London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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“Summer afternoon.” According to the great poet John Betjeman they were the two most beautiful words in the English language. Well, a cold spell like we’ve had here of late, you can certainly understand where the poet laureate was coming from.
These things are relative of course.
Thanks to the internet I’m still in touch with – though, I’ve reestablished contact puts it more precisely – still in contact with my best boyhood pal. That’s a friendship that goes back to the early 1950s, when we made each other’s acquaintance as five-year-olds in kindergarten. He became a high school English teacher in the small, northeastern Wisconsin city of Oshkosh. Yes, that Oshkosh. Oshkosh bigosh. Like the name of the state of Wisconsin, Oshkosh is a native American word. An Objibway word. It means ‘claw.’
Anyway, speaking of its being cold in London, my friend’s last email to me, sent and received yesterday, he said, he and his good lady had a blizzard bearing down on them in just a few hours – seven to ten inches of snow – and a blast of four days of subzero – that’s Fahrenheit – temperatures. In Celsius, figure minus 20 degrees. And here I am fretting about our cold snap of 5 degrees Celsius temperatures.
My friend in Oshkosh lives on the big lake there, the Winnebago. Another native American word. Algonquian this time. Means: person of the dirty water. Refers to the lake’s feeder river, the Fox River.
Anyway, for good measure he sent me a photograph of what he and some of his Oshkosh pals are getting up to. Spear fishing. Through a hole in the ice. You don’t get a lot of that in London. I shudder at the thought of it. Turns out a young neighbour gaffed a big one the other day. She clawed out of the claw a 180 pound sturgeon. It was a lot longer than she was tall. And weighed about twice what she weighs. How’d she managed to get it up through the hole in the ice – get it out of the claw? With a lot of help from her boyfriend and his friend, that’s how.
She’d scored with her spear. You could say she’d clawed that monster fish in the claw. She was trying to pull him up out of the claw. He was trying to pull her into the claw. They were both clawing for dear life. Fishy day, yesterday given that the whole world glommed onto that video coverage of a Humpback whale swallowing and then spitting out a kayaker off the coast of Chile. But what do you expect. We’re in the last throes of Pisces, the 12th and final sign of the Zodiac. Pisces is the Latin word for fish and the symbol of the sign is two fish swimming in opposite directions.
Anyway, back to London, back to our poet John Betjeman and those two, in his opinion, most beautiful words in the English language – “summer afternoon” – I asked my Oshkosh pal, what he’s been reading of late.
Figuring he’s going to be snowed in, he’s going to be doing some serious reading. He said, “four newspapers, a few blogs, The Athletic, sanitary district ordinances, and minutes from non-profits.” Well, given that I suffer from an incurable case of bibliomania, I was taken aback a little bit. But different strokes for different folks. And I was impressed by those four newspapers. Must find out what they are. And in the event, that passing mention sent me clawing back to a London newspaper of exactly 100 years ago. The Times of course. I just suddenly got curious, “I wonder what was going on in London on February 15th, 1925.” And I was thrilled to discover that everything was coming up roses for the Eros Flower Girls.
The story was headlined “Eros” Flower Girls. The subtitle was New Sites Found: Duke to Build Shelter.
Turns out that a century ago, right in the very heart of London, at the foot of the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus, there was, a hundred years ago, what the Times called a “time honoured ‘market’”. Ten flower girls doing their thing, selling flowers. The Times spoke of their “picturesque occupation.” That phrase “picturesque occupation” put me in mind of Betjeman and his being enamoured of the words “summer afternoon.” My thought was, “in any competition for the ten most beautiful phrases in the English language – “picturesque occupation” would have to be a finalist.
Anyway, turns out that the Eros flower girls – that itself is a beautiful phrase – the Piccadilly flower girls – were moved on a while back. Their time honoured market was interrupted by work on the Underground Railway.
But, yes, London – a place that boasts one of the hardest carapaces in the world, but underneath it, a sentimental, soft heart – London and Londoners came through for the ten Eros Flower Girls. They were in the news a hundred years ago because London’s rallied round and found alternative oitches for them. So they can, in the words of the times, “carry on their picturesque occupation until Piccadilly is once again fit to receive them back.”
And where will we find them? Four of their number will take up positions on the island at Piccadilly Circus; two will be be stationed at the London Pavilion; and the Duke of Westminster, bless his heart, has given permission for two of the flower girls to be situated in Hereford Gardens, Oxford Street. And he’s going to have a shelter erected for them, at his own expense. And the two remaining girls will be in Leicester Square. What a lovely tale. And to make a London Walks and indeed a London connection, on my Kensington Walk we stop by the house of Mrs Patrick Campbell, the famous actress. She was the actress for whom George Bernard Shaw wrote the part of Liza Doolittle in Pygmalion. When it became a musical the name was of course transmuted to My Fair Lady. Liza Doolittle was of course a flower girl at Covent Garden Market. Even as I’m bashing these words out something tells me there’s a London Calling podcast in the offing about her and that play. And indeed about Mrs Pat. But my point here is Pygmalion opened the summer of 1914, the last summer before the mother of all catastrophes, the onset of World War I. So a London flower girl in 1914. And ten London flower girls in 1925. Timing-wise they’re efflorescences on the same piece of London cloth.
Anyway, a hundred years ago exactly. A London feel good tale.
But to quote Keats’ great line, it does tease us out of thought. Teases me out of thought at any rate. I want to know, what happened to the Eros flower girls? When did that picturesque occupation finally quit that most evocative of London pitches.
Wish they were still there.
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.