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 evening to you, London Walkers, wherever you are. It’s Monday, January 6th, 2025.
This one’s going to be a bit of London Walks tapas. Small, perfectly formed and very tasty.
I thought we’d head over to Bloomsbury. Pause a minute on the corner of Malet Street and Keppel Street. Right there, just 40 yards down Malet Street is the back door of the British Museum. And that’s what gets the pulse racing. The corner of Malet Street and Keppel Street, nothing special about it. With the exception of Senate House, there’s nothing there. Except there’s everything there. You just have to know where to look. And what you’re looking for. All of that is very London Walks of course.
So I thought we’d pitch camp on the corner and unwrap it for you. Show you what’s there. And we’ll do it tapas fashion. Just one or two little pieces on the plate of each podcast. Sort of a miniature version of that series I did a while back on Trafalgar Square. A dozen or so episodes on what’s there in Trafalgar Square.
So, yes, the corner of Keppel Street and Malet Street. Malet Street runs north from the back of the British Museum up to University College London. My old college. Keppel Street is, well, a little feller. As the Americans say, it’s only one block long. And it’s a short block. Keppel Street’s not much more than a cut-through from Gower Street to Malet Street. Blink and you miss it, it’s that truncated. As it happens, truncated is the right word because until Senate House came along in the 1930s Keppel Street had a bit more length. It ran right through to Russell Square.
But the way we’re going to wave the checkered flag here is to start with those two street names. London names, they’re very often an x-ray of the past. And that’s the case with Malet Street and Keppel Street. You want to understand Bloomsbury maybe think of the board game Monopoly. Monopoly’s all about property. The winner’s the player who owns the most and the best and fills them up with houses and eventually hotels. Well, that’s Bloomsbury. And the winner of the Monopoly game in Bloomsbury is the Bedford estate, the Bedford family. The Dukes of Bedford. Think of the street names in Bloomsbury as hotels in Monopoly. Family names on more than 70 London streets in the Bloomsbury district bear witness to three centuries of Bedford ownership. And you guessed it, two of those family names are Malet and Keppel. Where we’ve paused, the corner of Malet Street and Keppel Street, to see what’s there. Take survey.
Now I think for this podcast, the most tempting tapas on our plate is the building on the northwest corner of Malet Street and Keppel Street. Easy to walk by it, pay it no heed. But you do that, you’re going to miss something really special.
The building houses the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. And it richly repays close scrutiny. Begin by looking up. Just under the cornice at the top – sort of like a forehead necklace – there’s a series of laurel wreathes and in between each pair of wreathes, a name. And what names: Jenner, Chadwick, Lister, Pasteur, Simon, Frank, Walter Reed, etc. The names of the great and the good in the fields of hygiene and tropical medicine. It’s fun – and instructive – to ring the changes of the names. There were originally 23 names. And, yes, they were all men. It’s pleasing to know that that frieze is no longer an all-male preserve. Five years ago the men were joined by Florence Nightingale, Alice Ball and Marie Curie.
And it’s also pleasing to know that that frieze of fame is not exclusively British. It’s international, which is the way science should be. Let us tip our hats to Johann Peter-Frank, the German physician who was a pioneer in public health. And Louis Pasteur was of course French. Marie Curie was French-Polish. And Walter Reed, well, the Americans will certainly recognise that name. Perhaps the best fit of all though – even though he’s slightly less well known – is William Crawford Gorgas. He was a U.S. Army surgeon who contributed greatly to the building of the Panama Canal. He introduced mosquito control to prevent yellow fever and malaria. In any ballot for a name on the Wall of Fame of the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine William Crawford Gorgas would be a unanimous first-round pick.
Oh and – at no little risk of belabouring the obvious – the names are front-stopped and end-stopped with laurel wreathes because the laurel wreath is a symbol of triumph, honour and victory.
But the delights of the LSHTM building – LSHTM is of course the acronym for London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine – the delights of the LSHTM building don’t end with said frieze of fame. The best feature – by my lights – is the creepy crawlies. The gilded vectors of disease. You’ll find them on the first floor iron balconies. Huge, gilded bronze insects and animals involved in the transmission of disease. There they are, two per balcony. At either end. The vectors that plagued societies through history. A war that getting on for a century and more now science has been winning. It’s a lovely bit of nomenclature – the gilded vectors – but let’s not be under any illusions. These aren’t fun, cute bugs and pets. A vector, let us not forget, is an organism, usually a biting insect or tick, that transmits a pathogen, disease or parasite from an infected animal to a human or another animal.
The gilded vectors – there are ten of them – are the parade of shame. They are – do look for them when you’re on corner of Keppel Street and Malet Street – they are: the Bedbug, the Tsetse fly, the Tick, the Housefly, the Flea, the Anopheles mosquito, the Aedes mosquito, the Rat, the Snake and the Body louse.
Well, that’s what’s there to see on the outside of the LSHTM building. But I’m thinking we should probably go inside, see what’s in there. And that visit will be another plate of tapas – another podcast – served up, by London Walks, on the corner of Malet Street and Keppel Street.
Oh and in case you’re wondering this little gem – the corner of Keppel Street and Malet Street – has been known to put in an appearance on our Bohemian Bloomsbury – Literary London Walk. Not every time, not every guide. But it is there and depending on the route we’ve been known to pitch up on that corner from time to time.
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.