London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
Daily word time.
Yesterday we had a German prince.
Prince Albert.
So today…
let’s have a German gymnasium.
And let’s start with our word of the day.
Naked.
Yes.
Naked.
And what, you may reasonably ask, has naked got to do with that extremely handsome building next door to King’s Cross Station?
Everything.
But we’ll come to that.
First, the word.
Naked is one of the oldest words in the English language.
Old English had nacod.
Bare.
Unclothed.
Naked.
And it goes much further back than Old English.
Deep into the Indo-European past.
It has relatives all over the linguistic map.
German nackt.
Dutch naakt.
Old Norse nakinn.
Sanskrit nagna.
Even Latin nudus belongs to the family.
This is linguistic bedrock.
People have been saying versions of “naked” for thousands of years.
Which brings us to ancient Greece.
Because the Greek word for naked was gymnos.
And Greek athletes exercised…
naked.
From gymnos came gymnazein.
To exercise naked.
And from that came gymnasion.
A place where you exercised naked.
And eventually…
gymnasium.
So strictly speaking, every time you say, “I’m off to the gym”, you’re invoking a building full of naked Greeks.
You’re welcome.
And now let’s go to King’s Cross.
And I owe what follows to Christian Wolmar.
Railway historian.
Author of the magnificent Cathedrals of Steam.
And, I’m pleased to say, London Walks guide.
Thank you very much, Christian.
Because Christian told me something I didn’t know.
And now I know it, I’m never going to see a particular London building in quite the same way again.
Which reminds me of something Mary used to say about one of our guides.
I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember which guide it was.
She used to say:
“He knows things other people don’t know.”
And actually, thinking about it, that’s true of every London Walks guide.
They know things other people don’t know.
And that’s one of the reasons people go on London Walks.
It’s one of the reasons London Walks has a following.
You find out neat stuff.
Things you didn’t know.
Things you’re pleased to know.
Things that change the way you see London.
And that last point is important.
Because London hasn’t changed.
You have.
You walk past a building a hundred times.
It’s just a building.
Somebody tells you one thing about it.
And…
metamorphosis.
There’s another good word.
Greek again.
Meta.
Change.
Morphē.
Form.
A change of form.
The building metamorphoses before your very eyes.
Same bricks.
Same windows.
Same roof.
Completely different building.
So.
King’s Cross.
Think of the human tide that pours through there.
King’s Cross station alone clocks up something like 28 million passenger entries and exits in a year.
And right beside it is St Pancras.
So we’re talking about tens of millions of human movements through that little patch of London every year.
People arriving.
People departing.
People changing trains.
People heading for Paris.
People coming down from Edinburgh.
People going to work.
Coming home.
Meeting somebody.
Saying goodbye to somebody.
Millions upon millions of them.
And there, right under their noses, is this handsome Victorian building.
You’ve probably seen it.
Red brick.
Big arched windows.
High roof.
Very handsome.
A visual feast.
Some of those millions will notice it.
A smaller number will know what it’s called.
The German Gymnasium.
Which is itself a slightly surprising name.
German Gymnasium.
Sounds vaguely like a school in Düsseldorf.
But no.
It really was a gymnasium.
It was built in 1864 and 1865 for London’s German Gymnastics Society.
Britain’s first purpose-built gymnasium.
And London’s German community paid for it.
That’s worth pausing over.
Because London was already what London always is.
International.
Immigrant.
Cosmopolitan.
People arriving here and bringing ideas with them.
The man at the heart of this particular story was a German-born Londoner called Ernst Georg Ravenstein.
Geographer.
Cartographer.
Gymnast.
And one of the leading figures in the German Gymnastics Society.
Inside their magnificent new building were ropes.
Parallel bars.
Horizontal bars.
Fencing.
Wrestling.
Boxing.
Weightlifting.
Indian clubs.
Broadswords.
And women were exercising there as early as 1866.
But now comes the thing Christian Wolmar told me.
The thing I didn’t know.
The thing that made the building metamorphose.
Olympic Games were held there.
Yes.
Olympic Games.
At King’s Cross.
In 1866.
Thirty years before the first modern international Olympic Games in Athens.
Now.
Pedant’s corner.
These weren’t the Olympic Games as we know them today.
No five rings.
No Olympic flame.
No gigantic opening ceremony.
And the little town of Much Wenlock in Shropshire has an extremely important prior claim in the Olympic revival.
William Penny Brookes had been holding his Wenlock Olympian Games from 1850.
Liverpool enters the story as well.
But in 1865 Brookes joined forces with Liverpool’s John Hulley and London’s Ernst Ravenstein.
Together they established the National Olympian Association.
And the following year came the first National Olympian Games.
Where?
London.
Some events took place at Crystal Palace.
Swimming was held at Teddington.
And indoor events were staged right there…
in the German Gymnasium beside King’s Cross.
Gymnastics.
Fencing.
Victorian Olympians competing underneath that magnificent roof.
And suddenly…
there it is.
Metamorphosis.
Walk past the German Gymnasium yesterday and you saw a handsome Victorian building.
Walk past it today and you can see something else.
Victorian athletes.
Ropes hanging from the roof.
Fencers.
Gymnasts.
Spectators.
The German immigrant community.
Ravenstein.
Brookes.
Hulley.
The embryonic Olympic movement.
And this is 1866.
Thirty years before Athens.
Forty-two years before London staged the Olympic Games in 1908.
Eighty-two years before London staged them again in 1948.
A hundred and forty-six years before London 2012.
So no.
Let’s not plant a flag and announce:
“The modern Olympic Games were invented in London.”
That would be pushing our luck.
Much Wenlock would rightly have something to say about it.
Athens would have something to say about it.
Pierre de Coubertin would certainly have something to say about it.
But can we say that London was one of the great incubators of the modern Olympic movement?
I think we can.
And there’s another feather in London’s cap.
Because London would eventually become the first city in the modern era to stage the Olympic Games three times.
1908
1948
And 2012
But before all of those…
before Athens 1896…
before the rings…
before the flame…
before the Olympic Games became the colossal international spectacle we know today…
men were competing in National Olympian Games in a gymnasium beside King’s Cross Station.
And millions of people pass it.
Year after year.
Some notice it.
Some know its name.
A much smaller number know what it originally was.
And then we get down to a minuscule percentage who know about those Olympian Games.
And now…
you’re one of them.
That’s satisfying.
Deeply satisfying.
There’s a lovely expression for that feeling.
Something suddenly swimming into our ken.
And that takes us to John Keats.
Londoner.
Poet.
And his great sonnet On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.
Keats describes the extraordinary sensation of discovering something.
A whole new world suddenly opening up before you.
He compares it first to an astronomer seeing a new planet.
And then to the European discovery of the Pacific.
Cortez and his men staring out at this unimaginable ocean.
Looking at one another…
“with a wild surmise”.
Silent upon a peak in Darien.
Wonderful.
There is, admittedly, a small problem.
It wasn’t Cortez.
It was Balboa.
Pedant’s corner again.
Vasco Núñez de Balboa became the first European known to have seen the Pacific from the Americas when he crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513.
Keats got the explorer wrong.
But if you can write a sonnet that good, I think you’re allowed the occasional geographical and biographical and historic howler.
And obviously discovering the German Gymnasium’s Olympic past isn’t quite the same thing as being the first European to gaze upon the Pacific Ocean.
But the sensation belongs to the same family.
Something swims into your ken.
You stop.
You look.
Wild surmise.
You know something you didn’t know five minutes ago.
And the world looks slightly different.
That’s what knowledge does.
That’s what a good guide does.
A good guide is in the metamorphosis business.
Not changing London.
Changing the way you see London.
So next time you come out of King’s Cross…
look.
There it is.
The German Gymnasium.
Handsome Victorian building.
Britain’s first purpose-built gymnasium.
Built by London’s German community.
A place where Victorian men and women exercised.
And, in 1866, one of the venues for Britain’s National Olympian Games.
Yesterday it was just a handsome building.
Today?
Ravenstein.
Gymnasts.
Fencers.
Olympians.
Athens still thirty years away.
Same bricks.
Different building.
Metamorphosis.
Oh.
And one final thought.
If you go inside today, you can have lunch there.
Fully clothed.
Probably just as well.
But remember what gymnasium means.
Naked.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.