London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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Good afternoon from balmy London. It’s August 2nd, 2024.
Today’s pin…the London news item pinned to the front end of London calling…we’ve now got the shortlist for the Stirling Prize. Translation: the Stirling Prize – it’s named after the famous British architect James Stirling – recognises the best new architecture. The winner will be announced on October 16th. And sure enough, three of the six structures on shortlist are London buildings. I say buildings a little bit guardedly because one of the six is the Elizabeth Line, London’s new east-west railway. But that’s London for you. Teutonic pedantry doesn’t cut it here. A railway line is a structure. Every building is a structure. Ergo a railway line is a building. And if you can’t wear that good luck with trying to convince me – and more importantly, RIBA, that a structure that’s got a floor, a roof, walls and holds people isn’t architecture. RIBA stands for the Royal Institute of British Architecture and you could make a good case that the Elizabeth Line has the pole position in the Stirling Prize running because it’s already been named RIBA’s London Building of the Year.
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Moving on, today’s Random – given today’s date – August 2nd – I think we better work Thomas Jefferson into the weave of the London Walks podcast. Because today was the day of days – the main signing day of the official copy of the Declaration of Independence – ordered by Congress but written by Thomas Jefferson. But let’s do a London Walks number with Thomas Jefferson. Let’s go off-piste. Thomas Jefferson wasn’t just the author of the Declaration of Independence. He was also the father of the American French fry. We hold these truths to be self-evident that potatoes are tastiest when they are sliced lengthwise and fried. To prove this, let fries be submitted to a candid world. Yes, Thomas Jefferson was the first person in America to slice ‘em and schweiss ‘em. He didn’t call ‘em French fries, though. The name’s a long time a braising. It first appears in English in 1886, sixty years after Jefferson’s death.
Savannah, Georgia take a bow. The name French fries debuts in an ad in the Savannah Morning News on the 11th of April 1886. An eatery called Arlington Cottage in Riverside Park in Savannah was serving up “clam chowder, white fish and flannel cakes, spring chickens, and Saratoga chips and French fries.” Southern hospitality, you gotta love it. Saratoga chips incidentally is the original name for potato chips or potato crisps as they say here in Blighty. And sure enough they came out of Saratoga, New York. They were also known as Kettle Chips. George Crum created them. And he couldn’t have been more American. He was born of an African-American father and native American mother in pre-Civil War America.
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Come to think of it, it’s sort of like preparing a meal, this podcast. All these different dishes. And that’s by way of saying, today’s Ongoing is a bit of a potpourri. Great word, potpourri. Comes from the French. Means, literally, rotten pot.
Fun word to explore. Its obsolete meaning in English is different kinds of meat cooked together into a stew.
Main meaning, though – I like this a lot – is a mixture of dried petals of different flowers mixed with spices and kept in a jar to perfume a room.
And then you get the figurative senses. In music, a series of songs or melodies put together into one piece. And even more all-purpose, a diverse collection or assortment of people or things. A miscellany. A mixture.
And this August 2nd, 2024 London Calling podcast is a potpourri because the first thing we’re going to throw into the pot is a little bit more about Queen Anne. Remember, yesterday was the anniversary of her death. August 2nd, 1714. She died at Kensington Palace. I’ll be going there on tomorrow’s Kensington Walk. Seventeen pregnancies – one of them of twins – but she died childless. Which put paid to the Stuart dynasty. The Stuarts were Scots – James I, the first Stuart monarch – was James VI of Scotland. He comes to the throne in 1603. So he’s one bookend of the Stuart dynasty. Anne’s the near bookend. James I was Anne’s great-grandfather but who’s to say whether she thought of herself as a Scot. Be that as it may, the most important event of her reign was the Act of Union, passed by the English and Scottish parliaments in 1707, which created a united kingdom to be called Great Britain. So that Stuart reign is bookended by hugely important matters Scottish. All of that’s a bit earnest and serious and dry, I keep thinking about Queen Anne the human being. Those seventeen pregnancies but no surviving children. How distraught she must have been. Who wouldn’t be? How do you cope with that? It sounds crass to say it but I can’t think of another way of putting it, did she have recourse to comfort food? Hers was the Golden Age of British Gluttony. And she was one of the two fattest British monarchs. 310 years ago today they would have been putting the finishing touches on Queen Anne’s coffin. Her square coffin. Poor lady. Her best friend, the Duchess of Marlborough, described her as “exceedingly gross and corpulent.” She was so large – so obese – she couldn’t go up and down stairs. At Windsor Castle they had to carve out a trap door in the floor of her apartments. They strapped her into a chair. Carried it to the trapdoor. How many men did that take? The chair was hooked up to a contraption fitted up with pulleys and hoists. The trap door was opened. And inch by inch, jerkily and awkwardly, the Queen was lowered to the state rooms beneath her private chambers. Surely the most wretched, god-awful entrance in the annals of the British crown.
It’s a long way, isn’t it, from the breathtaking elegance and grace and purity of form of the Elizabeth line to that hideously embarrassing, herky-jerky entrance of that morbidly obese Queen.
But this is also a potpourri because of three specials I’m going to single out here. All of them feasts.
In just over a week – August 10th – Ann will be doing one of her Foodies’ London tours. Foodies’ London in the City – Biscuits & Banquets it’s called. Those who know – that’s the word know italicised – go with Ann. She’s the walking tour equivalent of a great chef.
And then tomorrow, August 3rd, Stewart’s doing his Spies of Hampstead Walk. And Stewart will be serving up a petit four so to speak. He’s got a Special guest coming along on tomorrow’s walk. A woman whose parents got involved in an extraordinary KGB spy story. In short, someone with direct, personal, lived experience of the world of espionage. In the words of the Guardian, Stewart’s one of the architects of modern television news – he was the Editor and subsequently the CEO of Independent Television News – and his distinguished, remarkable professional career informs his walk. Not to put too fine a point on it, it all comes down to the contacts and Stewart’s got ‘em in spades. He can call in Winner’s Circle favours – and he’ll be doing so tomorrow.
And finally, and mein gott does the London Walks cup runneth over tomorrow, there’s Ruth’s Urban Geology Walk – Building and Rebuilding the Thames Embankment. Ruth’s the platonic ideal of a great guide. She’s a world-class geologist. She’s a born teacher. She’s fun. She’s charismatic. Trying to get people away from her after a walk is like being a lifeguard trying to get kids out of a swimming pool. They don’t want to leave. Going on one of her walks, it’s like throwing a switch. That part of London will never look the same again. She’s the time favourite guide – worldwide – of my best American pal. He’s been on dozens of London Walks and hundreds of walks around the world and Ruth is the top goddess in his pantheon of great guides. He now walks around Manhattan looking at building stone and wondering, ‘I wonder what Ruth would say about this stone.’ Think about that for a minute. When I do a great London Walk with one of my colleagues when I go back to that neighbourhood I see and remember a lot of what Adam or Richard Isobel showed me when I went through that neighbourhood with them. But I’m not thinking about Mayfair or Marylebone or Southwark when I’m in Rome or Sevilla or Lisbon. Nor is my friend David thinking about my Hampstead when he’s in New York. But he is thinking about an amalgam of Ruth’s Docklands and her Mayfair and her Westminster and her City of London. We’ve got 75 beyond brilliant guides on this team – David makes a selection, books two or three of them for private walks every time he’s in London – but Ruth is the only one he books every single time he comes to London. She’s like La Hangar, our favourite restaurant in Paris. We go to Paris a lot, five or six times a year. La Hangar is the only restaurant we go to every single time we go to Paris. Nuff said?
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.