London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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Here we go again, London Walkers, wherever you are. It’s Tuesday, May 21st, 2025.
Still Tuesday, May 21st. Yes, London Calling’s already stood muster for today. Did so this morning. But I did say, today could well be a doubleheader. There might be a second London Walks podcast coming out today. And what do you know, here it is. Here we are.
Here partly because I realised there was some unfinished business that should have gone into yesterday’s podcast. And before the memory of the tide that was May 20th ebbs completely I want to take care of that unfinished business.
That podcast was a short tour of May 20th in history. For whatever reason, May 2oth was a happening day in history. A lot went down. The podcast was essentially a five-course meal. This happened on May 20th. And that happened. And so on.
And of course in the way of these things, as soon as I hit the publish button I realised May 20th wasn’t a five-course meal. It was a banquet. And some of the stuff I left out was good London stuff. So to get game Two of our double header underway, I’m going to redress that matter, take care of those loose ends.
I launched the May 20th story by saying that Christopher Columbus died on May 20th, 1506. Well, something about that date and that big expanse of blue water and the lands that bookend it. Turns out that May 20th, 1927 Charles Lindbergh took off from New York on the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic. Took him 33 1/2 hours. So today’s the 98th anniversary of Lindbergh and his little monoplane the Spirit of St Louis touching down at Le Bourget Aerodrome in Paris.
And there’s more. Exactly five years later – May 20th, 1932 – Amelia Earhart set off from Newfoundland on the first solo transatlantic flight by a woman. She landed in Ireland. Took her just under 15 hours to make the crossing. She made the crossing and the crossing made her The Outstanding Woman of the Year. The media flurry included the question “But can she bake a cake?” Ms Earhart’s answer looped the loop. She said, “I accept these awards on behalf of the cake bakers and all of those other women who can do some things quite as important, if not more important, than flying, as well as in the name of women flying today.”
But let’s get to our London stuff. On May 20th, 1867 Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone of the Royal Albert Hall.
And on May 20th, 1913, the Chelsea Flower Show debuted.
And on May 20th, 1962, that favourite son of London, Bobby Moore, the greatest footballer London ever produced, played the first of his 108 International Matches. It was a friendly against Peru in Lima. England won going away, four zip.
So that turns our five-course meal that is May 20th in history into a ten-course banquet.
As historical banquets go it could hardly be more transatlantic: Columbus, Lafayette, the American War of Independence, the transatlantic flights of those two aviators, Lindbergh and Earhart, Peru, France, Ireland and given that our weekly – every Saturday – Oscar Wilde Walk will be here in less than two weeks, well, surely, an Oscar Wilde witticism or two is called for.
Oscar got Columbus and his achievement and indeed something else down to size when he said,
“Of course America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it was always hushed up.”
And for the rest of this podcast, how about Oscar’s pointing out that we live in fallen times.
He lamented, “It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information around.”
Well, there may not be an abundance of it. But there’s some. So here’s the tapas tray of piquant information for May 21st.
I grant you, morsels like this are about as useful as a milk pail under a bull. But I refuse to abjure them. Objection overruled I say to the aspersion that they’re useless. They’re piquant. And that’s good enough for me.
It was on this day, May 21st, 1688 that the great Augustan poet Alexander Pope was born. Born in London.
Two takeaways on Alexander Pope. One, Pope was the first professional poet in England. Pope’s predecessors were dependent on patronage. They went begging bowl in hand to the high and mighty. Had to curry favour with – and flatter – the Jeff Bezos’s and Elon Musk’s of the day. Pope was spared that ignominy. He negotiated his own deals with printers, publishers, and booksellers.
And Two, Alexander Pope was a world-class satirist. And he saw the world with a clear and mordant eye. Titus Oates figured in yesterday’s podcast. The savagery of the punishments that were visited on him. His being flogged from Aldwych to Newgate. And then the next day, from Newgate to Tyburn.
Pope and Oates were near contemporaries. There’s a chilling line in Virginia Woolf’s great novel Mrs Dalloway, “the world has raised its whip, where will it descend?” It descended on Titus Oates. He experienced that world. Alexander Pope observed it.
Try these lines from the third canto of Pope’s greatest poem, The Rape of the Lock.
Meanwhile, declining from the noon of day,
The sun obliquely shoots his burning ray;
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches hang that jury-men may dine;
More May 21st London English Lit. The poet Christopher Smart died in debtor’s prison in London on May 21st, 1771. Christopher Smart was 49 years old.
And today is the 25th anniversary of the death of the great 20th-century English actor, Sir John Gielgud. 25 years ago. It doesn’t seem possible. I saw him and Ralph Richardson in Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land at the National Theatre in 1976. An eternal flame of memory, that joint performance.
Anything else? Yes, the 85th anniversary of the Dunkirk evacuation is hoving into view. The great Dunkirk historian Nicholas Harman got it in his sights when he said it was one of the greatest defeats and one of the most extraordinary triumphs in British history. A nine-days’ wonder that changed the world. Harman says German soldiers of the time had the words Gott mit uns – God is with us – on their belts. The British had it in their hearts.
And a bit of local colour. I was in Hampstead earlier today. Went into a shoestore. It was like going into an expensive jewellery shop. The doors were locked. I asked the salesperson about it. She said, ‘yes, we have to, shoplifters are like locusts, they come in and clean everything off our shelves.’
A tie-in, I suppose, with the main new story today…the cost of living in Britain is shooting up. One consequence of which is hungry pensioners who can’t afford to buy food are turning to shoplifting.
And at the other end of the them and us socio-economic divide, I learn today that Jeff Bezos is a billion pounds richer every week.
Thinking now of Oscar Wilde’s pining over the meagre fare of useless information and thinking it would have brought tears of joy to Oscar’s eyes to know that a billion pounds would form a tower of £10 notes 6.2 miles high. How’s that for a skyscraper of useless information. And if you’re Jeff Bezos there’s an Amazon forest of them, shooting up like bamboo trees, every which way you turn.
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.