Anze Rakar

Anze moved to London for university and, once he had graduated, took the sensible path: a proper corporate job, high up in one of the glass towers in the City of London. It looked like the right move on paper. It took him about a year to admit that a screen and a spreadsheet were never going to hold his attention, and that the city on the other side of the office window was far more interesting.

So he swapped the desk for the pavement.

Long walks through unfamiliar neighbourhoods turned into a habit, then into something closer to an obsession. He started digging into who had lived where, which pub had seen what, and why a particular street bent the way it did. Learning the stories was satisfying. Telling them to other people turned out to be better still, and guiding became the job he had been looking for all along.

He has now been leading tours for more than five years. Away from work he has travelled to over 40 countries, and it shapes how he shows people around: he knows what it feels like to land somewhere huge and unfamiliar, and he likes handing visitors the thread that makes London make sense. The way he puts it, every London street is hiding at least one story worth stopping for.

Anze tells this one on Parliament Square, when the walk reaches the fight for women's rights. For most of the nineteenth century a wife's money and property legally belonged to her husband. Once that finally changed and women could hold wealth in their own name, one of them made the point louder than anyone.

Lady Valerie Meux had started out as a banjo-playing barmaid in Holborn before marrying into one of Britain's great brewing fortunes. London society refused to accept her, so she flaunted the money in the most Victorian way imaginable: she had herself driven around town in a tall carriage pulled by a pair of zebras, often steering them straight past the grand houses of the aristocrats who had snubbed her.

On the whispers about her past, she offered only this: "I can very honestly say that my sins were committed before, and not after marriage." Anze loves her because she is exactly the kind of character the guidebooks leave out.

When he is not guiding, Anze is usually at the gym, planning his next trip abroad, or working slowly through a flat white at his local coffee shop. His favourite corner of London is the East, especially around Hackney.

If you want to see how Londoners actually live, he will point you to Columbia Road Flower Market on a Sunday morning, where you can lose yourself among the locals and the flower stalls. For something more central, there is Tamesis Dock, an old barge turned into a bar on the river, where you can drink a pint with Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament across the water.