London Calling. London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead.
Story time. History time. George time.
That’s right, today you’re going to meet George. George is a London teenager. Eighteen years old. Six feet six inches tall. A goalkeeper. A Leeds University student. And, for the summer, a familiar figure in one of the most beguiling little corners of London.
George is the grandson of the legendary Kensington hairdresser Annie Russell. Elizabeth Taylor went to Annie. Joanna Lumley went to Annie. Generations of Kensington women went to Annie.
This summer, George is working at Hornets, the legendary menswear shop next door to his grandmother’s salon in infinitely charming Kensington Church Walk.
Hornets giving Annie Russell’s grandson a summer job?
That’s not big city, corporate London.
That’s village London.
And that’s all the introduction George needs. He can take it from there.
Well, bar one thing. Something George told me gives us our daily word. A famous London place name. Pimlico.
George, our quintessentially English kid, tells this quintessentially American kid, which I once was, that he lived in Pimlico when he was small. And my tail starts wagging from breakfast to Christmas.
Because Pimlico may be the earliest American place name in England.
Yes, you heard that correctly. Usually the traffic goes the other way.
Those English colonialists carried pieces of England with them.
London and English place names crossed the Atlantic along with the Pilgrim fathers and the settlers who followed them. Boston. Cambridge. Richmond. But this one may have made the return journey.
Pimlico appears to come from Pamlico, the name of an Indigenous American people and a great sound on the coast of what is now North Carolina. The name crossed the Atlantic in the age of Sir Walter Raleigh and his ill-fated Roanoke colonies. Pamlico became Pimlico. An American word changed its vowels, found its feet and settled down in London.
There’s another story about a seventeenth-century publican called Ben Pimlico and his celebrated nut-brown ale. But even Ben’s name may ultimately have come from American Pamlico.
So there it is. Pimlico. Quite possibly the earliest American place name planted on English soil.
A name that travelled a very long way to get to London.
And George has travelled a bit himself. From Pimlico to Wimbledon. From Wimbledon to Leeds. And, for the summer holidays, to Kensington Church Walk.
Time to meet George.
[George interview follows]