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 Friday, January 3rd, 2025.
This one’s going to be a potpourri. Which, if you think about it, is London through and through. A potpourri – that’s exactly what London is.
Great word, potpourri. We get it from the French. If you pronounce it the way it’s spelled, it would be pot pourri. So let’s start by exploring the word itself. Hey, as it says in my capsule bio, I’m the logophile. The guy who broods over words. So instances like this are always going to be on the cards.
The word potpourri – yes, in English English it’s pronounced just like popery, as in doctrines, practices and ceremonies associated with the pope, the head of the Roman Catholic Church – but our potpourri here is a different cup of tea. Crack the word open – take it apart – and you get, first, pot, as in the container used for cooking. And then pourri, which is the past participle of a French word that meant to be rotten. And in French it meant a dish of mixed meats. I suppose if you’ve got some meat that’s going off, you could mask that by cooking it with lots of spices. Anyway, the word migrates over here – over here in the land of the roast beefs – in 1564. Weirdly appropriate that, because 1564 is of course the year of Shakespeare’s birth. The year of the birth of the greatest word-smith the English language would ever produce. Anyway, potpourri – a dish of mixed meats – gets here: new land, new people, new tongue – and it immediately starts to do that immigrant thing: it starts to shape-shift, create a new identity for itself. Make that plural identities. By 1587 it means collection of miscellany. Eighteen years later, 1605, it means a medley of tunes. Half a century later it ripens into literary miscellany. And 35 years later – 1690 – it means a mixture of dried petals of different flowers, mixed with spices and kept in a jar to perfume a room. Potpourri is one of those upwardly mobile words. Once it got to merry old England it kicked the traces off and went to town. Great-grandpa was a bottom-rung French peasant – a stew made from rotten meat. A couple of generations on those humble origins are, as the Americans say, well and truly history. Because granddaughter is a frightfully upper-class young lady – she’s everything nice, sugar and spice and rose petals perfuming a room.
So there you go, there’s our word for the day. Our word for this edition of London Calling. Potpourri. A mixture of flower petals and spices to perfume your ears. Which, in the event, means three London poems.
Now admittedly, the first one is pretty strong stuff. It’s an addendum to yesterday’s piece about Henry Jermyn, the founder of the West End of London. I came across it after the fact, as it were. I.E., after I pulled the trigger on yesterday’s podcast about Henry Jermyn.
Talking about smoky, foggy London in the winter months, the great artist John Constable once observed – and observed is surely the mot juste here – Constable once observed that he sometimes could see the sun when he was in London in the winter but it appeared ‘as did a pearl through burnt glass.’
And from an artistic point of view, that was meat and drink to Constable. Because the drama of light and shade was what his paintings were all about. That great Italian word, chiaroscuro – it literally means light-dark – comes to mind.
Anyway, yesterday’s podcast about Henry Jermyn was mostly of the light variety. The poem I’ve since comes across introduces something darker, a bit of shadow.
As it happens, I found it in Andrew Marvell’s great satire on the conduct of the second Anglo-Dutch War, weirdly and wildly appropriate for our purposes, the poem is titled, “Last Instructions to a Painter.” It’s a vicious, no holds barred attack on Henry Jermyn – all of his warts, his shortcomings. His lack of ability, his appearance, and his overindulgence in the pleasures of the court.
Here’s Andrew Marvell, the great Metaphysical poet, raking Henry Jermyn over the coals. Telling a portraitist how to paint him.
Paint then St Albans full of soup and gold,
The new court’s pattern, stallion of the old.
Him neither wit nor courage did exalt,
But Fortune chose him for her pleasure salt.
Paint him with drayman’s shoulders, butcher’s mien,
Member’d like mules, with elephantine chine.
Well he the title of St Alban’s bore,
For Bacon never studied nature more
But age, allaying now that youthful heat,
Fits him in France to play at cards and treat.
Savage, isn’t it. Imagine being on the receiving end of that.
The great Tom Paine once said, “it is a faculty of the human mind
to become what it contemplates, and to act in unison with its object.”
If Paine was right, poor old Henry Jermyn, when he observed what was in that pre-painted glass that Marvell held up before him, it would have taken, like super glue that’s just dried. He would have become what Marvell was showing him.
Ok, moving on. I’m off to the British Museum in an hour or so. I’m going to become a member. Because I want to just pitch up and sail straight in. I don’t want to have to put up with the botheration of booking a timed entry ticket. Giving all of that a miss is one of many very good reasons for going on one of our British Museum tours, by the way.
Anyway, yes, I’m going to become a member. Instant access to two million years of human history and culture, nearly 100 galleries and eight million works.
Kapow! Eight million works – the largest cultural artefacts collection in the world. Sure enough I found myself wondering how long it would take to see all of them.
Shall we go cavorting down that lane for just a minute?]
Let’s say you spend an hour in the British Museum every single day. That’s the 362 days of the year that it’s open. And let’s say you see 30 objects every visit. That’s going some, it’s just two minutes per object, but, hey, we’ve got to crack on, there’s a lot to see in the British Museum. At that rate, in a year, we’d see nearly 11,000 of the treasures in the Aladdin’s Cave that’s the British Museum. So this time next year, that’s 11,000 down and dusted, only 7,989,000 left to go. Or to put that into a time frame, just 726 years to go. It’ll be mission accomplished – we’ll have seen it all – by the middle of the 28th century. But it’s maybe easier to get the measure of that if we back pedal. 726 years gets us back to 1299. Forget Keir Starmer and King Charles III, we’re hobnobbing with Edward I and William Wallace.
Anyway, that’s enough whimsy. Let’s have two more whiffs from the potpourri. Two poems. British Museum poems.
The first one’s by Thomas Hardy. It’s titled In the British Museum.
It’s a duologue. It’s full of drama. I’m tempted to say it’s shot through with chiaroscuro, it’s a light-dark poem. It’s about seeing – and understanding. And feeling. What the two principles respectively see. And understand. Or fail to understand. And ultimately what we see. And understand. About them. And indeed about this culture. It couldn’t be more English. It’s all about class. About social differences – educational differences. About a complacent sense of snobbery and disdain. About patronising airs and condescenion and lofty disdain. About an easy, fatuous assumption of superiority.
Here’s the poem.
In the British Museum
‘What do you see in that time-touched stone,
When nothing is there
But ashen blankness, although you give it
A rigid stare?
‘You look not quite as if you saw,
But as if you heard,
Parting your lips, and treading softly
As mouse or bird.
‘It is only the base of a pillar, they’ll tell you,
That came to us
From a far old hill men used to name
Areopagus.’
– ‘I know no art, and I only view
A stone from a wall,
But I am thinking that stone has echoed
The voice of Paul,
‘Paul as he stood and preached beside it
Facing the crowd,
A small gaunt figure with wasted features,
Calling out loud
‘Words that in all their intimate accents
Pattered upon
That marble front, and were far reflected,
And then were gone.
‘I’m a labouring man, and know but little,
Or nothing at all;
But I can’t help thinking that stone once echoed
The voice of Paul.’
The other poem is Louis Macneice’s The British Museum Reading Room.
As you listen to it, do please be aware of how the sound reinforces the sense. The alliteration of those lines, “they hope these walls of books will deaden the drumming of the demon in their ears.” And the compression, the diamond-like perfection of “the ancient terror” – it of course brings to mind the contemporary terror, the terror of July 1939, the ever so telling – gut-wrenching, really – date of the poem.
And nothing could be more perfect than the white-hot core of that last line, “the guttural sorrow of the refugees.” Guttural because many of their eastern European accents. And being a refugee – in those circumstances – couldn’t be a deeper sorrow, couldn’t be more gutting.
Here’s the poem.
The British Museum Reading Room.
Under the hive-like dome the stooping haunted readers
Go up and down the alleys, tap the cells of knowledge –
Honey and wax, the accumulation of years …
Some on commission, some for the love of learning,
Some because they have nothing better to do
Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden
The drumming of the demon in their ears.
Cranks, hacks, poverty-stricken scholars,
In pince-nez, period hats or romantic beards
And cherishing their hobby or their doom,
Some are too much alive and some are asleep
Hanging like bats in a world of inverted values,
Folded up in themselves in a world which is safe and silent:
This is the British Museum Reading Room.
Out on the steps in the sun the pigeons are courting,
Puffing their ruffs and sweeping their tails or taking
A sun-bath at their ease
And under the totem poles – the ancient terror –
Between the enormous fluted ionic columns
There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces
The guttural sorrow of the refugees.
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.