London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
And a top of the morning to you. From London. It’s August 10th, 2024.
Today’s pin – it’s not breaking London news, it happened on August 1st but I’ll take it all the same. I’ll trot it out on tomorrow’s Hampstead walk when we’re on the Heath. I’ll say something like, “this place is star-studded, famous faces, you see them all the time up here. And sometimes it’s not a case of them living or playing up here, sometimes they’re up here working. A few days ago, for example, Rene Zellweger was out and about here on Hampstead Heath. They were just along down there, on Parliament Hill Fields. They’d turned it into a film set and there she was, together with other actors and the film crew, shooting the latest Bridget Jones film.” If nothing else, my walkers tomorrow will be looking for that scene when the film comes out. And I daresay they’ll take a teensy bit of delight in whispering to their friend, “I was there last summer when she was shooting this scene.”
Ok, today’s Random, a couple of days ago I touched down on new guide Catherine’s new walk: On the scene at the Great Fire of London. I don’t know whether she mentions this – knowing Catherine she probably does – but I certainly do, in passing, when the Fire gets a cameo role in any of my walks. I like these factoids precisely they’re hard fact and they’re so off-beat. Bringing them up, it’s exactly like a great photographer toggling the manual controls to get exactly the image he wants. Here they are, three of them. At its full extent, the Great Fire of London was half a mile across. That’s some campfire. In Oxford – what’s that 60 miles away – they could see the smoke. Not only see the smoke, they could hear the fire. The roar of the fire in London – what a tremendous roar it must have been – all those many miles away in Oxford they heard that as a small, eerie whisper.
Ok, Ongoing. Sometimes on a London Walk you draw to an inside straight and hit it. Doesn’t happen very often but when it does it’s super special. My walkers on the Kensington Walk this afternoon are going to have one of those moments. It’s maybe a bit perverse of me but I’ll be thinking of it as a blowing out the candles moment.
That’s what we’ll be doing when we’re there in the precincts of Kensington Palace looking at the Old Stable Block.
I’ll have set it up by showing them a view of it bog standard tourists never get to see.
They never get to see it because if the palace complex is a mini solar system and the palace itself is the sun, the old Stable Block is far enough away that it’s like Pluto or Neptune. Which of course is what you’d expect. Horse manure is pretty aromatic, you’re not going to have the stable block right there, rubbing elbows with the palace itself.
Anyway, the tourists – the bog-standard tourists – don’t know it’s there, they don’t know where to go to see it. And even if they do wander off in that direction, if they do see it, they don’t know what they’re looking at. They miss it entirely. But anyway, like a director getting the setting just right for our shoot, I begin by showing my walkers a very old – 270 years old to be exact – a very old map of Kensington. The map is so fine, so detailed I’ve made multiple copies of it and I hand those copies round so my walkers can each individually scrutinise the thing. It’s really special, it’s Kensington in 1754. In addition to much else you can of course see the palace and the Round Pond, and there it is, swimming into our ken, the old stable block. And then we go from the old map to the real thing. There it is today. And it’s not just an old building they’re looking at because I light it up from the inside, as it were. Light it up with the stories. The stories are the gold nuggets in the pan. You have to know the stories to get the significance of what you’re looking at. So I tell them “these days, the Old Stable Block is grace and favour apartments. Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, had a grace and favour apartment there. Diana’s older sister had a grace and favour apartment there. Life isn’t fair, you’re kid sister is in a palace and you’re in a stables.” When I’m feeling really expansive I tell them about the time I got inside one of them. “It was a three-bedroom flat, the rooms we’re really small, etc. etc.”
But today’s going to be different. I’m going to say something like, “if we were standing here 43 years to this very hour there’d be a special bustle going on down there. There’d be a hearse out front. People coming and going. And conferring. There’d be what Emily Dickinson would have called “a certain slant of light.”
And that’s by way of saying, it was 43 years ago today that someone famous died there. Someone who’s on the mental map of a lot of my walkers because they watched the Netflix series, The Crown.
Yes, a very old man died on this day in 1981 there in his grace and favour apartment in the Old Stable Block. They might not know the name – it was Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles – but they know the character because he was instrumental in preventing Princess Margaret from marrying the love of her life, Group Captain Peter Townsend. She described him as “the man who ruined my life.” And all of that becomes more poignant because five minutes previously we’ve just looked at Apartment 1A, which was Princess Margaret’s Apartment in Kensington Palace. And latterly – until just a few month ago – it was William and Kate’s Apartment. We get a very good view of it, because you can see it from the south front of the Palace. But sure enough, I’ve improved on that view with my picture research. I do the artillery equivalent of bracketing – I walk my walkers right in on Apartment 1A with three different aerial shots I’ve dug up. And best of all, an old, 1960 plan of the private residences at Kensington Palace. That view – it’s an X-ray, an anatomy of the Palace Complex – and if I say so myself, it’s very special. There’ll be thousands of people traipsing past Kensington Palace this weekend but only 14 of them – my walkers – will get up close, will get these detailed views of the place.
Anyway, the takeaway is that Princess Margaret was in Apartment 1A and just along from there, in the Old Stable Block, was the man who ruined her life. Inevitably, their paths would cross from time to time. And apparently she cut him dead – looked right through him – whenever they met.
And I’ll gift wrap Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles – the courtier’s courtier – I’ll gift wrap him for my walkers by telling a tale or two about his life. How well connected his family was. His cousin marrying into the Royal Family, marrying King George V’s only daughter. His service in World War I. He won the Military Cross on the Western Front. But he said that the MVO George V gave him for looking after his son – that’d be the future Duke of Windsor – was his hardest-earned military medal. He was – this almost beggars belief – the private secretary to four successive British monarchs, beginning with George V right through to Queen Elizabeth II. Lascelles was very taken with the Prince of Wales – the future Duke of Windsor – when he first knew him. He described him as ‘the most attractive man I have ever met.’ The charm wore off, though. In 1927 he said of the Prince of Wales, i.e., the future Edward VIII who in due course transmogrified into the Duke of Windsor, he said of the Prince of Wales, “words like decency, honesty, duty, dignity and so on mean absolutely nothing to him.” When he became he said, he should be treated like a petulant child: one whose first question will always be, ‘can I get away with it?’
As for the future Duchess of Windsor, Tommy Lascelles rightly concluded that ‘the vast majority of the King’s subjects…would not tolerate their monarch taking as his wife, and their Queen, a shop-soiled American divorcee with two living husbands and a voice like a rusty saw.’
Lascelle’s diaries make for a fascinating, insider’s read. He was so well-connected. And it wasn’t just the ill-fated future Duke of Windsor who came in for his sharp scrutiny. We learn from Lascelle’s diaries that George VI had an explosive temper. So much so that Lascelles had a code word for his explosions of rage. He called them Nashvilles. Because George VI would gnash his teeth, clench his fist and shake it at the heavens.
And what a burst of illumination it was for me to learn that this paragon of courtiers knew about the atom bomb six months before they were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that’s another chronological coincidence isn’t it. Yesterday was the 79th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
Courtiers, like the people they serve, theirs is, in so many ways, a different world altogether from ours. I’m thinking of the Queen’s private secretary Lord Fellowes. On his passport, under the heading Occupation, it said, Courtier. Famously, at immigration control in Australia, the immigration officer said to Lord Fellowes, ‘by the way, mate, there’s no T in courier.’
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.