London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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And a top of the morning to you. A top of the morning from London. It’s July 24th, 2024.
Today’s pin – London’s most seen work of art comes on stream today. On stream being the mot juste.
It’s a new mural called, wait for it, In a River A Thousand Streams. It’s going to be unveiled today. It’s a mosaic mural that is 57 meters long. Location, location, location. The mural’s right by London Bridge Station, which means it’ll be seen by 21 million people a year. To get that into perspective for you, the National Gallery gets seven million visitors a year.
And there’s something else that’s very London – indeed very London Walks – about this. It’s the thinnest of membranes that you pass through to go from Unseen London to most seen London. Unseen London is Bermondsey. Best seen on Ann’s Undiscovered London Walk. It goes this morning at 10.45 from Bermondsey Underground Station. London’s an enigma wrapped in a paradox and shrouded in a conundrum. Which is a fancy way of saying, Bermondsey is the exact geographical centre of London and it’s not known at all. Nobody much goes there. It’s why we call it Undiscovered London. You’re in Bermondsey you’re in the exact geographical centre of London and simultaneously you’re in the London that nobody knows. London paradoxes don’t come any richer, any riper than that. But at walk’s end, you pass through that thinnest of membranes and you’re in everybody goes there London. Well, 21 million people a year. London Bridge Station. Not to mention Borough Market and Shakespeare’s Bankside.
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Now for a Random, since the Mural’s called. In a River a Thousand Streams, how about one of the streams Ann takes you to on that walk. The Neckinger. Great name, isn’t it. It’s said to be named for the Devil’s neckinger or neckerchief, the popular name for the hangman’s noose on the gibbet used for the execution of pirates. It stood on a wharf adjoining the point where the stream entered the Thames. Ann tells me that these days the Neckinger doesn’t so much flow as dribble into the Thames. That’s maybe appropriate, given that the long drop didn’t come on stream until the 19th century. In other words, the life – and not just the life – dribbled out of pirates when they were hoist by the devil’s neckinger.
So many surprises, so delectations in that, er, neck of the woods. Everything from the warehouse where the Sex Pistols & Throbbing Gristle performed to the name of the easternmost point of Bermondsey. Wait for it: Cuckold’s Point. And you head that way you’ll pass St Mary Magdalen with its remarkable, got started in 1538, fairly complete church register. Best entry in it is, this year, 400 years old. Say Happy 400th Birthday – it was January 4th – say Happy Birthday to James Herriot. As the register tells us, he was one of the forty children of his father, a Scotchman. That was one busy Scotchman. You have to wonder, did James Herriott’s father do his bit to birth the name Cuckold’s Point.
Kind of makes you want to discover Undiscovered London, doesn’t it.
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And that brings us to today’s Ongoing.
Let’s do some royal gossip. It’s always good fun. I’m doing that special Mrs Dalloway’s London Walk in a couple of weeks. August 7th. So I’m busy doing some background reading in that period, 1923 and thereabouts.
The Prince of Wales – the future Edward VIII and subsequently the Duke of Windsor has a cameo role in the novel. It was with considerable satisfaction that I discovered he was known as the People’s Prince. And there we all thought that formula was invented by Tony Blair when he smoothed out a thorny patch for the crown by giving a speech in which he referred to the late Diana Princess of Wales as The People’s Princess. Everybody thought that was a coinage. And a brilliant coinage at that. But no cigar. That one had been around for 75 years. The future Duke of Windsor was known as The People’s Prince. He and his brother George – that’s not his brother Albert who became George VI, it’s his brother George who was named George – anyway the People’s Prince and his brother George and his second cousin Lord Mountbatten may also have been Noel Coward’s Prince. The great playwright’s close friend. Yes, read between the lines. There’s been a lot of speculation that those three may have been switch hitters and that one or more of them may have dallied along their way so to speak with Destiny’s Tot, as Noel Coward was known. After all, one stop on Destiny’s Tot’s brisk trot was the wonderful song with the knowing title, Mad About the Boy.
One thing the boy – the eternally youthful Edward VIII – wasn’t mad about was his job as Prince of Wales. He called it – not publicly of course – “princing.” He was good at it. He was very popular, he had the common touch. He had another name for ‘princing.” An even more telling name. He called the crowd pleasing he had to do – you know, waving to us commoners – pretending to take an interest in malodorous crowds – he called it “stunting.” Sort of like being a performing seal.
The more you think about it, the weirder it gets. You boil it right down – and it’s not easy to do, given all the flam flam – you boil it right down, these were just ordinary people leading extraordinary lives.
The marvels of a royal existence, I collect them. I’ve got a curiosity cabinet full of them. The collection got started when I learned that the Prince of Wales – as he was then – had a servant who put the toothpaste on his brush.
A more recent addition to the cabinet – I find this stuff out and tell a friend and we look at each other with a wild surprise, silent upon a peak in NW3 – a more recent addition to the cabinet was discovering that the king, as he now is, has his shoelaces ironed every day.
But the very latest addition to my cabinet of curiosities comes compliments of the reading I’ve been doing for the Mrs. Dalloway’s London Walk. Royal watchers say the nature of their upbringing can have a warping effect on princes and princesses. The future George VI – Bertie as he was known – became withdrawn and neurotic. Unassertive to an almost unbelievable degree. He once sat for hours in a darkened room rather than dare ask a servant to switch on a light. Although it seems incredible that it never occurred to him to do it himself, custom would not have permitted a royal prince to carry out such a demeaning task.
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.