London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good evening to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Sunday, November 23rd.
Late Sunday evening. But the streak’s alive…yes, here it is – your daily London fix.
What have we got today? We’ve got a birthday. And an unbeatable Greenwich connection. Best fit for this one is our Greenwich Walk, which these days doesn’t run these days. It’s a summer programme outing.
Anyway, this show gets underway a long way from Greenwich. And a long way from 2025.
Let’s go to the River Clyde in Western Scotland. Go there on November 23rd. 1869. I want you to picture it. Grey Scottish water,
a bite in the air,
shipwrights with sawdust in their beards, and, easing down the slipway,
something so lean and racy
you half expect it to wink at you:
Cutty Sark.
One of the very last tea clippers ever built and, incredibly, the only one still with us. That’s the first marvel.
Out of all that forest of masts
and all that Victorian ambition,
only this one survived the lot.
And she’s here in London,
shimmering like a polished blade
above the Thames.
Now, a clipper’s all about speed.
It’s the F1 car of the 19th century.
And Cutty Sark
was one of the quickest of them all.
She measures in at about 280 feet long
if you include the bowsprit,
36 feet across the beam,
and tipping the scales
at around 900 gross tons.
Not a monster,
but built like a champion sprinter.
Her secret?
A perfect marriage of wood and iron.
On the surface
she’s all sleek timber elegance:
American rock elm and
Canadian rock maple
fused with East India teak.
Underneath that, though,
she’s hiding a skeleton of
wrought iron frames,
giving her the strength
to carry enormous sail
without cracking like a walnut.
She’s basically a Victorian cyborg.
And those sails.
More than 30 of them,
stacked up into the sky,
a total sail area
of roughly 32,000 square feet.
How big is 32,000 square feet?
It’s about the size of the Tate Modern Turbine Hall. Or the nave of Westminster Abbey. That’s a lot of sail.
When she was really going for it,
every stitch was up, canvas straining, rigging humming,
and the whole thing
tilted at an angle
that’d make any landlubber
grab for something solid.
With a good wind behind her
she could crack along at 17, 18
maybe 19 knots.
That’s pushing 22 miles an hour.
On water.
In the 1870s.
It’s the sort of speed
that made rival captains
gnash their teeth and,
occasionally, invent rude songs.
Why Dumbarton?
Because that’s where the wizard lived.
A shipbuilding genius by the name of Hercules Linton,
co-founder of Scott and Linton, was handed the commission
by John Willis,
a London shipowner
who wanted speed, pure and simple.
Willis wanted to own
the tea trade’s equivalent
of a derby winner.
Linton produced the design,
Dumbarton had the skilled men,
and the Clyde had decades
of shipbuilding magic
flowing through its yards.
The Cutty Sark slid from
blueprint to reality
in about nine months.
Quick as that.
And the bill?
Around sixteen grand.
Call it a couple of million in
today’s money.
Bargain,
considering she’s still with us.
Her name?
That’s another little delight.
It comes from Robert Burns’s poem
Tam o’ Shanter.
A cutty sark is a short shift,
a scanty nightdress,
worn by the witch Nannie
who chases poor Tam and his horse Meg. Willis liked a bit of cheek and whimsy,
so he plucked the name
straight out of Burns.
If you look at the ship’s figurehead,
she’s right there:
Nannie, arm outstretched,
wild hair flying,
brandishing the horse’s tail
she tore off in the poem.
Best figurehead in London, hands down.
And what did the Cutty Sark actually do? First and foremost: tea.
Cargo stacked to the rafters,
chests upon chests of it,
all strapped down below
in a hold
that would’ve been fragrant enough
to make a Tetley’s salesman
weak at the knees.
The run was always China to London,
and the race each year was legendary.
The first ship back got the best price. There were wagers,
rivalries,
press coverage.
It was the sporting drama of its day.
In 1872 Cutty Sark famously raced
the Thermopylae,
the green-hulled darling of the tea trade. They were neck and neck
until disaster struck:
Cutty Sark lost her rudder in a storm. Weeks at sea,
and her carpenter performed a miracle, rigging up a makeshift rudder
in conditions that’d make you cry.
She limped in behind Thermopylae,
but the legend stuck.
She didn’t win that one,
but good grief did she win hearts.
Her crew?
Usually around 28 to 30 men.
A tight little community sharing
cramped quarters
that’d make present day commuters
on the Central Line feel grateful
for the elbow room.
Officers were aft,
seamen forward,
hammocks slung above barrels or crates, everything smelling faintly of tar,
rope, tobacco and
the eternal damp of the sea.
It was hard work,
rotten weather,
long hours,
and constant danger,
but for those who served on a clipper, there was also this unspoken pride.
You were riding
one of the fastest things afloat.
When you passed other ships
you didn’t just overtake them,
you erased them from the horizon.
After tea came wool.
Australia beckoned,
and Cutty Sark
became a regular on the wool run. Suddenly
she’s tearing back from Sydney to London in record times:
73 days, 72 days, that kind of thing.
Those runs are the ones
that really cemented her reputation
as a thoroughbred.
Steamships were starting to muscle in,
but none of them could quite match
the feeling of a clipper
outrunning the world under full sail.
And that’s the thing: beauty.
There’s a reason
people get a little misty eyed
when they see her.
She’s all line and lift and tension.
The sheer slopes
up to that arrow-point bow,
the lovely taper of her stern,
the long straight run of her deck.
She looks alive, even at rest.
You stand beneath her now in Greenwich, where she’s been lifted
so she seems to float in mid air,
and you get that shiver.
As if she might decide the tide’s right
and slip off on another dash
to the other side of the world.
It’s astonishing she survived at all.
After her glory years
she ended up training seamen,
then as a stationary cadet ship
in the Thames,
and finally
the ambitious conservation campaign
of the 1950s
saved her from being broken up.
Fire nearly took her twice
in the 21st century,
but she’s tougher than she looks.
Today she’s restored,
gleaming, proud, and entirely irresistible.
Go and see her.
Stand beneath that hull,
feel the weight of history above you.
Walk her deck, grip the wheel,
look up at where the sails once towered. She’s the last of her kind,
a runner built for the long blue road,
and she’s here,
waiting,
reminding us that speed
was once carved from timber,
hoisted by hand,
and carried on the wind.
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 £25 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 Jack the 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.