London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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Good morning from London. It’s July 23rd, 2024.
Ok, today’s pin, let’s lift the glass of this podcast to London’s pubs. You’ve been doing this as long as I’ve been doing it, you’ve got a long view, you’ve got some perspective. I well remember 30 years ago on my Along the Thames Pub Walk wowing my walkers with the factoid that London fielded a team of 10,000 pubs. If you went to a different pub every day it would take 30 years to make the rounds. A 30-year pub crawl. Imagine the condition you’d be in if you wandered in that wilderness for 30 years. Start as a boyish, fresh-faced youth of 20-something and 30 years later stagger into the promised land of the 10,000th pub as a pink-cheeked little old man.
Anyway, the pin is we live in fallen times. There are nothing like 10,000 pubs in London these days. These days it would be a quick ten-year wander in the wilderness. We’re down to a mere 3,500 pubs. And in case you’re wondering, the greatest concentration of them is in Westminster. There are just over 400 pubs in the borough of Westminster. Remember, for administrative purposes London is divided into 32 boroughs and pub-wise Westminster is making the running. The London borough that is most parched for pubs is Barking and Dagenham. Your pub crawl there would be a three-week affair. One pub a day, three weeks gets you to every watering hole in Barking & Dagenham.
Thus speaketh the burning bush of London Walks.
Moving on. Today’s random. Let’s do some London wildlife.
When I guide our Old Westminster walk I always shed some light on Edward the Confessor’s coat of arms. It’s a gold cross and five little gold birds on a blue shield. Some people are doves but no, they’re martlets, a mythical bird without feet. A bird that doesn’t have any feet is a bird that has to keep going. And it was a perfect symbol for Edward the Confessor. He was so holy, so upright, he was practically levitating. And he was always questing, always trying to get closer to God. Now it turns out that the inspiration for the mythical martlet was the real-life feathers and fork-tailed Swift. In Katherine Rundell’s lapidary phrase, the Swift is sky-suited like no other bird. Rundell says – what fascinating stuff this is – “Swifts do have legs, albeit tiny weak ones. Adult swifts can walk if they absolutely have to, but younglings can’t, and, if all goes well, do not need to. They tip themselves from the nest and fly straight to Africa, some not alighting again for ten months, some for two years or four, and a few never stopping at all….A swift flies about 200,000 kilometres a year; the Earth has a circumference at the equator of 40,075 kilometres; so a swift flies far enough each year to put five girdles round the Earth.” And why are the martlets gold on Edward the Confessor’s coat of arms? They’re gold to match the sun they fly after.
You see, no dross on a London Walk. We fetch up gold for you.
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Here endeth today’s Random.
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And so we come to our Ongoing. It’s High Summer now. We’ve come to the end of what we as guides call the Two Bottle Season.
That’s two bottles, as in two bottles of water. Which is what savvy guides carry on every walk in late May, all June and the first part of July.
Two bottles of water because of the pollen from London plane tree. The pollen is invisible to the eye, minute threads, each of them fitted out with spikes. They get into your throat, hook themselves onto your voice box and suddenly you can’t make a sound. Your lips and mouth are moving but there’s no sound coming out. And latched on, hooked on to your voice box with those tiny spikes, they’re very difficult to dislodge. You often cough your head off to no avail trying to shift them. What works best is a deluge of water down your throat. Ergo the two bottle supply savvy guides carry with them.
But now a word about the London Plane, which in every other respect is the most wonderful tree. Being a Yank, I call them the Sequoias of London. They’re almost indestructible. The Planes in Lambeth Gardens are 300 years old. Ditto the stately old fellow in Greenwich’s Old Royal Naval College courtyard.
Other London trees won’t even make it to the century mark.
Why does the Plane do so well in London? It’s perfectly adapted to London conditions, that’s why.
Its leaves have a protective waxy epidermis. Its roots are perfectly adapted to the clay that is the London soil. Most important of all, though, the London Plane sheds its bark. London, like every city, is not full of fresh pure country air. It’s a dirty city. The dirt and pollution gets into the Plane’s bark and then the bark comes off. The pollutants don’t get into the tree’s vascular system, so to speak. So apart from its spiky pollen, the London plane has everything to recommend it. It eats pollution. It provides shade. It keeps our city cool. Its emerald green is pleasing to the eye. As is the mottled, palamino pattern of the shedding bark on its trunk. You even have to compliment it on its branching policy. Its branches aren’t low-hanging. They’re not oppressive. They don’t weigh down on us. It branches high in the sky, creating, well above our heads, a perfect canopy. Its spiky pollen excepted, there’s everything to like about the London Plane.
And in case you’re wondering, the tree’s a hybrid, a combination of an American Sycamore and an Oriental Plane. And it made its debut, first pitched up here, in London, several hundred years ago. Ergo its name, the London Plane.
Given my background, whenever I spend some time in the company of a London Plane, I see all of that of course but I also hear the songs the tree has inspired. There’s an allusion to the Plane in Keats’ great poem To Autumn. It puts in a couple of appearances in Virginia Woolf’s great novel Mrs Dalloway. On the Mrs Dalloway’s London walk I’m guiding in a couple of weeks we’ll look at same Plane trees Mrs Dalloway looked at when she went for her walk on that June day in 1923.
And finally, there’s Amy Levy’s poem, A London Plane-Tree.
Yesterday, I introduced a new, occasional strand to the London Calling podcast. Said from time we’d work into the weave a great bit of London writing. London as seen, as set down, by its finest writers.
Call it the fair wind and following sea to send the London Walks podcast on its way.
That Zephyr, that gentle puff of a westerly, sail-filling wind for today’s London Calling podcast is Amy Levy’s poem.
A London Plane-Tree
Green is the Plane-tree in the square,
The other trees are brown;
They droop and pine for country air;
The Plane-tree loves the town.
Here from my garret-pane, I mark
The Plane-tree bud and blow,
Shed her recuperative bark,
And spread her shade below.
Among her branches, in and out,
The city breezes play;
The dun fog wraps her round about;
Above, the smoke curls grey.
Others the country take for choice,
And hold the town in scorn;
But she has listened to the voice
On city breezes borne.
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.