London Calling: Changing Gear

London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.

Yesterday I promised you an announcement.

A rather important announcement, as it happens.

And an unusually personal one.

So here goes.

We’re now closing in on 2,000 episodes of London Calling, the London Walks podcast.

And along the way, we’ve had two very long runs of consecutive daily editions.

The first was four or five years ago. Four hundred and twenty consecutive days. Not a day missed.

And now we’ve just completed another extraordinary run.

Five hundred consecutive days.

Five hundred! One every single day. No days off. No holidays. No Sundays off. No Christmas off. Five hundred days in a row.

Which brings me to something rather pleasing.

The letter D.

D for David.

D for Daily.

D for 500 in Roman numerals.

And D for a new Direction.

There we are. We’re not 3-D. We’re 4-D!

And that fourth D is what today’s announcement is all about.

But first, another milestone.

We’ve recently passed half a million listens.

Half a million!

I find that number almost impossible to imagine. I know what twenty people look like. Twenty people on a London Walk. I can see their faces. Talk to them. Answer their questions.

But 500,000 listens? That’s a rather different kettle of fish.

Especially when you consider that Mary and I run London Walks off our kitchen table.

That’s quite a reach for a kitchen table.

And the remarkable thing is where some of those listeners are.

There’s a lovely bloke who works for NASA in Huntsville, Alabama. He gets his daily dose of London from us.

There’s a lady in Fort Worth, Texas, who listens while she’s doing the housework.

A young doctor in west London who tunes in during her lunch break.

And Pamela in Canada. Pamela, who, along with a certain Harvard professor in Massachusetts, would most certainly be on the Board of Directors of London Walks. Were we to have such a thing.

And that’s not to mention the handful of listeners in Japan and Spain and Poland and Denmark and India and China and Iran and Israel and Chile. And points further afield.

Still waiting for someone to tune in from Antarctica.

Come on, Antarctica. What’s keeping you?

And me? I’m sitting here at our kitchen table in London, talking into a microphone.

Somehow, out of that, we’ve made a little community.

People I’ve never met. People I know. People who have London in their lives in all sorts of different ways.

And I find that extraordinarily touching.

Because it’s one thing to send your voice out into the world.

It’s quite another to discover that somebody, somewhere, is actually listening.

So thank you. All of you.

Now, about that fourth D. That new direction.

London Calling isn’t going away. Far from it.

But the daily editions are coming to an end.

Instead, we’re going weekly.

Every Saturday. At midday.

And the new programme will be longer. Something like 25 to 30 minutes.

And different.

I’m thinking of it as a London magazine. A weekly audio magazine about this extraordinary city.

A London person. Famous, forgotten, celebrated, notorious. The great and the good. And sometimes the decidedly not so good.

A London place. A street, a building, a square, a corner of London with a story to tell.

An anniversary. Something that happened in London, perhaps centuries ago, on one of the days of the week.

An interview. Often with one of our wonderful London Walks guides. But not always. Perhaps someone who works in an interesting London institution. Someone with an unusual job or hobby. Or even a visitor who’s got a story to tell.

And a word that I’ve drawn a bead on. What it means today. Where it came from. What it meant originally. The strange journeys words take through the centuries.

Perhaps a little London news. Something new. Something that’s vanished. Something that’s changing.

And, whenever I can manage it, a wild card. A delightful oddity. Something that makes you say, ‘Well, I never knew that!’

So there we are. A little of this. A little of that. A whole lot of London.

Now, why the change?

Well, producing a podcast every single day is quite an undertaking.

You finish one, put it to bed, and there’s the next one standing at the door, tapping its foot, looking at its watch.

Sometimes I want to spend longer with a story. Dig a little deeper. Check another source. Follow another lead. Make another telephone call. Sometimes a story needs room to breathe.

I want to do a bit more reading, too.

I rather fancy rereading all of Dickens. Every last word. From The Pickwick Papers to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The whole magnificent procession.

And I rather fancy doing a bit more swimming.

At the moment, I’m using my Virgin Active membership so infrequently that, by my reckoning, each swim is costing me something like £160.

A hundred and sixty pounds!

At that price, I’d expect the pool to be filled with champers.

And I want to spend a lot more time out and about in London. Microphone in hand. Meeting Londoners. Talking to people. Finding out what makes this extraordinary city tick.

You can’t do much of that when you’ve got another podcast to produce before midnight.

And there’s something else. A larger consideration.

You see, London Calling is, in a sense, the sidecar attached to the motorcycle.

The motorcycle is London Walks. The business Mary and I have spent so many years building. The walks, the guides, the customers. The whole wonderful enterprise.

The podcast is the sidecar.

And somehow, somewhere along the road, the sidecar has pretty much taken over my life.

Not the running of London Walks, I hasten to add. Mary, Fiona, Peter and Naimh have been keeping the motorcycle on the road, thank goodness.

But as far as my own involvement goes, I’ve been so busy trying to steer the sidecar that I haven’t been giving the motorcycle nearly as much attention as I should.

And that’s something I want to put right.

Not by abandoning the sidecar. I love the sidecar.

But by spending a little less time in it. And getting my hands back on the handlebars of the motorcycle.

And I want to keep enjoying the podcast. Because I do enjoy it. Enormously. The research. The discoveries. The pleasure of finding something I didn’t know yesterday and sharing it with you today.

I don’t want that pleasure to become a treadmill.

So, instead of seven short podcasts a week, one longer, richer, more varied edition.

And I hasten to add, that doesn’t mean there won’t be the occasional extra.

Indeed, there’s going to be one tomorrow.

Because tomorrow, November 8th, is an important anniversary in London’s literary history. On that day in 1623, Shakespeare’s First Folio was entered in the Stationers’ Register.

And that’s a story I’m certainly not going to let pass without  London Calling flagging it up.

And I think there’ll be another one on Monday.

After that? Who knows?

Maybe the next one will be our first Saturday magazine edition, on November 14th.

Or perhaps something irresistible will come along on Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Or Thursday.

That’s the beauty of the new arrangement. If there’s a story crying out to be told, I can tell it. Without having to produce another one the following day.

And that raises a question. How are you going to know when one of those extras comes along?

Well, I’ve been thinking about that.

What about a little notification service? Would you be interested?

Just a short email whenever an unscheduled London Calling appears.

Something along the lines of, ‘Hello! Surprise! There’s a new London Calling podcast out. Hot off the press. Here’s what it’s about. Here’s where to listen.’

No daily emails. No cluttering up your inbox. Just a little tap on the shoulder when something new comes along.

If that appeals to you, I’d love to hear from you.

Go to the London Walks website, walks.com, and use the contact form to drop us a line. Just say you’d be interested in London Calling podcast alerts.

No commitment at this stage. I’m simply trying to find out whether there’s an appetite for it. And if enough of you say yes, we’ll get something organised.

Because I certainly don’t want to produce a surprise podcast and then have nobody notice it’s there!

So that’s the plan.

What I’m giving up is the obligation to produce a podcast every day. Not the pleasure of producing one.

And I think there’s something rather nice about having a regular appointment.

Saturday. Midday.

Settle down with a cup of coffee. Or tea. Take the dog for a walk. Go for a stroll. Put your feet up. Whatever suits you.

And come and spend half an hour in London.

Incidentally, I’ve already started putting together the first edition.

We’ll meet an Elizabethan poet who helped change the course of English literature. We’ll visit a remarkable City of London building. We’ll encounter a young John Keats and one of the most magnificent sonnets in the language.

We’ll investigate a couple of English words with truly extraordinary histories.

And, with a bit of luck, there’ll be an interview with somebody who knows a side of London most of us never see.

All that, and perhaps a surprise or two.

Saturday, November 14th. Twelve noon. All being well.

London Calling.

Still calling.

Still curious.

Still exploring the greatest city in the world.

Just taking a little more time to enjoy the journey.

And I very much hope you’ll come along for the ride.

See you… well, I was going to say, see you next Saturday. But that ain’t the case. It’s see you tomorrow.