London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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Top of the morning to you. From London. It’s July 31st, 2024.
Today’s pin…aka what’s happening in London.
This one’s a heads-up. Especially for anyone who goes on this Friday’s Soho Walk.
This is a drinking at the Last Chance Saloon job. And I mean last chance. Camisa & Son, London’s original Italian deli – they’ve been serving customers in Soho since the 1920s – is closing its doors for good this Friday, August 3rd. When in Soho do as Soho-ites do. Come lunchtime they unerringly head for Camisa’s. The fresh sandwiches are heaven sent. Taste once of a Camisa sarnie and you’ll forever afterward make the sign of the cross when you walk by Pret a Manger. This Saturday in Soho is going to be black Saturday indeed. Soho-ites are already grimly muttering, “it’s not the last supper, it’s worse. It’s the last sarnie.” Local knowledge. You can’t beat it. Oh and since you’ll be wondering, Camisa’s is on Old Compton Street.
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Moving on, today’s Random – today, July 31st is the ‘tweener. July 30th is the least likely day for people in the UK to die. The Office for National Statistics tells us that there are just 1,208 deaths on average on July 30th. That’s 13 percent lower than usual. Which makes it all the more poignant that William, the Duke of Gloucester, died on July 30th, 1700. He was barely 11 years old. On July 27th that year – three days after his 11th birthday was celebrated at Windsor – the boy fell ill with suspected small pox. He died on the day people don’t die in this country. He was the only surviving child of the future Queen Anne. And you better buckle up for what’s coming. Princess Anne was pregnant 18 times between 1683 and 1700. Only five children were born alive. Only one of them – the future Duke of Gloucester – survived infancy. But he didn’t survive childhood. His death of course put paid to the Stuart line. Which in turn brought in the Germans. In the person of George I. He was the 52nd in line to inherit the crown when Queen Anne died. The 51 ahead of him were disqualified because their line of descent was from a woman.
And that brings us to August 1, 1714. The death of Queen Anne. The anniversary of the death of her son was unbearable. It pretty much killed her. She was only 49 but sh’d been failing since early that year. The anniversary will have clobbered her. She barely made it through the next day. This day, July 31st. It took all her strength to say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Two barely audible syllables – that was all she could manage. She died early the following morning, August 1st 1714. And here’s the London Walks connection. Well, several of them actually. She died at Kensington Palace, which of course is one of the centrepieces of our Kensington Walk. And there’s the statue of Queen Anne in front of St Paul’s. It comes into several walks.
But best of all – especially at this time of the year – the statue of Queen Anne in Queen Anne’s Gate. It’s got a great cameo role on our Old Westminster Walk. It’s said to be the most haunted statue in London. On the anniversary of her death – that’ll be tomorrow – it clambers down off its pedastal, walks to the end of the street, walks back, hoists itself back upon to the pedestal for another year of Queening away, sentry-like. So get thee to Queen Anne’s Gate tomorrow – August 1st – in fact, we’re doing the walk tomorrow – you just might see something that’s beyond extraordinary.
Oh and if you can’t make tomorrow, there is a booby prize. The other 364 days of the year, as you walk by the statue keep looking back at it. Queen Anne’s eyes give every indication of following you as you make your way by her. I personally haven’t seen her get down off her pedestal and go for her anniversary of her death walk, but I have walked by her at night and I can vouch for the booby prize. She watched me walk by. Her eyes followed me. It’s uncanny. And more than a little creepy.
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And so we come to today’s Ongoing. You know the tradition spelt out in the nursery rhyme, “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue and a sixpence in her shoe.”
Everytime I hear that I think of Alicia Ellen Neve Little. Also known as Mrs Archibald Little. Mrs. Little is going to be new to you. But she was certainly involved with something old.
Something blue – well, in Chinese culture blue is the colour of trust, immortality and advancement. And while on the one hand – or should I say on the one foot – Mrs Archibald Little is not well known at all, on the other hand (or foot) she’s all about trust and advancement. And indeed she’s achieved immortality. In China at any rate. And as for ‘something borrowed’ and a sixpence in her shoe, well, bear with me.
And Mrs Archibald Little – new to you – is here today because “she died a childless but beloved, eccentric aunt at her home, 34 Stamford Road, in, yes, Kensington, on this day, July 31st, 1926.
And now I’m going to bind her to you forevermore. Alicia Little, more than anyone else, was responsible for the abolition of foot-binding in China. Her biograph Sybil Oldfield takes up the tale.
“She found intolerable the widespread foot-binding of Chinese girls as the traditional symbol of the girl’s desire to please a future husband. She saw countless lame girls hobbling with sticks, dark lines under their sad eyes, their pale faces rouged to look healthy; she heard many gruesome accounts of gangrenous limbs, mortification, and amputations; she saw ladies having to be helped by their (unbound) women slaves to cross a room; she saw women carried on the backs of men like sacks because they could not walk, and knew that many died or committed suicide in civil wars because they could not flee; she learned from doctors of the lifelong injury done to Chinese women’s internal organs from the necessity to throw the balance of their whole bodies on to their heels; and in the west of China she noted how poor women even tracked boats: with bound, hoof-like feet, besides carrying water, whilst in the north the unfortunate working women do field work, often kneeling on the heavy clay soil, because they are incapable of standing.”
And something borrowed. As part of her campaign, she reprinted and circulated an influential appeal by an eminent Chinese official: ‘no pain [is] more injurious than the breaking of the bones and sinews … It makes the daughters cry day and night, aching with pain … I do not think much of such respect for ancestors’. Other learned, scholarly tracts followed in classical Chinese with great authority, including one by a descendant of Confucius himself, and were posted as placards by Alicia Little’s society all over China. She took on a society of millions, waged war on a widespread, centuries-old tradition. And in the end, tripped it up. Brought it down. She unbound the feet of Chinese women, unbound Chinese culture from a backward, cruel, centuries-old tradition.
An hour ago the August London Walks newsletter went out to its 15,000 subscribers. It – this latest newsletter – is dedicated to the women of London Walks. No better day to remember – and honour – a beloved, eccentric Kensington auntie who slew a Chinese dragon.
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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.