Top of the morning to you, London Walkers, wherever you are.
It’s Sunday, October 25th.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
Going to loosen the collar today. Put my feet up.
Going to chill.
Be a bit discursive.
A bit expansive.
But there is a thread running through it.
The thread is this.
A really good guide gives you another pair of eyes.
Suddenly you see something that was there all along.
You just didn’t know what to look for, how to see it. What it means.
We’ve just been in Seville.
And while we were there we met up with our friend and colleague Concepción. The best guide in Sevilla, Concepcion runs Sevilla Walking Tours.
She was just about to take out a Rick Steves group.
We guide for Rick Steves here in London, so we had a chance to compare notes.
Guide talk.
Walking tours.
Groups.
Cities.
The usual.
And before we parted company I switched on the microphone and interviewed her for a few minutes.
So, London Calling listeners, you’re going to be hearing from Seville’s very best guide one of these days.
Watch this space.
But before the interview came one of those tiny moments.
Tiny moment.
Huge effect.
We were up by the Macarena, beside a surviving stretch of Sevilla’s old city wall, not far from the Andalusian Parliament.
Concepción was taking her group into the Basilica.
And outside it stands a statue of one of Sevilla’s great bullfighters.
Joselito el Gallo.
“The Little Rooster.”
And for some reason I looked at the statue and asked Concepción:
“What does the word matador actually mean?”
And she said:
“The killer.”
And the scales fell from my eyes.
The killer.
Of course.
The matador is the one who kills the bull.
And somehow I had never thought about the word.
Never opened it up.
Never looked inside it.
Hey presto: our Word of the Day.
Matador.
We hear the word and we see the costume.
The cape.
The arena.
The ceremony.
The posture.
The colour.
Hemingway.
Spain.
All of that gets packed into the word.
But strip all that away.
Spanish matar means “to kill”.
A matador is, literally, a killer.
And once you know that, the word changes.
The whole thing changes.
And I sat there thinking, hang on a minute.
Sixty-odd years ago I was at university reading Hemingway.
Bullfights.
Spain.
The Sun Also Rises.
Death in the Afternoon.
And I’ve gone back to Hemingway every twenty years or so ever since.
And not once, not one professor, not one teacher, nobody, ever stopped and said:
“By the way, do you know what matador means?”
The killer.
I call that dereliction of academic duty.
Somebody should have opened that door.
One little fact.
Two words.
“The killer.”
And suddenly you understand something you didn’t understand before.
You see differently.
And Concepción didn’t stop there.
She knew about the man in the statue.
Joselito.
His place in Seville.
His connection with the Macarena.
There was the statue.
I could see it perfectly well.
But she gave me the key.
And suddenly the statue opened.
And that took me straight back to something that happened to Mary and me in Venice a few years ago.
Because it almost goes without saying, we’re hooked on walking tours.
When we travel, we take considerable pains to find the best guide we can.
Not the cheapest.
Not necessarily the most convenient.
The best.
Because time when you’re travelling is precious.
Sometimes you know you’ll be back.
Paris.
Seville.
Venice.
Fine.
But sometimes you’re somewhere for one day.
Maybe two.
And you know perfectly well you’re never going to pass that way again.
Those hours matter.
And if we’re going to spend two or three of them with a guide, we want those hours to count.
So, Venice.
We’d done our homework.
Found a terrific guide.
And yes, of course, there was some of the Venice you’d expect.
St Mark’s.
The great set pieces.
But then she took us away.
Properly away.
Back streets.
Ordinary neighbourhoods.
Working Venice.
Big blocks of flats.
Places we never would have found on our own.
And she stopped.
Pointed at a doorway.
And said:
“See the flowers?”
Flowers outside somebody’s front door.
Fine.
Nice.
We probably wouldn’t even have noticed them.
And she said:
“That means they’ve just had a baby.”
Oh.
And then:
“And you can tell from the flowers whether it’s a boy or a girl.”
And there it was again.
That moment.
The scales falling from your eyes.
Thirty seconds earlier it was a block of flats.
Doors.
Windows.
Balconies.
Now?
There’s a new baby behind that door.
A family.
Excitement.
Grandparents arriving.
Neighbours knowing.
A tiny human drama taking place in an ordinary Venetian building.
Nothing in the architecture had changed.
We had changed.
We knew something.
And because we knew something, we could see something.
That’s guiding.
Or at least that’s guiding at its best.
Not firing dates at people.
Not spraying information around like a garden hose.
It’s giving somebody the one fact that unlocks what’s in front of them.
A word.
A flower.
A doorway.
And suddenly a city that was mute starts talking to you.
Which brings me home.
London.
And London cabbies.
Because our last leg back from Sevilla we hopped in a black cab at Paddington.
Drew to an inside straight and hit it because he was one of those London cabbies.
You know the ones.
You ask one question.
And twenty minutes later you’ve had a seminar.
Wonderful.
I asked him what all the trouble around the Strait of Hormuz and the war had meant for him as a working cab driver.
Diesel.
Had the price gone up?
“Oh yes.”
He told me that before all this kicked off he’d been paying about £1.30 a litre.
Now, he said, it was about £2.05.
That’s a savage increase when the thing you do for a living is drive around London all day.
And that got us onto cabs themselves.
Old diesel cabs versus the new electric ones.
Now, take these figures as one London cabbie talking from his own experience.
But they fascinated me.
He said a new electric cab now comes in at around £110,000.
That stopped me.
A hundred and ten thousand pounds.
For your place of work.
Then there’s charging it.
When the electric cabs first came in, he said, you could charge one for something like three pounds.
Now?
He said it’s nearer twenty.
And you’re off the road while you do it.
He said about forty-five minutes for a charge.
Then I asked about range.
Again, his experience.
Decent weather?
Perhaps sixty-five miles.
But turn on the heater in winter or the air conditioning when London is baking, and he reckoned you could be down around forty or forty-five miles per charge.
He said the electric cabs have that little petrol engine as a range extender.
And that more drivers are leaning on that now than they used to.
And then came another surprise.
Uber.
I assumed he’d hate Uber.
Not a bit of it.
He said he was glad they’re here.
That stopped me as well.
Why?
Because, he said, black-cab drivers don’t get anything like the aggravation and trouble they used to get.
The really difficult customers.
The aggressive ones.
The abusive ones.
His view was that a lot of that trade has migrated to Uber.
“They go with Uber now.”
And then he made another point.
The Uber driver, he said, is in a very different position.
Somebody gets in.
They’re difficult.
They’re abusive.
And the driver has to be very careful about answering back.
Because of the rating.
Those stars matter.
His livelihood is wrapped up in them.
So, in my cabbie’s view, the Uber driver sometimes has to keep schtum and take behaviour that an old-fashioned London cabbie might have answered in fairly robust Anglo-Saxon.
Now, that’s one cabbie’s take.
I’m not presenting it as the findings of a Royal Commission.
But as a little piece of London sociology?
It’s fascinating.
Uber arrives.
You assume the black-cab trade simply hates it.
And here’s one black-cab driver saying:
Actually, there’s one thing I rather like about them.
They’re getting the grief now that we used to get. And they’re welcome to it.
And while we’re on black cabs, let’s put a few more factlets on the table.
Because they’re extraordinary machines.
That famous turning circle, for example.
A London taxi has to be able to turn in a circle just twenty-five feet across.
Think about why.
London.
Narrow streets.
Ranks.
Tight manoeuvres.
Picking somebody up on the other side of the road.
That turning circle isn’t some charming eccentricity.
It’s bred into the machine by London itself.
And then there’s the driver.
Because now we arrive at The Knowledge.
Capital T.
Capital K.
It dates back to 1865.
To become an All London cabbie you have to master 320 standard routes.
Something like 25,000 streets.
And thousands of points.
Hotels.
Hospitals.
Clubs.
Theatres.
Embassies.
Stations.
Courts.
Museums.
Restaurants.
And it’s not simply memorising 320 journeys.
That would be difficult enough.
You have to acquire a working mental map of London.
Somebody gives you two points.
You call the route.
Street by street.
Turn by turn.
All out of your head.
And typically it takes years.
A lot of people who start never finish.
It is ferociously difficult.
Indeed, doing The Knowledge has been described as “the intellectual equivalent of memorising the complete works of Shakespeare.”
And you can see why.
Twenty-five thousand streets.
Three hundred and twenty standard routes.
Thousands upon thousands of landmarks, hotels, hospitals, theatres, clubs, stations, courts and restaurants.
Not merely remembered.
Held in your head as a living map.
And now comes perhaps my favourite London cab fact of all.
Scientists at University College London have studied the brains of London cabbies.
Not metaphorically.
Actually put them in MRI scanners and looked at their brains.
And they found something extraordinary.
The posterior hippocampus is larger in London taxi drivers than it is in ordinary controls.
The hippocampus is deeply involved in spatial memory and navigation.
And the more years somebody had spent as a London cabbie, the greater the difference.
But even that wasn’t enough.
Because you could say:
Well, perhaps people who happen to have that kind of brain in the first place are the people who become London cabbies.
So researchers went further.
They studied people while they were learning The Knowledge.
And the ones who successfully qualified showed changes in the posterior hippocampus.
In other words, learning London had physically changed their brains.
Think about that.
The Knowledge gets into your head.
Literally.
And, very roughly, you can think of it a bit like a weightlifter.
Use a muscle hard enough, train it hard enough, and the muscle develops.
The brain isn’t a bicep, obviously.
But the broad idea is wonderfully similar.
Exercise a particular system intensely, year after year, and it adapts.
A London cabbie spends years exercising the part of the brain that builds and uses a map of London.
And you can see the result in the brain.
I love that.
London doesn’t just get under your skin.
London gets into your hippocampus.
And suddenly my chat with that cabbie becomes part of exactly the same story as Concepción in Seville and that guide in Venice.
Knowledge.
Local knowledge.
The thing you cannot see from outside.
The thing somebody has spent years acquiring.
And then, if they’re generous, they give you a little bit of it.
Here.
Have this.
Look again.
And then we got talking about the old diesel taxis.
And I said something I’ve probably never said out loud before.
I love the sound of them.
That throb.
That unmistakable London diesel-cab sound.
And suddenly another memory came flooding back.
Years and years ago.
Mary and I coming back from Paris.
In those days you went down to the coast and took the ferry across.
Sometimes the hovercraft.
Remember the hovercraft?
And coming home it was the ferry and then the train back up to London.
Victoria.
You get off the train.
You’ve been away.
France.
Different voices.
Different streets.
Different smells.
And then you step out of Victoria Station.
London.
And there are the black cabs.
Engines running.
That diesel throb.
And I can hear it now.
It was almost a sound effect saying:
You’re home.
And maybe that’s the point of all this.
Concepción has The Knowledge.
Our Venetian guide had The Knowledge.
The cabbie had The Knowledge.
Different knowledge.
Same magic.
It’s the thing a really good guide gives away.
Generously.
Here.
Have this.
Look at that statue again.
Look at that bunch of flowers again.
Look at that black cab again.
You thought you knew what you were looking at.
Now look again.
Cities are covered in writing we can’t read.
Signs without words.
Stories without labels.
Meanings hiding in plain sight.
And then somebody who really knows the place comes along and translates.
“The flowers mean there’s a new baby.”
“Matador means the killer.”
“That’s what it costs me to keep this cab moving.”
Tiny pieces of knowledge.
But they change the view.
And maybe that’s the difference between merely being somewhere and really beginning to see it.
A good guide doesn’t just show you the city.
A good guide teaches the city to show itself.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
London Walks anthem time.
See you tomorrow.