London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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Top of the morning to you, London Walkers, wherever you are.
It’s Thursday, June 5th, 2025.
This puts it so well. “A writer whose language truly possesses its subject is often powerfully attracted to place. In Mrs Dalloway London itself is almost a character. Woolf shows us here that where we live is one of the ways of understanding who we are.”
That’s Carol Ann Duffy, the Scottish poet and playwright. And former Poet Laureate. Her ten-year term as Poet Laureate expired in 2019. Carol Ann Duffy goes on to say, “Mrs Dalloway is a vivid reminder to us, should we need one, that some of our best poets have written in prose.”
A poet who’s a novelist who helps us better understand a place which in turn helps us understand who we are. Them’s rich pickings. But what’s best of all is when you can go to the actual place book in hand. See what Virginia Woolf saw. See what her character Mrs Dalloway saw. See how Virginia Woolf transformed it. Navigate via the stars of detail. Take a really good look at those particulars, savour them. Because it’s the details that yield up, make it possible for us to understand the essential.
And so, yes, I’m making the case for going on a walk that’s about one novel. One very great novel. One novel that’s about one day in London. One day in London as experienced by an upper-class English woman named Clarissa Dalloway. You can think of Clarissa as the concert pianist. The orchestra is the other characters in the novel; the music they make is their experience of London. And there’s one more telling point to be made here. I’m going to make it by quoting the first line of one of Emily Dickinson’s greatest poems…
“There’s a certain slant of light…”
It’s winter afternoons that Emily Dickinson has in mind… Whereas I’m thinking of Summer mornings.
Two very different slants of light. But they both get us where we want to go.
The roll out, the first eight and half lines of the Emily Dickinson poem read:
There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –
None may teach it
What Dickinson is saying is that “certain Slant of light” is everything, it’s where the Meanings are, it’s the master at getting those Meanings across, getting them into us.
Now it’s being summer I’d want to rephrase, ever so slightly, the Dickinson poem.
I’d have it read, There’s a certain Slant of light,
Summer mornings –
That recaptures the first fine careless rapture…
I’ve done some grafting there, haven’t I. That last line is Robert Browning’s. But if you know Virginia Woolf’s novel you’ll see what a perfect fit it is.
And of course the last line of the Dickinson poem – “where the Meanings are” – is right for whichever Slant of light is in play, summer or winter.
So at no little risk of belabouring the obvious, we walk the walk when Mrs Dalloway walked it – that certain slant of light on a Wednesday morning in mid-June is, dare I say it, our holy grail. That and what Mrs Dalloway hears: “Big Ben… There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.” We hear it when she hears it: 10 am. And I’ll aim to get the timing right so when it strikes 11 – which she also hears – we’re standing in the place where she heard it strike 10 – we’ll be standing on the kerb at Victoria Street, in front of Westminster Abbey.
What else? Well, Mrs Dalloway goes for her walk on a Wednesday morning in mid-June in 1923. The two Wednesdays in mid-June in 1923 were June 13th and June 20th. It’s been much pored over which Wednesday it was. You can make a case of either of them. That’ll be some of the scholarly ground that we cover – which Wednesday was it? And just to be on the safe side, we run the walk on both Wednesdays that fall in mid-June.
What makes this summer’s two outings doubly special, though, is this year, 2025, is the centenary of the publication of Mrs Dalloway. It was published on May 14th, 1925.
So we’ll be getting something this summer that won’t come round again. At least not for a hundred years.
In one word, Hatchards. Hatchards, London’s oldest and classiest bookshop. Mrs Dalloway goes there on her walk. Is given pause by something she sees in the window at Hatchards.
And full marks to them, Hatchards, to mark the occasion, have got this summer – and this summer only – a Mrs Dalloway window display.
We’ll take a good look at it. And it gets better. Because Hatchards have published a special limited edition of Mrs Dalloway for The Hatchards Library. 2,000 of them. Why 2,000? Because the first print run of Mrs Dalloway was 2,000 copies. I’ve got my copy of that limited edition. Mine is no. 1600. So a copy of that limited edition would make a brilliant gift to any friend who suffers from an incurable case of that best malady of them: bibliomania. Or indeed a brilliant gift to yourself, for your bookshelf.
I normally bring along to the walk two editions of Mrs Dalloway. This summer it’ll be four editions. My two working editions, my copy of The Hatchards Library limited edition, and my copy of the centenary edition based on the original Hogarth Press edition.
That’s going to be fun for my walkers to hold – get the heft of – look at. And indeed be photographed with, should they so desire. The dust jacket features the original cover created by Virginia Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, for the Hogarth Press. It’s a beautiful book. Beneath the cover, your eyes will feast on ‘deep rust’ boards printed in gilt. Exactly what people who bought one of those first 2,000 copies in 1925 ran their eyes over when they slipped the dust jacket off.
And it’s the same typesetting style as the original Hogarth Press edition. And it’s held to the original punctuation and spelling features. Everything to be said for it. And especially for holding it, looking at it, standing where Mrs Dalloway stood, in front of Hatchards, in a certain slant of light on a Wednesday in mid-June.
Well, I think the chances are pretty good that there’ll be another Mrs Dalloway podcast in the next day or so.
Another Mrs Dalloway podcast because, as Henry James put it, “There is only one recipe – to care a great deal for the cookery.” The cookery that produces the dish that is that walk has got better, has got some new ingredients, since the last time the walk was walked. It’s got better because the novel’s important – important generally and important to me – and because I care a great deal for the cookery.
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.