London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Usual salutation. Pro forma but nonetheless genuinely meant. A very good evening to you London Walkers. Wherever you are. It’s Friday, November 28th.
And, coming up – that’s right – your daily London fix.
Letting off steam is putting it crudely. But it’ll have to do. I’m under the gun these next few days and can’t cast about for a better way of putting it. By steam I mean things I’d like to say at this point or that point on a London Walk. But time doesn’t permit. So here’s my chance – I’m going to say it here, let some of that steam off here.
What I have in mind is a house in Church Row in Hampstead. On my Hampstead Walk of course. And in particular the man who lived there. And why can’t I tell the tale out there on the walk? Well, it’s Church Row. The finest street in Hampstead. An almost perfect early Georgian ensemble. And believe me, the cup overfloweth. Church Row’s like the climax of a mighty symphony. I’ve just totted them up. There are 26 point-outs on or just off Church Row. Houses, street furniture and other details, architectural felicities and other particulars, a panoramic, various and sundry other places, tomb stones, a photograph of Dame Judy Dench’s house, two reproductions of old prints of Church Row, showing what it looked like in the 1890s and earlier in the 19th century. So you direct your walkers’ gaze. Get them to see this or that house, this or that particular… and then you hit the light switch. Illuminate it. You illuminate it with a few carefully chosen words that tell, briefly, the story, explain the significance of what they’re looking at. It’s the words that empower them, enable them to see the place with your eyes. So, 26 point outs – and their accompanying captions. You can’t dwell on the dwellings, so to speak. I’m careful to refrain from saying, if only you knew the full story. But I often think it. And the full story – and my thinking, gosh, wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could cut loose, serve up the whole banquet rather than just this tapas – well, that’s the steam. And sometimes – all the time, really – you’re yearning to let that steam off. So that’s what I’m going to do here. With just one of those 26 point outs on Church Row. Number 26 to be precise.
Not the last of the 26 point-outs. Rather, No. 26 Church Row. The house number.
So here we go then.
26 Church Row, Hampstead.
A house with stories so hot
they could warm the whole
of North London, even in February.
And at the centre of it all,
Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas.
Bosie.
Minor poet.
Spoiled, reckless, insolent and extravagant.
He would spend money on boys and gambling and expected you know who to contribute to funding his tastes.
They often argued and broke up, but then they made up.
Yes, I’m talking about
Oscar Wilde’s beautiful disaster.
The blond bombshell who sashayed
into Wilde’s life,
set it ablaze,
and then behaved as if the
resulting inferno
were simply part of the general decor.
Right, imagine him.
That face for which the word “angelic” was invented.
Swan-necked,
petal-skinned,
pouty in a way that would make
a modern “influencer”
throw in the towel.
Bosie had that combination of
posh entitlement and dangerous beauty that makes perfectly sensible people
do perfectly ridiculous things.
And that, ladies and gentlemen,
is exactly what happened to poor Oscar. But let’s leave Mr Wilde for a moment, and zoom right in on that elegant house
in Church Row
where Bosie hid,
sulked,
posed,
wrote poems,
plotted vengeance,
and recharged his batteries
before the next round
of operatic melodrama.
Picture Church Row.
It looks like it’s been dipped in honey. Georgian perfection.
Doorways with fanlights.
Chimneys like polite exclamation marks. And just a few doors along on the left hand side of that quietly impeccable terrace,
Bosie lived.
Imagine the neighbours
doing their
very best Hampstead
middle-class discretion
while furtively flicking the curtains. Because while Oscar Wilde died
several years before Bosie
moved into the house,
the aura of the scandal
hovered above him like
one of those little cartoon clouds
that follows you around after
you’ve said something inadvisable
at a dinner party.
Bosie arrived in Wilde’s life in 1891, twenty one years old
and absolutely cooking
with sexual charisma.
Oscar was in his late thirties,
already famous,
already adored,
already hovering
in that tricky area
between “brilliant man with
a glittering career” and
“man making decisions that
will shortly result in disaster”.
Bosie was the catalyst.
The accelerant.
The human equivalent of handing Oscar
a lit match
in a room full of fireworks and saying, “Darling, go on,
what’s the worst that could happen?”
And please don’t misunderstand me.
Bosie wasn’t just a pretty face.
He was also a poet.
A pretty good poet, actually,
when the mood took him.
But the mood didn’t often take him.
More often the mood that took him
was a dramatic flounce or a furious sulk. He had the emotional stability of a wasp
in a jam jar.
But heavens, was he thrilling.
Wilde adored him like
a teenage girl adores a pop idol.
He wrote to him,
pined for him,
forgave him things that
would make a saint swear.
And two years later,
that fatal quarrel with Bosie’s father,
the brutal Marquess of Queensberry.
The father from hell.
Imagine a bulldog that’s
been taught to box. Queensberry was well known for his short temper and threatening to beat people with a horsewhip.
He was vulgar,
violent, but not stupid.
He smelt impropriety the way a bloodhound smells sausages.
And when he decided Wilde was corrupting his boy,
he came roaring after him. After both of them actually. He threatened to disown
Bosie and “stop all money supplies.” Alfred responded with a telegram reading: “What a funny little man you are.”
And then there was the postcard Bosie sent his father. The postcard stated,”I detest you.” And it made it clear that he would take Wilde’s side in a fight between him and the Marquess, “with a loaded revolver”.
Queensberry wrote back, addressing his son as “You miserable creature”. He said he’d divorced his son’s mother so as not to “run the risk of bringing more creatures into the world like yourself”
So that’s how things were between father and son.
Not surprising then, that Bosie,
instead of calming things down,
egged Oscar on.
“Take him to court,” he said.
“We’ll show the old brute.”
Wilde did.
And the old brute showed him.
The trial ruined Oscar,
got him the prison sentence,
two years for gross indecency.
Served with hard labour.
And on the heels of the prison sentence, the exile,
the tragic collapse. And in due course death in that horrible little hotel room in Paris. The memory tempered only by the best last words ever, “either that wallpaper goes or I go.”
And Bosie,
once the sun
around which Wilde orbited,
suddenly disappeared
into a fog of self-pity,
rage,
and in due course, an about face,
tedious anti-Wilde posturing.
What’s not generally known about Bosie is that he also served a prison sentence. Not for gross indecency. But for libelling Winston Churchill. A six month sentence. Six months sleeping on a plank without a mattress. It broke his health.
Anything else? Well, yes, lots actually.
But let’s just throw one more faggot on the fire. Yes, I know, that word is a highly offensive homophobic slur. I’m not using it in that sense. I mean it in the sense of a bundle of sticks bound together as fuel.
And that last bit of fuel on the bonfire is this: Bosie was a raging anti-semite. What a piece of work he was.
And on that note, let’s get back to Church Row. Back to No. 26. That very fine early Georgian Hampstead house.
Bosie holed up there a few years
after the storm.
It was a sort of emotional spa.
A quiet corner where
he could recover
from his own catastrophes,
write moody poems,
and convince himself he
was the true victim of
absolutely everything.
He never quite got over himself.
He spent much of the next half century reinventing the story
with himself as the misunderstood hero. He even ended up
converting to Catholicism,
writing religious verse,
and railing against homosexuality
in a manner
that would make any reasonably informed psychotherapist
reach for a notepad and a very deep sigh.
What did he get up to
in Hampstead though?
Picture it.
Bosie sweeping down Church Row like
a fallen angel
who wanted you to know
he’d fallen from a very great height. Hampstead in those days wasn’t
the yummy mummy enclave
it later became.
It was a slightly bohemian,
slightly raffish hillside
where poets and painters mixed
with doctors and lawyers in search
of clean air and a touch of culture.
Bosie fit right in.
He had just enough scandal to spice up
a dinner table
without quite enough money to be insufferable.
Well, he was insufferable,
but in that fascinating way
you can’t stop watching.
Like a beautiful vase wobbling
on the edge of a mantlepiece.
You know it’ll crash, but oh,
what a spectacle on the way down.
And just imagine the conversations.
The little drawing room here,
the flicker of firelight,
the clink of glasses,
Bosie reclining like a fallen god,
letting slip morsels of gossip.
“Oscar? Oh yes,
such a pity about him.
Terrible business.
Of course I tried to save him.
No one listened.
Pass the port.”
The sly smirk while the guests leaned in.
A flash of thigh.
A pout.
A sigh so theatrical
you’d think he was auditioning
for a role in La Traviata.
But that’s why we stop there
on the Hampstead Walk.
Because Bosie wasn’t just
a side character in Wilde’s tragedy.
He was the pivot.
The hinge.
The beautiful boy
who turned the whole story
from comedy of manners
to Greek tragedy.
And that house,
that quiet Georgian gem,
was the aftermath of that tale.
A sanctuary for a man who left
chaos in his wake.
A place where he retreated,
regrouped,
and perhaps occasionally
looked in the mirror and admitted,
very quietly,
that the angel face
had come with devilish consequences.
So yes.
Church Row.
No plaque.
No fanfare.
Just brick,
sash windows,
and a breeze
that still whispers Bosie’s name
if you listen closely.
Hampstead keeps its secrets well.
But you, lucky walkers,
now know one of its juicier ones.
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 £25 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 Jack the 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.