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 9th, 2024.
Today’s pin – Infinite accumulation, that’s not a bad descriptor for what London’s all about, be it the generating and amassing of pounds, shillings and pence or like an ancient but hearty tree adding ring after ring of history or the piling high of cultural wealth. Turns out though that ‘Infinite accumulation’ is the name of London’s grandest new piece of public sculpture. It’s just been unveiled at London’s Liverpool Street rail station. And it’s a must see. I note in passing that it’s a perfect fit for our Sunday morning Street Art tour, the meeting point of which is, you guessed it, Liverpool Street Station.
Ok, let’s zoom in. Infinite Accumulation is 98 metres long and 10 metres tall. It’s a series of gleaming arches adorned with silver mirror balls. But these aren’t gleaming arches that are rigorously, stiffly ordered like the arches of an aqueduct. No, they’re weaving and undulating like kelp responding to ocean currents. And here’s another jaw-dropper for you, Infinite Accumulation is the work of 95-year-old Japanese artist Yayoi Kusuma. It’s her largest public sculpture to date. And it’s her first permanent, public installation in the UK. And I don’t think you can improve on her read of her creation. She says the piece represents the multicultural dynamism of London. “The spheres symbolize unique personalities while the supporting curvilinear lines allow us to imagine an underpinning social structure.” Ok, you’ve been primed. You’re now in the know.
And for today’s Random, let’s get you in the know about Georgian sexuality. Live and learn – I now know, and you’re about to know – this is compliments of my reading A.D. Harvey’s magisterial work on Sex in Georgian England – I now know that until the first half of the eighteenth century it was generally assumed that sexual appetite was stronger in women than in men. It was commonly said of women – and here I’m quoting – “though they be the weaker vessels, yet they will overcome two, three or four men in the satisfying of their carnal appetites.”
The difference a century can make. You get to the 19th century, when they discovered electricity they were using it to stop young men having illicit erections (or at least from enjoying them). Thank you Bill Bryson for that electrifying historical tidbit. But imagine a lusty Georgian woman time travelling to the 19th century and seeing a perfectly good erection brought down, struck by lightning as it were. Imagine her reaction: “are you out of your effing minds? Get me out of here. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.”
Ok, Ongoing. Stepping back, taking a big picture view, thinking about walking tours generally. It’s so basic, so fundamental, so foundational, what we do. Think about it for a minute. When we’re babies we’re desperate to get to our feet. Desperate to walk. And desperate to talk. I’ve forgotten the title of the book and indeed the author’s name but a couple of years ago I read a book about that basic, fundamental, human activity. The author made the point that babies are extremely efficient crawlers. But it’s no matter. As good as they are at crawling they’re not stopping there, they’re not remotely satisfied with crawling. They get to their feet as soon as they can. Punishing though it is. When they’re learning to walk they’ll often fall over 500 times in a morning. But it doesn’t stop them. Over they go and up they get. Time and again.
And walking tours are also of a piece with our earliest days in school. Show and tell. That’s an important classroom activity for a five-year-old. And if you think about it, that’s what happens on a walking. Personal memory here. Taking Katy, my first born on her first walk outside. She was a very early walker. Walked at about nine months. Couldn’t talk yet. But she sure was trying. Those first walks were from the front of our house up to the corner and back. A forty-yard walk. A forty-yard walk that normally would take less than a minute. But with Katy that 40 second took an hour and a half. Because she was guiding me, showing and telling me everything, all the way. Everything was fascinating to her. And by everything, I mean everything. Every pebble. Every blade of grass. Every crack in the sidewalk. She’d point to it, make sure I saw it, didn’t miss it. And she’d tell me about it. Not in words because she couldn’t talk. But she could grunt. Every blade of grass, every pebble got noticed. Was pointed out. Was commented on: huh, huh, huh. And that’s why a 40-second walk took an hour and a half. But in its essence that was a walking tour. We walked. We stopped. Things were pointed out. And then I was told about what we were looking at. Now to go back nearly 2400 years ago and to go from a nine-month-old who sure could communicate but hadn’t yet broken the surface of proper speech, to go from that grunting less than a yearling to one of the greatest thinkers and talkers of all time – in short, to go from baby Katy to sage old Aristotle – is also to make a pass, like a satellite going past one of Saturn’s rings and seeing and recording with the camera amazing things – fundamental truths about this schtick of ours, walking tours, and indeed how they overlap with another fundamental human activity: teaching and learning.
Being a retreaded academic, I’ve often described London Walks as the world’s best teaching job: there’s no marking, no committee meeting and the students are all interested. They’re there because they want to be there.
And in important ways a walking tour is akin to Aristotle’s pedagogical methodology. He gave peripatetic lectures. He and his students would walk a bit. They’d stop. When they stopped Aristotle would do a bit of lecturing. And then they’d walk some more. They’d stop again. And there’d be another dollop of lecturing. That’s exactly how a walking tour works. I think it might be the best teaching method ever invented. All the planets are aligned: those two fundamental human activities: walking and talking. And if you think about it, if you’re sitting in a lecture hall, everything slows down, your blood goes to your feet, your brain’s getting less oxygen, your attention wanders, you get sleepy. It’s far from ideal. Aristotle got it right. Walking tours get it right. You walk your blood’s circulating. There’s constant new stimulus – what you’re walking past. Your brain’s oxygen-rich. You’re wide awake. You feel good. It’s perfect. It’s things as they should be. It’s how we’re meant to be.
And that, in a leisurely fashion, gets me to the walk I did a couple of days ago. Mrs Dalloway’s London. It’s sui generis as walking tours go. It’s closer – a lot closer – to an Aristotelian pedagogical session than any other walking tour I do. And yes, I did say a walking tour is essentially how Aristotle taught. But there was one difference: I said he’d stop and lecture. The guiding we do is not really lecturing. To put it in culinary terms, when we stop for a point out and a bit of guiding it’s tapas or hors d’oeuvres as opposed to the full Sunday roast of a full-on lecture.
Indeed, the very word lecture gives the game away. At least in a historical sense. The word lecture – it’s cognate with the word lectern – and a lectern, remember, is a tall stand from which a preacher or a lecturer can read while standing up.
Anyway, the word lecture comes from the mediaeval Latin word legere, which means, ‘to read.’ Before printing was invented books were made by hand. They were copied out by hand. A book was a manuscript. Manus is the Latin word for hand. Manual labour is work that’s done by hand. The point being that when books were manuscripts they were impossibly expensive. There was only one book to hand. The professor had it. He would read from it to his students. That was a lecture. It was a reading. For the record, you can drill down even deeper into that word lecture. I said it comes from the mediaeval Latin word legere meaning to read. But the PIE – the proto IndoEuropean root of legere is leg – l, e, g – and that meant to collect, to gather, with derivatives that meant to speak (‘to pick out words’) and what follows from that is ‘to read’ etymologically probably means ‘to pick out words’.
Anyway, retreaded academic that I am, the one walk I do that crosses that bourne – that in some ways is a throwback to my university lecturing days – is that Mrs Dalloway’s London Walk. And that’s because in three places on the walk there are lecture moments – I read short extracts from the novel and comment on them. Lots of other walks I quote from books – mostly poetry – but in those instances it’s always from memory. It’s never a case of my actually reading a passage from a book. One of the passages recounts that extraordinary moment when the character Peter Walsh walks up Whitehall and is overtaken by a group of 16-year-old schoolboys from Finsbury who are marching up Whitehall to the Cenotaph to lay a wreath. Virginia Woolf describes their coming up Whitehall as making a rustling, regular thudding sound, which as it overtook Peter Walsh drummed his thoughts, strict in step, up Whitehall, without his doing.” Notice, he’s been turned into an automaton.
And also notice that verb, ‘drummed.’ Notice that phrase, ‘strict in step.’ And then you get the money passage: “I can’t keep up with them, Peter Walsh thought, as they marched up Whitehall, and sure enough, on they marched, past him, past every one, in their steady way, as if one will worked legs and arms uniformly, and life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline.” Think about it, let it get its talons into you it’s a terrifying passage. Life laid under a pavement of monuments. Life drugged into a stiff, staring corpse by discipline. One will working all those arms and legs. Working them uniformly. Terrifying. And even more so when it comes into historical focus. When context it historically. This is five years after the mother of all catastrophes, as the Germans called World War I. Five years after millions of Europeans – including nearly a million Britons – were fed into the maw of industrialised slaughter. And these are 16 year old boys. Some of the first words Virginia Woolf picks out at beginning of the novel are What larks, what plunges. Larks soar. Our minds soar. This novel does what hadn’t been done ever before in fiction, it tracks the human mind, it tracks consciousness. Where the mind goes. What is does. How it behaves. But she also says, ‘what plunges’. And that’s what she does as well, she dives down into the depths, into the ocean of the mind. The oceans has depths and profundities and movements and currents and eddies that are an infinity compared to what you find in a river. Virginia Woolf is saying the human mind – and experience generally – is like an ocean. And the world of lived experience – lived both in our heads but also in the world at large – it’s an ocean, all the forces and impressions and currents – this novel does what hadn’t been done before in fiction – it plumbs and soars in those regions, catches glimpses of those workings.
In one word, of life.
So coming back to this Peter Walsh passage and why it’s so terrifying, she’s tapped into, put her finger on a powerful current in the ocean of our experience, our culture – an authoritarian, militaristic, controlling, dare I say male impulse or constraint – a will to power – that is so powerful it’s virtually life denying. It’s the thanatos current. The death wish drive and current. Life laid under a pavement of monuments, life drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse.
And you can guess, it’s point counterpoint because I then read a passage expresses a completely different sensibility. Mrs Dalloway’s female sensibility.
And then, picking out words, I read…well, I quote, I’ve memorised this one: the first words of Shakespeare’s great tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra.
Antony has refused to hear some messengers from Rome and Philo, a Roman who’s there in Egypt with Antony, has seen what’s become of him, how he’s let himself go – well, he’s let his Roman side go wrack and ruin, it’s caved in –Philo says, these are the first words spoken in the play:
Nay, but this dotage of our general’s O’erflows the measure.
Now the first thing you have to keep in mind with Shakespeare is the importance of first things, of first words. Shakespeare will often sound the keynote in the first words spoken. And my god, does he ever do that here. Not just in the first words, not just in the first line, not just in the first word, but in the first syllable.
Nay. That word: it’s martial, it’s authoritarian, it’s commanding, it’s denying, it’s restricting. Nay. It’s an order.
Nay, but this dotage – notice that word dotage. The contempt that’s dripping from it. Not only has Antony gone native, he’s turned the natural order of things on its head. Well, what a Roman would see as the natural order of things. Namely that men are dominant. They call the shots. They’re not ordered about by women. Not even by Roman women let alone native women. Native women are to be shagged and discarded. You don’t fall in love with them. And as for doting on them, that’s beyond the pale. Nay, but this dotage of our general’s… and then notice where that opening remark takes us. This dotage of our general’s o’erflows the measure. Measure is Roman. Everything is to be ordered, controlled, measured. But what Antony’s done – and is doing – o’erflows – overflows – the measure. Can you hear it? It’s pure genius. What informs that thought is the Nile, which famously floods every years and in doing so makes for incredible fecundity, renewal, growth, fertility, disorder, life. The very essence of Egypt. There in that first line you’ve got the essence of the world of that play – its two poles, Rome and Egypt. Two diametrically opposed worlds. That’s a deep dive into the ocean of experience. Detecting, feeling the force and pull and swirl of deep, powerful, and in this case opposing cultural and social and national and psychological currents we’re at the mercy of. Shakespeare does this all the time. He goes there. He takes us there. Virginia Woolf dove down there as well – takes us there – in that extraordinary, astonishing work, Mrs Dalloway.
Now I’m not sure, there’s a general point here. All I do know is that on that walk I bring up Antony & Cleopatra, there on Whitehall when I’m talking about that Peter Walsh passage. They’re both cut from same cloth. And on a personal level, I’m just so aware that something like this happens time and again with me. Shakespeare’s like a handrail for me. I reach out to him again and again. When I need to do so. When I get into storm-tossed waters.
A friend who knows me very well once teased me about this, how one of the leashes around my neck leads back to Shakespeare. Using that cliched current expression, my friend said, “you know, Shakespeare’s living rent-free in your mind.” I sent him a note that night. I said, ‘no, he’s not living rent-free. Far from it. He’s doing a lot for me. Doing a lot of chores up there. And I hit him with Bernard Levin’s wonderful passage. Which is a lot of fun. I’m going to hit you with it. A moment of levity to wind this up. Living proof that Shakespeare o’erflows the measure as does my dotage – and rightly so.
Here’s Shakespeare as served up by Bernard Levin.
If you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me”, you are quoting Shakespeare;
if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger; if your wish is farther to the thought; if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool’s paradise -why, be that as it may, the more fool you , for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then – to give the devil his due – if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then – by Jove! O Lord! Tut tut! For goodness’ sake! What the dickens! But me no buts! – it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.
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.