London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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And, from London a very good day to you, wherever you are. It’s Friday, September 20th – Equinox weekend.
Today’s pin…London news indeed. Much wrangling and consternation about the proposed pedestrianisation of Oxford Street. The idea has come from the Mayor’s office. And there’s not much question that if it happens it’ll be transformative. A little bit of cosmetic tweaking it isn’t. Cars were banned from Oxford Street some years ago but it’s still a black cabs rat run. And there are 16 bus routes that go along Oxford Street. If the plan goes through all of those taxis, all of those bus routes, would have to be diverted or removed. In the words of the Mayor’s Office, Oxford Street is the “nation’s most famous high street”. He’s calling for a traffic-free pedestrianised avenue to compete with Times Square in New York, the Champs-Elysees in Paris and Las Ramblas in Barcelona. The Labour Mayor – for it is he, Sadiq Khan, says he wants Oxford Street to become the “leading retail destination in the world.” Its opponents are calling it a Frankenstein monster of a proposal. It was mooted a couple of years ago and didn’t get off the ground then. The people who are opposed to it are saying the Mayor’s office is shooting electricity through that old stiff of a proposal in an attempt to bring it back from the dead. They’re saying the neighbours – residents in Marylebone, Mayfair, Soho and Fitzrovia – aren’t going to want it because they’ll have to bear the brunt of the diverted traffic. In short, noise, congestion, fumes, and everything else that goes with traffic rat runs. Westminster council is up in arms. It’s saying pedestrianising Oxford Street is likely to worsen crime and make it a terrorist target. Well, we’ll see how it plays. For what it’s worth, I’m reminded of what happened in Malaga in Spain. We got this from Victor, our wonderful guide there. Malaga banned cars from the centre of the city a few years ago. Victor said there was tremendous opposition. Half of Malaga was up in arms. But the local government steered it through, brought it in. Victor said the opposition lasted for about two weeks after the plan was made operational and then it, the opposition, abruptly died a complete death. He said, after a fortnight everybody realised banning cars from the centre of Malaga had made the city a much better place. Apart from a few die-hards everybody took to it at once. Fell in love with it. Well, we’ll see. Watch this space.
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Moving on, today’s Random – howzabout the contribution the French have made to London. And indeed to this country generally. We can start with the 13th-century baron, Simon de Montfort. He mounted a rebellion against Henry III. When he defeated his majesty in battle de Montfort called a parliament. That was in 1265. And, yes, that was the origin of parliamentary democracy. If you think about it, the very word parliament, its root is parle, French for speaking or talking. Parliament’s a talking shop. So thank you Johnny Frenchman for our parliament. But the two Frenchmen I most had in mind – well, ancestrally Frenchmen – were the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Brunel’s father was the French engineer Sir Marc Isambard Brunel. Brunel’s achievements were many and hugely important. Starting with the Thames tunnel, which as our Brunel expert Robert will tell you on his Thames Sightseeing and Brunel Tour, that tunnel made modern cities possible. An interesting aside that connects with today’s Ongoing, when Brunel was 15 his father was in serious financial difficulties. So much so he was sent – like Dickens’ father at almost exactly the same time – Marc Brunel was put in the slammer, in debtors’ prison. The Tsar of Russia offered to bail him out if he would go to Russia and apply his talents there. That concentrated the British government’s mind. Couldn’t have this country losing a prominent engineer to the Russkies. The government settled Marc Brunel’s debts on condition that he’d stay put in Britain.
Anyway, our second extremely important nineteenth-century civil engineer with French connections was Joseph Bazelgette. Bazelgette’s grandfather was a Huguenot immigrant who’d come to this country in the aftermath of France stretching itself out on a gurney and taking a razor to each of its wrists. I’m talking of course about the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Edict was a law that forbade the French Catholic majority from persecuting the Huguenot protestant minority. Said law was revoked. That’s what in today’s parlance would be called a dog whistle. The Catholic bigots said, ‘right, they’ve revoked it, we can persecute the protestants, let’s get on with it.’ And of course the response of the protestants was to leave. Which was France’s loss and this country and the Netherland’s and Prussia’s gain. Because the Huguenots were exactly the sort of immigrants a country walks. They were sober, skilled, industrious, law-abiding, hard-working people. Ideal citizens. Their coming here was a huge plus for this country, and a major loss for France, the country they’d left. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes was governmental stupidity on a monumental scale. Bears repeating, France stretched itself out on a gurney and knowingly, gormlessly, slit its wrists.
Anyway fast forward two generations and that French immigrant’s grandson is a majorly important civil engineer in London. A huge difference maker. Even casual students of London history know that we have Joseph Bazelgette to thank for the Embankment of the Thames and London’s sewer system. Which was a game-changer for London. A lifesaver. Tens of thousands of lives. What had been a filthy, stinking, polluted, disease-ridden open sewer of a city became almost a showcase model of good urban practice and methods.
But all of that’s well known. I want to push the envelope of. your Bazgette understanding. Embanking the Thames, yes. That modern sewer, yes. But we also have Joseph Bazelgette to thank for two of London’s major streets: Charing Cross Road and Piccadilly. So the next time you stroll up Charing Cross Road to get a book at Foyles or in one of the second-hand bookshops there, indulge in a knowing little nod and a sotto voce, ‘thank you very much, Joseph Bazelgette for Charing Cross, it was a good piece of work, what you did here. And same goes for a stroll up London’s Broadway, Shaftesbury Avenue. ‘Good on you, Joseph Bazelgette, thank you very much indeed for London’s Theatreland street.’
And so we come to today’s Ongoing. Our Russian guide, the lovely Margarita, will tomorrow be taking 15 or so lucky people on her London 1902-1916 Seedbed of the Russian Revolution walk. In short, Lenin’s London. And Stalin’s. And Trotsky’s. Extraordinary to think that they were all here. And the places where they lived and met and caroused and plotted and schemed are still here. And in the way of these things, it’s pleasing that it’s an anniversary walk of sorts. It’s 2024. It was exactly 100 years ago that St Petersburg became Leningrad. Only to revert to St Petersburg a few years ago.
Extraordinary how names – place names – are an x-ray of the past. And the connections you can make.
St Petersburg being a classic case in point. During the Great War the name got changed to Petrograd. Why did it get changed? Because St Petersburg was too German. And then of course seven years after the 1917 Russian Revolution it was rechristened – though that verb christened sticks out like a sore thumb – it was rechristened Leningrad. And Snap! Time to make a connection: think of the British royal family – solidly of German origin – at the same time – during World War I – changing their name from the German Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the impeccably English House of Windsor.
That’s just one of many extraordinary connections. But just generally, it’s impossible to gainsay the importance of what happened in London in that decade and a half, impossible to gainsay the importance of the ground Margarita will be taking her walkers over tomorrow. Those years when Lenin was an exile – part of the time in London – those were the formative years. And then the Great War starts. And Germany, dead keen to foment, to bring about a revolution in Russia, and with it a cessation of hostilities on the eastern front, so it can unleash the full force of its military might on the western front, Germany discovers what Karl Marx had discovered years before, “when you start dealing with the Russians all hell breaks loose.” But it didn’t just have Russian-German implications. It had implications of world-historical importance. Winston Churchill put it best. He said of the German decision to allow the exile, Lenin, to return to Russia at the critically important moment, “they transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.” What that led to, the Russian Revolution, propelled the United States into world politics after the First World War. Indeed, in Alan Moorehead’s words, “the revolution had its impact upon every country during the 1920s, and its influence is clearly visible in the depression and in the politics that led up to the outbreak of the second world war. The Nazis’ rise to power in Germany was intimately connected with the heritage that Lenin left behind; without Stalin’s assurances of support Hitler would hardly have dared to plunge the world into another terrible conflict in 1939. America’s commitments in Europe and the Far East, the fall of China, the Cold War, Korea, the endemic crisis in the Middle East, the missiles races – all these have their origin in the storm that swept away the Tsar in Petrograd in 1917. It’s a chilling thought that the slave camps, the treason trials, the repressive bureaucracy, some of their DNA came into being in the London that Margarita explores on her Seedbed of the Russian Revolution walk.
The Bolsheviks betrayed every political slogan that brought them into power. They had promised the freedom of the individual and instead had censored the Press, forbidden strikes, and set up a secret police. They had undertaken to respect the rights of minority states and in no time they had an army on the move to crush the independent republic of the Ukraine. Sound familiar? Bread and peace had been at the heart of the party’s programme from the beginning. What Russia got was famine and civil war. And come Lenin’s death, it got what wouldn’t have seemed possible. It got worse. Churchill again, ‘Russia’s worst misfortune was Lenin’s birth…their next worst – his death.’
Where’s that leave things? Well, 1) a strong recommendation to go on Margarita’s walk if you can make it tomorrow, Saturday, September 21st. And if you can’t, well, try and catch it the next time she runs it. I’ll be back here cometh that hour. I want to revisit this subject from a different angle. An extraordinary angle. More than an angle. A connection. The Russian Revolution – Kensington connection. Stay tuned.
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.