London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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Good evening from warm, sunny London. It’s July 28th, 2024.
Today’s pin…let’s do some headlines. A couple of tabloid headlines. And to redress the balance, a broadsheet number.
The London press is a circus. An endlessly fascinating – an often infuriating circus. No other city in the world has a newspaper scene like Fleet Street (to use the portmanteau synonym for the British press). It’s brash and boisterous and shrill and powerful and cutthroat. You can trace the faultlines and obsessions in this country’s popular culture by seeing what the tabloids are getting up to. More often than not those matters are laid bare right there on the front page, crystallised in headlines. And while they’re often infuriating you have to take your hat off to them – they’re often clever, witty, trenchant. They’re really good at what they do. So the big headlines – the front page story – that caught my eye yesterday blared out from The Sun and The Mail. And sure enough, they were crowing about the opening day problems the French had at the Paris Olympics. One was the weather, the downpour that put a considerable dampener on the opening day festivities. And what I ask you were the French supposed to have done about that piece of bad luck: crummy weather. But predictably, the British tabloid press smirked and crowed about the weather. The Sun headline read, Wet the Games Begin. And as for The Mail headline, I don’t know whether it was about the weather or the sabotage that hit French railways hours before the Olympics opening ceremony. Or both. But sure enough, The Mail edified its readers with a crude, cod French headline, La Farce.
You’d think for once they’d maybe find it in themselves to be a bit more grown-up, a bit more generous and sympathetic, a bit more neighbourly, a bit less xenophobic. But no, it’s just not in them. Especially Johnny Frenchman. Kick him when he’s up, kick him when he’s down, kick him at every opportunity. Mustn’t ever let the great British public get the idea that maybe that’s a pretty successful society just on the other side of the sleeve.
Needless to say, I preferred the light the Observer, my Sunday broadsheet, shed on the affair. Its headline read: French verdict on opening ceremony: ‘It was like us – a joyful, chaotic mess.’
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Ok, moving on, today’s Random – let’s go with a Tudor factoid. How’s this for an impressive stat. At the time of his death Henry VIII had no fewer than 42 palaces.
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And that brings us to today’s Ongoing. I did my Saturday afternoon Kensington Walk yesterday, July 27th. I was slavering for it to have been July 28th but the calendar refused to cooperate. I was eating my heart out because July 28th is a red letter day in Kensington’s history.
How’s that truism go, the seven most stressful life events are: birth, marriage, divorce, moving house, major illness, job loss and death.
Well, July 28th hits home for Kensington on a couple of those counts. It would have been fun to my group, “ok, everybody, it’s time to wish Beatrix Potter a Happy Birthday. She was born here in Kensington on this very day in 1866. And indeed, you’re standing in the church – St Mary Abbots, the Kensington parish church – where Beatrix Potter got married. That was on October 15th, 1913. Now it wasn’t Kensington but it’s a great story – and Kensington’s so literary you can’t fault the fit – so I also would have mentioned, “for those of you who are of a literary bent, “today was the day, in 1814, that the great romantic poet Shelley and Mary Godwin eloped to the continent. Headed down the path that led to Frankenstein.
But back to Kensington. 14 Kensington Square to be exact. We take a good look at 14 Kensington Square because Margot Asquith, the remarkable wife of Herbert Asquith, the prime minister who took this country into World War I, lived at 14 Kensington Square. And died at 14 Kensington Square, on – you guessed it – July 28th, 1945. She’s good copy, Margot Asquith. Her wedding register was signed by four prime ministers: Gladstone, Rosebery, Balfour and Asquith. She knew 12 prime ministers and she married a thirteenth. And when I say she knew them, she knew them. She was given a private recital of ‘Maud’ by the poet laureate Tennyson. She launched a dreadnought. She waltzed in a cabinet ante-room at 10 Downing Street with Admiral Jackie Fisher. She knelt down and prayed in a railway carriage with General Booth of the Salvation Army. She wept with the German ambassador on August 4th, 1914. Tears streaming down his face, he said, “we didn’t think anybody would take seriously that old Belgian treaty. Well, somebody had taken it seriously and the mother of all catastrophes, as the Germans called World War I, was underway. Remarkable woman. Her house there in Kensington Square, the wisps of history float by, like breezes they ruffle our hair.
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.