London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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And, from London a very good day to you, wherever you are. It’s September 13th – Friday the 13th – 2024.
Today’s pin…Thoroughly London, this tale. They’re so London. Everybody loves them. They’re modest. They’re quietly satisfying. They give us a little soupçon of pleasure. They’re handsome. They’re like a lone sapphire – a brooch – on a cream-coloured shawl. And hey, as long as we’re at it, sapphire is the September birthstone.
But that’s enough circling. Let’s close. Have you guessed? I’m talking about London’s blue plaques. The blue plaques are the end product of the world’s oldest commemorative scheme. Now if you want to think of London news stories as balls that are bouncing around up on top of a fountain – a water feature – well, one of those bouncing balls this week has been the tale of the missing blue plaques. Apparently nearly five percent of them have gone missing. That’s a lot of missing London lockets, sapphire London lockets. There are just over a thousand blue plaques in London. And fifty or so of them have disappeared. Including the trailblazer, the very first blue plaque. It went up in 1867. It marked the birthplace of the great romantic poet Lord Byron. When the building was demolished the blue plaque somehow went missing. And no, it’s not been a question of theft, of the blue being stolen. The culprits – the assailants – are war damage, demolition or building work.
And Byron’s isn’t the only big name that’s on the missing Blue Plaques List. William Hogarth, John Milton, and Joseph Lister are three other London headline acts whose names are not where they were and where they should be. And the upshot, well, English Heritage has launched a campaign to rediscover the missing 50 blue plaques. Good on you, English Heritage and good hunting.
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Moving on, today’s Random – I’m tempted to call these past two weeks Anniversary Fortnight. As always, at the end of August there are wreathes and flowers and photos and remembrance notes on the gates of Kensington Palace. They were there to mark the 27th anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. And then September 8th was the second anniversary of the death of Queen Elizabeth II. The remembering, the ceremonies – such as they’ve been this year – are teaspoons compared to the Terex Hydraulic 400 Excavator that Queen Victoria rolled out, so to speak, when her husband Prince Albert died in December 1861. For starters, we’re talking the clocks in his bedroom permanently stopped at 10.50 pm. The exact minute of Prince Albert’s death.
W. H. Auden’s poem, “Stop All the Clocks” immortalised the idea but Queen Victoria got there first, beat him to it by a good 75 years.
The clocks were the only things that were stopped, though. Prince Albert’s room was seen to every day, as if he had just left it and would be in and out of it during the day. His clothes were laid out for him every day. And soap, towels and hot water brought to the room at the appropriate times. And then taken away in due course. I don’t know about you but I’d give a lot to be a fly on the wall in those servants’ quarters, give a lot to hear what they made of that malarky.
Ok, ongoing time. I’ve got some London Walks news for you. But before we get to it, let’s look back one more time, for now, at our late, lamented Queen Elizabeth II. Hers was the most famous face – the most recognised face – the most portrayed face on God’s green earth. Stamps, currency, portraits, countless millions of snapshots, newsreels, newspapers, magazines, television, ad infinitum, really.
When she died the former Prime Minister David Cameron opined that over the course of her long life she met something like 4 million people. Most of them strangers. Nobody else – no matter how much of a public figure they are, how much of a glad-hander they are – nobody else will have come anywhere near that figure. Four million people. Virtually all of them strangers. It’s a showstopping number. I ran the figures. The queen lived 96 years and 140 days.
Counting leap years that’s 35,204 days.
Now surely we can assume that she didn’t have too many royal duties when she was a youngster. So the first 18 years of her life – that’s about 6,500 days when she wasn’t meeting strangers. And ditto the last few months of her life when she was very old and frail.
So – round figures here – the four million people she met – that meeting and greeting would have taken place in that admittedly large window of about 28,500 days when she was actively Queening and Princessing.
Four million in 28,500 days gives an average of just over 140 people a day. Let that sink in. Would you be equal to it? Would you want to? I wouldn’t. Meeting 140 strangers in one day would be a huge undertaking. And then imagine that not just being one day, but every day of your very long life. Were I to do that two days, three days, four days running…and then think there’s no end in sight of this, well, for me that would be Shakespeare time. I’d think – despondently, despairingly –
this is going to stretch out to the crack of doom.
You want some perspective? As a London Walks guide I meet probably 50 people a week. That’s 2600 people a year. I’ve been doing this for 44 years. That’s about 114,000 people. That’s quite a few people. More than most people meet I should think. But it’s in the nature of the job. But 114,000 over against 4 million. It’s a drop in the bucket. For every one person I’ve met, Queen Elizabeth met 35. Another way of putting that, you want a daily average, I meet about seven people a day. Queen Elizabeth 140 a day. How did she do it? Rather her than me.
Ok, here’s the London Walks news.
Two new sets of walks coming into view. Both of them get underway in October.
On the last Monday night of every month Adam’s going to be doing The Monday Night Music History Club. They’ve virtual tours. Strapline 1) reads: A World of Sound from the Comfort of Your Own Home.
Strapline 2) reads: Explore music history with guide Adam in the company of like-minded people this autumn and winter. The first six online events cover everything from record stores to The Beggar’s Opera, music films to planning a great music-themed vacation. All music, all over London and beyond. Join the Club! And I’d just add they’re a great bargain. The membership is £24. That gets you six virtual tours. That’s £4 a tour – less than a Starbucks Cafe Latte. It’s a 50 percent saving on individual tours. Oh and it’s your call: you can join live. Or watch on demand at your own convenience.
That’s Monday night. Well, the last Monday night of the month.
Friday nights it’s the Friday Night Late. Small group – maximum of twelve people – VIP Tours of the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. They start at 6 pm. The first one is the British Museum. It goes on October 4th.
And then the following Friday, October 11th, it’ll be the National Portrait Gallery. And then Friday, October 18th it’ll be the British Museum. They alternate – British Museum, National Portrait, British Museum, National Portrait Gallery – on the Friday nights in October and November. And, as you’d expect, an all-star team of guides. Karen, Fiona, Simon and Marc.
Here’s what I say about the National Portrait Gallery Tour. First, the rhetorical question,
WHY GO WITH US?
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind of the fourth line of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem Found. That line reads, “Dark breaks to dawn.” “Dark” is wandering aimlessly through the National Portrait Gallery, looking at (but not seeing) a few portraits, reading the caption that identifies the sitter. Yawn. Welcome to “dark.”
And good luck with it.
But – nudge, nudge – it doesn’t have to be that way.
“Dark breaks to dawn” when you hear the stories. You “see” them by hearing the stories. When you hear the stories portraits become people.
That’s why you go with us.
“THERE is a budding morrow in midnight:”—
So sang our Keats, our English nightingale.
And here, as lamps across the bridge turn pale
In London’s smokeless resurrection-light,
Dark breaks to dawn…
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.