London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
Listen closely. Can you hear it.
No, not the traffic.
Not the buses grinding round the corner. Not even the chatter.
The lights.
Or rather – more of them.
Because Leicester Square is about to get brighter.
That’s the news. Plans afoot to turn up the wattage. More illumination. More glow. More dazzle in a place that already does a pretty good job of looking like it’s plugged directly into the mains.
And you think – really? It needs more?
Then again… perhaps it does.
Because this is London’s stage. The place where the curtain is always about to go up.
Red carpet territory.
Film premieres. Flashbulbs popping. Crowds ten deep craning for a glimpse of someone stepping out of a car. The sort of place where a murmur can turn into a roar in about three seconds flat.
Right in the middle of everything. A sort of theatrical bullseye. Stand here and London circles you.
Four hundred years ago this was fields. Proper countryside. And then along comes Robert Sidney, builds himself a grand house, and the place takes his name. Leicester House. Leicester Fields. And eventually, the square we’ve got now.
And what a square.
What would those first residents make of it today? They laid out a polite, genteel rectangle. Gentlefolk strolling, perhaps a bit of gossip, a bit of fresh air.
Now?
Well. You’ve seen it.
And right at the heart of it, that little kiosk. The half-price ticket booth. One of London’s great democratic institutions.
Theatre for the people.
A reminder that just a few yards from here, in every direction, the curtain is going up somewhere.
Turn your head and you’re looking at the National Portrait Gallery. Faces of the nation, staring back at you.
Slip round the corner and you’re at the National Gallery.
And just there, almost hiding in plain sight, St Martin-in-the-Fields. Music, light, and that marvellous café in the crypt. Divine is the word.
Truly.
Fan out a little further and you’re in Soho.
Or Covent Garden.
Or along Charing Cross Road with its bookshops.
Or swing up to Piccadilly Circus. Or drift down to Trafalgar Square.
It’s a ringside seat.
The best in London.
Possibly the best anywhere.
And yet.
For all the noise, the lights, the crowds, there’s something else here.
Something older.
A little less well behaved.
Here’s one you won’t get from the million words written about Leicester Square this week.
Young Winston Churchill. Sandhurst cadet. High spirits.
A taste for mischief and a nose for a cause.
The Empire Theatre stood just off the square.
Its bar had become notorious. Respectable society on one side. Prostitutes on the other.
Screens put up to keep them apart.
Enter Mrs Ormiston Chant.
What a name.
Ormiston Chant.
Now with a name like that you don’t just read it — you listen to it. Ear trumpet firmly in place.
Start at the back end. Ton. As in Kensington. Paddington. Old, old word. Anglo-Saxon old. Means a farm. A settlement.
Work your way forward. Orme. A personal name. Viking. Norse.
One of those sturdy, no-nonsense chaps who probably knew his way round a longship.
Put it together and you’ve got Ormiston.
Orme’s farm.
And then – Chant.
Because her full name was Laura Ormiston Chant. That Ormiston, sitting in the middle, almost certainly a family surname pressed into service. Respectable. Proper. A name with a bit of lineage about it.
And Chant.
Well.
You can hear her, can’t you.
Voice raised. Cause declared. Not so much speaking as… proclaiming.
And yes, if you’re of a mind to, you can have a bit of fun with it.
Orme’s farm.
She was farming all right. Farming reform. Cultivating moral improvement. Sowing virtue, reaping respectability.
And doing it, one suspects, at full volume.
You rather imagine her advancing on the Empire Theatre, standards flying, voice ringing out…Chanting. Or more likely, braying.
That’s braying. Not praying.
I expect most of Leicester Square was praying she’d bugger off.
————————-
Anyway, all of that, as it happens, is not far off the mark.
Because the lady in question was a moral reformer. A campaigner. And not a quiet one.
Mrs Ormiston Chant organised a campaign to exclude prostitutes from the bar of the Empire Theatre, right there in Leicester Square. A line drawn. Respectability asserted.
Or so it seemed. Cue Winston Churchill. Dander up. Testosterone surging.
Churchill didn’t care for it. Not one bit. Let’s get him into focus.
This was the young Churchill. Sandhurst cadet. High spirits.
A nose for a cause and a taste for a bit of theatre of his own.
He rallied a band of fellow cadets, marched into the Empire… and tore down the screens that had been put up to separate the ladies of the night from the theatregoers.
And then – because of course he did – he rose to the occasion.
“Ladies of the Empire,” he declared, “I stand for Liberty!”
You can’t make it up.
And here’s the thing.
I stand for London Walks. And no question but some of the stuff we put out here is good for what ails you.
Because the next time you and a couple of friends are standing at the half-price ticket booth in Leicester Square, you’ll have something up your sleeve.
You’ll be able to turn, casually, and say:
“Did you know Winston Churchill first entered public life just a few yards from where we’re standing?”
Pause.
“Do you know the tale? It’s a corker.”
Anyway.
That’s Leicester Square for you. High drama. Low intrigue. A little bit of both, usually at the same time. And for good measure, an aroused young Winston Churchill seeing the light and going to bat for Leicester Square’s horizontales.
Which brings us back to the lights.
Leicester Square has always been about light. Not just the literal kind. The metaphorical kind. Attention. Focus. That sense that something is happening, or about to happen, right here, right now.
So perhaps adding more lights isn’t so much a change as an admission.
An acknowledgement of what this place already is.
A spotlight.
A place that doesn’t just sit quietly in London – it announces London.
Turn up the lights? Go on then.
Just don’t expect it to be any quieter.
C’est tout for today.
Well maybe c’est tout.
There just might be another one of those little bonus ‘casts.
So maybe see you later is what’s called for here. Or perhaps, see ya tomorrow. We’ll see. Which of course is the London Walks calling card. Get out and about in this town with those great guides you don’t look, you see.
See?