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 22nd, 2024.
Today’s pin. No prizes for getting this one right. Every London newspaper – every London news outlet – the lead story is Biden’s baling.
But this is London Walks. We go off the beaten path. So here’s a Biden breather for you, a great London news story that’s pretty much been drowned out by the Biden breaker.
You got some spare readies lying around you’re in with a chance to own a pair of John Lennon’s spectacles. They’re round. They’re blue-tinted. They’re going under the hammer of Catherine Southon auctioneers on July 31st. It’s expected they’ll fetch two to three thousand pounds. My hunch is they’ll go for a lot more than that. For the back story we go back to 1968. Go to Abbey Road studios. A young man and his girlfriend are visiting the studios. The young man sees the spectacles on a piano. He thinks they’re his spectacles. He must have put them down there. He picks them up. And there’s John Lennon. John Lennon says, ‘no, they’re mine, but you can have them.’ 56 years later someone else is going to have them. It’s going to be fun to see how much they fetch. The spectacles are going on sale along with 33 black and white photographs of the studios and the Beatles that were taken by the young man, who didn’t just get some pretty photographs, that day, he also got a pair of John Lennon’s granny glasses.
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Moving on, Today’s Random. For some reason I’ve got the year 1837 swirling round in my head today. That was the year 18-year-old Victoria ascends to the throne. You can think of that year as the beginning of the modern age. 1837 is the year London gets its first mainline railway terminus. Yes, Euston Station. The steamship SS Great Western is launched in 1837. It’s the year that births, marriages and deaths begin to be registered in England and Wales. It’s the year Cooke and Wheatstone file their patent for the electric telegraph. That great institution, the Royal Institute of Architects comes fully on stream – it gets its royal charter. Also coming on stream, a new city in the Australian colonies. It’s named Melbourne after the British prime minister. Britain gets its first black police officer. His name is John Kent. And stockbroker Moses Montefiore becomes the first Jew to receive a knighthood. Running your eye over that list you can see the modern age – our world – beginning to take shape. And part and parcel of that – this is the thought that’s been going round and round in my noggin – the pillory is no more. An Act of Parliament on June 30th abolishes that horrifying form of punishment. Being helpless in a wooden contraption positioned in a public place – your hands and head pinioned – and passersby pelting you with rotten eggs and tomatoes, maybe spitting on you, taunting you, hurling abuse at you. That centuries-old London scene was finally a thing of the past. My grandmother was born in 1899. Her grandfather fought in the American Civil War. When I was a child she told me stories about him. Had he been a child in London there would have been a fair number of greybeards pottering about who were old enough to remember seeing prisoners in the pillory when they were youngsters. You can think of living memory as the long bound of a single lifetime. So two long bounds gets us from somebody about Joe Biden’s age to me being a child and hearing from somebody whose long life was just one bound from somebody who as a London child saw people in the pillory.
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And that brings us to today’s Ongoing. How many of you remember E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. Published in 1973, it was iconic for a few years. It went to bat for small businesses, small polities, small policies, small technologies. Took issue with the prevailing, the mainstream ethos of big is better. It’s just a personal opinion but I think Ernst Frederich Schumacher was onto something. (For the record, E. F. Schumacher was born in Germany – ergo the German name – but he was a British statistician and economist.)
We’ve steered the Good Ship London Walks by the constellations Schumacher picked out. Never wanted it to be big and cumbersome and corporate and impersonal and smacking of the world of the franchise. Never wanted it to be a chain, never wanted it to be anything other than local.
Wanted to handpick every guide. Know them personally. Know their interests and areas of expertise and strengths. And, yes, weaknesses.
A lot of good things flow from that configuration. And one of them is the centrepiece of this Ongoing.
It’s not widely known this but London Walks from time to time arranges for a public walk to take place at the request of a customer. It’s happened – or is happening – three times this year. Much earlier this year somebody wrote to us, said they were going to be in London in May, they’d really like a Belgravia Pub Walk when they were here – they’d been several times previously to London but that walk had never been on when they were here in the past, what about it, could we put one on for when they were here this time. Small is beautiful. Small is also flexible. And responsive. It can react quickly. We did. We scheduled that walk at their request, for when they were here. I guided it. I’d completely forgotten someone had requested it. Was taken by surprise when the couple said, “thanks very much for laying this walk on for us.”
A second instance is coming up in a couple of weeks. A Canadian academic – Jan a professor of English Lit in British Columbia – wrote to us a year ago. He said,
Dear David,
Hello from western Canada! I just saw your post on social media from this morning’s Mrs. Dalloway walk (you seem to run into the most amazing surprises on that walk!) and I have a question. Is the Mrs. Dalloway walk something that you are including regularly? And/or would it be a walk that could be in rotation next summer?
I would greatly look forward to joining it next summer!
Just thought I would let you know that someone far away is very keen on that walk!
Thank you for all that you do (and thank for all the amazing online walks during the plague….I enjoyed them so much).
All the best from British Columbia,
Jan
I wrote back, “Thanks for your lovely note, Jan. Tell me when you’ll be here and I’ll try and run it that week. For obvious reasons a Wednesday would be best. But if you can’t make a Weds. we can make an exception. Though Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays are pretty much no go days for me because I guide other walks on those days.”
And so sure enough, Mrs Dalloway’s London will be taking place on August 7th. And I’m very much looking forward to Jan from British Columbia who made it happen.
And a third instance, another niche walk, Charlie’s Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley in Somers Town. Somebody wrote in and said they couldn’t make the July 10th outing for that walk. Could we possibly schedule it on a date that they could make.
I wrote to Charlie and said, ‘what about it Charlie, why don’t you get in touch with them and see when would be a good time for them and if it works for you let’s schedule it then for them.
A bit of guide-walker communication ensued and sure enough they found a mutually convenient date: November 16th, 2024.
What’s not to like.
Small is beautiful.
And to end, here’s a new, occasional strand for the London Walks podcast. A rich dessert, so to speak. A great bit of London writing – London as seen, as set down, by its finest writers.
To get us started this wonderful poem by Rudyard Kipling. It’s called The River’s Tale. Historically, it’s the best thing ever written about the Thames. So evocative.
Curtain up, here we go.
The River’s Tale
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.