London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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A very good evening to you, London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Monday, June 23rd, 2025.
Bit of a mixed bag tonight.
Weird the stuff you notice. Sort of like burrs that stick to your jacket. Moving through the bit of woods that is this day or that day in your life you brush by all kinds of burrs. Some of them stick. Most of them don’t.
And here’s the thing, the burrs that stick almost certainly say as much about you as they do about the bit of woods you’re moving through.
So, for me, today, Midsummer Eve, one of the burrs that stuck was that Telegraph story that was headlined, “Deadly fungus in Tutankhamun’s ‘cursed’ tomb can help fight cancer.”
It’s got it all, that story, that headline.
Another burr that stuck was the inscription on the gravestone of American Vietnam war veteran Gene Simmers. Gene Simmers was born in 1947, died in 2022. The inscription reads: “In memory of the elderly woman I killed in Vietnam. Forgive me. I’m so sorry.”
Now what I’m wondering is, that burr sticking on this day of all days, is there some sort of connection with what the newspapers are full of today? Descriptions of the American B-2 Spirit Stealth bombers making a 37-hour round trip from Missouri to drop 14 30,000 pound ’bunker busting’ GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs on nuclear sites in Iran. A weapon that can burrow through 196 feet of rock and earth before exploding. A weapon the charge of which releases a ‘destructive, kinetic punch at sonic speed’ that is capable of ‘collapsing a mountain.’ Bonbs that can collapse a mountain dropped yesterday and a young American soldier over half a century ago shooing dead an elderly Vietnamese woman and what he did preying on his mind for the rest of his life, if those two events are on the same spectrum they’re certainly out at either end of that spectrum. Be that as it may, I’m convinced that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The parts – the two events – are a world apart. By every measure: magnitude, distance, time, geo-political importance. – So I’m racking my brains trying to figure out what the catalyst was that so decisively fused them in mind. It’s a conjunction, a juxtaposition, that I’ve been thinking about all day. Could the catalyst have been the Iraqi foreign minister’s statement that what has happened will have everlasting consequences.
One thinks of that old Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times.” Earlier today I interviewed one of the brightest stars in the London Walks constellation, the retired lawyer – first a solicitor and subsequently a barrister – the retired lawyer David Gollancz. David’s in the process of creating what’s going to be a fascinating walk. It’s called 10 London Battles that Changed World History.
You’d have to be pretty obtuse not to wonder – and worry – are we on the brink – is this our Summer of 1914 – are we on the brink of yet another battle that’s going to change world history.
Ok, so much for the day’s main white noise. Except to say let’s hope and pray it doesn’t turn into red noise,
But, yes, moving on. This day, June 23rd is Midsummer Eve. So let’s escape from what’s going on today by going way back. Revisiting what this day means. And how people marked it in the pre-modern era. And, hold on to your hats, because those traditional Midsummer Eve activities, many of them are pagan in origin. Twenty, thirty, forty generations back Londoners and other people in these British Isles will have marked Midsummer Eve or Midsummer Night by dancing around and jumping through bonfires. Those bonfires weren’t just a bit of gaudy night fun. They had an important job to do. That job was to chase away dragons. What else? Well, on Midsummer Eve people also set about gathering branches and flower. to decorate their homes. And that wasn’t just a case of prettying things off. Those flowers and branches were also doing a job of work. They were warding off evil spirits. And, yes, the sap was running high. The forebears of these Brits also busied themselves performing rituals that enabled them to ascertain the identity of their future lover or spouse. Practically the whole of Great Britain was a light show. Right across the country bonfires were lit on hilltops and could be seen for many miles. Torches were lit from the bonfires and carried through the streets of London. Or, out in the sticks, through the fields and villages. And if your luck was in on Midsummer Eve you could make yourself invisible. Or so they believed. The invisibility catalyst was the seed of a certain fern. The seed was believed to only be visible on Midsummer Eve. If you were lucky enough to catch one as it floated to the ground – hey presto – you were invisible.
Ok, gear shift, hand brake turn, screech of wheels. We’re going to end Midsummer Eve by going to Warrington Lodge on Warrington Avenue in Little Venice. We’re dropping by on June 23rd, 1912. For the record, Warrington Lodge – it’s a swish hotel today – is where our Little Venice walk usually ends. Anyway, we’re pitching up there – sort of like the three wise men – pitching up there on this night in 1912 because a baby boy has just been born there. That baby boy will be christened Alan Mathison Turing.
Come thirty years later he’s going to do something that’s hugely important. He’s a mathematical and computer genius. He’s the key player at Station X – aka Bletchley Park, the English country house in Buckinghamshire that was the centre of the codebreaking operation during World War II. The genius loci of the Ultra Project, it was Turing who masterminded the cracking of the Enigma, the German cipher machine used to encrypt messages that went out to U-boats, the Luftwaffe, etc.
What Alan Turing did shortened the war and saved millions of lives.
Nobody – no general, no political leader – was more important to the outcome of World War II.
But it all ended so badly, so sadly. Alan Turing was a homosexual. He was persecuted. He committed suicide. Put some cyanide in an apple and took a bite.
Now it turns out that it’s not true that that bite out of the apple was the inspiration for the logo of Apple computers. But even knowing that it’s not true doesn’t rule the tale out of bounds. It’s an urban legend, the modern equivalent of an old wives’ tale. But it’s such a good yarn that it merits telling. That Alan Turing – the work that he did at Bletchley Park, the birthplace of modern computing – that Alan Turing’s biting into that cyanide-laced would reverb – in urban legend form – in the Apple logo on this computer, not least because it also chimed with Eve eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and indeed with the famous story of Isaac Newton and the falling apple…well, what’s not to like. Literally true it’s not. But hey, it’s figuratively true. And on Alan Turing’s birthday, that’s good enough for me, that passes muster. Happy birthday Alan Turing. Wherever you are.
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.
To my Lord’s in the morning, where I met with Captain Cuttance, but my Lord not being up I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy. It is said, that he said that he was sure to come shortly at the right hand of Christ to judge them that now had judged him; and that his wife do expect his coming again.
Thus it was my chance to see the King beheaded at White Hall, and to see the first blood shed in revenge for the blood of the King at Charing Cross. From thence to my Lord’s, and took Captain Cuttance and Mr. Sheply to the Sun Tavern, and did give them some oysters. After that I went by water home, where I was angry with my wife for her things lying about, and in my passion kicked the little fine basket, which I bought her in Holland, and broke it, which troubled me after I had done it.
Within all the afternoon setting up shelves in my study. At night to bed.