London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
And bowler hat time.
Because once upon a time, Britain conquered half the world wearing a bowler hat.
That’s not even an exaggeration.
There was a period when the bowler hat was everywhere. The City. The suburbs. Railway platforms. Insurance offices. Fleet Street. Whitehall. The law courts. Umbrellas. Briefcases. Pinstripe suits. Pipe smoke. Grey skies. Bacon-and-egg ties. The 8.17 to Cannon Street.
The bowler hat wasn’t just a hat.
It was practically a branch of government.
And the strange thing is, it began not in the City, not in a London gentlemen’s club, not in Whitehall…
…but because somebody kept getting smacked in the face by tree branches.
Which is wonderfully English.
The story begins in 1849 with the Coke family
of Holkham Hall in Norfolk. Their gamekeepers needed a hard-wearing hat that wouldn’t get knocked off when they rode through woodland. Top hats were too tall and too fragile.
Caps weren’t smart enough.
So they turned to the oldest hat shop in the world:
Lock & Co. Hatters
And Lock’s commissioned one of their hat-makers, William Bowler, to come up with something new.
Hence the name.
The story goes that when the first prototype arrived, Edward Coke put it on the floor and jumped on it to test its toughness.
Again: very English.
The hat survived.
And history had a new silhouette.
Now here’s the thing. Nobody foresaw what was about to happen.
The hat was designed for country gamekeepers.
But somewhere along the line the City of London took one look at it and said, “yes, that’ll do nicely.”
And that was that.
The bowler migrated from hedgerows to Threadneedle Street.
By the late 19th century it had become the uniform of respectable male London.
Bankers. Solicitors. Accountants. Stockbrokers. Civil servants. Clerks. Railway officials.
Men who said things like, “I’ll put it before the committee.”
Millions of them.
There are old photographs of London streets where every single male head appears to be wearing a bowler.
It’s almost eerie. Like a great migration of dark mushrooms.
And because Britain then sat at the centre of a vast empire, the bowler travelled.
To New York.
To Buenos Aires.
To Johannesburg.
And especially,
wonderfully improbably,
to Bolivia, where indigenous women still wear bowler hats to this day.
One of history’s great fashion detours.
But mostly the bowler became shorthand for England itself.
You say “Englishman” to somebody in 1930s Chicago or Bombay or Melbourne and what floats into their head is probably:
umbrella, newspaper, moustache, bowler hat.
The thing became symbolic.
A kind of portable London.
And culture got hold of it.
Charlie Chaplin.
Though of course Chaplin’s Tramp wore a slightly battered version,
a bowler with dignity problems.
Then Magritte.
Those haunting paintings of anonymous men in dark coats and bowlers.
Men who look like commuters from some especially philosophical branch of the insurance industry.
Then television.
The Avengers.
Steed with his immaculate bowler.
And then perhaps the most unforgettable bowler hat moment of all.
Goldfinger.
Oddjob.
The razor-rimmed killer bowler hat slicing through statues and human composure alike.
Only the British could take the safest, most respectable hat ever invented and weaponise it.
But here’s the thing.
Underneath all the parody,
all the clichés,
all the comedy,
the bowler hat represented something real.
A real London type.
A vanished species.
The commuter.
The office worker.
The decent, dutiful,
largely anonymous man who helped keep this giant city functioning.
And that brings me to a poem.
A beautiful poem by A. S. J. Tessimond called The Man in the Bowler Hat.
Tessimond’s one of those poets who deserves more readers than he gets.
Quietly brilliant.
Humane. Observant.
The sort of poet who notices the people everybody else walks past.
And in this poem he gives voice to the ordinary London commuter.
The unnoticed man.
Listen to this.
“I am the unnoticed,
the unnoticeable man:
The man who sat on your right in the morning train:
The man you looked through like a windowpane.”
Good lord.
That’s London.
Or this:
“The man who was the colour of the carriage,
the colour
of the mounting
Morning pipe smoke.”
You can see him.
You know him.
Or knew him.
And then this heartbreaking bit:
“I am the man they call the nation’s backbone…”
Exactly.
That’s the bowler hat man.
Not glamorous.
Not celebrated.
Not famous.
But reliable.
Dependable.
The fellow who got up in the dark every morning,
shaved, put on the suit, caught the train,
kept the machinery running.
London was built by those men every bit as much as it was built by kings and conquerors.
And Tessimond sees them.
Sees their sadness as well.
Their conformity.
Their invisibility.
Their swallowed lives.
“The would-be-safe-and-sound,
The uncomplaining bound…”
That phrase.
“The uncomplaining bound.”
That’s devastating.
And perhaps especially moving now because the bowler hat man has almost vanished.
Go into the City today and you’ll see open-neck shirts, Patagonia fleeces,
hedge-fund trainers
costing more than Georgian townhouses,
young financiers dressed as though they’re about to repair somebody’s wi-fi.
The old uniform has gone.
But the image remains.
The bowler still survives in the imagination of the world as a symbol of London.
And maybe symbols matter most when the thing itself has disappeared.
Anyway, if you don’t know Tessimond, seek him out. Truly.
He’s marvellous company. Quietly melancholic.
Dryly funny.
Deeply English in the best sense.
And if you want to see where the bowler hat story began, come with us on the Old Palace Quarter walk.
Because there on St James’s Street, almost at the gates of St James’s Palace itself, sits Lock & Co. Hatters.
350 years they’ve been going.
Still there.
Still magnificent.
Still selling hats to the world.
Including, from time to time, to yours truly.
Yes, on my walks I’m often topped to the north with a Lock & Co. fedora.
Though perhaps one day I should turn up in a bowler.
Just to see what happens.
London calling.
See you tomorrow.