newer means of storytelling both promote and consolidate their livelihood. Jenny Draper, 32, was revising for exams for her Blue Badge - the qualification awarded by the ITG to accredited guides in London - during Covid, and feared that without regular practice tours, she’d forget the history she’d been studiously committing to memory. So she became @jdraperlondon on TikTok, largely to keep her knowledge and delivery elastic.
‘It definitely brought me some work,’ Jenny reflects, ‘but I’d been doing YouTube for ages.’ The move, it seems, was natural.
And everyone is getting in on the action. On TikTok, Candace Abroad, a ‘full-time London travel blogger’ with more than 30,000 followers, shares a series of videos with the caption: ‘You need to take this walk in London’. Her second instalment, chronicling a wander around the City, has been liked 6451 times. Meanwhile, the Ladies Who London podcast, presented by Blue Badge guides Alex and Emily - found on Instagram @tourguide.alex and @guideemily respectively - has enjoyed more than 100,000 downloads.
Ben Virgo even noticed that he’d lead tour groups with apparent strangers from across the globe, only to discover the unlikely connections visitors had, thanks to social media: ‘You’ll often meet people from different continents and they’ll have friends in common, because you’ll later hook up on Facebook.’
Pandemic Legacies
Guides are benefitting not only from broader methods of public outreach, of course, but a resurgence in walking tour popularity following the pandemic. Virtual walking tours, the kind aped on TikTok, emerged as an option during the worst of Covid-19 lockdowns. But Jenny's grateful to be back in person, in what has shaped up to be a 'bumper year for tourism'.
'I feel like everyone had three holidays booked up,' she laughs.
Considering the relative precarity of tour guiding as a profession, Louise Grainger is relieved things are looking up. As a spokesperson, she felt deep responsibility to her professional community during the pandemic. ‘Tour guides are freelancers,’ she says. ‘The past few years have been very tough, as they have for any creative freelancer - musician, actor, dancer, singer, tour guide. There was no government support whatsoever. They just fell through all those cracks.’
Watch me attempt my own tour. Results pending...
We'll Always Have London...
But even as jet-setting holidaymakers arrive in London from all around the world, permanent city residents are using tours to rejuvenate their relationship to their home.
'The host was so passionate and so his enthusiasm for the subject came through. He'd written a book about Jack the Ripper'
Charity worker Heidi Henders, 25, is one such person. As someone who grew up in Liverpool, she's found that tours have made her feel closer to her adopted city.
‘I think it’s really easy to feel divorced from the history here,’ she says. ‘I occasionally have quite overwhelming moments thinking, "oh, this is London". There are so many stories.’ When her mother visited in September 2021, Heidi undertook six hours of walking tours in one day to show her around - and the stories have stuck with her. ‘Now I notice more, I look for what’s going on in those streets.’
And for Dane Cobain, 33, a freelance writer from Buckinghamshire, a Jack the Ripper tour in the unidentified murderer’s preferred stomping ground - Whitechapel, a district just beyond the City, in London’s East End - presented a perfect opportunity for a memorable first date.
‘We were both into serial killers and true crime documentaries,’ he explains. ‘We needed something to do and it was a shared interest.’
Whether it’s the unusual setting for a hot date, or a three-minute TikTok dissecting the seedy past of Smithfield Market, tour guiding is here to stay. On 28th November, inside an eighteenth-century private palace bordering St James’ Park - Spencer House, which, over the years, has hosted such glittering events as an 1857 ball for Queen Victoria - the ITG celebrated its 20th anniversary. The evening included a performance from a Royal Academy of Music scholar, harpist Megan Humphries, and celebrated the professional membership organisation’s 1700 members, of which two thirds plough their trade in London.
And Ben Virgo, for one, is convinced he’ll never tire of the stories. ‘I find, even though I’ve told them hundreds and hundreds of times, I still get choked up.’
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