London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Top of the morning to you London Walkers, wherever you are. It’s Wednesday, December 3rd.
It must have been astonishing.
It was a raw December evening in 1660 – December 3rd, 1660 as it happens.
London’s shaking the Puritan dust
out of its hair,
theatres are newly unpadlocked, and suddenly: a woman.
A woman on a public stage in England.
Desdemona, no less.
Margaret Hughes stepping
into the candlelight at
the Vere Street Theatre and
rewriting the rules of the game
in the time it takes to say
My noble father,
I do perceive here a divided duty.
Now,
London knows a sensational debut when it sees one.
And this was one of those nights.
A proper London game changer.
Like the first tube train,
the first street-lit gas lamp,
the first time a black cab driver said yeah, I can take you south of the river. A hinge night.
The stage door swings open and
out walks the future.
But let’s set the scene first.
London, December 3rd, 1660
The playhouse is
a converted real tennis court in
Vere Street, just north of the Strand.
A long rectangle of a room,
smelling faintly of old rackets,
damp timber, and
excitement.
This is Killigrew’s place,
the temporary home of
the King’s Company while
Drury Lane is
being knocked into shape.
Londoners are pouring in.
Courtiers.
Merchants.
People wearing more silk than is strictly good for them.
Everyone talking at once.
Six years since Cromwell and
the Roundheads shut all this down. Six years of no plays,
no jokes,
no theatres.
London – and not just London,
England’s been dry as dust.
And now, tonight,
something no Londoner,
no one in this country
has ever seen: a woman on the stage.
London’s been culturally starved.
A decade and more of
the cultural equivalent
of a bread and water diet.
And Othello.
What a choice for the big return. Murder,
jealousy,
passion,
betrayal.
A play with enough voltage to
light ten boroughs.
We should linger on the cast.
It’s a who’s who of Restoration stars.
Charles Hart in the title role,
striding around like a man born
to tell stories at full volume.
Michael Mohun as Iago,
a seasoned old warhorse with
a wounded air that
audiences adored.
Possibly Walter Clun somewhere
in the mix,
smooth,
elegant,
powdered to within an inch of his life.
But that night, they might as well
have been cardboard cut-outs. Because Margaret Hughes is
about to walk onstage.
Before Margaret, the Boys…
In Shakespeare’s day, Desdemona would have been played by a boy. There were famous ones:
Richard Robinson, who specialised in playing women and
was known for his grace.
Kinsayder’s favourites in
the children’s companies,
lively little performers like
John Rice who
took on the women’s roles.
Including Desdemona.
And just so we’re clear,
Kinsayder wasn’t an actor at all.
Kinsayder was the pen name of
John Marston, a
razor-tongued satirist who
spent the 1590s
insulting half of London
before switching to playwriting.
Kinsayder wasn’t an actor,
but he moved in
the same theatrical world as Shakespeare,
which is why his name
drifts through the backstage fog of
the period.
And of course the legendary
Nathan Field,
who grew up in
the children’s companies
before graduating to adult roles.
Fleet boys with high voices,
schooled in the arts of swooning, weeping, and
carrying a candle without tripping. They must’ve been good or Shakespeare wouldn’t
have trusted them.
But they were always pretending. Restoration London wanted
the real thing.
Ok, Curtain Up
Candles flare.
The boards creak.
And there she is.
Margaret Hughes.
Mrs Hughes if we’re being formal. The first recorded woman to act
on the London stage.
Imagine the intake of breath.
Imagine the ripple
going through the pit.
A woman playing a woman.
It sounds absurd to us now
but in that room
it was enough to make people drop their programmes.
If they’d had programmes.
Which they didn’t.
Samuel Pepys hadn’t started his diary but if he had we’d have eight
glorious pages.
Pepys wrote a few months later
that seeing a woman act was
a strange thing.
Though he cottoned on
quickly enough.
Hughes must’ve known she
was stepping into history.
And not by accident either.
Someone in Killigrew’s company looked at her and
thought: yes.
Yes, she can hold this space.
Yes, she can play Desdemona dying on that bed and
make a packed house sob
into their lace cuffs.
And by all accounts, she did.
As for what London made of it…
No boos.
No muttering.
No demands for the boys
to come back in wigs.
Quite the opposite.
The audience was captivated.
The city had crossed a threshold and liked the view.
Within weeks other companies
were scrambling to hire actresses. Within years you get Nell Gwyn, Elizabeth Barry,
Anne Bracegirdle.
Great name isn’t it.
But Margaret Hughes was the first. The original spark.
She becomes a company regular.
A leading lady.
And then, in the way
Restoration London often
became a soap opera,
she meets Prince Rupert.
Yes, that Rupert.
The dashing Cavalier general,
nephew of Charles I,
inventor of mezzotint,
amateur scientist,
professional heartthrob.
He falls for her.
Sets her up in style.
She has his daughter, Ruperta.
Moves into the soft-shoe society of the Restoration elite.
Fine clothes.
Fine jewels.
Dinner with the glitterati.
The actress becomes
a companion of a prince.
Quite a promotion.
When Rupert dies in 1682,
he leaves her well provided for,
and she lives comfortably into
the next century.
From anonymous actress to
royal consort to
grande dame.
That’s a trajectory you’d
struggle to pitch to Netflix
without being told to tone it down.
Meanwhile, back here,
back in 2025…
Othello’s back in the spotlight again. One of the hottest tickets in London
at the moment is a production with Toby Jones as Iago.
Inspired casting.
Toby Jones is
all over the telly right now.
A national treasure who
seems to be everywhere except
your utility bill.
And in this version,
the poor actors playing Othello and Desdemona are,
in a strange way,
doing what Charles Hart and
Margaret Hughes didn’t have to do. They’re playing second fiddle to Iago. Jones is a gravitational force.
People go to see him twist that role into new shapes.
And there’s something lovely about that.
Because London,
in 1660 and 2025,
is still a place where
Othello can reinvent itself.
Still a city where
an actor can walk into a familiar part and blow the doors off it.
Yes, London as the stage…
That’s is the thread that
ties it together.
In 1660
Margaret Hughes walks into the light and becomes the future.
In 2025
Toby Jones walks into the light
and shows us something new
about the villain who makes
the whole tragedy tick.
London’s the constant.
The stage on which the game changes, again and again.
And Hughes is
woven into that history.
Not a footnote.
Not a curiosity.
But the woman who
made the modern stage possible.
The first truly feminine voice.
The first real tears.
The first time Desdemona
was a woman pleading for her life instead of a boy pretending to.
That’s why the line stands.
It must have been astonishing.
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 £25 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 Jack the 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.