London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Fore! Yes, you heard right. A straight lift from the game invented by God to punish guys who retire early. AKA the game called golf because all the other four letter words were taken. Fore of course is the shouted warning that here comes my shot, don’t let it bean you. And it’s Fore! today – August 12th, 2024 – because, flying off the tee, is the hottest day of the year, so far. Temperatures are going to get up into the mid-30s.
That’s 93 degrees Farhenheit, for anyone who still hasn’t cottoned on to Celsius. That’s hot. That’s our pin for today. Fore! You have been warned.
Now as for a Random, a personal detail to get us started. I’m off to the dentist later today and when I’m there in the waiting room I’ll be thinking, so this was what the eighteenth century was like. Chairs in a room then we’re like chairs in a waiting room today. They were pushed up against the walls. They weren’t adrift in the middle of a room. And why was that? Had to do with how dark houses were. There was no electric lighting. The lighting they had – candlelight – was a sorry affair indeed. The light yield from a good candle, a top-of-the-line candle, was about one percent of the light you get from a single 100 watt bulb. So houses were seriously dark.
Positioning chairs against the walls of those shrouded in darkness rooms made domestic navigation easier. Made it easier to walk through those dark rooms without coming a-cropper, having a head-on collision with a chair and taking a tumble.
A chair that wasn’t safely off to the side, its back to a wall, would have been a booby trap in those days.
Ok, Ongoing. We’re going to drink another draught from my prized new possession – my friend Tom’s wonderful gift. A magical little book titled Reynolds New Map of London and Visitors Guide. I rub my hands in glee at that adjective “New.”
It was new in 1853. The rule of thumb is you get a new generation every 25 years. So 1853, that’s seven generations ago.
More to the point, though, and oh my god is this up my street, 1853 is exactly midstream in Dickens’s career. And as some of you know, I’m in this country because of Charles Dickens. Did my PhD on Dickens at the University of London. That all kicked off in 1973. Maybe one day I’ll tell the story of my first hour – literally my first hour – in London. What happened, well, let me put it this way, it couldn’t have been more Dickensian. Couldn’t have been more appropriate. A fitting start to my London life. And for that matter, Dickens was my entree to London Walks. Ian, who owned London Walks at the time, this was 1980 didn’t want an American guide. But I knew something about Dickens. Knew a fair bit about Dickens. And London Walks does a lot of Dickens Walks. So that was how I got my foot in the door. And ten years later Mary and I took the company over.
So I’m holding in my hand right now a little book that Dickens must have seen, might well have owned himself. And yes, it’s publication date, 1853, puts it exactly midstream in Dickens’ literary career. His first novel, Pickwick Papers, was published in serial parts, beginning in 1836. Seventeen years later gets us to 1853 and the publication of Reynolds New Map of London and Visitors Guide. 1853 is the hinge year. Because 17 years later – 1870 – Dickens is at work on his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Which he doesn’t complete. Because he dies that year.
So this little guidebook is a snapshot, so to speak, of the London of 1853. It’s a fascinating read. Some of it is our London, still with us, recognisable today. But other bits and bobs of it are bygone London. London then. But not now.
But it’s not a simple dichotomy of either lost London or fragments of the past that are still with us today.
There are some wonderful gray areas. Matters that tease us out of thought, if I may borrow Keats’ great line.
I’m thinking about that excerpt we looked at yesterday – the guidebook’s Advice to Strangers, as its subheading put it…in particular its warning that visitors needs must be vigilant and circumspect in their conduct lest they become the prey of some of the swarms of knaves who are constantly on the lookout for the unwary.
Well, how’s that French expression put it, the more things change, the more they stay the same. People today – Londoners and visitors – are constantly being warned about phone thieves. We’re told you need to be vigilant – be aware of what’s going on around you when you’re using your phone. They can swoop just like that and snatch your phone on your hand. Last year 143 phones a day were stolen. That’s roughly one phone every ten minutes.
The language is a little dated but people who have their phone snatched out of their hand or lifted from their back pocket are the prey of some of the swarms of knaves in 2024 who are constantly on the lookout for the unwary. Take a bow 1853. You’re alive and well in the London of 2024.
And a day or two ago London Calling – this podcast – stopped by the London Museum, touched down on its rebranding and renaming and indeed it’s forthcoming relocation. Its relocation to Smithfield, the old meat market. Which of course is being done up in preparation for being the new home of the London Museum. But here’s the thing, that wonderful old building – which is being repurposed, getting a new lease of life as the new home of the London Museum, it wasn’t there in 1853. It didn’t come along until the 1860s. And when it did come along it was a completely different cup of tea from what had been there before. It was a meat market. The Smithfield Market it replaced – the Smithfield Market that was there in 1853 – was a livestock market.
And so naturally I wanted to see what my 1853 guidebook had to say about the Smithfield Market of its day.
Turns out the guidebook has a subheading called Markets.
It lists four of them: Covent Garden, Smithfield, Leadenhall, and Billingsgate.
Here’s what it says about Smithfield:
SMITHFIELD, for cattle, sheep, etc., which are brought from all parts of the country. The average number of cattle brought here annually is 270,000; 1,600,000 sheep and lambs; 25,000 pigs; 185,000 oxen. Market days for cattle: Monday and Friday. For hay and straw, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
And let’s be frank, the animals were slaughtered there.
There were 4,000 butchers in London. There were 20,000 milk cows in London. London was a barnyard. And, yes, there’s still trace evidence. What springs immediately to mind is that street just along from Smithfield. It’s called Cowcross Street.
But Dickens is the linchpin here. I’m here because of Dickens. To be perfectly frank, the wellspring for this podcast – and indeed for London Walks in its present incarnation – is Charles Dickens. In a very real sense Dickens made all this happen. So let’s end with Dickens’ description of Smithfield on market morning. This passage from his novel Oliver Twist.
It was market-morning. The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire; a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above. All the pens in the centre of the large area, and as many temporary pens as could be crowded into the vacant space, were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen, three or four deep. Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a mass; the whistling of drovers, the barking of dogs, the bellowing and plunging of oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every public-house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping, and yelling; the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses.
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.