London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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Top of the morning to you, London Walkers. Wherever you are. It’s Thursday, November 7th, 2024.
“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety…”
Recognise it? You should do. It’s the most famous line in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. It’s spoken by Enobarbus, a Roman general and politician. A colleague of Marc Antony. Maecenas, another Roman, has pitched up in Alexandria and asked Enobarbus to fill him in. “What’s going on with Antony?”
What’s going on with Antony is Cleopatra. Enobarbus spells things out for Maecenas. He describes the Egyptian Queen. It’s the most famous description in Shakespeare.
Begins: “I will tell you.
The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them…”
And that’s just the start. 40 lines later Maecenas is reeling, giddy. My god does he get it what she, Cleopatra, is doing to Marc Antony. The spell she weaves. The hold she has on him.
Maecenas says, my God he’s got to get away from her.
To quote Maecenas word for word, “Antony must leave her utterly.”
And that triggers Enobarbus’s famous remark, words that flame in the air,
“Never; He will not:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety…”
Aside here, you want to understand how form is meaning in Shakespeare, how sound reinforces sense, consider for a moment that first line, “Never; he will not…”
The Shakespearean line is a ten syllablle, iambic pentameter structure. de dum, de dum, de dum, de dum, de dum. The second line here is a case in point.
“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale…”
Count ‘em. It’s ten syllablle line. And it’s almost perfectly iambic pentameter. But here’s what you need to know about the Shakespearean line, the way he makes the music, creates impact and power, is compliments of the variations he hangs, like ornaments on a Christmas tree, on that basic ten syllablle, iambic pentameter structure. So that second line is ten syllables but it doesn’t begin de dum. It begins dum. The first syllable, the word Age, gets the emphasis. And its breaking step as it were – its being the first syllable – gives it even more emphasis. Age.
Putting that emphasized syllable in an unemphasized position, gives it far more impact than if he had written, say, ‘And age’. Making the first syllable in the line a dum syllable catches us unaware as it were, makes it leap out at us. Far more so than de dum. And age…
But that isn’t even the half of it.
What is far more telling is how Enobarbus opens that speech:
Never; He will not:
That’s a half-line. It’s just five syllables instead of ten.
Shakespeare writes the silences. Making it a half line makes the sense hang there for two and a half beats…gives it far emphasis. Sense-wise that first line, “Never; he will not:” is like the dong of a bell and then the reverberations. As Virginia Woolf famously put it about Big Ben, “the leaden circles dissolve in the air”.
Well so much for the quick Shakespearean tutorial…
The main reason I summoned up Enobarbus’s crystallisation of Cleopatra – “Age cannot with her, nor custom stale her infinite variety…” – is, Enobarbus could just as readily have been describing London with that remark.
That’s one reason for summoning it up. The other reason is I’m in Egypt.
In Egypt and thinking about great writers generally. And about London. Or more generally, about place.
Place because where we are, where we live is one of the ways of understanding who we are. I’m convinced that place is a principal lens through which we view the world.
Place – and married to place, for a lot of us, great writers.
That’s certainly the case with me. London is the principal lens through which I view the world. And very often it’s London refracted through great writers. Dickens, Shakespeare, Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle and so on.
And so today, for whatever reason, I’m thinking about the London essayist – and poet and novelist – Charles Lamb. And in connection with Charles Lamb, Virginia Woolf.
I don’t know about you but knowing where a writer lived in London changes the way I see that part of London. And indeed it changes the way I see the writer and his or her London. What they said about it. Knowing that one of the greatest London essayists of all was born at 2 Crown Office Row in the Temple cannot but change how you see Crown Office Row and indeed how you see the future great essayist who began life there.
Or even more tellingly, that when he was five Charles Lamb left home to go to school at Christ’s Hospital. The point being, Charles Lamb’s school, Christ’s Hospital, was directly across the street from the most sinister and infamous building in London: Newgate Prison.
And you want a fine example of how a great London writer can change the way you see London, try this for size. It’s certainly part of my mental furniture.
Every time I go into a London graveyard I think about this. In a churchyard with his older sister Mary, Charles Lamb, puzzled by the uniformly euologistic character of graveyard inscriptions, turned to his big sister and asked, “Mary, where are the naughty people buried?”
Anyway, I’m going to end this – well, not quite end it – by reading a letter that Charles Lamb – that consummate Londoner – wrote to the great Lake District poet, William Wordsworth.
Letter goes as follows:
And I ask you, looking over Lamb’s shoulder while he’s writing that letter to Wordsworth, hearing what he’s got to say about London – how he feels about London – how can you not, in due course, hear the stringed instruments of another part of the symphony orchestra join in: I’m talking about a couple of London passages in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Both of them – the essayist and the novelist – reminding us that, as the former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy so deftly put it – both of them reminding us that some of our best poets have written in prose.
Personal note and a London Walks note. Personal note first, this London Calling episode is coming from Egypt. Looking out over the Red Sea. I can’t help but wonder what Charles Lamb would have made of this place. And the London Walks matter is I’m about to schedule our final 100th anniversary Mrs Dalloway’s London walk. That’s 100th anniversary to the day.
Mrs. Dalloway was published on the 14th of May 1925. We’ll be doing the Mrs Dalloway’s London Walk on the 14th of May 2025. And some things are exquisitely perfect. Mrs Dalloway went for her walk on a Wednesday. The 14th of May 2025 is a Wednesday. And she, Mrs Dalloway, hears Big Ben at 10 am – “There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.”
Anyway, I defy you to hear these two passages from Mrs Dalloway and not see – feel – how Mrs Dalloway’s London dovetails perfectly with Charles Lamb’s London.
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.