London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
And from London – a very good evening to you. It’s August 15th, 2024. Today’s pin, this one’s a feel-good. Beavers have been beavering away. It’s a British beaver baby boom. The beaver is making a comeback in places that have been bereft of beavers for centuries. Including London. Hats off to the Ealing Beaver Project. Ealing’s a west London district. Eight months ago a five-member beaver family was introduced into a pond in Paradise Fields, an eight- hectare public park in Greenford. The pond is fed by Coston’s Brook and a stream. So it’s a pretty good approximation of natural habitat. Well kitted you could say. Well kitted out indeed. Two kits have arrived. Yes, the family of five are now a family of seven. And to think that as recently as 20 years ago beavers had been extinct in Britain for 400 years. Twenty years on from their being reintroduced to this green and pleasant land, there are now about 1500 of them in Scotland and 600 to 800 in England. Elliot McCandless from the Beaver Project is optimistic about the beaver comeback. He says about the new arrivals in Paradise Fields, “What’s happening in Ealing is really positive and it’s really thrilling to see them thrive in an urban environment. It’s one small step for species restoration.”
Now as for a Random, you know getting to know London, past and present, it’s a bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. But it’s a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Three dimensional because you’re not just piecing it together in one time frame. It’s layered. Chances are what was there in 1924 wasn’t there in 1724. Let alone 1224. And there’s a pretty good chance it’s not there today, in 2024. So, yes, it’s a multi-dimensional puzzle. And the other thing is you realise, sooner or later, that just about everything is connected. So I’m thinking about the ancient Mayflower Pub in Rotherhithe. It’s usually the final stop for Robert’s Thames Sightseeing, Brunel’s River Cruise tour, ending as it does in Rotherhithe. And Rotherhithe being the home of the Captain and a lot of the crew of the Mayflower. And the Mayflower weighing anchor there that day in 1620 and setting out on its epoch-making voyage. And how touch and go it was for them the first year or two in the new world. But also how fast they came on. And here come the connections. It’s all about connections. That new colony over there in Massachusetts prospered. In no time at all Plymouth paid off its debts for the Atlantic passage and for supplies the pilgrims bought on credit. And how did it prosper? How did it pay off those debts? London had a healthy appetite – an expanding market – for Plymouth’s exports of beaver pelts and wood. Clapboards. One connection leads to another connection. A lot of American wood fuelled the Great Fire of London. A point Catherine’s been known to make in her new On the Scene at the Great Fire of London walk.
Maybe turn that over in your mind for a minute. The Pilgrim Fathers braved those breaking seas and oyster-grey winds in 1620. 46 years later London burned down. A lot of American wood made that conflagration much more terrible than it would have been otherwise. Had history taken another turn the Fire of London almost certainly wouldn’t have been as horrific as it was.
But there are wheels within wheels.
The fire completely destroyed 80 percent of London. The city had to be pretty much completely rebuilt. And that in turn is why London was the most modern city in Europe throughout the eighteenth century.
Moving on, today’s Ongoing. To tell you the truth I was just flaneuring, having a meander. Seeing if something would turn up. Lately I’ve spent a fair old bit of time in 1923 – June of 1923 to be exact – because of that Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway’s London Walk I do. And I thought, I wonder what was going on the next summer after Mrs Dalloway went for her walk. Going on in 1924. A nice round hundred years ago.
So I lit out for the territories. The territories being the newspapers back then. Principally the Times, the Telegraph and the Illustrated London News. That’s usually productive. You find stuff. Something will come swimming into your ken that you didn’t have the foggiest about.
My find, such as it was, hardly set my pulse racing. But it did bemuse me. And puzzle me a bit. Turns out the Telegraph had a regular section – it ran in 22 issues in August 1924 – a regular section titled Americans in London. It was always introduced the same way: “The following are among the latest American arrivals at the principal London hotels.” Now 22 issues is 80 percent of the Telegraph’s output that August. Because it was a six day a week paper. Didn’t appear on Sunday. So there 27 issues that month and 22 of them ran that Americans in London story.
The other thing that jumped out at me is that it was always the same two hotels: the Grand and the Metropole. On ten days that month the Hyde Park Hotel got a look in. But that was it. No mention of the Savoy. No mention of the Ritz. No mention of the Cecil or Brown’s or the Langham or the Grosvenor. It’s puzzling. Did the Telegraph have a contact – a deep throat – in those three hotels who was tipping the paper off about their latest well-healed American check-ins. And it’s curious that 1) that almost daily Who’s Who from the other side of the Atlantic who’s just pitched up in our hotel was regarded as newsworthy; and 2) that those well-healed Yank and Yankette guests countenanced it, that they weren’t fussed in the least about their hotel in effect going public about their being a guest there. Those top hotels would be infinitely more discrete today. And those high-end 2024 guests – paying £5,000 to £20,000 or more pounds a night for their suite at a top London hotel wouldn’t be at all happy about having their name splashed all over a daily newspaper. O tempora, o mores! as the Latin phrase has it. Oh the times! Oh the customs! They don’t stay the same, they change.
Two of those three hotels are still with us, incidentally. The Metropole is now the Corinthia, which some say is the grandest hotel in London. The Hyde Park Hotel was billed as being the on banks of the Serpentine at Albert Gate in Knightsbridge. For me, though, the most interesting one was the Grand. It was in Trafalgar Square. On the corner of Charing Cross and Northumberland Avenue. Built in the 1880s it had seven floors, 500 rooms, and a large ballroom. During World War I it housed military officers. After a short stint as a palatial hotel it became a retail headquarters. Lasted until 1986. The tunneling for the Jubilee was what did for it in the end. It was pulled down. The building that replaced bears some resemblance to it, both in appearance and name: it’s called the Grand Buildings. Home to, amongst other concerns, a pretty fine Waterstones Book Shop.
Now if I can hazard a guess, the Corinthian – which in 1924 was known as The Metropole – is just round the corner in Northumberland Avenue. So both of those hotels must have been ideally situated for American visitors. Because the Charing Cross terminus, London’s most central railway station, was right there.
And since both of them are in effect Trafalgar Square Hotels I suspect we can infer that in 1924 Trafalgar Square was regarded as the hub of London, the beating heart of London. So they’re the two grand hotels right in the centre of London. It probably stands to reason that one or the other of them would be the first choice for well-healed American visitors coming to London. And that makes this, yet another in that Trafalgar Square Redux series that I pumped out over a period of a couple of weeks earlier this year.
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 Museum of London archaeologist, historians,
university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes
criminal defence lawyers,
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.