London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
So, from London – a very good morning to you. It’s August 16th, 2024. Today’s pin… what do you say, I think we better find out what’s in the London piñata today. You know piñata, that Mexican celebration. They fill a paper mâché container with sweets, have a bash at it with a stick, and the goodies come tumbling out. To the delighted shrieks of the kiddiewinks, young and old. Well, in the August 16th London piñatá we’ve got an anniversary. It was this day in 1897 that the Tate Gallery opened. So if you’re off to the Tate today with a pal, you can impress ‘em with a choice factoid. “Hey, we’re off to the Tate today, would you like to know why this is a very special day in the history of the Tate?”
Now as for a Random, I think what’s called for is Fleur Adcock’s wonderful poem, Leaving the Tate. It’s poetic perfection. Correction, it’s London poetic perfection. Because it’s about London and living in London. The Tate, London, those are the integuments of the poem but deep inside it’s about being a human being, being alive. In my personal London poems Olympics, this poem’s got a medal round its neck. It’s a winner. Fleur Adcock is 90 this year. She’s a New Zealander. A transplanted New Zealander because she’s a consummate, a dyed-in-the-wool Londoner. If you don’t know her work, you should. If you’re going to buy one book of poems this decade, my flat-out recommendation – my gold medal recommendation – would be, make it Fleur Adcock’s Collected Poems.
Coming out with your clutch of postcards
in a Tate gallery bag and another clutch
of images packed into your head you pause
on the steps to look across the river
and there’s a new one: light bright buildings,
a streak of brown water, and such a sky
you wonder who painted it – Constable? No:
too brilliant. Crome? No: too ecstatic –
a madly pure Pre-Raphaelite sky,
perhaps, sheer blue apart from the white plumes
rushing up it (today, that is,
April. Another day would be different
but it wouldn’t matter. All skies work.)
Cut to the lower right for a detail:
seagulls pecking on mud, below
two office blocks and a Georgian terrace.
Now swing to the left, and take in plane-trees
bobbled with seeds, and that brick building,
and a red bus…Cut it off just there,
by the lamp-post. Leave the scaffolding in.
That’s your next one. Curious how
these outdoor pictures didn’t exist
before you’d looked at the indoor pictures,
the ones on the walls. But here they are now,
marching out of their panorama
and queuing up for the viewfinder
your eye’s become. You can isolate them
by holding your optic muscles still.
You can zoom in on figure studies
(that boy with the rucksack), or still lives,
abstracts, townscapes. No one made them.
The light painted them. You’re in charge
of the hanging committee. Put what space
you like around the ones you fix on,
and gloat. Art multiplies itself.
Art’s whatever you choose to frame.
Moving on, today’s Ongoing. This one’s going to be an unashamed plug for a new walk.
Partly because I’ve had my head down the last 24 hours producing and pushing out of the nest the mid-month London Walks newsletter. And partly because of the pas de deux I did yesterday with one of the all-time great London neighbourhoods, my beloved Kensington. And partly because I fell amongst thieves with yesterday’s podcast. Got sucked down – very agreeably so – into the whirlpool of London 100 years ago. In effect, I dropped by my 1924 London newsagent and browsed through pretty much every Times and Telegraph that month. That sure postponed the launch of yesterday’s podcast. It didn’t go out until nearly midnight last night.
So much for the “partlys.” The main reason I’ve got the gavel in my hand and am doing my auctioneer number is the individual lot that’s come up today. The new walk, I mean. Alison’s Bankside, Brothels & the Bard. The timing’s right, it debuts tomorrow, Saturday, August 17th. But most important of all, this is one special piece. One special walk. It’s got it all. Starting with a 17th-century skyscraper. The Monument to the Great Fire. You could call it an hors d’oeurve. But it’s an hors d’oeuvre that’s a feast in itself. A visual feast. Alison will unpack that extraordinary relief carving on the west panel of the Monument’s pedestal. What all those figures signify. She wrings the meaning out of them. It’s like drinking nectar. It’s only a couple of minutes but it’s an education. Then it’s big picture stuff: over London Bridge, over the Thames. Fantastic views. And having crossed over, well, it’s a banquet, a smorgasbord. Shakespeare of course. But there’s that glancing aside to the very spot where English poetry began, where John Gower picked up a quill pen over 600 years ago and wrote a line of verse, in English. And so it was off to the races. Standing there where that happened, if that doesn’t move you, forgive me, but something’s missing. A course correction’s called for. And then it just cascades. The church where Shakespeare’s brother is buried. And where John Harvard was baptised. We think it likely that Shakespeare was present for the occasion. The replica of the Golden Hinde, the ship in which Drake circumnavigated the Globe. The palace where Henry VIII first set eyes on Catherine Howard. She was 15. He was old enough to be her grandfather. He weighed 400 pounds. He had suppurating sores. Just what every 15-year-old girl wants. He laid eyes on her coming through that door – we’re there looking at that very door – he laid eyes on her coming through that door and he said, “I’ll have that.” And then of course we’ve got the notorious prison whose name became the byword for all prisons. And a bit of seasoning there, the corpse in the gibbet. And there’s the opportunity to sit on what by my lights is the most special seat in London. Yes, even more special than the coronation chair. And here’s the thing – this gets me tingling with excitement every time – you can sit there and entertain the thought, “where I’m sitting, there’s a pretty good chance William Shakespeare sat here.” And of course there’s Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the first thatched roof building to be built in London since the Great Fire of London. And the stews, the brothels. There’s one of the oldest houses in London. There’s the actual site of the original Globe. And the site of the Rose. And the bear biting. And, yes, Borough Market.
If you’re even remotely sentient what you’re picking up on here is the astonishing variety on this walk. It may well be Numero Uno – the most stimulus rich walk in the London Walks repertory. Think of an art gallery that has over 500 paintings and there’s one painting that takes the honours. This walk has a pretty good claim to being that painting.
You want a bit more roll-out: there’s Chaucer, there’s London’s last remaining galleried coaching inn, there’s Dickens, there’s gambling dens, there’s hordes of history, on and on it goes. It’s a feast like no other. A very long table and it’s groaning with goodies every step of the way.
And finally – last but by no means least – it’s got a superstar guide. Alison. She’s an award-winning Blue Badge guide. She was so good that when she finished the course they immediately asked her to become the English Lit instructor on the Blue Badge course. Just as Oxford or Cambridge university will make their most brilliant graduate a fellow: they want him or her to stay on at the university. They don’t want to lose ‘em.
So there you go. The first one goes tomorrow, Saturday, August 17th at 2.30 pm from Monument Underground Station, the Fish Street Hill exit. This is your tap on the shoulder, you’ve been invited.
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.