Do London Differently by London National Park City

Sixty years on from the opening of the BT Tower, and with its redevelopment into a hotel and leisure complex now underway, this audio walking tour explores Fitzrovia and the neighbourhoods living in the shadow of the tower.

Cultural historian David Anderson and artist researcher and London National Park City ranger Jordan Rowe trace a series of sightlines to the tower across twelve stops, from the Building Centre on Store Street to the summit of Primrose Hill. Along the way they reveal a little known story: how the BT Tower, originally the General Post Office Tower, relied on clear microwave paths to function, and how that invisible network quietly acted as a brake on tall development across the West End and Bloomsbury, shaping the skyline and our relationship to London's parks, squares and incidental green spaces.

Taking in wartime deep level shelters, post war planning fantasies, London clay, POPS (privately owned public spaces) and the fight for a scrap of green in one of the capital's most deprived neighbourhoods, Signals and Sightlines asks how public space is really produced in the city, and what we stand to lose as a once public icon passes into private hands.

You can walk the route yourself through the Go Jauntly app, or find it on the London National Park City website. Physical maps are available to pick up from venues in the area (check the website for details).

Made possible through a grant from London National Park City with support from the UCL Department of Geography, and released to coincide with the 2026 edition of London's Open House Festival.

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How does a scientific society founded in 1788 end up funding teenagers to build ponds and paint murals?

Michael sits down with Dan Simonsen, Education Manager at the Linnean Society, to unpack the Our Local Nature Grant and its Youth Panel. These are grants of up to £1,000 for youth-led nature projects, awarded by young people, for young people. We get a rare look at funding from the funder's side of the table: how the money is decided, what makes an application stand out, and why handing real budgets to 16 to 18-year-olds changes everything.

If you are 16 to 18, or you work with a group of young people who have an idea for their local patch, there are two live opportunities here and two fast-approaching deadlines. London projects this year come with a blue infrastructure focus through the Mayor of London's Green Roots Fund, so expect ponds, rain gardens and a fair bit of talk about water.

Guest

Dan Simonsen, Education Manager, the Linnean Society.

Key deadlines

• Youth Panel applications close 20 September 2026, 23:45
• Grant applications close 25 October 2026, 23:45 (applicants hear back in early December, projects run from winter into summer 2027)

Links and resources

• Our Local Nature Grant: https://www.linnean.org/the-society/medals-awards-prizes-grants/our-local-nature-grants
• Youth Panel: https://www.linnean.org/learning/beyond/youth-panel
• Green Roots Fund (Mayor of London): https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/environment-and-climate-change/parks-green-spaces-and-biodiversity/green-space-funding/green-roots-fund
• Free bucket pond guide: https://nationalparkcity.london/mini-ponds-for-pollinators-workshop-and-resources

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Walking artist, activist and academic Morag Rose, founder of the Loiterers Resistance Movement, explores how walking can be a creative art form and an act of resistance. Drawing on her book The Feminist Art of Walking, she makes the case that the streets belong to everyone, and that keeping public space open, accessible and free is something worth fighting for.

Recorded at the University of Westminster on 15 May 2026 as part of the London Walking Festival Conference.

More about Morag: http://thelrm.org/morag-rose
The book (Pluto Press): The Feminist Art of Walking

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Recorded at the University of Westminster on 15 May 2026, introduced by Dr Tom Cohen. A Do London Differently production.

Iain Sinclair arrived the way he always travels. On foot. That morning he set out from his front door in Hackney, followed a Footways route across the city, and treated the keynote itself as a pit stop before walking home by some longer, odder way. For more than fifty years he has read London by walking it, and in this hour he turned one morning's route into a portrait of the whole city: its ghosts, its wildlife, its surveillance, and its small daily miracles.

Highlights

The map as an old friend. Sinclair's method is simple and strange. Read a map at home like a book or an artwork, picture the journey, then put it away and set off without it. Carry the route in your head, divert freely, and come home to argue with the map like an old friend. Do that, he says, and the city renews itself.

The ghosts come out. Walk the same streets long enough and the dead walk with you. Passing a block of once neglected flats, Sinclair found himself back in conversation with the poet Barry MacSweeney, minutes after bumping into the poet and publisher Tom Chivers in the tea room. The map, by choosing one route, brought a decades old exchange flooding back.

A howl, a donkey and Van Gogh. By the canal he passed a schoolboy walking alone and making an unearthly howling noise. It looped him into his newest project, a series of walks in the footfall of Vincent van Gogh, ending at Auvers-sur-Oise and the Wheatfield with Crows. There, above a bench, a real donkey made the same noise, and led to the story of Theo's gravely ill baby, also named Vincent, saved and thriving on donkey milk. A howl of despair answered by a howl of survival.

Divert, and you'll find treasure. Thrown off the canal by a barrier at New North Road with no explanation, Sinclair offered the practical heart of the talk. Take the information that is available, then divert. The diversion delivered Arlington Square, a green oasis, and the reminder that London is not one park but a series of them, revealed only by walking. Set against that is the constant privatising and fencing off of space. You move between the dystopian and the utopian, and the movement makes you new.

Loud ghosts on Duncan Terrace. The literary dead crowd the route. The street where Joe Orton was murdered. Peter Ackroyd, once dragged home over his own doorstep. Kathy Acker, who told Sinclair she blamed the Regent's Canal for everything after drinking from a bottle she had dropped into it.

How a walker was made. From Brixton and film school in 1962, walking in obedient straight lines along the Northern line, to the 1966 return and the first proper London walk: Freud's ashes at Golders Green, Marx at Highgate, Rimbaud's house on Royal College Street. Later, a line of energy drawn from Bunhill Fields, where Blake, Bunyan and Defoe lie together, across the river to Greenwich, with St Anne's Limehouse framed dead centre. From then on, walking and writing were the same act.

Lights Out for the Territory. The book that made his name, published in 1997, found its shape by turning everything into walks. He closed by reading its credo from the first chapter: walking as the best way to explore the city, drifting purposefully, and above all noticing everything the rest of us stride past.

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Episode type: London Walking Festival 2026 Special (final episode)

Recorded at: Church of St. Bartholomew the Great, London

Guest: David Harrison, co-founder of Footways and creator of the Historic Ways map

In the final walking festival special of the series, Michael talks to David Harrison at St Bartholomew the Great about the deep history of walking in London. David traces the surviving evidence of the city's pedestrian past, from Portland stone pavements at Lincoln's Inn to an 18th century "low traffic neighbourhood" at Queen Anne's Gate. He tells the remarkable stories of Ben Jonson and John Taylor, who both walked from London to Scotland in 1618 by entirely different routes, and maps out the lost medieval pilgrimage route from London to Walsingham. The conversation takes in Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, Dickens and Bob Cratchit, 400,000 Victorian commuters, the wealth of medieval monasteries around Smithfield, and the modern revival of pilgrimage walking through the London Walking Festival.

In this episode:

• Early pavements surviving in London at King's Bench, Lincoln's Inn and St Paul's
• Queen Anne's Gate as an early low traffic neighbourhood
• Samuel Pepys' walking commute across London
• Lancelot Andrews walking from Cambridge as a student
• Ben Jonson's 1618 walk to Edinburgh via the east coast
• John Taylor the Water Poet's Penniless Pilgrimage via the west coast
• The Canterbury Tales route along the A2
• The lost medieval pilgrimage route from London to Walsingham
• The Greenlink Walk from Epping Forest to Peckham Rye
• Walking Post's London Diagonal route
• The Essex Way from Epping Forest to Harwich
• 400,000 people walking into the City of London daily in the Victorian era
• Bob Cratchit and Dickens walking from Camden to the City
• The monasteries of Smithfield and Clerkenwell
• Filth and Health conference, 26 June at Bart's Hospital

Footways 

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Walking is London's most common form of transport, but it rarely gets the attention it deserves. In this London Walking Festival special, Michael Shilling sits down with Will Norman, London's Walking and Cycling Commissioner, to unpack TfL's new Walking and Wheeling Action Plan.

Will explains why wheeling is now named alongside walking for the first time, what the plan's three new targets mean for Londoners, and how half a million daily car trips could realistically switch to walking. They discuss the Oxford Street pedestrianisation, the push for 1,000 new pedestrian crossings by 2031, side road zebra trials, the transformation of School Streets across 800 schools, and the creative approaches needed to get more children walking independently.

The conversation also explores how walking connects to London's green and blue spaces, the role of grassroots community groups, the promise of a new strategic waterway walking route, and why Will has become addicted to the Merlin Bird ID app on his walks through the city.

Will shares his top three London walks and reflects on nearly a decade of quietly making active travel the new normal.

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Filmed on location along the route by Michael Shilling, with Lola May (Community Climate Action Coordinator, Paddington Development Trust) and Eman Asir (Library Officer, Westminster Libraries).

What is The Natural Way? A fully accessible, six-mile circular walking route through North Paddington, inspired by the Camino de Santiago and Europe's pilgrimage trails. Walkers collect stamps designed by local children at stops along the way, visiting libraries, community centres, gardens and places of worship across Westbourne, Queen's Park and Harrow Road.

In this episode, Lola and Eman walk the route and discuss:

• How the Camino de Santiago inspired a walking trail through one of London's most deprived neighbourhoods
• The Europe Challenge and how libraries and community groups are collaborating across Europe
• Why local young people didn't know the Grand Union Canal was on their doorstep
• Meanwhile Gardens: frogs, frogspawn and the first skateboard bowl in London
• Gerry's Pompeii: a secret sculpture garden 30 years in the making
• Swift nesting boxes on the Amberley Estate and what swifts symbolise about migration and belonging
• Wildflower meadows, bat forests and the biodiversity growing out of the concrete
• The Nature of Things salon nights at Mason & Fifth hotel
• Why "starting to notice" is the most important skill the walk teaches
• The right to joy: reclaiming a neighbourhood's story through walking

Libraries on the route (maps and stamps available): Paddington Children's Library | Paddington Library (reopening soon) | Maida Vale Library | Queen's Park Library

Key stops mentioned: Grand Junction (Grade I listed church and community centre) | Grand Union Canal towpath | Meanwhile Gardens | Gerry's Pompeii sculpture garden | Beethoven Centre | Queen's Park | Urban Wise (urban study centre)

Digital route: Available on the Go Jauntly app

Upcoming events: Guided walks, bat walk and planting session, bird song walks, trip to the urban beaver sanctuary. Check Eventbrite and Instagram for dates.

The Natural Way is a project of: Paddington Development Trust and Westminster Libraries, supported by The Europe Challenge (Arts Council and European Cultural Foundation).

Links:

• The Europe Challenge project page: theeuropechallenge.eu/north-paddington-nature-pilgrimage
• Go Jauntly: North Paddington Nature Pilgrimage

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Episode: Walking Festival Special Recorded at: London National Park City Visitor Centre, Mortimer Street Host: Michael Shilling

Guests: Catherine Woodhead, CEO, Living Streets Emma Griffin, Co-founder, Footways

Episode Summary: A National Walking Month special exploring the state of walking in London and beyond. Catherine Woodhead shares the near-100-year history of Living Streets and its current campaigns around school streets, women's safety and pavement parking. Emma Griffin makes the case for strategic walking networks and shares findings from the Footways pilot project across five English cities and towns.

Key Topics and Takeaways:

Living Streets is approaching its centenary in 2029. The charity created the zebra crossing, contributed to the Highway Code and the introduction of drink driving offences.

The Pedestrian Pound (third edition) demonstrates the economic value of walkable high streets. A monthly market closure in Swansea drew 3,000 people per day and led to new shop openings.

Walk to School Week runs 18-22 May with a secret agents theme. 130 London schools signed up so far. Happy Shoes Day falls on the Tuesday.

Walk Out on 29 May encourages women to walk for themselves, not just for errands or other people. Nine out of ten women and girls feel unsafe walking in the dark.

Pavement parking prohibition is moving forward in England, following Scotland's lead. Transport Minister Lillian Greenwood confirmed moves towards giving local authorities the power to act.

Footways' pilot project across five English cities and towns has produced findings around walking network hierarchies: strategic routes (train stations, hospitals, workplaces), secondary routes (GP surgeries, schools), and wider networks.

Side road zebras are being trialled in Westminster. They are inexpensive, do not require Belisha beacons, and reinforce pedestrian priority at side road junctions.

Central London's walking conditions have been transformed by connected improvements: Seven Dials, Holborn, Covent Garden, Mansion House. Bank Junction and a Regent's Park to St James's Park route are currently under consultation.

Links:

livingstreets.org.uk 

livingstreets.org.uk/walk-to-school 

livingstreets.org.uk/walkout 

footways.london

londonwalkingfestival.com

Credits:

Do London Differently is a London National Park City podcast. Hosted by Michael Shilling. Recorded at the London National Park City Visitor Centre, Mortimer Street.

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London Rivers Week turns 10 this year, and we are celebrating with a special episode. Liz Gyekye, Communications Manager at Thames 21, joins host Michael Shilling to talk about the festival, the charity's work protecting the River Thames and its tributaries, and how you can get involved.

Running from 23 to 31 May as part of the London Walking Festival, London Rivers Week features around 40 events across the capital, from guided riverside walks and low-tide explorations to citizen science surveys and family creative days.

We talk about how Thames 21 has evolved from pulling shopping trolleys out of rivers in the 1990s to running large-scale restoration projects and water quality monitoring. Liz shares the story behind the successful campaign to ban plastic wet wipes, backed by 142,000 wet wipes collected from the Thames foreshore over five years. We also discuss wildlife surprises in the tidal Thames, favourite London rivers including the Wandle and the Hogsmill, the water vole reintroduction near Tolworth, and what individuals can do to make a difference.

Events are filling up fast. Visit thames21.org.uk for the full programme.

Links: London Rivers Week 2026: thames21.org.uk/joinacampaign/london-rivers-week-2026/ London Walking Festival: nationalparkcity.london/london-walking-festival Thames 21: thames21.org.uk London National Park City: nationalparkcity.london

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Episode summary: Michael Shilling talks to Scott Oughton-Johnson, founder of The Proper Blokes Club, about how a single walk in Southwark in September 2020 grew into a network of 25 to 30 walk-and-talk groups for men across London. They discuss men's mental health, the power of walking side by side, how to start a new group, and plans for a new Pimlico walk as part of the London Walking Festival.

Guest: Scott Oughton-Johnson, Founder, The Proper Blokes Club

Recorded: May 2026

Key topics covered:

Origin story: Scott's personal experience with mental health, getting NHS support, and realising that walking and talking to people he did not know was the combination he needed. The first walk in Southwark where only one person turned up 15 minutes late. The founding motto: if two turn up, the walk happens.

Scale and ambition: Around 25 to 30 walks a week across 12 London boroughs, with plans to reach every borough. Registered as a Community Interest Company. Scott now works on the project full time.

How the walks work: Informal format. Meet at a start point, walk for about an hour, no pressure to talk. Walking side by side and avoiding eye contact helps bring barriers down. No advice given, just listening and signposting to professional services.

Who attends: Predominantly men aged 45 to 65. A mix of backgrounds. Common ground in shared experiences: family, relationships, work, money. Friendships that extend well beyond the walks themselves.

Starting a new walk: One hour a week at a regular time. Scott recces the route, does risk assessments, runs a launch campaign, and attends the first walk. No red tape for volunteer-led walks.

The magic number: Three is ideal for walking conversation. Two works, but three means the conversation can flow naturally even if one person is quieter.

Seasonal patterns: Summer brings new members, winter is when people need it most. Men who discover the benefits in summer tend to keep coming through the colder months.

Work-life balance: Scott working long days, learning to trust his walk leaders, and the quote from London National Park City: "A movement is not a movement until it moves on its own."

Pimlico pilot: Eight walks funded as part of the London Walking Festival, stretching into June. Riverside route, well lit, with the aim of building a permanent group.

Drop-in spaces: New daytime sessions for men who are less mobile, retired, unemployed, or on shift work. Dad's groups also running during the day.

Links:

The Proper Blokes Club: https://www.theproperblokesclub.co.uk

Find a walk near you: https://www.theproperblokesclub.co.uk/walks

London Walking Festival: https://nationalparkcity.london/london-walking-festival

London National Park City: https://nationalparkcity.london

The Proper Blokes Club on the London Walking Festival: https://nationalparkcity.london/walk-talk-connect-join-the-proper-blokes-club-this-may

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