London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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Night’s candles are burnt out and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
Which is by way of saying, a very good morning to you, London Walkers. Wherever you are. It’s June 19th, 2025.
And, yes, the prodigal son is back. Has come home. It’s been a few days. I did a runner. Had a hospital appointment. And then had to get the mid-month newsletter produced and sent on its merry way. And the immersion of the two mid-June Mrs Dalloway’s London Walks. So, busy bunny. Sidelined me a bit. But back and raring to go.
And I think I’m going to effect the re-entry by doing some word analysis. Maybe start with a bit of analysis of the word analysis. It’s originally a Greek word meaning release. Or a loosening. You release something by loosening it. Think about that in relation to psychiatry, psychology – in particular Freud. Freudian analysis. Freud’s insight was that there are sometimes important matters buried deep inside our psyches – they’re repressed – and they need to be released, brought to the surface. That’s the all-important first step in putting things right.
But Freud and psychiatry is not what I have in mind here. Words themselves can be analysed. After all, I’ve just analysed the word analyse. And names are words. And, so, yes, names can be analysed. Names often have a meaning that can be released. I’m thinking now about my hospital appointment.
My nurse was a pretty young woman from Delhi named Diksha. I complimented her on her lovely name and asked her if it has a meaning. Is a diksha a noun, for example? She said, “yes, a diksha is a little gift that Indian pupils or students give to their teacher at the end of the school year. Flash! Fireworks! The sky lights up. A moment of beauty and insight into another culture, another people. That’s a word – and a practice – we need to borrow, need to loot. And as long as were at it, the English word Loot is a Hindi word. My youthful and jocund Indian pal Sachen, joking about what monsters the English were – the world’s greatest looters, they stripped India bare – Sachen puts it neatly and wittily, he says, “they even looted the word loot.”
Well, I wasn’t Diksha’s teacher but she gave me the Diksha of that beautiful name of hers, what it means – and she said I’d passed. On to the next grade. A“consultation” with the register. Another young Indian doctor – she couldn’t have been a day over 16 – so sharp. Already a brilliant doctor and that’s with an only 95 percent developed brain. (The human brain isn’t fully developed until we’re 25 or 26.) So what’s she going to be like with a 100 percenter and a few years’ experience? Anyway, the 16-year-old’s name is Srushti, a Sanskrit word meaning “universe.”
Shedding light on that for Srushti was giving me another diksha. Two lovely little gifts on a morning in June in south Hampstead. The Royal Free. What fun.
Now as for Mrs Dalloway. Published in 1925, set in 1923, it’s a post-traumatic stress disorder novel. At one point Mrs Dalloway says, “it’s over, the war is over.” That’s wishful thinking. It wasn’t over. It’s still not over. And one must never forget that Mrs Dalloway is not Virginia Woolf. They’re two very different people. And that subject, the war – the greatest cataclysm in European history – can be brought right up against Virginia Woolf. Her husband Leonard Woolf’s brother was killed in the war. Clarissa Dalloway’s husband is an MP. 23 MPs were killed in the Great War. Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister who took the UK into the War, lost a son. Bonar Law, who was prime minister from 1922 to 1923, lost two sons.
In 1931 the War Graves Commission, in a bid to give people an idea of the scale of the loss – the price in blood this country paid – the War Graves Commission reported that were the dead to form up in Trafalgar Square and march four abreast down Whitehall, march past the Cenotaph to Parliament Square, it would take that ghostly column 3 1/2 days to pass the Cenotaph.
Another way of putting that… There are 884,421 words in the Complete Works of Shakespeare. The next time you’re in a bookshop pick up a Complete Works. Hold it in your hand. It’s a big, hefty volume, runs to hundreds of densely printed pages.
Would have to because it holds – comprises – over 800,000 words. Open it to a big, any page. Look at how many words are on that page. There’ll be over a thousand of them.
Now think of each one of those words as the life of a young soldier or officer. There you’ve got it, in your hand. All the words in Shakespeare – all 884,421 words – that’s almost exactly the same number – that’s how many British soldiers and officers were killed in The Great War.
There, that’s done for you. A single-volume edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare will never look the same again.
There’s an equally haunting statistic.
The daily average of slain British soldiers and officers over the course of the war was 486. 486 a day – every day – over nearly four years. That’s just over 20 an hour. One every three minutes.
If a London Walk takes two hours, by the end of the walk 40 young men will have lost their lives.
And what about the young women. For years after the war girls and young women were told, “you need to prepare yourself for spinsterhood. The odds against your getting married are very long. There aren’t enough men for all of you. By a long chalk.
Yesterday I interviewed Simon about his Cotswolds trip. One of the beautiful Cotswolds Villages he visits is a Thankful Village. Also known as a Blessed Village. Correction, it’s a Doubly Thankful village. There are over 6,000 villages in the UK.
All but 153 of them have war memorials, listing the names of the young men from that village who lost their lives in the Great War. The 153 are the Thankful Villages, the Blessed Villages.
And there are just 14 villages – the one Simon goes to on that Cotswolds trip – are Doubly Thankful Villages. Doubly thankful because they also had no fatalities in World War II.
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 London Museum archaeologist, historians,
university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes a criminal defence lawyer, 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.