London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Top of the morning to you London Walkers, wherever you are. It’s Saturday, November 29th. And hot off the press, here it is, your daily London fix.
Here’s one you can impress your friends with.
Get them thinking,
his – or her – erudition –
it knows no bounds.
Ok, you ready?
Here we go.
Newspapers, remember them?
Those great rustling beasts of
ink and opinion.
Once the kings of the breakfast table. Before the internet.
Before rolling news.
Before doomscrolling.
Back when information arrived
with a thump on the mat and
left your fingers black.
So let’s wind the clock back.
Not a little.
A lot.
Back to 1814.
Late November.
And to a cramped,
noisy,
wonderfully filthy corner of London known as Printing House Square,
the home of The Times.
On this particular Saturday,
something astonishing is
about to happen.
A moment that changes
not only newspapers
but the entire engine of civilisation.
But before we go inside,
let’s take a stroll through London 1814.
It’s a city heaving with life.
The Napoleonic Wars are
limping to a close.
Soldiers with wooden legs hobble through Covent Garden
looking for work.
Sailors swagger along
Wapping’s wharves in search of
rum and trouble.
Hawkers shout themselves hoarse
in the streets.
Chimney sweeps pop up
like soot-covered jack-in-the-boxes.
The great frost has nipped fingers blue. And the air.
Ah yes, the air.
A perfume of horse dung,
coal smoke, river mud and
humanity,
shaken together
like a city-sized cocktail.
Gas lamps are only just
beginning to creep in,
so after dark the streets flicker
like a stage set lit
by a nervous apprentice.
The Prince Regent is
misbehaving flamboyantly in
Carlton House.
Theatre crowds pour out of Drury Lane. Hackney coaches rattle.
Pickpockets pounce.
The Thames rolls by
sullen and brown.
And if you listen closely,
you can hear London itself breathing. Hissing.
Muttering.
Plotting.
And tucked into all this
glorious chaos
is The Times of London,
already the heavyweight
of the British press.
Serious.
Influential.
Loud.
Not cheap either.
Sevenpence a copy.
That’s half a day’s pay for a labourer. The readership is clerks,
barristers,
merchants,
doctors,
grandees,
MPs,
bankers,
bishops.
Everyone else reads it in
coffee houses,
taverns and
club rooms
where one paper gets passed round
like a sacrament.
But here’s the big thing.
In 1814,
every single one of those copies is produced by human muscle.
Pressmen straining at
the great wooden presses.
Ink everywhere.
Sweat.
Swearing.
A fast pressman might
manage 250 sheets an hour if
the wind is behind him.
That’s what a newspaper is in 1814.
Hard graft.
Ink under the fingernails.
A craft that goes back to Gutenberg.
Until tonight.
Because on November 29th, 1814,
for the first time in world history,
a newspaper will
roll off the press
not by hand
but by steam power.
And the machine that does it
has been smuggled into the building
with all the secrecy of a royal mistress. Hauled in at night.
Bolted together behind locked doors. Hidden from the workforce
for fear the pressmen will panic,
riot or
simply smash it to pieces.
These are men with families to feed.
And steam,
to them,
is this eerie new presence.
A force that
could take the bread from their mouths. Steam in 1814 is
what the digital revolution is to us.
Brilliant.
Bewildering.
Unsettling.
A little bit frightening.
And the man behind
this mechanical marvel?
A German inventor called
Friedrich König.
He’s imagined a machine
that Londoners think
sounds like witchcraft.
A maze of glowing metal,
pistons,
rollers and
cylinders.
Almost alive.
When König shows
his plans
to the printing trade in Germany,
they laugh him out of the room.
Too radical.
Too dangerous.
So he heads to London.
As dreamers often do.
The Times owners listen to him.
And here’s the thing about The Times. Behind the high-minded editorials and righteous thunder,
they are absolutely obsessed
with one thing.
Speed.
Get the news out first and
you dominate the conversation.
Speed is power.
So König’s dream is irresistible.
He builds the machine in secret.
And on this November morning,
it’s ready.
Firing on steam.
Hissing like a caged dragon.
Let’s go inside.
It’s before dawn.
You can still see breath in the air.
The compositors have set the type
for today’s paper.
The forms are locked and ready. Normally the pressmen would
step up now,
rolling ink,
hauling the lever,
heaving those wooden presses
back and forth
like galley slaves.
But not today.
Because today,
König’s machine is
already running.
The pressmen walk in and freeze.
There it is.
This iron beast.
Thundering away.
One thousand sheets an hour
pouring out of it.
Not 250.
One thousand.
A stack of fresh newspapers
growing like a magic trick.
It inks itself.
Positions the type.
Moves the paper into place.
Makes the impression.
Ejects the printed sheet.
Resets itself for the next pass.
Almost without human touch.
You can imagine the
range of emotions.
Silence.
Shock.
Maybe admiration.
Probably some creative profanity.
John Walter II,
the editor,
gathers the men.
Reassures them.
No one is being thrown on the scrapheap. Not yet anyway.
But they should take in
what they’re seeing,
because history
just turned a page all by itself.
To mark the moment,
the paper includes a leading article
that tries to explain this miracle
to the readers.
Not in dry engineering terms,
but in grand,
Georgian flourishes.
Let me rephrase its heart.
It tells the public that
a new contraption has arrived.
A system so cleverly arranged
it behaves almost like a living creature. It lifts the heavy burden from the shoulders of men
and produces sheets with
a speed human hands can never rival. Once the type is set,
the machine does everything.
It inks,
it presses,
it withdraws,
resets and
advances at a pace
that seems almost supernatural.
A silent servant made of iron.
And they’re right.
This is the moment printing
becomes industrial.
The moment the news accelerates.
The moment the modern world begins.
What else is in
that November 29th issue?
Dispatches from Europe.
Napoleon rumours.
Letters to the editor.
Advertisements for miracle cures. Shipping news.
Parliamentary rows.
The usual cast of characters.
But running beneath every column is something new.
The Industrial Revolution
stepping into the newsroom.
Labour and management,
already jittery,
staring at the future.
And a quiet prophecy of what’s coming. Faster trains.
Steamships.
Cheaper paper.
Mass literacy.
The penny press.
Public opinion becoming a tidal wave instead of a trickle.
And today?
The Times has millions of digital readers around the world. Including this reader here in London.
It still prints thousands of
physical copies every night,
in colour,
at a speed König could
never have dreamed of.
But it all goes back to this day.
This hour.
This machine.
So here we are,
two centuries later,
strolling through London and
chatting about a morning
when a German inventor and
a group of startled pressmen
watched a machine clatter into life and pull the world behind it.
The machine age didn’t begin
in a factory.
It began in a newspaper office.
With steam.
And ink.
And a city that never sits still.
And that’s the story.
The day technology walked into
Fleet Street,
cleared its throat and
said: Gentlemen,
everything is about to change.
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 £25 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 Jack the 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.