London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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Top of the morning to you, London Walkers, one and all. It’s February 25th, 2025.
Here we go again, some London entries in a London Walks guide’s commonplace book.
Numero Uno. Learned last night there are at least 350,000 millionaires in London. Ok, that figure probably does need to be elaborated on. The gist of it is, there are 350,000 London houses that are valued at more than one million pounds each. So anybody who owns one of those house is, on paper at any rate, a millionaire. The thing is, in most cases those householders will have a mortgage. So strictly speaking, the building society or bank that advanced the mortgage will be the millionaire. In passing – I mentioned yesterday that looking at word origins and derivations is often richly rewarding. That word mortgage is a perfect case in point. You take that word apart you get gage, which means pledge. And mort, which is cognate with the word mortician or the word mortuary. The root of those words – mort – means death. So a mortgage is a death pledge. Grim thought isn’t it, you take out a mortgage you’re in effect pledging to go on paying the thing off until you die.
Anyway, be that as it may, let’s do a bit more with that figure of 350,000 houses. Bottom line is one of every 11 houses in London is worth over a million quid. There are about nine million Londoners. If 350,000 of them are millionaires that works out at about four percent of the population – one in every 25 Londoners – is a millionaire. There are 22 seats on the lower deck of of a Routemaster, the famous red London bus. If all those seats are occupied and there are three people standing, you or one of your fellow passengers will be a London millionaire. Statistically. Now there’s a thought.
Moving on, a word generally about the past. My compatriot, Henry Ford, once foolishly said, “history is bunk.” As utterances go, sentiments don’t come much more moronic than that. Henry Ford couldn’t have been further wrong. The past is hugely important. The past shaped the present. You can’t understand the present unless you know something about the past.
So, yes, like historians, guides are always sniffing along the trail of the past.
If you listen regularly to this podcast you’ll know that I regularly wander about in the groves of old newspapers. I’m addicted to it. Not least because of the stuff you come across.
I’ve got two for you today. Both of them News in Brief items from the Times newspaper of exactly 100 years ago. In the first instance I’m looking at the sentence Mr Justice Avory handed down to an 18-year-old tailor Robert Oulagi. Young Mr Oulagi did something that he shouldn’t have done. He broke into F.G. Mitchell’s house on Gloucester Terrace. The cook Miss Eva Braggs was in bed. The teenage culprit tied her up in bed, beat her and for good measure set fire to her bed. He then stole a watch. Now the good news is Miss Bragg was rescued. She was injured but would make a full recovery. Physically at least. One wonders what her mental state was going forward. The teenage assailant wasn’t so lucky. I’m not saying he didn’t deserve it. Justice Avory sentenced him to 21 months imprisonment with hard labour and 20 strokes with the ‘cat-o-nine tails.’ The cat o nine tails was a whip with nine ends. So each stroke of the whip was in effect nine strokes. Twenty strokes of the cat – that was like being whipped 180 times. Ouch. What’s it all add up to. It’s a piece to the puzzle isn’t it. Deepens, enriches, however slightly, one’s picture and understanding of this country. A hundred years ago one of the strokes of punishment – so to speak – a judge could call on was flogging with a cat-o-nine-tails. Note to self, find out when that came to end. Who was the last man – one presumes it was a man – to be sentenced in a court of law to however many strokes across his bare back with the cat.
My other cull from the 1925 Times was a letter from a reader. Mr. P. Malcolm Wright from Bath wrote in to say that “a very large number of people in the country today would welcome the return of the Sunday morning postal delivery. The disadvantages of such an institution seem to me negligible in comparison with the benefit which would accrue to the general public in not being out of touch with one another during the weekend.
Snap! Just like that I learn that once upon time there had been a regular Sunday morning postal delivery. For the record, in the late 19th century there were between six and twelve mail deliveries per day in London. People could exchange multiple letters in a single day.
Good to know, that. Sort of puts our smug self-satisfaction with the miracle of our electronic communications into perspective.
And here’s an update on the story about the legendary Mega City comic book store in Inverness Terrace in Camden Town. Classic, vintage, Brit pop Camden Town it figures on Judith’s Camden Town walk. I’d mentioned a day or two ago that the much loved old shop was for the knacker’s yard – Martin Kravetz, who founded the funky little independent comic book store was reached that age and was riding off into the sunset and shop was being closed. And whoosh, in like Superman, swoops the comics retailer Forbidden Planet. Come to the rescue.
Turns out there’s a back story. The mover and shaker behind the rescue is Andrew Summer, the chief operating officer at Forbidden Planet. And what do you know, Andrew Summer had an important personal relationship with Mega City Comics. When he was a callow youth and a comic book addict – which he still is – Andrew Summer spent, in his words, “countless hours” in the Inverness Street store sifting for gems to add to his 30,000-strong comic book collection. He reckons he bough 5,000 comics from them over a ten year period. And that in consequence, the shop means a great deal to him historically and emotionally. Just as it means a great deal to Camden generally.
Ah, it’s a London feel good story, isn’t it. What’s not to like.
And one more for the road. This chapter of London Calling will take our listenership for the podcast over 370,000. That’s 370,000 listens, not 370,000 listeners. Certainly not 370,000 regular listeners. But all the same, we’re chuffed about that figure. We’re a little walking tour company. This podcast is something we do on the side. The contributors – a merry little band – are a subset of the London Walks team of guides. Myself, David, Richard Walker, Ann, and Adam do most of the heavy lifting. In our spare time, I hasten to add. So to have put out getting on for 2,000 episodes – that’s since the pandemic – and for them to have been listened to 370,000 times, hey, we’ll take it. So thank you – all of you – who tune in from time to time.
I had a gander yesterday at the geographical spread of the people who listened to Richard Walker’s latest.
His piece about the nineteenth-century prime minister Disraeli – what Disraeli had to say about the extremes of wealth and poverty in this country – and was stunned, no other word for it, that that piece had listeners all around the world. On every continent. Antarctica excepted. Here’s the list: Taiwan, France, Burkina Faso, the UAE, Italy, Colombia, Jamaica, China, New Zealand, Spain, Nepal, Germany, Japan and of course Australia, Canada, the UK and the United States. Those couldn’t be further flung or more disparate cultural and geographical and historical matrices. The thought of them – you – getting together, sitting down – the person from Burkina Faso sitting between the Nepalese and one of the six listeners from Japan. And the Jamaican seated next to the Chinese person and the Colombian. And their comparing notes, getting to know one another, swapping stories, there’s something really appealing about that imagined scenario. What I wouldn’t give to make their acquaintance. Make your acquaintance. Get to know them. Get to know you.
So look, it’s a long shot, I know, but no harm in asking, if you’re a listener, I’d love for you to write in and tell us something about yourself. And if it’s alright I’ll say a little something about you on one of these London Calling podcasts.
London Calling has called. Maybe a few of you will answer the call. That would be fun. And interesting.
The London Walks email address is [email protected]
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.