London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets Ahead.
Story time. History time.
And to get us started, a couple of wild cards. One of the greatest sporting shows on earth gets underway today. The Championships. The Fortnight. Or if you prefer, Wimbledon. The oldest tennis tournament in the world. And the most prestigious. And ever cleaving to that great London Walks principle, to see London you have to hear it, I thought, ok, let’s unpack the very name of the tournament. The tournament got started in 1877. So next year it’s 150 years old. A century and a half. Hoary with age, right? Well, actually, in the scheme of these things, it’s nothing compared to the name itself. As a name Wimbledon’s been jogging along for a millennium or more. It’s Anglo-Saxon in origin. The suffix – don – means hill. And the first part – the main part of the name – was a personal name. Fuse the two parts together and you get – this is a rough and ready translation – Wynnman’s Hill.
I suppose you could say Henman’s Hill, unwittingly, is a distant but recent echo.
And as long as we’re in SW19 how about some London lingo. At four to six Janik Sinner is the strong odds-on favourite to win this years Gentlemen’s Singles. Run that through the mill of London-speak – i.e., cockney rhyming slang – it would come out as something like Betting types are putting a national debt on Sinner to nose. Tommys of four to six. Let’s translate that. National debt is rhyming slang for bet. It’s rather good, that. The undercurrent of national debt for bet is saying gambling can seriously harm your bank balance. And nose means win. It’s short for nose and chin. It’s rhyming slang from the turf. A horse can win by a distance as short as a nose. And Tommys is cockney rhyming slang for odds. It short for Tommy Dodds. Tommys of ten thousand to one that you don’t know its back history. But, hey, this is London Walks, we get you up to speed on fun stuff that you didn’t have the foggiest about. You ready? Turns out there was a 19th-century coin-tossing game which spawned a music hall song with the lines; “Heads or tails are sure to win / Tommy Dodd, Tommy Dodd.” And, well, one thing led to another. Tommy Dodd became Tommy Dodds, which rhymes with odds. And then you just lop the rhyming word Dodds off, leaving you with Tommy. Make Tommy plural – Tommys. And there you’ve got it. Tommys. Odds. Sinner going to win this year’s Wimbedon. Well, his Tommys are four to six. He’s the safest national debt to nose.
Ok, moving on…
Time to serve up today’s main course.
Anyone for taking a good look at an old London gravestone?
Go on. Properly look at it.
Not the name. Not the dates.
Look at the pictures.
The skull.
The hourglass.
The anchor.
The cherub.
The crossed trumpets.
The weeping willow.
What if I told you those aren’t decorations?
What if I told you they’re a language?
A code.
A dead language, if you like. Though in this case that phrase lands a bit too well.
And once you crack it, once you know how to read it, London’s old churchyards change completely.
They stop being collections of stones.
They become conversations.
Messages from the dead.
That’s our subject today.
And it’s a beauty.
Because London’s old graveyards are full of them. Tiny stone-carved telegrams. Last words chiselled into symbols.
A skull doesn’t just mean “death.”
An anchor doesn’t just mean “anchor.”
Every mark means something.
And the thing about London is, it’s got layer upon layer of this stuff. Hundreds of years of grief, hope, fear, faith, love, vanity, theology, all compressed into little carved images.
It’s one of the great hidden literacies of the city.
You can walk through a churchyard and miss the whole thing.
Or you can know the code.
And suddenly it all lights up.
The skull and crossbones is the great classic. But it’s cleverer than it looks. At first glance it seems brutally simple: death, mortality, the end of the road. But look closely at the bones. They’re not random. They’re the thigh bones. The femurs. The great load-bearing bones of the body, the bones that get us upright, get us to our feet. And in Christian symbolism that matters. Because at the Resurrection, when the dead rise, these are the bones that stand us up again. So the image is doing two things at once. The skull preaches the certainty of death, the inescapable fact of it. But the crossed thigh bones underneath it hint at something else entirely: rising again, life after death, the body restored. It’s not just doom. It’s doom with a glimmer of hope tucked underneath. Which is very old London, really. Grim, practical, unsentimental… but never entirely without faith.
The skull –
no question but it’s the old favourite.
Consider the other variant.
The stark skull, yes.
Plain enough, you’d think.
Death. Full stop.
But often it’s paired with wings.
A winged skull.
Now that’s different.
That’s not just death. That’s the soul taking flight.
The body’s done. The journey’s begun.
And there’s something wonderfully unsentimental about it. Georgian London especially was big on this. No soft-focus sentimentality. No “gone to a better place” mush.
Just: here’s a skull.
Tick tock.
Your turn next.
Then there’s the hourglass.
A terrific symbol.
Time running out.
Life measured grain by grain.
Sometimes the hourglass has wings.
That’s even better.
Time flies.
Literally.
You see that on a gravestone and suddenly you’re face to face with a 300-year-old memento mori.
Remember you must die.
Cheery lot, our ancestors.
But useful.
Then the anchor.
That surprises people.
Why an anchor?
Because in Christian symbolism it means hope.
Steadfastness.
The soul anchored in eternity.
It comes straight out of St Paul: “Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul.”
That’s lovely, isn’t it.
Especially in a city built by sailors, merchants, dockers, shipwrights.
London’s maritime life washing up even in its graveyards.
And then the cherub.
Not cute.
Not Hallmark.
A soul.
The spirit ascending.
A lot of these cherubs, by the way, look deeply odd. Bug-eyed. Flat-faced. Like startled celestial potatoes.
Stone carving wasn’t always Michelangelo.
Then you’ve got the trumpets.
They’re usually crossed. Those are resurrection trumpets.
The Last Judgment.
The dead rising.
Imagine that image in plague-ridden London.
Buried in a city that kept filling its graveyards at industrial speed.
The Great Plague, 1665.
Nearly 100,000 dead.
People would have read those symbols with real urgency.
This wasn’t abstract.
Death wasn’t an occasional visitor.
It was practically a lodger.
And here’s where it gets wonderfully specific.
A broken column?
Life cut short.
A young death.
A future interrupted.
A snuffed candle?
Same thing.
Flame out.
A weeping willow?
Victorian mourning.
Melancholy in tree form.
An urn?
Memory. Classical grief. Very fashionable in the 18th and 19th centuries.
A lamb?
Almost always a child.
And that’s the one that gets you.
Because there it is.
A little lamb.
And you know at once what happened.
No dates needed.
No words.
Just heartbreak.
And that’s the genius of symbols.
They leap the centuries.
You don’t need to know Latin.
Or theology.
Or who George III was.
You just get it.
Straight to the gut.
And London is thick with this.
Go to Bunhill Fields.
Go to St Pancras Old Church.
Go to Highgate Cemetery.
Go to St Olave Hart Street.
Wander.
Read.
Decode.
It’s like learning to see again.
It’s quintessential, classic London Walks isn’t it.
That’s what we do.
We get you inside a neighbourhood.
Inside a subject.
Inside the hidden workings of the city.
We hand you the decoder ring.
And after that, London is never quite the same.
Because next time you pass an old gravestone and see a skull and an hourglass, you won’t just see stone.
You’ll hear the old city whispering.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick Tock indeed. See you tomorrow.