London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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And, from London a very good morning to you, wherever you are. It’s September 5th, 2024.
Today’s pin…
How’s this for a runaway success story. But it is going to run away so you better act fast. Heytea – they’re described as bubble-tea disrupters – got started twelve years ago in a tiny shop in an alley in a small town in Guangdong in southeast China. Twelve years on they’ve conquered the world. The milk-tea outfit has more than 4,000 stores round the world.
Their newest shop has just opened at the Royal Opera House. But here’s the thing, it’s a pop-up shop. A limited edition number. It’ll only be here for two and a half weeks. A limited edition shop with a limited edition tea. Called Midnight Tea Party, the beverage has chocolate cheese foam on top, Red Blossom Milk Tea in the middle and Brown Sugar Boba in the bottom. In the words of the metro – and I for one didn’t take much convincing – it’s a cuppa like no other. Anyway, there you go. If you’re going on any of our walks that start from Covent Garden Tube – Ulrike’s Seven Deadly Sins for example – why not get there a bit early, nip round the corner to the Royal Opera House and grab a bit of the gusto of the very latest London viral sensation. Two birds with one stone. It’ll set the taste buds a tingling and give you bragging rights.
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Moving on, today’s Random – going to get down and dirty now. A couple of days ago I got drafted in to cover our Bohemian Bloomsbury – Literary London Walk. And as always, I did my best to serve up at least one Googly. Look it up, it’s a cricket term. Nearest baseball equivalent would be a knuckleball. Instead of just poets and novelists they also got an exotic in the shape of the really handsome house of the inventor who turned paper from a handcraft into an efficient manufacturing process. And of course the implications of that were important and far-reaching. It made literature a lot cheaper. Made it affordable to working people. Transformed the market. Impacted lives in so many different ways. Think Christmas cards, packaging (wrapping paper) and, yes, loo roll. That stuff was invented in 1857. One of our main authors on that walk – Charles Dickens – was 45 years old in 1857. Well, I warned you this one was going to get down and dirty.
Ok today’s Ongoing. And here we go, this one qualifies as yet another Trafalgar Square Redux job. Trafalgar Square Redux 15. One of Dickens’s great characters is Jerry Cruncher in A Tale of Two Cities. Jerry’s a consummate London. A born hustler. He’s a bit of a con man. By day he’s an odd job man in front of Tellson’s Bank at Number One Fleet Street. But Jerry’s got a little number on the side. By night he’s a grave robber. He digs up freshly planted corpses, helps himself to any portable property he finds – rings, bracelets, that sort of thing – and carts the body away, sells it to medical schools. But you mustn’t call him a grave robber. He doesn’t like that denomination at all. He takes offense. He says, “don’t call me a body snatcher, I’m a resurrectionist.”
Anyway, I’m doing a Jerry Cruncher here – being a bit of a resurrectionist – I’m going to disinter and recycle something my great compatriot, Bill Bryson, planted a good few years ago in his wonderful book At Home. We learn from Bill Bryson that in the middle of the 19th century – right when Charles Dickens was making the acquaintance of loo roll – toilet paper as Americans would say – London had just 218 acres of burial grounds. And, yes, they were packed full. Thirty years earlier when the great poet and artist William Blake was buried in Bunhill Fields – great name, Bunhill Fields, it’s a corruption of Bone Hill Fields – when Blake was laid to rest in Bunhill Fields he had lots of company. He was buried on top of three other people. And later he was topped up with four other people. Yes, they were placed on top of him. You go on our Marylebone Walk on Saturday afternoon you might like to – you might not like to – reflect that the Parish Church burial ground was a tiny plot – just over an acre – and it held over 100,000 bodies.
As for Trafalgar Square – the church there – St Martin in the Fields – it’s tiny churchyard stood where the National Gallery stands today. It held 70,000 corpses. There’s a thought for you, what, when you’re next in the National Gallery looking at a Rembrandt or Constable’s Hay Wain or Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. It gets worse. The crypt of St Martin’s in the Fields held thousands more. Yes, that’s right, the crypt, better known to all of us today as the Cafe in the Crypt. One of the most delightful spots in London to have a sitdown, have a proper cup of tea, have some nosh, have a rendezvous. Pleasant today but it couldn’t have been more unpleasant 165 years ago. In 1859 when St Martins decided it was going to clear out the crypt the naturalist Frank Buckland struck while the iron was hot. He said, “the father of modern surgery John Hunter is buried in the St Martin in the Fields crypt. We have to disinter him, take him to Westminster Abbey and rebury them there. Come the hour they opened the great creaking oaken door of vault Number 3. Frank Buckland said, “we threw the light of our bull’s eye lantern into the vault, and then I beheld a sight I shall never forget.” That sight was tens of thousands of jumbled and broken coffins. In Bill Bryson’s words, they were crammed in every which way, as if deposited by a tsunami. It took Buckland days to find John Hunter. Imagine poking around in there – in that lurid light, heavily masked I’m sure because the stench would have been unbearable – imagine poking around in there for 16 days.
But Buckland found what he was looking for and John Hunter was despatched off to the Abbey, where he is to this day. His tens of thousands of neighbours though didn’t get paid anything like that tribute. They were unceremoniously carted off to unmarked graves in other cemeteries. And in consequence we now have no idea of where the final resting place is of any number of historically important people, among them Charles II’s favourite mistress Nell Gwyn, the great scientist Robert Boyle, the furniture maker Thomas Chippendale, the highwayman Jack Shepard, the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, etc. Lost, gone with the wind of change. But we can raise a glass to them in the Cafe in the Crypt. Though it won’t be a cup of Midnight Tea Party.
Final thought. What I’m wondering is, when Buckland found John Hunter’s remains did he have a midnight tea party there in Vault Number 3 of the crypt in St Martin in the Fields.
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.