London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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And a very good morning to you, London Walkers, wherever you are. It’s Saturday, March 1st, 2025.
Two brief odds and ends and then a London Walks announcement.
Other day on the Underground that standard public address anouncement suddenly hit home. How does it go, something along the lines of: Please be aware that pickpockets operate in this station.
Happily, it didn’t hit home because I had my pocket picked. No, it was one of those weird things, I suddenly heard the word pickpocket with a ringing clarity and wanted to know more about it. Not least because there’s a closely related word that we don’t hear anymore. Cutpurse. Cutpurse is pretty self-explanatory. A purse was a pouch tied to your belt or waistband with a strap or some strings. And, at no little risk of belabouring the obvious, in it you kept your small needfuls: coins, etc. And of course it was a ready target for a thief with a practiced eye, a sharp knife, and a quick hand. Especially in a crowd. It was after all hanging on the outside of your garment. Ripe for the picking, so to speak. Though cutting was the the word.
As it happens, the words pocket, purse, pouch, poke are all first cousins to one another. They derive from the Old French word poke. Poke we don’t hear anymore except in the old proverb pig in a poke. Which means pig in a pocket. A pig in a pocket is a pig you can’t see. The idea being if you’re savvy you wouldn’t buy a pig without first seeing what you’re getting for your money.
Anyway, in due course what we know as pockets came along and his job got appreciably harder for the cutpurse. It wasn’t just a matter of sidling up behind you and in a flash cutting the strap that was holding your pouch and in one fell swoop pocketing – so to speak – the ill got gain. No, the thief had to dip you. Get his hand into your pocket and extract your valuables. Altogether a trickier operation.
Anyway, I looked up the two words in question. And sure enough, the word pickpocket is the youngster. It first appears in English in 1591. For the record, right about when Shakespeare first set foot in London. And when pockets as we know them were beginning to come on stream. For men at any rate. Women’s garments were of course a different story. To some extent still are.
Anyway, the next stop in the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary, was the word cutpurse. And sure enough, it’s much much older. Three hundred years older. It first appears in English in 1292.
Ok, moving on. And, yes, this is another Commonplace book entry. For some reason I’ve found myself thinking about some of the statues in Parliament Square. In particular, the statues of Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and Mahatma Gandhi.
There they are, all tranquilly – beatifically – rubbing along together. Wouldn’t have been the case were they alive and at close quarters like that. Especially Churchill and Gandhi. But also, from time to time, Churchill and Lloyd George. You would have been able to cut the atmosphere with a knife.
No love lost, shall we say.
Though in the case of Lloyd George and Churchill it was often behind the back. The fiery Welshman didn’t rate the half-American mongrel. I’m thinking of the time Lloyd George said of Churchill, “Poor Winston…a brilliant fellow without judgement which is adequate to his fiery impulse. His steering gear is too weak for his horse-power.”
That was vanilla compared to how Churchill felt about Gandhi. And look, the uncomfortable fact of the matter is Winston Churchill – the man voted the Greatest Britain of All Time – was an unreconstructed racist. In the early 1950s he seriously proposed that his party, the Conservative Party, should campaign under the slogan Keep Britain White.
And he was a monster in particular about Hindus. He said, and I’m quoting, they are “a foul race protected by their pollution from the doom that is their due.”
When Gandhi was released from prison and met the viceroy at his, the viceroy’s, palace in Delhi, Churchill was apoplectic. He exploded on the floor of the Commons. He said, “It is alarming almost nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of the type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor. Such a spectacle can only increase the unrest in India and the danger to which white people have been exposed.” To grant independence to India, Churchill went on, would constitute “a crime against civilisation” and a “catastrophe which will shake the world.”
Well, India rightly got its independence. Was it a catastrophe? Did it shake the world? Not to my knowledge.
Anyway, the next time you’re down there and glancing over at the old bigot maybe temper your feelings of reverence should you have them. Winston Churchill certainly deserves his due but at the same we should look at him warts and all.
Ok, London Walks news now. The Summer and early autumn Canal Walks schedule has just gone up on walks.com.
The full monte – fifteen canal walks from June 1st to mid-November.
And what a pleasure it was to run those pennants up the London Walks flag pole. They’re a magnificent strand to the London Walks programme. And if you didn’t know this, it’s time you did. The Canal Walks guides are all members of the Inland Waterways Association and they donate their fee to the IWA. That means, above all, two things: 1. They know their onions. They have many years’ experience and expertise about the canals. Many of them are in fact boat owners. And 2. If you go on a canal walk, you’re making a direct contribution to a really worthy cause. The guide’s fee goes to the IWA. Helps to underwrite the really important work the IWA does on a daily basis. Work aimed at keeping London’s astonishing canal network shipshape. And indeed improving it.
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 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.