London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
We start high.
Very high.
The Northern Heights of Hampstead Heath.
The roof of London.
And laid out before you… the whole city.
On a clear day you can see all the way across London and down into Kent.
There’s the Queen Elizabeth II bridge, way out east.
The Olympic Park. Stratford.
The Emirates Stadium.
Docklands – Manhattan on Thames.
The Dome – like an albino tortoise undergoing a serious acupuncture treatment.
The Gherkin.
It’s all there.
Spread out like a map.
And then –
you look down.
Immediately below you.
The village within the village.
The village on the Heath.
The Vale of Health.
We walk down to it.
A great green sweep of grass.
Dropping off the heights, into something altogether quieter.
And suddenly –
you’re somewhere else.
One street.
Three dozen houses.
Trees.
A pond.
A fold of land that feels… almost rural.
I always say to my walkers:
hard to believe, I know, but you’re in central London.
How bucolic do you want your London?
There’s the Vale of Health pond.
We reach it through the woods.
There’s the old sheep fold.
And the names…
You could dine out on the names.
Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote the lyrics to the Indian and Bangladesh national anthems. And for good measure penned the greatest line in all of lyric poetry..
There’s D. H. Lawrence.
There’s Alfred Harmsworth, the Zeus – or maybe the Satan – of British journalism.
There’s Leigh Hunt – crucial to John Keats, who was invited here and wrote his first great poem as a result.
Actors, directors, musicians.
Liam Gallagher.
Janet Suzman and Trevor Nunn.
Alan Bates.
Antony Minghella.
Even fiction moves in.
Bridget Jones herself, in Mad About the Boy.
You could spend two hours here just telling stories about the famous.
And then –
you come to number 5 Heath Villas.
And I say:
here’s someone no one has heard of.
Bridget Jennings.
A daily domestic.
A cleaning lady.
She’d been doing that work for over forty years.
Born in Chiswick, 1882 or thereabouts.
Daughter of a labourer.
By 1901 she’s in service. A housemaid.
Working at a boys’ preparatory school on Heath Street.
Then in the 1911 census.
She’s 29. A daily domestic.
Living with her father, a widowed building labourer.
Two rooms at 5 Stamford Place.
Two rooms.
Father and daughter.
Ten years later.
Same address. Same two rooms.
But now she’s alone.
And Bridget?
Still a daily domestic.
Eighteen years later.
She’s moved to number 5 Heath Villas. There in the Vale of Health.
Same work. Same quiet endurance.
Living alongside a charwoman and a laundry worker.
Three women.
Three lives of hard graft.
And then –
one morning in 1942 –
Bridget Jennings came out of that front door, set out across the Heath, heading down into central London to her job as a cleaning lady…
and world history hung in the balance.
Because on that walk…
she found an envelope.
Stamped:
Top Secret.
Inside it –
a plan.
But Bridget Jennings didn’t open it. Didn’t look inside. She heeded the words on the outside of the envelope. Top Secret.
And what was that Top Secret – it was the plans Operation Torch.
The Allied landings in North Africa.
The moment the war turns.
Churchill’s “end of the beginning.”
And for just over a day
that plan was missing. The most important Top Secret document in a world of Top Secret Documents.
When Winston Churchill was told the plan had gone missing,
he bit clean through his cigar.
You can understand why.
Because if that document had fallen into the wrong hands…
well.
History might have taken a very different turn.
But it didn’t.
Because Bridget Jennings –
from number 5 Heath Villas –
picked it up…
and did the right thing.
No fuss. No curiosity. No peeking.
Just duty.
She handed it in.
And the world carried on… as it did.
In 1944 she was awarded the British Empire Medal.
The citation read:
“For services to a Government Department.”
That was all.
No explanation.
No detail.
Still top secret.
And today?
Number 5 Heath Villas is still there.
Three bedrooms. Two bathrooms. Two reception rooms.
A handsome terrace in the Vale of Health.
Valued at getting on for three million pounds.
In a word… gentrified.
From cleaning lady Bridget Jennings one room in that house
to this.
From a life of hard graft…
to prime London real estate.
And yet –
for all that…
for all the famous names who’ve lived in the Vale of Health…
it’s Bridget Jennings we should remember.
Because one morning, on her way to work,
she found an envelope marked Top Secret…
and did the right thing.
No one’s heard of Bridget Jennings.
Except you have now.
As Andrew Marr once said, after taking a Hampstead Spies walk led by former ITN editor Stewart Purvis:
what struck me was how much more emotional and vivid a story is when you are standing in front of it, rather than glancing at a screen.
Quite.
Because here –
you’re not glancing.
You’re standing
right where it happened.
See you tomorrow.