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 afternoon to you, London Walkers, wherever you are. It’s March 3rd, 2025. A bright, sunny day in London.
Yesterday, on my Hampstead Walk, there were crocuses aplenty on Hampstead Heath. And birds were singing. And of course Hampstead’s dogs were beside themselves – were giddy – with excitement and joy. Hampstead Heath is of course canine heaven. And if you’re dog you don’t even have to go to all the trouble and bother of dying to get there.
And I’m feeling bright and sunny because of email that came in a couple of days ago. It was from a compatriot of mine. A compatriot who as it happens is also a David.
Regular listeners to this podcast will be aware that I put a note in a bottle, capped the bottle and flung it out onto the seas a few days ago. It was a long shot. Maybe the longest of shots. I’d looked at the analytics and seen that London Calling had gone over 370,000 listens. And analytics also told me where those listeners were. Where they are. Where you are. To our amazement, all over the world. What analytics wasn’t doing – doesn’t do – is get any of you – any of those listeners – into individual focus as it were. It’s basically just an undifferentiated, bog-standard person icon. All of them identical. Hundreds of them. Scattered all over the world. Though obviously more in the United States and the UK and Canada and Australia and Germany than, say, Nepal or Burkina Faso or Colombia or China. Though, yes, to our astonishment we do have at least one listener in Nepal and Burkina Faso and Colombia and China.
So anyway, I was curious about you. The people who listen to London Calling. Put the message in the bottle and flung the bottle overboard. The message was an invitation to write and tell us something about yourself.
And sure enough, one of you – so far – took me up on the offer.
Hello David in Huntsville, Alabama. For it was he. David, made my day hearing from you. David said he’s an engineer working on NASA rockets. It’s clear from what he said that David’s a Londoner. Not literally but in a deeper, more important sense. David said he and his wife honeymooned in London. And they just keep coming back. That’s how I know David’s a Londoner. He’s been bitten. He’s got the bug. His five-year-old son has been here three times if you count the time he was in his mum’s womb. And I loved this googly. Well, I loved every word of David’s email. But this mention in passing was a bonus. Turns out that Huntsville, Alabama was originally named Twickenham. I wonder if there’s ever been a rugby match in Huntsville. Londoners will get the allusion instanta. But even better was the really fitting, really useful word David maybe coined and certainly served up. He said, I’m quoting, “I’m so grateful for the dailyish virtual trips over there when I can’t make it for real.” Dailyish. C’est parfait, David. Many thanks indeed for that. Only thing to add is 1) you’re an engineer who can write, David. And 2) you’re ever so gracious. I’m thinking of your last line: “Thanks so much for broadcasting a little bit of London to the American South!” Thank you, David, for listening. And being so generous, so gracious.
Ok, moving on. And, yes, here’s another installment of London Commonplace Book entries.
Like everybody else, I’ve been thinking about the great Gene Hackman and his wife. And, yes, a little bit heartsick about what might have happened. Was it a double suicide? He was 95. Good innings. But she was, what, in her 60s. It’s so sad.
But here’s the London thing, you live here long enough, you go round the block enough times, something like this is always going to have a London resonance. I’m thinking about what happened 42 years at Montpelier Square in Knightsbridge. A double suicide. Man and wife. The great author and journalist Arthur Koestler CBE – Darkness at Noon was probably his most famous book – Arthur Koestler and his wife Cynthia took an overdose of a powerful drug laced with alcohol, sat themselves in two side-by-side armchairs looking out over that beautiful Knightsbridge Square. And in due course died. I don’t know, is this macabre of me? It’s impossible for me to go to Montpelier Square and not look up at that window, think of the two of them sitting there, dying there. And now that London memory is woven together with the passing of Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa. Yeats’ great line, All changed, changed utterly comes to mind. Bonnie and Clyde, the French Connection, all of his films – I’ll never again watch them with the innocence of before.
Moving on. Happenstances. The stuff you learn about London. Quirky stuff. Not quite sure where I stumbled across this one, but it was fun to find out that London’s first traffic island came along in 1864. In St James’s Street. The mover and shaker was a Colonel in the British Army. Colonel Pierpoint. Now the trail does get a bit dodgy. Perhaps even borders on being an urban legend. Anyway it seems that Colonel Pierpoint was a member of a gentleman’s club there on St James’s Street. Some say White’s Club. Others insist that it was the Carlton. Doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that Colonel Pierpoint found it a bit of trial getting across St James’ Street. Especially after a few drinky poos at his club. Just too much horse-drawn traffic thundering up and down that major London throroughfare. So he agitated and apparently went into his own pocket to have a traffic island built. So far, so good. But the sequel wasn’t good. Not for Colonel Pierpoint. One day he got out to his pride and joy. Made the mistake of stepping back off it to admire it. And sure enough he was run over by a horse-drawn vehicle. Colonel Pierpoint peered and I like to think pointed at his road safety invention – gave it a thumbs up – and for his troubles got himself launched into eternity. So the next time you make your way out to a London traffic island, ideally there on St James’s Street, maybe peer back into the seeds of time, and spare a thought for the colonel and his point counterpoint exodus.
I mentioned Cat’s eyes the other day. Did a bit of a follow-up, a bit of digging. Looks like they’ve been around for 90 years now. And it was the French who came up with the idea. In an article that ran on June 21st, 1934 the Telegraph’s motoring correspondent described them as street studs. He said he said he discovered them in a small road off Le Mans. Said a stud is about two inches in diameter and stands nearly as high above the surface, with reflectors let into its side so that it flashed at you in the dark like cats’ eyes. He said they were used with great effect to mark the road centre round a blind corner. And for the record, he said he believes something very similar is being used between Leicester and Market Harborough. So there you have it, in all probability the first cat’s eyes in the UK. On a stretch of road from a town whose name means Oat Hill to a small city whose name means dwellers by the river. Cat’s Eyes, oats, river dwellers, we’re getting right down to raw English fundamentals here.
And speaking of which – raw English fundamentals, I mean – how about this chance discovery. Back we go to 1543. A London sumptuary law passed by the Mayor and
Common Council. The Mayor was ordered to confine himself to seven dishes at dinner or supper; the Aldermen and sheriffs to six; and the Sword-bearer to four.
The bad old English class system rearing its ugly head and throwing its weight around. After his fourth dish the Sword-bearer had to suck it up. The Lord Mayor was just getting started. I can’t help but wonder was the Sword bearer ever tempted to go postal, as Americans used to say. Bring that sword right down on that fifth dish. Who knows, maybe even telescope three centuries, foreshadow Oliver Twist, “please Sir, Oliver Sword Bearer wants some more.”
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.