London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
—————————————
And a very good morning to you from London! It’s August 24th, 2024.
Today’s pin…this one’s a perfect example of how a London Walk is not something dead and set in stone. It’s a living thing. It evolves. It changes. So I’m thinking about that walk I have a huge soft spot for – the platonic ideal of a niche walk – Ann’s Cat Tails – A Feline Take on London History. It’s like a world-class mouser, that walk. And what I can guarantee you is on its next outing – September 8th – it’ll have caught something, having something to proudly show us we haven’t seen previously.
And what’s beyond charming is, what this mouser of a walk has just caught has a code name. Larry Bridges.
Ok, that’s enough cryptic. Time to decode. The world’s most famous cat is Larry. Larry rules the roost at Number 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister’s official residence. Larry is now 17 years old. And the implications of his advanced age are…well, you can guess. Anyway, it turns out that Number 10 Street has a plan in place for announcing Larry’s demise when the dreaded day comes. And that plan is code-named Larry Bridges. And that’s particularly charming because willy nilly it’s an acknowledgement that Larry is, well, royal. As The Times – which broke the story – put it, “Larry Bridges is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the code names given to safeguard the details of preparations for royal deaths. Planning for the death of Queen Elizabeth II was known as Operation London Bridge, while King Charles’s is referred to as Operation Menai Bridge, after a crossing in Wales.”
Two final points. One, there’s something deeply satisfying about the code names being bridges. It’s deeply satisfying because the matter at hand is of course a crossing over. As Hamlet puts it, ‘the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.’ And bourne, there’s a good London word, a good London place name for you. Burn or Bourne. It means brook or stream or river. It’s still used very commonly in Scotland. But also in England, Bournemouth, for example. The mouth of the bourne. And, yes, it’s all over London. Eastbourne. Westbourne. Holborn, the bourn in the hollow. Tyburn, the two bourns. Kilburn, the cold burn. The place names mark the approximate location of secondary rivers, tributaries to the Thames. And it’s got great classical echoes. In Greek mythology, Charon is the ferryman who rows the souls of the dead across the Rivers Acheron and Styx, which separate the worlds of the living and the dead. And for that matter, there’s Tennyson’s great poem, Crossing the Bar.
Especially its hauntingly beautiful final lines,
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
Our bourne of Time and Place. Brilliant.
I said two final points: the other one is a gladsome note. Government officials have stressed that “Larry may be a ripe old age but he’s doing OK now.”
—————————-
Moving on, today’s Random – this town, sometimes it feels like you’re deciphering it all the time. So I learn yesterday that the white gloves affixed to the top of the left shoulder of the ever so stylish formal coats worn by the Ritz Hotel porters aren’t just there to look good, they do in fact get used from time time. A Ritz porter informed me yesterday, “yes, we do wear them about three times a year – whenever we’ve got a royal in.”
So now you know. Now we all know. They’re wearing those white gloves you know there’s a royal in the Ritz.
For me, finding that out was particularly satisfying because it immediately put me in mind of that lovely review one of our walkers wrote a while back. She described the service we provide our customers as – and I’m quoting – “the London Walks white glove treatment.” Putting two and two together that in effect is saying we treat our customers like royalty. We’ll take that accolade, we can live with that reputation.
Ok today’s Ongoing. Let’s do another installment about getting to know Tottenham Court Road Underground Station and its environs. This by way of setting the table for our walkers who go to Tottenham Court Road Underground Station to go on Richard’s Beatles Magical Mystery Tour or Adam’s Rock ’n’ Roll London Walk. As I mentioned yesterday, that area has been a significant spot for 900 years. Its historical riches – well, it’s teeming with them. It’s an Amazon rainforest of London history. But it’s also avant garde. It’s culturally rich. There’s a lot going on there. It’s architecturally rich. Ditto matters culinary. So I’m going to map all of that out in a series of podcasts about that little acre, turn Tottenham Court Road Tube stop from a name on the Tube map, a nondescript destination, into an experience. Turn empty calories into a feast. Now I’ve mentioned history, culture, architecture, food, etc. But that leaves one out. Literature. Poetry. It turns out those enivrons are also studded with some great poetry. And I’m going to roll out one of those poems today, that’s the fare, the dish I’m going to serve up in this Ongoing. The poem’s by Thomas Hardy. It’s called Coming Up Oxford Street: Evening
Hardy wrote it in 1872. It’s like a great photograph. It preserves a moment both in the life of this city, but also in the life of one individual in particular. Best of all, I think, it’s redolent with moving historical echoes. It’s about a city clerk who comes walking along there at day’s end. He’s had a long day at work in the City. He’s tired. He’s, well, depressed. Understandably I think. He’s a got long walk home. And the point is, he’s walking west. The route, from the City and along Oxford Street, that’s the route to the gallows at Tyburn. It was the route of the condemned. It was their last journey. Passing along there – past what is today Tottenham Court Road Underground Station – they have maybe 45 minutes left to live. Before they’re launched into eternity. Those are the echoes, the reverberations that crowd in, bear down on this wretched clerk. He’s a dead man walking. He’s condemned.
Other echos that are consonant with that. Well, the sun is setting. But it’s also unforgiving. There’s no escaping it. The poem’s also about the rich and the poor, how life’s a picnic for some people and a living nightmare for others. And never the twain shall meet, though they’re in very close proximity. It’s about urban loneliness. It’s about life in the city. It’s about despair.
It’s a great poem. Here it is.
Coming Up Oxford Street: Evening
by Thomas Hardy
The sun from the west glares back,
And the sun from the watered track,
And the sun from the sheets of glass,
And the sun from each window-brass;
Sun-mirrorings, too, brighten
From show-cases beneath
The laughing eyes and teeth
Of ladies who rouge and whiten.
And the same warm god explores
Panels and chinks of doors;
Problems with chymists’ bottles
Profound as Aristotle’s
He solves, and with good cause,
Having been ere man was.
Also he dazzles the pupils of one who walks west,
A city-clerk, with eyesight not of the best,
Who sees no escape to the very verge of his days
From the rut of Oxford Street into open ways;
And he goes along with head and eyes flagging forlorn,
Empty of interest in things, and wondering why he was born.
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.