London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Top of the morning to you, London Walkers.
Wherever you are.
And the hour’s come round.
Bring me my Bow of burning gold.
Bring me my Chariot of fire.
Here we go.
Here’s your daily London fix.
It’s Tuesday, February 10th.
And sure enough,
it’s London anniversary time.
An anniversary that isn’t marked with bunting or brass bands.
It comes with a hush.
With a closed door.
With a bottle on a table.
On this day in 1862,
Elizabeth Siddal died.
Her name matters.
Elizabeth – from an ancient root meaning God’s oath, God’s promise. A name heavy with expectation.
A name that suggests something meant to be kept.
In life, she was Lizzie.
And somewhere
between the promise
of the full name and
the diminutive everyone used,
the story begins to slip.
Her surname matters too.
Siddal – probably nothing more exotic than someone from a broad English valley.
A place name.
Topographical.
Plain.
Which makes everything that follows all the more poignant.
Elizabeth Siddal wasn’t born to be a symbol.
She became one.
She was a London girl.
Grew up south of the river.
Her family ran an ironmongery business.
She earned her living through dressmaking and millinery.
She painted. She wrote.
She worked.
But London, being London,
noticed her face first.
And her hair.
Red hair in Victorian Britain was rare.
Conspicuous.
Charged.
For centuries it had been mistrusted – the colour of witches,
of outsiders,
of women who didn’t behave.
The Pre-Raphaelites flipped that meaning.
What had once been suspect became intoxicating.
Red hair was no longer sinful.
It was spellbinding.
Lizzie Siddal’s hair was coppery, abundant, luminous.
It became her signature before she had any say in the matter.
She is “discovered” in 1850
while sitting as a model for another artist.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti sees her and is struck,
not casually, but obsessively.
He draws her again and again.
Her hair pours, coils,
dominates the page.
The face is often still, withdrawn. The hair is alive.
She becomes Beatrice.
She becomes Delia.
She becomes an idea.
Years pass. Rossetti delays.
She waits.
There are class differences,
money worries,
his indecision, her fragile health. The relationship doesn’t advance so much as ache.
They finally marry in 1860.
Quietly. Hastily.
In Hastings.
No friends present.
Even the wedding seems to tread softly,
as if afraid of being overheard.
In April 1861
she gives birth to a stillborn child. The light goes out of the room.
She declines.
And then, 10 months later, it’s February 10th.
Rossetti is out.
Lizzie is at home.
She takes laudanum.
The verdict will say “accidental death”.
But there is a note.
A note that was suppressed.
Once you know that, the story changes temperature.
She’s dead on this day in 1862.
And now comes the gesture that fixes the tale in the imagination.
Just before Lizzie’s burial,
Rossetti places a calf-bound manuscript of his poems into her coffin.
You will often hear it said that he placed the poems in her hair –
those famous red tresses.
Strictly speaking,
the record says the book
was laid beside her body.
But the persistence of that version tells you something important.
Because the Victorians treated hair as relic.
Hair could be cut without pain.
Hair survived death.
Hair could be worn,
woven into rings,
pressed behind glass,
kept close to the skin.
Queen Victoria herself
hoarded locks of it.
Hair was memory made tangible.
So whether the poems lay
in Lizzie Siddal’s hair or
beside her,
the symbolism is exact.
Her hair had already become the place where art,
desire, and identity
lodged themselves.
Rossetti lives with that decision for seven years.
Then he cannot. That manuscript was the only copy of those poems. He wants them back.
Permission is obtained.
Formal permission.
The coffin is opened.
The manuscript is retrieved.
It’s water-damaged.
Decayed.
One poem has been pierced by a worm.
A love affair that begins with drawings of a living woman ends with words pulled from a grave.
And now – quietly, chillingly – the calendar brings us back to today.
Because this very day,
people are standing in Tate Britain, looking at her.
They’re standing in front of John Everett Millais’s Ophelia.
They’re thinking Shakespeare.
They’re thinking tragedy at a safe, literary distance.
They’re seeing a young woman floating on her back in a stream, palms turned upward,
mouth slightly open,
as if the last line of a song has just drifted away.
Her dress billows and drags at her. The water is dark and slow.
Around her, the flowers are impossibly precise –
daisies, pansies, poppies –
each one loaded with meaning, even if you don’t yet know what it means.
And then there’s the hair.
That red hair spreads across the water, refusing to sink.
It fans out like a halo,
or river weed,
or flame.
The body yields.
The hair does not.
It’s beautiful.
It’s exquisitely done.
It feels calm.
Almost tender.
The sort of calm that reassures you nothing terrible is happening at all.
And only afterwards does the knowledge arrive:
the face they’re looking at is Elizabeth Siddal.
Ophelia is dead in the painting.
And Elizabeth Siddal –
who lay in a bath and posed
for Ophelia –
is dead on this very day,
ten years later.
Look at the hair in that painting.
It floats.
It spreads.
It refuses to sink.
The body yields.
The hair insists.
And then, a few rooms on,
she appears again.
This time it’s Rossetti.
Beata Beatrix.
Painted years after Lizzie died.
Painted across the 1860s,
it isn’t a single memory –
it’s grief revisited.
Here the water is gone.
The flowers are gone.
The world has thinned to stillness. Lizzie is shown half-length,
eyes closed,
head tipped back slightly,
as if she’s listening to something just beyond hearing.
The background is blurred,
almost hesitant,
as though reality itself is keeping its distance.
There’s no drama here.
No struggle.
No narrative action at all.
Just a moment suspended between breathing and not.
And then you notice the detail Rossetti wants you to notice.
Between her hands, a poppy.
Small. Pale. Unavoidable.
Not a decorative flourish,
but a symbol loaded
to breaking point.
Laudanum. Sleep. Oblivion.
Death rendered almost beautiful.
Today, of all days,
those two paintings do something they don’t usually do.
They align.
Ophelia, floating in calm water, already dead in the world of the painting.
And Beatrice,
eyes closed,
a poppy in her hand –
Beatrice caught at the moment of death.
Millais gives us death completed. Rossetti gives us death arriving.
Elizabeth Siddal,
dead on this very date,
ten years later.
Fiction and life.
Rehearsal and outcome.
Image and event.
The paintings stay put.
The calendar moves. And once a year, on this day, they meet.
Fire that looks like calm.
Beauty that burns without smoke.
Ok, let’s decompress. Let’s decompress with an entirely unashamed plug.
A plug that’s doing you a favour.
If you want to see those paintings properly unpacked –
not just admired, but understood – go on the distinguished art critic Rick Jones’s Monday afternoon Tate Britain Tour.
Rick has a gift for making paintings speak when the room itself stays silent.
He’ll show you why the hair matters.
Why the poppy matters.
Why those open hands in Ophelia are not just beautiful, but fateful.
Which feels exactly right for Elizabeth Siddal.
Because her story never shouts.
It waits.
And on this day,
February 10th,
it waits again –
quietly, beautifully – with a promise in its name,
a valley in its surname,
and red hair that refuses to fade.
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 a former Member of Parliament, three terms at Westminster, bringing first-hand experience of power, policy and political theatre to the very streets where it all played out.
It includes two barristers, three doctors, two geologists, a distinguished museum curator and a former Time out Editor.
It includes authors, historians, national journalists, a former London Museum archaeologist, and university professors (one of them an eminent Cambridge University paleontologist).
It includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre actors, and two professional photographers. And last but not least, the creme de la creme of top flight professionally qualified Blue Badge Guides, including 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 here’s the clincher. We’re playing at home.
London Walks is London-based. Period.
We’re not an impersonal, faceless platform run from halfway round the world. There’s no chatbot. No call-centre script. When you contact us, you reach a real person. A Londoner. Someone who actually knows the streets you’re about to walk.
That’s not a detail. That’s the difference.
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.