A Walking Investigation Through the City of London

Two thousand metres. Two hours. Ten people, maximum, because anything bigger stops being a conversation and starts being a lecture.

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This isn't a tour of buildings. It's a tour of what the buildings are covering for.

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You'll stand where a Roman amphitheatre sat hidden for nearly two thousand years, next to a bank protecting £250 billion in gold it mostly doesn't own, on a street where the freemasons rebuilt half the City in stone and left their symbols on more doors than anyone tells you about. You'll walk an alley that used to move more money than most countries, past a pub named after a physician who cured epilepsy by firing pistols next to people's heads and somehow still treated the King. You'll hear how a coffee house ran something close to insider trading three hundred years before anyone had a word for it, and why the only reason London finally built proper sewers was that the smell reached Parliament.

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None of it is chronological. None of it is trivia. All of it is connected, and by the end you'll be doing the connecting yourself, largely without meaning to.

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Expect genuine research and a fair amount of moral ambiguity we're not going to resolve for you. Expect darker material too — fraud, plague, public executions — handled honestly rather than sensationally.

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You will not be quizzed on dates afterwards. You will, however, probably stop walking past your own local bank without wondering what it's not telling you.