Feminist Jack the Ripper Walk

London calling.

London Walks connecting.

This… is London.

This is London Walks.

Streets ahead.

Story time. History time.

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Good morning from London. It’s July 27th, 2024.

Today’s pin…Looks like the weather today is going to be perfection itself. I’m guiding Kensington this afternoon and have it on good authority – I wheel that phrase out somewhat advisedly – I have it on good authority that the temperature is going to be a perfect 21 degrees Celsius, that’s 70 Fahrenheit, with zero percent chance of the wet stuff. Well, that’s what the weatherman is saying right now, 9 am, but every single weather forecast in this country has to be taken with a large lump of salt. Three sage old bits of weather wisdom about the UK are, 1. We don’t have seasons in this country, we have weather. Mull that one over for a minute and you’ll get it. Hint, hint, season’s are pretty dependable. Weather’s changeable. 2. If you don’t like the weather in Britain just wait. Because it’ll change that soon. And 3. We get four seasons in a day. Sometimes four seasons in an afternoon. Or even in an hour or two. Anyway, that’s all by way of a preamble. The weatherman says we’ve got a heatwave heading our way. If he’s right – and of course his is the most inexact science of all, it’s often the case that a weather forecast turns out to be so much crystal ball gazing – our great guide Adam has gone cold turkey with forecasts, hasn’t listened to one for over five years – he says it’s like being unchained from a lunatic – anyway, Adam’s considered opinion is that if you want to know what the weather has in store for us here you might as well look at the horoscope as watch a weather forecast – anyway, if the weatherman’s reading of the runes is right the heatwave, such as it is, will pitch up next Monday. And how hot’s a London heatwave – well, the weatherman is saying 29 degrees Celsius. That’s 84 Fahrenheit. That’s a cool day in Sevilla. Indeed, it’s a cool July day where I grew up, in Wisconsin, in the American midwest, where July and August temperatures were regularly, consistently up in the 90s, 35 Celsius or thereabouts.

Anyway, should we get our heatwave London pubs will do a roaring trade. A tall cool one – or not so cool – out on a bench outside our favourite boozer, what’s not to like. Well, actually, what’s not to like is the price. And so we come to the rub of the pin…we learn from Camra, the Campaign for Real Ale, that the period October 2022 to March 2024 was the wettest 18-month period since records began. And, yes, that had agricultural implications. The UK harvest of basic crops, including barley for making beer, was down by nearly 20 percent. Which in turn prompted the British Beer and Pub Association to issue a warning that the industry would ‘strive to absorb some of those costs but, with margins already at historic lows, some costs will have to be passed on.”

And I’ve just passed on that grim warning. Your cooling draught’s not going to come cheap.

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Now for a Random – in keeping I think with our – well, most of us – in keeping with our mounting anxiety about what’s going on with our weather. Storms, heat waves, etc. Let’s roll out British geologist Derek Ager’s observation that “the history of any one part of the Earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror.”

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And so we come to today’s Ongoing. My hat is permanently off to my colleagues, London Walks guides. It’s like working with a bunch of inspired artists and scientists. They’re so switched on. Always coming up with new ideas. Making new finds. And that bears fruit here at London Walks in new walks. And we’ve got a very special one coming in stream in just over a month. It’s been created by Ulrike. A lot of you will know her work. Ulrike created and gives those two much acclaimed Seven Deadly Sins walks. One in Westminster the other in the City of London. Those walks rack up nothing but acclaim. Dozens, literally dozens of rave reviews. Ulrike’s thorough, painstaking – she’s incapable of being slapdash.

Anyway, her new walk is a dark side of the moon job. It’s a Jack the Ripper Walk from a feminist perspective. She’s titled it Women of the Abbyss – the Victims of Jack the Ripper.

Dark side of the moon is spot on. As Ulrike puts it, we’re going to discover and explore the other side of the Jack the Ripper story.

But let’s hear it from Ulrike herself. She says about the walk, “there are no murders without victims, and before they were victims, “the Five” were women with lives more difficult than we can readily imagine. I’m going to introduce you to these five women. We’re not going to look at their deaths; we’re going to look at their lives. The tragic turns and decisions in their lives that led them to “the prototype of hell” – Whitechapel and Spitalfields in the 1880s.

Jack London called the Victorian East End of London the Abyss, the pit of hell, once you fell in, there was no way out. It was a neighbourhood of squalor and destitution at an unimaginable level.

We’re going there. Come with me and meet Polly. And Annie. And Elizabeth. And Kate. And Mary Jane. See where they barely existed. Did what they could to keep despair at bay. See their haunts, their London, the streets and alleyways they knew. See where things closed in on them. See and imagine what it felt like to be lost, forgotten, out at the edge – on the very margin of the richest society on earth. Where despair was writ in the very fabric of their surroundings. And imagine how brave they must have been trying to keep it at bay. Their lives mirrored those of millions of other Victorian women. Let’s give them a face, a voice, and let us not diminish them, define them only by their deaths, confine them to their deaths. Make them bit part players – expendable pawns – barely glimpsed through the red mist of that psychopath.”

The walk debuts on Saturday, August 31st. In the morning as it happens. At 10.45. That timing dovetails perfectly with Petticoat Lane Market. It’ll be in full swing when Ulrike’s new walk crosses the finish line. And she’ll be doing it again on the morning of Sunday, September 8th. Both of those of course are Jack the Ripper anniversary dates. And future dates are in the pipeline. As always, it’s all there on walks.com – go to the calendar on the website – the two dates I’ve mentioned – or do a search for the title of the walk, Women of the Abyss.

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.

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