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This London tour guide has come to know and love his adopted home
Jonnie Fielding came to tour guiding and embarked on his love affair with London by chance. After moving from the Midlands town of Rugby to the capital 25 years ago, he worked as a session musician and writer for TV. He applied to be a tour guide simply because it was a job that didn’t involve sitting at a desk. At the time, he’d lived in London for a decade and disliked the city. Nor was he a fan of history. His new job changed everything and he came to love both.
“The whole city transformed for me and I started to enjoy living here,” Fielding says.
Branching out on his own, he set up his business, Bowl of Chalk, which is Cockney rhyming slang for “walk”. He initially used flyers and a website to find customers but these days he’s something of a social media star thanks to Covid-19. The pandemic ravaged his business, so last January Fielding began posting a daily “Fun London Fact”. He’s now notched up more than 190,000 Instagram followers and about 20,000 on TikTok and Threads. These days, he posts two or three times a week and runs group tours two weekends a month (six across each weekend) all over London. In addition, he offers private tours for holidaymakers, school children...