London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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Top of the morning to you, London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s May 1st, 2025.
We’re going to do a death today. An exodus that took place 325 years ago. May 1st, 1700.
But not just the end of a life. The life itself. Some of it. Especially its London manifestations.
Some London lives, tracking them, it’s like looking at a radar screen. Or if you prefer, they’re like isotopes. Tracking them, it’s urban spectometry, geographical and biographical spectometry.
How’s that Libyan proverb go? Great fires erupt from tiny sparks.
Some London isotopes – London lives – are like that. You spot the isotope – pinpoint the spot – and then when you zero in you see there’s nothing at all matter of fact about the isotope. There’s something very interesting about it. The spark is erupting.
Ok, that’s enough of a tease. So much for the seven veils. Let’s take them off.
We’ll start with our fellow human being and his death, 325 years ago today.
Curtain up – curtain down – on the poet and dramatist John Dryden.
Dryden’s a difficult read. Not much read – or performed – these days. Bar a few academic specialists. Sometimes a poem or a book lights the fuse that leads to the author. You want to find out more about him or her because of their book or poem that you read. Just occasionally it’s the other way around. The life of the writer firms up your resolve – you have at their poetry – difficult though it is – because of what you know of their life. Dryden’s in that second, much smaller category.
And knowing a bit about him also impacts that other huge poem that we read and reread and reinterpret every day. The great epic poem that is London.
So let’s track a couple of those isotopes. Seeing them – embedded here and there in London – getting them into focus – knowing, “ah, so it happened here” – changes the way you see “here’. Changes the way you see this or that corner of London.
So, yes, John Dryden, poet and dramatist, died on May 1st, 1700. He died in Soho. Died in poverty. Was intestate. Didn’t have any money. What he did have was gangrene. So, a horrible death.
John Dryden was our first Poet Laureate. That honour was bestowed on him in 1668. And then it was taken away. It was taken away because he became a Roman Catholic. Dryden’s death spared him one loss, one sorrow. A deeper sorrow. John Dryden had three sons. His eldest son, Charles, drowned in the Thames. Four years after his father’s death.
But let’s go back to Soho. Back to the day of John Dryden’s death. The next day he was buried in St Anne’s in Soho. St Anne’s – consecrated in 1686 – was destroyed in the Blitz. It was rebuilt in 1990. What is still there is the churchyard. It’s much higher than the street that runs by the church. Much higher because of the Soho dead, centuries of them, planted in that churchyard.
St Anne’s was just the first anteroom to eternity for Dryden. His body was soon exhumed. It lay in state for a few days in the College of Physicians. And then 13 days after his death he was reburied in Chaucer’s grave in Westminster Abbey. Some funeral. His body was accompanied to the Abbey by singers and the hearse was followed by forty four coaches.
That spark has already erupted. Fuel to the flame is the thought – the bit of London savvy – that Dryden is borne along on the tide of eternity just a few yards from where he was a schoolboy. Yes, Westminster School. His spirit by definition is disembodied. But if it’s there, in attendance, keeping watch, is it also somehow aware if not looking lovingly, affectionately, protectively and wonderingly at the spirit of his childhood self. “Hello you, hello lad, do you know who I am?” Sightless yes, but do they somehow look at one another? In wonder.
And some more isotope work. We can also look at the plaque on Gerrard Street – in Soho – that commemorates Dryden. It’s another spark that erupts.
First of all, the plaque is on 43 Gerrard Street. Oops. Oops because it was later discovered that Dryden lived in a house on the site now occupied by no. 44. So, close but no cigar. For the record, No. 44 was built in the early 1680s. It was refronted in 1793. And then the site was redeveloped in 1901. A year of infamy for that bit of Gerrard Street. Because No. 43 got the chop as well. The press described the demolition of 43 Gerrard Street as “a hideous and wanton act of vandalism.”
That act of demolition sent 43 across the bourne from which no traveller returns but the plaque, damaged though it was, was immediately re-erected on the new structure. Even though it was next door to where Dryden had actually lived.
And one more whoosh of oxygen for the spark in question: the plaque is a rare surviving Society of Arts plaque. Reset, rephrase. The plaque isn’t just rare, it’s unique. It’s the only Society of Arts plaque that’s white with blue lettering.
Well, there is one more marvelous London Dryden isotope. Though ‘marvelous’ isn’t how Dryden himself would have described it. But I’m keep it in reserve. Keep my powder dry. Until December 18th. The anniversary of something that befell Dryden in Rose Alley in Covent Garden. A spark that erupts. A story that once you know it, well, Rose Alley never looks the same again.
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.