Kew Gardens, prison, theatricality, slavery

London calling.

London Walks connecting.

This… is London.

This is London Walks.

Streets ahead.

Story time. History time.

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Good morning from London. It’s July 29th, 2024.

Today’s pin…some London news that’s a good fit with a warm summer day. Not that it’s good London news…climate change is rearing its ugly head at Kew Gardens. It’s actually been rearing it for 40 years. These days Kew is a lot warmer than it was just a few decades ago. About 3 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in the 1980s. The experts at Kew have done some climate modelling and what it’s telling them has the alarm bells ringing. To put a number on it. There are 11,000 trees in Kew Gardens. Over half of them are at risk of dying by 2090 thanks to climate change. What will do for them is warmer temperatures parching the soil. Making it drier and reducing the amount of water the trees can access.

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And on that cheery note, today’s Random – what is it about Londoners and their innate sense of drama and their fondness for dressing up, for costumes. Peter Ackroyd reminds us that the greatest London folk-hero of them all, Jack Sheppard, yes, that Jack Sheppard, the great escapee – the London thief who escaped from prison six times – had an innate sense of theatre which never seemed to desert him. Not long after the sixth and last time he got over the wall – an escape from Newgate, London’s maximum security prison – Sheppard robbed a pawnbroker in Drury Lane. He immediately put the haul to good use. He bought a fashionable suit and a silver sword and hired a coach and had the coachman drive the vehicle through the arch of Newgate itself before visiting the taverns and ale houses in the neighbourhood. And he was partial to disguise. He’d get the right garments – the right costume – and pass himself off as this or that tradesman. In Peter Ackroyd’s lapidary phrase, “to ride in a coach through Newgate was a mark of theatrical genius.” Jack Sheppard has his hour upon the world’s greatest stage – London – in the early 18th century. He was born in 1702. Our Ripper walk touches down in the street he was born in. And was hanged in 1724. In the trenchant phrase of historian Peter Linebaugh, there was to be no reprieve from his ‘final escape.’

So Jack Sheppard was strutting and fretting his hour upon the London stage 300 years ago. A long time ago. What doesn’t seem so very long ago was Victorian London. And what do you know, 140 years ago they were putting journalists in the slammer for cutting a little too close to the bone. The greatest journalist of the day W. T. Stead – we go by his house on our Old Westminster walk – the great W.T. Stead was rewarded for his campaign for the exposure of vice by being locked up in Cold Bath Fields prison. But sure enough, like Jack Sheppard, Stead had the Londoner’s innate sense of theatricality. Every year on the anniversary of his conviction he’d attire himself in his convict’s garb – he’d been allowed to keep it as a souvenir – and drive into the city. It’s no wonder there’s almost always a visual surprise – something unexpected – on our walks. The theatrical goes with the territory of being in London. Every day is showtime. The place is a parade.

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And so we come to today’s Ongoing. Let us bow our heads, for a moment, in tribute to William Wilberforce, who died on this day, July 29th, 1833. And let’s get the final hours of Wilberforce’s life into focus. William Wilberforce was a politician and a philanthropist. But above all, he was the great slavery abolitionist. He led the fight to bring about the abolition of slavery. And what a long march, what an uphill struggle it was. He first took up the cudgels – the sustained leadership of the parliamentary campaign for the abolition of the slave trade – in 1787. Forty-six years later he’s a dying man. Late on July 26th, 1833 William Wilberforce is thrilled to hear that the bill for the abolition of slavery had passed its third reading in the Commons. It’s the culmination of his life’s work. On the following evening he becomes much weaker. He has a series of fainting fits.

Early in the morning of this day, July 29th, he crosses over into the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.

He breathes his last at 44 Cadogan Place in Knightsbridge. The funeral was in Westminster Abbey, he’s buried in Westminster Abbey. There’s a very fine seated statue of him in the Abbey. We see it on our Abbey tour. How does the saying go, let us now praise famous men. And women. Famous men and women who were good men and women. Who fought the good fight.

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.

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