And the Sound of London Walks!
We've got words - boy, do we have words! And we've got some imagery. And as of this week (I'm writing this in mid-January 2008) - we've now got sound! So I thought it might be fun - let alone make the London Walks "site" that bit more "well-rounded" - to put up a Sounds of London page. Just some of the stuff that's part of our - Londoners' - ordinary, everyday, aural environment. Stuff that might even make you a little bit "homesick for London" if you've been here, heard that, got the brain crease! Or if you're gearing up for a trip to London - especially a first trip - and would like a little aural preview, so to speak, well, this should be right up your street. And if you haven't been here and aren't planning on coming here (more's the pity) but are nevertheless curious about this place - would like to know what London sounds like! - well, this is for you, too.
So here's a starter.
It's a set of sounds that every Londoner - well, virtually every Londoner - hears virtually every day. It's of course a tube train. This is what London commuting sounds like. I recorded it tonight - at London Bridge station - after my
Along the Thames Pub walk. It's the Jubilee Line, so it's pretty state of the art. Which, alas, means there's no "Mind the Gap"* warning. But you hear the train coming in to the station, hear the doors open, hear Ms. Tube Voice announcing the station, the line, etc., hear a pinging sound (it alerts blind people that the doors are about to close), hear the doors close and the train taking off and accelerating. It's so utterly quotidian - so much a part of the furniture - that it's one of those sets of sounds that one hears but doesn't really listen to (have I put that the right way round?). So oddly enough I found it quite interesting to open up to it. Listening - really listening - I was stunned by how loud it is. It struck me for the first time - this revelation comes after 35 years of riding the tube! - that picking up speed in the tunnel the sound-set wasn't all that different from the scream a wide-bodied passenger jet makes when it hits the critical phase of its acceleration down the runway.
Have a listen for yourself and see what you think...
*[Another update: remedied that, er,
gap, last night.
Here it is - another extremely famous London sound.]
[And if I can just interpolate an update in here, right here - on June 2, 2008 -
here's what is surely the most famous London sound of all. And with it, another one that is very well known and indeed, I think, loved. Well, they're both loved. The second one is "homier". In the days when we went to Paris by rail from Victoria - train from Victoria to Dover and then the ferry and then train from Calais to Paris - and reversed it to get home, I always knew I was home, felt somehow reassured, when I heard this sound at Victoria station. I'm talking of course of the throb of the diesel engines of London black cabs.
Here they are.]
And as for the Sound of London Walks...well, the plan is to build up a whole "library": a "bite" from every guide and maybe even from every walk. Just to give you an idea of what a London Walk is like - both content-wise and delivery-wise. Made a start. Got
Tom at Tower Hill, caught the peroration to his
London Walk - St. Paul's to the Tower. For the record, somebody at the start of the walk had asked him, "where do we end up?" He said, "1381". He was only half kidding. As this "bite" makes clear. It's vintage Tom - witty, informative, fun, engaging, playful. There's a reason this guy is one of the three or four best guides in London (the which takes some doing because there are literally thousands of guides in London!) - and these couple of minutes encapsulate quite a few of those qualities, those reasons. Go on, treat yourself. Have a listen. It's
here.
The Man with the Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens is one of my favourite poems. And I particularly like the last 11 words of the third stanza. Here's the opening of the poem, the lead-in - as it were - to those magical 11 words.
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
"Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar." There are many things to like about those lines: the clean simplicity of its diction, its musicality - it strums, after all; the vividness (and ineffable strangeness) of the governing image, etc. But what I particularly like about it is the way it speaks to what we do: "things as they are" are changed upon "the blue guitar of London Walks". I'm thinking of course about the way a great guide will "take you places" - take you into the past,
into understanding - with his (or her) stories and the way they're delivered. (You just cannot gainsay the importance of delivery, of presentation, of voice quality, of timing, of presence, etc.) And in "taking you places" the place where you are is transformed. In fine, what a great guide can do is
change the way you see a place. Enrich it for you. So yes, you've got the things as they are - the here and the now - but those "things as they are" are
"changed upon the London Walks blue guitar". What Tom did there was to banish dullness. Certainly nobody in that little group gathered round him at the Tower Hill execution site that day will ever again see that patch of London in dull, everyday "monochrome". Think of the TIDTWIKA
moment in
The Wizard of Oz - the transformation from the tedious, ho hum black-and-white of rural KS to the
multiple colour-orgasm of the Land of the Emerald City. That kind of alchemy is what a great walking tour is all about. It's what a great guide can deliver.
Another example? Well, here's Brian - who's right up there on the Leader Board with Tom - delighting a group of walkers in front of the British Museum (on his
Literary London - the Write Stuff pub walk). Delighting them with a bit of I Never Knew That About The British Museum alchemy.
The whole thing - the information, the manner, the delivery (the timing, the voice), the drollery - is spun gold.
Here it is.
Or how about Corinna? What does she bring to the party? Well, for starters, she's a prodigiously talented actress (her West End rap sheet is as long as your arm). Let alone a ferociously intelligent Cambridge bluestocking. Best of all, she's as eccentric as they come - and hugely gutsy. She breaks into song on her walks.*
Here's an example. It's from her Ghosts, Gaslight & Guinness walk. *As does Shaughan.
And -
on a different note - there's this. It's
Katy reading from the first chapter of the
London Walks London Stories - the London Walks book that's in the pipeline. Lend an ear
here.
Finally,
a bit of the world of Helena's The Blitz walk. A fascinating subject fronted by a brilliant, Oxford-educated historian: it's a combination that makes for a piece of perfection of a walk. The "grab" is
here.
And here's one of the best London sounds of all. More spun gold. Lots of it. Only problem is it's going to create a real itch in you - going to fill you with a huge I-wish-I-was-there wish! It's a "curtain call" at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. Ain't no other "curtain call" in the world like the ones at The Globe. It's an auditory bath of happiness, excitement, delight, music, fellowship. It's joyous, it's infectious. A good time, a grand time, a great time. Go on have a listen. Images can't begin to convey what's going on there. How special an evening at The Globe is. This couple of minutes of
heard joy - a feeling of shared well-being - does convey it.*
It's here. Enjoy. (And in case you're wondering, it was
The Merry Wives of Windsor!)
*I can't think of any other "auditory experience" - in London or elsewhere - that so puts me in mind of one of my favourite images of all. It's an image that's haunted me ever since I first came across it. It's the Anglo-Saxon "pictograph" for the soul's journey from eternity - through life - into eternity. They pictured it this way, explained it this way, with this image: before we're born the soul is like a white bird that's flying through the cold, dark, silent night. And when we're born, well, at the moment the bird flies into a window (a "wind eye" - yes, that's the derivation of the word "window") at the end of the long hall, the building that was figuratively and literally at the centre of every Anglo-Saxon community. The "soul bird" flies in there - and inside that long hall it's warm, there's light, there's food, there's drink, there's music, there's fellowship (cries of "Waes Hael" - "good health"). And that's life. And the bird carries right along - and then, at the other end of the hall is the other "wind eye". And the bird flies through it. Into eternity again. Into the dark. Into the cold. Into the silence.
It's just the most astonishing image. Shiver-up-the-spine stuff. Well, for me at any rate. And when I listen to that Globe audience at a curtain call - well, I suspect that's as close as any of us will ever get - 1,200 years later - to the world of Beowulf, the world of the Anglo-Saxon hall - and that white bird going through it.
"Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore"