6 curated walks, written to be listened to on foot. Open one and the guide talks as you walk — where to go, what you are looking at, and why it is there. Each one runs between two stations, so you can start from either end.
7 stops · 1 h 30 min · 3 km
Southwark is where Victorian London went to find out how things break — and, a few hundred metres away, how people do. Seven stops built around a hinge: an operating theatre sealed up and forgotten for ninety-four years, a debtors' prison that starved three hundred people in three months, and the man who carved FACTS NOT OPINIONS over his door and tested the wreckage of the Tay Bridge. About an hour and a half, station at each end, and it walks from either one.
5 stops · 50 min · 1.2 km
The most famous royal address on earth was a private townhouse the family had to be talked into occupying, and the palace every ambassador is still accredited to hasn't had a monarch in it since 1837. Five stops on royal reluctance: a king who refused to move into the palace his brother bankrupted himself building, a public that only got inside because a different royal house burned down, and the architect who built all of it and lost his career doing it. About fifty minutes, tube at both ends, and it walks from either one.
5 stops · 1 h 20 min · 2.9 km
Almost nothing on this route was made for the place it stands. An Egyptian obelisk already fourteen centuries old when the Romans first moved it, and which drowned six men getting here. A national gallery wearing Marble Arch's sculptures on the site of the king's stables. A dictionary assembled from quotations copied onto slips of paper. And a Wren gate taken apart into two thousand seven hundred numbered stones, exiled to a Hertfordshire park for a hundred and twenty-three years, and bought back for a pound. About an hour and a half, station at each end, and it walks from either one.
7 stops · 1 h 50 min · 4.3 km
Within half a mile, Georgian and Victorian London built a machine for collecting, classifying and keeping things — and then applied it to children. Seven stops from a teaching collection that was shut to the public for 168 years, through a hospital where mothers left a coin or a scrap of fabric so a child could be matched if they ever came back, to a collection that was itself destroyed in a night in 1941. Told from the pavement, so it works whether the doors are open or not. About an hour and three-quarters, tube at both ends, and it walks from either one.
8 stops · 1 h 35 min · 3.1 km
This bank of the Thames is where London put the people it had nowhere else to put — the mad, the destitute, the sick, the dead. Eight stops on what gets kept and what gets thrown away: a nurse forgotten for a century, a churchyard saved because one person went looking for one grave, a slab of the Berlin Wall kept instead of crushed, and a war museum standing inside Bedlam. About an hour and three-quarters, tube at both ends, and it walks from either one.
5 stops · 55 min · 1.3 km
Two royal palaces stood on this ground and both burned — Whitehall in 1698, Westminster in 1834. Everything you can see in the most photographed quarter-mile in Britain is one of three things: what survived a fire, what replaced what didn't, or what went underground once fire stopped being the worst that could happen. Five stops, about an hour, including the king who was tried in one building and executed outside another — with the hour marked on a clock face. Station at each end, and it walks from either one.