London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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And a very good afternoon to you, London Walkers, wherever you are. It’s February 26th, 2025.
And sure enough, I’m turning yet again to my commonplace book. My London – my London Walks – commonplace book.
For whatever reasons – reasons known but to God, or for that matter perhaps they don’t bear looking in to – today’s entry mostly has to do with crime and punishment. And with Charles Dickens.
And, yes, I’ve been at the old newspapers again.
I say that the way a struggling, fell off the wagon alcoholic ‘fesses up: “yes, I’ve been at the bottle again.”
Anyway, in this case a very old newspaper. 200 years old tomorrow. The Sunday Times for February 27, 1825. I readily admit, it’s an addiction of sorts. Why do I do it? Why do I keep drinking in the Old Newspapers saloon? Two main reasons, I think. One is very much a London Walks reason. I want us to show our walkers things nobody else is going to show them. And that’s literally and figuratively show them. Literally has to do with the route and the things that get pointed out on the route. Figuratively has to do with the mind’s eye. The light we shed, the stories we tell them. And to excel at that we have to know things that our rivals don’t know. That means knowing the territory better than anyone else. It means knowing not just superficial, guidebook history but deep history. It means knowing the locals, finding out stuff from them that’s not part of the public record.
It means going off-piste. Both in terms of the route and the stories you serve up. Jejeune, paint-by-numbers guiding – reheating and serving up what’s in a guidebook entry about a neighbourhood – doesn’t cut it. I want London Walks to give people stuff no one else will give them, give them stuff they’re not going to get anywhere else. To paraphrase the old ad, reach the parts other tours don’t reach.
So that’s the first reason, the honing my craft reason. The second reason is I want a front-row seat at the history I’m talking about. I want to be there. Or as close as I can get. Rather than being at several removes. Being a couch potato and watching on the box, a documentary about, say, Regency London. Another way of putting that is vegetables. Vegetables aplenty in supermarkets. But they’ve been cleaned up, they’re neat and orderly and pretty, they’re packaged. And if you think about it, history books – as brilliant and as inspiring and as riveting as some of them are – the history you get from them is sort of like supermarket vegetables. Potatoes and carrots and tomatoes and onions that are still in the garden – that are being dug up or picked off the vine by the gardener – that haven’t been prettied up, are still dirty – that makes for a different experience. There’s an immediacy, a rawness about vegetables at that stage of their journey that’s been sanitised away – processed – by the time they reach the supermarket shelves.
And I see history that way. I want it both raw and sanitised. Sanitised is getting it in a really good history book. Raw is getting back there, getting that front-row seat, seeing those vegetables and when they first come out of the garden.
And that’s what old newspapers can give you, can do for you.
Where they can take you. What they can show you.
You have to be a bit of a gambler. A bit of a wildcat oil driller. Sometimes you drill down and you hit nothing. It’s a dry well. But when you hit a gusher, it doesn’t get much better than that.
And I hit one with the Sunday Times of 200 years ago. That Sunday was actually February 27th. Closest I could get with that weekly newspaper to exactly 200 years ago today. So the presses on this issue would have been rolling at this time exactly 200 years ago.
And I hit it on page 4. The back page. In 1825 the Sunday Times – which was still a youngster, it had only arrived on the scene in 1822 – in 1825 the Sunday Times was just a four-page affair.
And there it was on the back page. Jump out at me, second column, three-part story, the three headings being: OLD BAILEY, NEW COURT and EXECUTION AT NEWGATE.
The Sunday Times was reporting the previous week’s capital punishment proceedings. What happened in court. And the end result at the gallows.
May I suggest we take a ringside seat – if you can bear to – at the New Court.
Here’s what went down. This is the report – well, the start of the report – the journalist filed and his paper, the Sunday Times, printed.
“The whole of the prisoners having been tried, they were on Wednesday morning severally called up, to receive sentence. The first number that were placed at the bar to receive sentence of death, consisted of young men between twenty and thirty years of age, some boys, and two women.” The report goes on to list the condemned by name. Thirty one of them. And pinned, you might say, to each of their names, their crime. The crimes were: highway robbery, burglary, assaulting and stabbing, horse stealing, sheep-stealing, house-breaking in the daytime; theft from dwelling houses, stealing goods exceeding the value of 40 shillings. 40 shillings was two pounds. Two pounds in today’s money would be about £240. Ok, they stole goods in excess of two pounds. But my hunch is that in probably quite a few of the cases the total amount the thief – now condemned to die – had made off with wouldn’t have amounted to more han a few hundred pounds in today’s money. A lot less than, say, what you’re out of pocket if your cellphone gets nicked today. Burglary was by far the most common crime. Thirteen of the 31 condemned to die were found guilty of burglary.
It may be just me, but the phrase that seared across my mind – it’s like an ugly red welt – was “young men between twenty and thirty years of age, some boys, and two women.”
Boys, two women and young men in their 20s. It’s almost as if there was an eligible for execution age bracket. And James, Roger, Elizabeth, Mary, Henry, the two Georges, Henry and their fellows qualified. They were the right age. This was a state – a time – that made a regular practice of executing its young. Executing those who were surplus to requirements. A century earlier Alexander Pope wrote his greatest poem, The Rape of the Lock. In the third canto we find this couplet:
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches hang that jury-men may dine;
That was 1712. That London was a cruel, hard, unforgiving place. And nothing much had changed a century later.
And the death sentences for the 31 young people are just the warm-up act. Because in the next paragraph the Sunday Times informs us that on Tuesday morning Henry Durham, aged 19 years, and Cornelius Wood, aged 20 years, were hanged, in pursuance of their sentence, in front of Newgate, in view of an immense concourse of spectators. Durham’s crime: attempted burglary. He and two others were caught in the area of the house they were attempting to burgle.
The area is that outside patch in front of a kitchen cellar. One of Henry Durham’s accomplices turned state’s evidence, pointed the finger at Henry Durham and got off for doing so. The wretch Henry Durham – the pitifully young wretch Henry Durham, all of 19 years old – was hanged for attempted, hanged, one suspects, because the judge was hungry and signed the sentence so he could go off to dinner. The other young man, 20-year-old Cornelius Wood, was hanged for, I’m quoting, violating a spinster.
End of tale? So much for that issue of the Sunday Times?
Not quite. Turns out that three columns over we find the following ad:
“WARREN’S BLACKING is strongly recommended to the Public from its superior brilliant qualities preserving the leather soft, and at the same time producing, ina few moments, the most beautiful JET BLACK LUSTRE ever beheld, excluding damp from the feet, and particularly calculated for voyages as it retains its virtues in all climates, and will not soil the finest linen. Made by ROBERT WARREN, 30, STRAND, and sold by every respectable Vender in Bottles at 6d, 12d, and 18d each. N.B. Observe each label is signed “ROBERT WARREN.”
So what you say. Here’s so what. Some of those labels signed ROBERT WARREN – the branding for that shoe blacking – might well have pasted on those bottles by an 11 or 12 year old child. A little boy named Charles Dickens. A heart-sick little boy. A despairing little drudge who worked 12 hours a day, six days a week. A 72-hour work week pasting those labels on those bottles of shoe blacking. Yes, that Charles Dickens. The boy who would grow up to be the greatest novelist this country would ever produce.
And there’s no question but his being put out to work at Warren’s Blacking – when Dickens first went there the premises were an old, tumbledown ramshackle riverside building – Dickens could hear rats from the river scuffling and squeaking beneath the floorboards – there’s no question but time was the most important, the most traumatic, the most formative episode in Dickens’s entire life. It changed his outlook irrevocably.
And where does the newspaper ad figure in all of this? It mainlines us back to Dickens’ world, his childhood, his times. If Warrens Blacking was advertising in the Times it was part of the common currency of the London of those days. Everybody had heard of Warrens Blacking. And that would have made that little boy’s sense of shame and humiliation – because of what he felt he had been degraded to – all the more acute.
And then, all the very same page of the newspaper, major stories about what happened to that society’s marginal people. Young people. Boys. Some of them Charles Dickens’s age. Most of them only a few years older. Many of them, out of desperation, committed crimes. For the most part they were crimes against property. And if they were caught… And tried. And found guilty. Well, think of those 31 death sentences handed down. And those two death sentences carried out. Bears repeating, the London of 1825 for the great unwashed was a hard, unforgiving, cruel place. That was the boy Charles Dickens’ world. Just as it was the world of the 31 condemned. And the two young men who were hanged. What did life feel like for the boy Charles Dickens? He would have been hungry. He would have been exhausted. He would have been cold. He would have felt powerless and abandoned. Imagine a whirl pool swirling around, sucking anybody caught up in it – especially a little child – toward a black hole. For what it’s worth, that’s my read. That’s what I felt like to be the boy Charles Dickens in that dreary, dark, despairing time.
Final point, the next time you reread Oliver Twist – with its account Fagan in the condemned cell the night before his execution – or David Copperfield – with its account of the despairing boy David being put out to work in the wine warehouse Murdstone and Grinby after his mother’s death – or this passage in Great Expectations:
[passage from Great Expectations follows]
Smithfield, let us not forget was the livestock market. Animals, cows, oxen, horses, geese were bought, sold and slaughtered at Smithfield. This was a neighbourhood where they slaughtered animals. And they also slaughtered people. More often than not, young people. Now back to Dickens.
The next time you reread any of those three books, maybe bear in mind what you saw today on the back page of the Sunday Times on the last Sunday in February in 1825.
This wasn’t a world – a London – that Dickens dreamed up. This was his London. His everyday London. He knew it at close quarters. Had a ringside seat. Too close for comfort, really.
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com –
home of London Walks,
London’s signature walking tour company.
London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size walking tour company.
And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything.
It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £20 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science: you get what you pay for.
And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question: Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world?
You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world you do whatever you have to do
to attract and keep the best guides in London –
you want them guiding for you, not for somebody else.
Bears repeating:
the way we’re structured – a guides’ cooperative –
is the key to the whole thing.
It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason people who know go with London Walks, it’s the reason we’ve got a big following, a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished, in many cases distinguished professionals:
By way of example, Stewart Purvis, the former Editor
(and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And Lisa Honan, who had a distinguished career as a diplomat (Lisa was the Governor of St Helena, the island where Napoleon breathed his last and, some say, had his penis amputated – Napoleon didn’t feel a thing – if thing’s the mot juste – he was dead.)
Stewart and Lisa – both of them CBEs – are just a couple of our headline acts.
Or take our Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian, Donald is, in the words of The Jack the Ripper A to Z, “internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” Donald’s emeritus now but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains up and mentors our Ripper Walk guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks Aristocracy of Talent – its All-Star Team of Guides – includes a former London Mayor. It includes the former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. It includes the Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. And the former chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, a former London Museum archaeologist, historians,
university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actors, a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners (people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award)…
well, you get the idea.
As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament, every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar
and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note…
come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.