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 22nd.
Coming your way now, yes, here it is – your daily London fix.
This one might have you rubbing your eyes for a minute wondering how’d I get here. Let’s see how long it takes for the penny to drop.
London wakes slowly that morning.
A bit grey.
A bit nippy.
One of those mornings
where the mist clings to the Thames
and the buses look like
great red beasts
lumbering toward Trafalgar Square.
You grab the papers and nothing leaps out. Just the usual political fray.
Profumo’s long shadow
still hanging about Westminster
like an unwanted guest.
Cabinet gossip.
A hint Macmillan’s health isn’t what it once was.
Harold Wilson sharpening his arguments like a man ironing his best shirt
for a coming showdown.
And the Beatles.
Of course the Beatles.
You can’t escape them.
They’re on the charts,
in the papers,
on the airwaves,
in the teenage bedrooms draped in scarves. She Loves You is still
everywhere you turn.
They haven’t conquered America yet
but the tidal pull is gathering.
And there’s something delicious about that.
A young president in Texas,
a young band in Liverpool,
and neither knows they’re about to switch places in the hierarchy of myth.
Londoners settle into their routines. Offices,
buses,
sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, shopping lists,
typewriters clacking.
You walk past bookshops
in Charing Cross Road
and the displays tell the story
of the season. John le Carré’s
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
is the sensation of the autumn.
Everyone’s talking about it.
A Cold War novel with real edges.
On another table
you spot Agatha Christie’s The Clocks, Söderberg’s translations,
a few battered copies of
The Feminine Mystique
for the earnest and curious.
If you’re a student
you might be clutching
Anthony Burgess or Günter Grass, pretending to understand all of it.
And the cinemas.
They’re buzzing.
From Russia With Love
is the hit of the moment.
Sean Connery
slipping through train carriages
and Istanbul bazaars
like a sleek mink in a dinner jacket.
Tom Jones is still packing them in
with its cheeky British chaos.
The Great Escape is
drifting into legend already.
Steve McQueen on that motorbike
is practically a national pastime.
And at home, telly.
Good old black and white telly.
Two channels. BBC and ITV.
That’s your lot.
No colour.
No remote.
No bingeing.
No late-night wasteland.
You watch what’s on.
And what’s on is very good.
Coronation Street holding the north. Steptoe and Son holding everything else. Z-Cars showing us a rougher,
more modern Britain.
And on Saturday nights a show that feels like it’s chiselling a new national mood: That Was The Week That Was.
Sharp. Satirical. Irreverent.
Here’s the delicious historical twist.
The very next day, November 23rd,
the BBC is due to premiere Doctor Who. They don’t know yet
that they’ll have to repeat the episode because something much bigger
is going to blow the schedule apart.
Back on the streets,
the international flavour of London
is subtle but real.
Heathrow is already humming with 707s, those sleek BOAC beauties
lifting off like something out of tomorrow. Flying feels glamorous,
rarefied, the domain of
smartly dressed professionals
and adventurous tourists.
But the ocean liners haven’t vanished.
The Queen Mary and
Queen Elizabeth are still
shouldering their way across the Atlantic. Southampton sees arrivals every week. Americans stepping off the gangplank clutching guidebooks
and wearing too much tweed,
bound for the West End or
the Tower of London or
afternoon tea at Fortnum’s.
London is a hinge between eras.
Half jet age,
half Edwardian ocean grandeur.
But let’s widen the frame for just a minute. Because we know we know what was coming. They didn’t.
If they thought about America that morning it would have been something along the lines of the old world fast fading, the new Kennedy world ablaze with all its vigour and youth and optimism and hope.
After all, it was just over a year earlier the great Eleanor Roosevelt had gone, and with her a whole political weather system seemed to drift off the map. For decades she had been the conscience of America, the one steady lantern you could rely on in the fog. And then suddenly she was not there. People were still getting used to the idea of America without a Roosevelt in the wings.
So when that vigorous, handsome young President settled into the White House with his sail-trimmed stride and his bright-eyed optimism, it felt like a changing of the guard. The New Deal generation – let alone Truman and Eisenhower – fading into sepia, the new generation stepping forward in full colour. A Roosevelt twilight giving way to a Kennedy morning. History’s great handover.
It must have felt like all change, all changed utterly, to borrow Yeats for a second. The old giants passing on. A new figure rising. A fresh script being written. And absolutely no one imagining that the new story was about to be torn in half. The mood at the time was all expectation. All promise. The sense that the river of history had found a lively new current.
Little did they know.
And across the world, there are other indications of bygone times loosening its grip.
Two great writers are slipping off the stage. C. S. Lewis in Oxford,
quiet and dignified.
Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles,
with his final request for LSD,
bowing out
in the most Huxley way possible.
Those departures would
both have been front-page news
on any other day of the century.
Vietnam?
The pot is boiling.
The coup against Diệm
just three weeks earlier
has left the country raw and unstable.
The Viet Cong are escalating.
American advisors
are sending nervous cables.
Kennedy’s own policy
is wobbling
somewhere between withdrawal
and deeper engagement.
The whole region feels like a lit fuse.
And London knows none of it.
You wander down Fleet Street at midday and the newsrooms
are winding down for the weekend. Reporters slipping out to the pub.
Sub-editors sharpening pencils.
The presses grumbling
their metallic lullabies.
Late afternoon.
A BOAC jet takes off from Heathrow in the fading light.
A Cunard liner steams quietly
along the English coast.
The pubs fill with the Friday crowd. Evening papers rustle.
And then, at 6.30 pm London time,
the world tips.
A bulletin
whispers into the BBC newsroom.
Shots fired in Dallas.
No details.
The first wire reports are
scrambled,
fragmentary,
maddeningly incomplete.
Editors shout. Teleprinters rattle like machine guns.
Radio anchors slide into their seats
with the dread of men
who know they’re reading history
before they’ve had time to understand it.
Londoners in pubs fall silent
as newsreaders clear their throats
and say the words
no one can quite believe.
Shots fired.
President Kennedy wounded.
And then, the hammer blow:
President Kennedy is dead.
Half the city stands stunned.
Westminster Abbey lowers its flag. Grosvenor Square fills with
dazed Londoners
placing flowers at the embassy gates. Black cabs idle
with radios murmuring inside.
Shop lights flicker strangely
in the gathering dark.
And all the trivialities
of the morning papers vanish like mist.
A day that began with Bond films
and bookshop browsing
and office gossip
ends with half the world grieving.
And the eerie, impossible thing is this:
for most of the day,
London was completely ordinary.
Utterly, beautifully, stubbornly ordinary.
A city humming in neutral.
A city with no idea t
hat history was already sprinting toward it with a gun in its hand.
That’s the shape of the story.
That’s the pulse of the piece.
A quiet London Friday in November,
November 22nd, 1963,
drifting along with its books
and films
and black-and-white telly,
unaware it was living through the last few hours of the thousand days.
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.