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Posted: Fri 25th Jul 2025
Founded by passionate Londoner Philip Carey, Striding Cities helps you experience London in a new light, through thoughtfully curated walking routes and running trails.
Philip's mission is to inspire people to reconnect with the city and uncover its hidden gems, new food and drink spots and local secrets.
Here, he talks about his business journey so far, the challenges he's encountered and how he turned to Grow London Local for support along the way.
Watch the video to hear Philip's story.
Hello, I'm Philip Carey and I run Striding Cities.
What I do is I connect people with London and I do that by creating self-guided routes around London that look at how to explore it, how to run it or keep fit within it and also how to find places to eat, drink and be merry.
There are two real challenges that I faced setting up the business. The first one was that I was quite ambitious in what I wanted to do.
So I had 47 different routes around London that I had to curate and collect and put into a structure that people will use and in a way that's natural to them.
The second real challenge is that in order to compete in modern terms, you've got to compete with the best. So your standard has to be really high.
I came across Grow London Local when I was on the website looking at my social media and I saw it come up a few times.
Then I went into the main website and I looked through it, and then I submitted a form. Christian set up a meeting and then I went through what Grow London Local was all about.
Grow London Local has been the foundation by which I built a number of pillars, such as Digital Boost. And that provides not only mentors but also courses.
My advice to any small business is don't give up, keep on going one step at a time. And use Grow London Local because it has great resources.
The people are like you – and that will give you a sense of community. And take those steps so you grow one step at a time.
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