London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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Good evening from London. It’s July 26th, 2024.
Today’s pin…it’s a tempest in a teapot.
Like everybody else, I’ve been aware for a while now of the new plastic bottle caps. That they’re tethered to the bottle. They’re tethered to it. Small difference. Pretty humdrum. Quotidian in the extreme. But it’s interesting how you can get it wrong about the humdrum. It’s like a blurred photograph. And then the same shot comes along and it’s in focus and it’s something completely different from what you thought you were looking at.
So my blurred photo with the new-fangled – the tethered plastic bottle caps – was that maybe the old-style ones had caused a fatality or two. Some poor sod had used his teeth to unscrew the cap. Maybe it was somebody who only had the use of one arm. The cap had come off in his mouth and he’d choked to death on it.
All in all that’s probably a reasonable ‘read.’ But it turns out I was barking up the wrong tree. The reason for the new style, ‘tethered’ caps is the environmental scourge of discarded plastic bottles and lids. They take up to 450 years to decompose. And they do terrible things to dolphins and whales. So keeping them in one piece is a small step toward making a fist of riding herd on the problem. If we produce 500 billion plastic bottles a year and we trash all of them we’re trashing a maximum of 500 billion pieces of plastic. Whereas in the days when the cap separated from the bottle – sort of like a frog birthing a tadpole – not that frogs birth a tadpole but you get the idea – when the cap separated from the bottle you had a thousand billion pieces of plastic rubbish starting their long march – their 450-year trek toward decomposition.
And somebody’s also made the point that tethered caps free up one of your hands. In the days of untethered caps one hand had to hold the cap and the other hand held the bottle you were quaffing your water from.
All well and good. But sure enough, politics – geopolitics – pokes its ugly nose into the tethered caps saga. It turns out – live and learn – that the tethered caps have been brought to us compliments of an EU directive. And what do you know, it’s rubbed the Brexiteers up the wrong way that drinks manufacturers in this country are toeing the EU line. When because – thanks to Brexit – they don’t have to. British drinks manufacturers could produce disposable plastic bottles that don’t stay in one piece when they’re opened. But they’re not availing themselves of that freedom. And of course what the anti-Brexiteers are saying is, “what’s it take for you to get it through your thick skulls that manufacturers aren’t going to run separate production lines just for Britain.” Or another way of putting that, “I hate to break it to you but a market of 500 million trumps a market of 66 million.”
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Now for a Random – this is one spectacular Did You Know – the largest private aquarium in Europe is in the City of London. It’s in the atrium of an office block in Bishopsgate. The monster aquarium is 13 feet high and 65 feet wide. It holds 1200 fish. All of them transplanted from the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. It takes two full-time staff to feed the fish. And three part-time divers to clean the rocks and the inside of the glass tank. And, yes, it’s an American firm who’ve splashed out on the thing.
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And that brings us to today’s Ongoing.
I call them London knots. Like knots in a tree that’s been cut down and sawn. Knots are where a branch was attached to the trunk and they show up as darker, shaded circles in a plank of wood.
It’s a pretty good analogy because a knot indicates there was a growth there, the plank is not the whole story. Like knots in a plank London knots are small – you have to keep your eye out for them – but once you spot them, well, they’re dense with meaning.
Here’s a good example. The next time you’re on the Strand – down by the Savoy Hotel – look for Number 85. Above the window there you’ll spot a small red plaque with three lions on it. It’s a boundary marker. It marks the boundary between St Martin in the Fields and the Duchy of Lancaster. The centerpiece of the Duchy of Lancaster holding there was the ancient Savoy Palace. It became the property of the Duke of Lancaster in 1345. And who was the Duke of Lancaster? You might well ask. He was the Sovereign, the King. The Duke of Lancaster was his second title. One fragment of the Savoy Palace has survived. The Savoy Chapel. And it, like Westminster Abbey, is what’s called a Royal Peculiar. In other words, it comes under the jurisdiction of the crown rather than the Archbishop of Canterbury. So in through there, you’re moving about in a royal demesne. Or domain if you prefer.
But when I say that little red badge is a London knot and as such is dense with meaning…here’s where we get to if we follow the branch so to speak. The lineage of the Duchy of Lancaster goes back nearly 800 years.
And it’s very tangled, seriously complicated. Two things set it apart. First of all, when the usurper Henry IV came to the throne he ordered that the Lancaster inheritance should be held separately from all other Crown possessions – and should descend through the Monarchy as a private estate.
But more to the point here, most of the Duchy of Lancaster is in the northwest of England. And thanks to an antiquated system that dates back to feudal times, when someone in the Duchy of Lancaster dies intestate – that is, dies without a will or a known next of kin – their property and assets go to the crown rather than to the Treasury. To put it very bluntly, it’s a huge money spinner for King Charles III. Last year that essentially feudal arrangement generated 26 million pounds for His Majesty.
That little red badge on the wall above No. 85 on the Strand – that London knot – is about the size of a small saucer – but the branch it leads to goes back centuries, spreads and spreads. Indeed, it’s a mighty forest in itself.
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.