London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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It’s Thursday, May 29th, 2025.
And so this one takes the hitting streak up to what, ten days in a row. Hitting streak, well, it’s a baseball metaphor isn’t it. The Yankee Clipper, Joe Dimaggio’s record-breaking 56-game hitting streak in 1941. For anyone who needs a translation, in the 1941 baseball season the New York Yankee outfielder Joe Dimaggio hit safely in 56 consecutive games. In other words, not once in those 56 games did the opposition get him out every time he came up to bat. It’s practically hallowed that record, it’s thought to be the most unbreakable record in baseball history. It was of course before my time but when it comes to mind I nowadays find it incredible that they having a fine old time over there – playing baseball, having a jolly American summer as if nothing was going on over here. And of course everything was going on here. This country – really pretty much all of Europe was locked in the death struggle of World War II. Joe Dimaggio’s 56-game hitting streak began on May 15, 1941. On June 22nd Dimaggio was 35 games into his 56-game hitting streak. He was just ten games away from breaking the standing record of 44 games, set by Willie Keeler in 1896. But when I think of Dimaggio hitting that home run against the Detroit Tigers on June 22nd, 1941 to extend his hitting streak to 35 consecutive games, I can’t but think that on that same day 6,000 miles away Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Those two events – that baseball game – wholesome, harmless, innocent, happy – taking place in the exact same time frame that Barbarossa – 10 million human beings locked in mortal combat – was getting underway – it’s one of those fuse-blowing mental juxtapositions.
And why have I been thinking about Joe Dimaggio’s hitting streak and counting what my current hitting streak is on this podcast, well, I suppose it’s because I wasn’t sure I was going to get this one today. My latest streak – a ten-day job – bites the dust. For the record, the record I set a few years ago, I can’t imagine I’ll ever get close to it again. It’s my Joe Dimaggio streak. I turned out one of these podcasts every day for some 420 consecutive days. It was that Today in London History sequence. That run, they’re all still here. An archive of them.
Anyway, thought maybe I wouldn’t get today’s done – end of this latest brief streak, this ten-day streak – because the last 48 hours have been really tough. Getting the latest newsletter out. It’s a big job, it always takes 20 to 30 hours to produce it. As a rule each of these podcasts takes three to five hours. So losing 20 to 30 hours to the newsletter, that’s like having a rug pulled out from under you. Anyway, time-wise, I may have hit the wall – but I’m going to make it. There’s going to be a London Calling podcast – this is part of it – for May 29th, 2025. The streak is alive and well.
And what we’re going to do today is put another bead on the string of the Literary London occasional.
Today – May 29th – was the 151st birthday of G. K. Chesterton. Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Man of letters. Novelist, essayist, poet, critic, journalist. And what a character. So if you’re not to speed with Chesterton, it’s time to remedy that. No better time. I did the Kensington Walk today and Chesterton figured in my afternoon. Both pre-walk and during the walk. I went in early to go see – and photograph – 32 Stafford Terrace, Chesterton’s boyhood, and where he was born. And when we went into St Mary Abbots, the parish church, I mentioned to the group that today was G. K. Chesterton’s birthday and that in fact he got married in this very church. So who was G. K. Chesterton and why do we – should we – remember him. Well for starters, apart from George Bernard Shaw – who’s also got a cameo role on my Kensington Walk – apart from George Bernard Shaw G. K. Chesterton is still the most quoted 20th-century writer. But here’s the thing, he’s usually quoted without acknowledgement. And if you think about it, that’s a good measure he’s entered this country’s consciousness. It’s a curious thing, Chesterton’s influence has been enormous but nearly all his books are out of print. His was a one-of-a-kind mind. So versatile, so creative, so inventive. He was interested in just about everything. His range was enormous. And he could really turn a sentence. It’s no exaggeration to say he was one of the most stimulating and much-loved twentieth-century authors.
And what a personal life. The child is the father of the man and you can’t do better than start with his biographer Bernard Bergonzi’s one-sentence crystallisation of his childhood. Bernard Bergonzi says “he was a dreamy, absent-minded, untidy child, and he preserved these attributes throughout his life.” Didn’t speak until he was nearly three. Didn’t read until he was eight. Genius dances to its own tune, timing-wise. He went to my alma mater (to use the American expression). University College London. And he also studied at the Slade School of Fine Art.
He certainly wasn’t a late developer in the matter of his literary career. His output – starting in his 20s – was prodigious. He made his name initially as a reviewer and essayist. But there were also two collections of poems and a study of Robert Browning. And he was just getting going. In 1904 he published his first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. It was followed in 1908 by The Man Who Was Thursday. Both books were strange and original fantasies, but fantasies based on serious ideas. Then in 1911 he gives us the first of the Father Brown stories. Father Brown, one of the most famous of literary detectives. Father Brown is, of all things, a little Roman Catholic priest of little note. Or so he appears to be. Sort of a Clark Kent of the cloth. But in actual fact Father Brown has a first-class mind and yes formidable powers of observation. And sure enough, he’s seen deeply into human nature and especially the criminal mentality compliments of the confessional booth.
Father Brown’s creator most certainly was not of little note.
He’d been a slender youth but there was a grossly fat man inside trying to get out. And he did get out. He became grossly overweight. In his cloak and wide-brimmed hat he was instantly recognisable. People thought of him as a latter-day Dr Johnson.
One of his biographers described him as ‘the fat man in the cloak and the brigand’s hat forever stopping for a pork pie and a beer while he scribbled yet another poem or article on his cuff or on the back of a sugar packet’.
Living in London – Fleet Street and all its temptations – well, Chesterton was like a kid in a sweet shop. His wife realised she had to get him away from London. She moved him Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire. But he was, as the specialists say, morbidly obese. He died quite young, in 1936. He had just turned 62. Died of heart and kidney failure.
Now for a petit four, let’s bring in a tray of his delightful writing. How about, “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”
Or, “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see”
Or, “There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.”
Or, “If there were no God, there would be no atheists”
Or “The reason angels can fly is because they take themselves lightly.”
I think my favourite, though, is, “Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
I particularly like Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Here it is.
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 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.