London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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And a very good morning to you from London! It’s August 30th, 2024.
Today’s pin… is, well, London money matters. Could be more Tube misery headed our way. The Tube drivers’ union has given a thumbs down to a £70,000 pay offer and is threatening to strike. I think last week I we reported here that somebody had come up with the figure of £76,000 a year being the amount you need to live in London. Shocking to think that 70 grand keeps the Tube drivers below the poverty line, as it were. Speaking of which, yesterday I saw a homeless person in Piccadilly Circus Underground Station holding up sign saying ‘please help me raise the £18 I need to get a bed and a roof over my head tonight.” I ran the figures. That comes to £126 a week, which is just over £500 a month, which is £6000 a year. And that’s just for hostel housing. Like everyone else homeless people need to eat, they need clothing and shoes, and all the rest of the paraphenalia that we need to be fitted out with if we’re not going to be Shakespeare’s King Lear’s “poor, bare, forked animal.” London. It’s an expensive city to live in if you’re rich. It’s even more expensive if you’re poor. I had a sudden urge a couple of days ago to give myself an Ozymandias moment – the famous line in Shelley’s poem – “look on my works, ye mighty, and despair” – and no better way to do that than to go into that shoe shop in Belgravia that specialises in designer trainers. I looked on those works and despaired. £1300 pounds. £1500 pounds. They’re so far up in the stratosphere of the market they don’t mess around with that hopelessly vulgar pricing practice of bringing an item in with 99 pence out at the far end of the afterburner. You know, £1299.99 instead of £1300. Or £1499.99 instead of £1500.
And we also learn today that Britain’s biggest lender is going to let first-time house buyers borrow 5.5 times their salary. Years ago, our first property – indeed all three of the roofs over our heads – we were allowed to borrow a maximum of 2.5 times my salary. And the term of a mortgage in those days was 25 years. Nowadays there are 50 year mortgages. It’s pretty shocking, really. You’re 24 years old and trying to get onto the property ladder and the way things are takes you by the scruff of your neck and shoves your face in it: you’ll be paying this mortgage off for half a century. You’ll be 74 years old before you get shot of it. Renews the bite in the word mortgage, which, broken down, means ‘death pledge’. Mort – same word as in mortuary. And gage, means pledge. A 50-year mortgage, you’re in hock virtually until the day you die.
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Ok, today’s Random. Let’s drop in again at one of my favourite cafes, the Bill Bryson Foot for Thought Cafe. One of my favouite guides, Adam, the Zeus, the Jupiter, the headline act of London music tours, is conducting his Bob Dylan in London walk on September 7th. And of course one of Bob Dylan’s great lyrics is Lay, lady, lay Lay across my big brass bed. Well, thanks to Bill Bryson I now know that brass beds became popular in the 19th century not because brass was suddenly thought a stylish metal for bedsteads but because it gave no harbour to bedbugs. I suppose had he known Bob Dylan could have taken that factoid and run with it a bit: Lay, lady, lay Lay across my big brass bed – it’s bed bug-free – just me.
Ok, today’s Ongoing.
I’ve said on a couple of occasions, getting to know London, it’s like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. I’ll be guiding my beloved Kensington tomorrow. Over the course of that walk I show them some seriously remarkable old documents. Old documents my walkers won’t have seen. Old documents – some of them privately sourced, they’re not in the public realm – that will be a revelation to the people on that walk. Old maps, old photographs, an obituary, old floor plans and grounds plans, etc. One of them is a 65-year-old plan of the private apartments in Kensington Palace. It’s a great visual. Demarcates them, lays them out, shows them to us. And specifies who was living in them at that time. One of them is of course Nottingham Cottage. Built by Wren, it’s just over the way from 9 and 10, which was Diana’s apartment. And across Clock Court from 9 and 10 is Apartment 1A, the grandest private apartment in the complex. It’s four storeys and 20 rooms. It was Princess Margaret’s apartment. And latterly, until just a few months ago, it was where William and Kate were domiciled at Kensington Palace. It’s fun to look at it, Apartment 1A, on that old plan of the private apartments in the palace complex and then look at it for real out there, standing before the palace. You know where to look and what you’re looking at, well, there it is. It’s that usual thing, it’s just fun to know. “Oh, so that’s it, that’s where Margaret was in her day. And of late the Prince and Princess of Wales.”
And then of course we look closely at Nottingham Cottage. Where Harry and Meghan were. It’s tiny. Two bedrooms and two drawing rooms. When they showed Oprah Winfrey round it, she was stunned by its modesty. She exclaimed, “no one would ever believe it.”
Anyway, I’ve been serving that up on my Kensington Walk for some time now. But from tomorrow, I’ll be able to fit another piece to the jigsaw puzzle. Turns out that Nottingham Cottage was the grace and favour residence that was given to Crawfie – Marion Crawford – Princess Margaret and Princess Elizabeth’s governess – for services rendered. For fourteen years – until the future Queen was 20 – Marion Crawford looked after the princesses. In Craig Brown’s words, she played games with them, cosseted and comforted them, saw more of them than their parents and who was, in a real sense, their closest friend.
And then when she retired – happily ensconced in her grace and favour residence – Nottingham Cottage – where Prince Harry would take up residence some 65 years later – she was persuaded by American publishers to tell the story she had to tell. The book was called The Little Princesses. That was crossing a red line. For her troubles Crawfie became an instant non person. Joined the roll call of the unmentionables. She was evicted from Nottingham Cottage. Never spoken to again by any member of the family she’d given the best years of her life to.
We learn from Craig Brown that thirty years later Princess Margaret was once asked about her former governess. Princess Margaret replied with just two words: “She sneaked.”
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.