London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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It’s July 25th, 2024.
David here.
Today’s pin. For once I’m going to get personal. Today’s my birthday. And that’ll have to do. This one’s going to be short and to the point. Going to get it laid down bright and early. I’ve got a walk this afternoon. Kensington. And then it’s theatre and some grub tonight. So that’s me, that’s July 25th, down and dusted.
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Now for a Random – being an American mutt, I’ve got some Irish blood coursing through my veins. As well as Swiss and German and English and Dutch and, yes, Comanche. That last is the bit I like most. Anyway, today’s Random is a reminder that in the 19th century the British authorities made it a capital offence for any Irishman to wear his national colour. And that bit of history goes some way toward accounting for the green belt that I wear on every single London Walk.
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Now as for today’s Ongoing, it’s twin helpings of literature. My two favourite passages about London. The first one is the greatest opening Dickens ever wrote. The opening of his great anti-legal novel, Bleak House.
I’m much indebted to Charles Dickens. I’m in London because of Charles Dickens. My children exist because of Charles Dickens. I used to tease them. “I hope you lot know how lucky you are your dad came to London.” The little one’s sense of self is so strong his response always was, “bullshit, Dad, I would have got here even if you and mum hadn’t got together.”
To which his older brother’s response was, “his grasp of human biology is imperfect.”
And finally, I have Charles Dickens to thank for my connection with London Walks. Ian, who owned London Walks, did not want an American guide. But we do a lot of Dickens walks and I knew something about Dickens. I pitched up here 51 years ago to do a PhD. on Dickens at University College London.
Now as for that Dickens’ London favourite passage, it figures on my Legal London Walk. Which I guided on Monday. I always begin that walk by saying, “look, I’m not a lawyer, by academic background I’m a literary historian, by profession I was a television journalist. So I make no claims whatsoever to professional legal expertise. The walk is primarily historical – and literary – all of it well seasoned with anecdotal legal bits and bobs.”
Anyway, my favourite stop on the walk is Lincoln’s Inn Old Hall. It’s a guiding moment but it’s also a teaching moment. I can do a little bit of my thing, a little bit of lit crit there in front of that magnificent old building. Which I’m going to do here. I start by saying, “Lincoln’s Inn Old Hall is very old indeed. You’re standing in front of a mediaeval building. You’re looking at a Tudor building, a building from the time of the Wars of the Roses. A building that was here before Columbus discovered the New World. It wasn’t hoary with age then – it was a brand new building when Columbus sailed the ocean blue – Lincoln’s Inn Old Hall dates from 1491 but it’s astonishing to think that those Tudor masons and bricklayers and glaziers we’re hard at it building the structure you’re looking at when the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria – Columbus’s ships – we’re being outfitted in Palos, that port in southern Spain from which they set sail. Lincoln’s Inn Old Hall was restored in the 1930s but essentially you’re looking at a late 15th-century building, a 500-year-old building.
A 500-year-old building that is the focal point for the greatest opening Dickens ever wrote. The opening to Bleak House, his great anti-legal novel.
It opens with the shortest sentence he ever wrote. A one-word sentence: London.
And I must say, that one word – those two syllables – always bring to mind my other favourite London literary passage. The opening of V.S. Pritchett’s London Perceived. I love the way he assays the word London. Here’s the passage.
“One’s first impression is of a heavy city, a place of aching heads. The very name London has tonnage in it. The two syllables are two thumps of the steam hammer, the slow clump-clump of a policeman’s feet, the cannoning of shunting engines, or the sound of coal thundering down the holes in the pavements of Victorian terraces. Lie down on the grass in the middle of a London park, far away from any street and from the numerosity, and the earth rumbles and trembles day and night. The note is low and ruminative and, in this, resembles the quiet but meaning voices of the people who hate drama more than anything else on earth and for reasons that do not totally bear inspection. As Londoners we are – you see – drama itself and have no reason to whip ourselves up into states with sirens and altercations. We like the police to be quiet, the ambulances discreet, and the fire engines jolly.
The weight of the city and its name have other associations, mainly with the sense of authority, quiet self-consequence – known among us as modesty – unbounded worry, ineluctable usage, and natural muddle. These are aspects of a general London frame of mind, if Paris suggests intelligence, if Rome suggests the world, if New York suggests activity, the word for London is experience. This points to the awful fact that London has been the most powerful and richest capital in the world for several centuries. It has been, until a mere 15 years ago – [aside here, Pritchett wrote these words in the early 1960s] – It has been, until a mere 15 years ago, the capital of the largest world empire since the Roman and, even now, is the focal point of a vague Commonwealth. It is the capital source of a language now dominant in the world. Great Britain invented this language; london printed it and made it presentable. At the back of their minds – and the London mind has more back than front to it – Londoners are very aware of these things and are weighed down by them rather than elated.The familiar tone of the London voice is quick, flat-voweled, and concerned. The speaker is staving off the thought that hope is circumscribed and that every gift horse is to be looked at long in the mouth. He is – he complains – through no fault of his own, a citizen of the world. Half his mind, like that true Londoner, Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, is with his galleons overseas.”
Great stuff, isn’t it.
And as long as we’re at it, let’s treat ourselves. Here’s Pritchett on what Londoners make of the likes of me, a foreigner.
Here’s the passage.
“The extraordinary thing is that, despite the blunder of the splodge as a whole, life is wonderfully liveable in this city: so much has been left to Nature and human nature and their privacies. After the first chills of loneliness, after their unbelief before the climate, after their astonished failure to find a congenial night-life, foreigners usually astonish us by coming to the same conclusion. They may not like us, but they like the place. Since 1940 they have liked it enormously. London has its immigrants who come for the money: the West Indians, the Africans, the Indians, the Pakistani, the Italians, the Cypriots, the Irish pour in.
But more flattering than these is the large and growing population of expatriates: people getting out of the new, expanding, aggressive countries with a future, a program, and a zeal for the human races.
Americans, South Africans, Australians, Canadians slip out of their societies and are added to the Jews of the thirties, the Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, and so on who wish to be left to lie outside the reach of ideologues and witch-hunters, and live as they please. London loves the morbidities of freedom. It has been the traditional refuge from despotism and persecutions from the seventeenth century onwards. Although Londoners are, more than any other city people, wary of foreigners, although London landladies are Britannias armed with helmet, shield, trident, and have faces with the word ‘No’ stamped like a coat of arms on them, the place is sentimental and tolerant. The attitude to foreigners is like the attitude to dogs: dogs are neither human nor British, but sop long as you keep them under control, give them their exercise, feed them, pat them, you will find their wild emotions are amusing, and their characters interesting. They even have their own sometimes enviable life; they assume your habits and – such are the pleasures of British loneliness – they become a man’s best friend. The Bayswater landlady gazes at her spaniel and says with proud complacency, ‘He’s trying to say something.’ So is the foreigner. After a year or two of resentment, the foreigner recognises that London is a place where we are all mongrels together, mainly on leash, but let out for short, mad daily scampers in the park.”
Woof, Woof, it’s walkies time.
So back to Dickens, back to Bleak House, back to Lincoln’s Inn Old Hall.
The hinge of the plot of that great novel is a probate case. Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Like Shakespeare, Dickens is brilliant at names. Jarndyce and Jarndyce. You can hear the off-rhyme, jaundice. And what happens is this probate case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, gets into the toils of the law. And it never comes out. It was based on a real case that went on for decades. Well, I lie, it does come out – but only after a veritable eternity. The legal system does finally spit it out but only after it’s picked it clean in legal costs. And it has a completely corrupting effect on everybody it touches. People learn, “ah, I’m named in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I don’t have to do anything, I don’t have to work, I don’t have to get an education, I’ll just sit back, put my feet up and wait for judgement to be handed down and I’ll come into my inheritance. And, well, as I said, judgement is never handed down – the whole thing is eaten up in legal costs.
Dickens sets all that out in that great opening. And this building – Lincoln’s Inn Old Hall – is the focal point for that opening. It’s an astonishing piece of writing. It turns on two great tropes – a fancy word that means extended metaphors. Those two tropes are mud and fog. Talking about the mud Dickens says it gets deeper and deeper until right here, Lincoln’s Inn Old Hall, it’s at its deepest. Dickens is being both literal and figurative here. The mud would have been thickest here because this was the centre of London. There was more traffic, more horse-drawn vehicles churning up the mud, more horse manure. But he’s also being figurative. With that trope he’s suggesting that the law is like quicksand. People get into it and they get stuck. It sucks them down. Does for them.
And then he segues to his second great trope. The fog. It’s beyond astonishing, this passage. Dickens wrote this in the early 1850s but you can imagine a modern cinema director, Ridley Scott or Martin Scorsese, shooting an aerial, tracking shot, coming up the Thames. And the fog gets thicker and thicker, until it’s thickest right here, at Lincoln’s Inn Hall, where the Lord High Chancellor, the head of the English legal system, sits in his High Court of Chancery. And again, Dickens is being literal as well as figurative. The fog would have been thickest here because this was the centre of London. On a per capita basis there were far more coal fires here – pumping out all that coal smoke, the raw material of the infamous London fog. But he’s being figurative. Brilliantly so. We want several things from a legal system. It’s important that justice be swift. It’s no good locking somebody up in Guantanamo Bay and not bringing any charges against them. Prisoners everywhere need to be told what they’re accused. They need to be tried. And if they’re guilty, lock them up, put them away. That’s how it is, that’s fair enough.
But right at the centre of the equation – the main thing – the most important thing of all – is to achieve justice. And to do so, you have to see clearly. A good legal system is one that lays bare, that clarifies. What Dickens is suggesting – and brilliantly – with his fog trope is that this country’s legal system fails miserably, it does precisely the opposite of what it should be doing, it doesn’t clarify, it obfuscastes, it befogs.
And those are just the main courses of the greatest opening Dickens ever penned. The side dishes are no less wonderful. The megalosaurus that he mentions at the beginning, for example, suggests that the law is ancient, should have been long ago extinct, and has a brain the size of a walnut.
Or consider the three generations – ancient Greenwich pensioners, the wrathful skipper, the little ‘prentice boy – they represent past, present and future. They speak to the stranglehold the English legal system has the society it should be serving but is in fact bringing ruination to.
Well, that’s enough teaching.
Here’s the passage. Here’s my – and Dickens’ – birthday present to you on this day of days, July 25th, 2024.
London.
[opening to Bleak House follows]
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.