London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Top of the morning to you London Walkers, wherever you are. It’s Friday, December 5th.
And here it comes, your daily London fix.
First order of business. I’ve got some egg on my face and it’s coming off without further ado.
Yesterday’s piece was about John Gay, his passing.
I banged on a bit about
the very special epitaph
on his memorial stone
in Westminster Abbey.
Confidently enjoined you.
Said you go to the Abbey,
you have to make sure you see it –
it just might be the best epitaph in Poets Corner.
Ok, hanging my head in shame here, turns out, I got that one wrong.
Mary,
who’s a Westminster Abbey guide, set me straight.
She says it’s no longer in
Poets’ Corner.
It’s been relocated to the Triforium.
Debt settled, Egg no longer on face,
let’s lift the flap on
today’s
London history ‘nativity calendar.’
This one’s a birthday bash.
A birthday bash that’s
yet another chapter in
the Literary London Saga.
Today
we’re lighting a quiet
little birthday candle for
the poet Christina Rossetti,
who was born on this day,
December 5th, 1830.
Ah, yes, Christina Rossetti.
A poet who never needed
to shout,
never needed to grandstand,
never needed to shake the rafters.
Christina Rossetti just whispered –
and somehow made
the whole room lean in.
Let’s look in on her arrival.
Come along to Fitzrovia, north of Oxford Street.
Fitzrovia on a wintry day in 1830. December doing its best impression of a wet dishcloth.
Fog drifting around
with all the self-importance of
a character actor who
insists on a slow entrance.
And then:
a cry from inside
a modest townhouse
on Charlotte Street
(now Hallam Street,
because London
occasionally rearranges
its own streets like
a tipsy interior decorator).
Christina has arrived.
Small.
Serious.
Slightly offended by the temperature. You get the sense
she would’ve preferred a
milder month, perhaps May,
but alas – destiny.
Waiting for her inside is
the Rossetti family:
a sort of Victorian
creative pressure cooker.
The father, Gabriele,
is an Italian poet
who can
turn even a misplaced teaspoon
into a full-scale operatic moment. The mother, Frances,
is the calm one –
the domestic border collie
gently herding everyone
back into reason.
The siblings are all
prodigies in waiting:
Dante Gabriel, f
uture Pre-Raphaelite celebrity; William Michael,
who will eventually record everyone’s business
whether they want him to or not;
and Maria,
serene and scholarly and
destined for the convent.
Into this
talent-crammed environment
comes the baby Christina,
who quietly begins doing what
she will do for the rest of her life:
observe everything.
She’s a watcher.
Some people burst into rooms. Christina slips into them and
notices the exact thing
everyone else missed –
the flicker of uncertainty in a smile, the way a curtain moves when someone sighs,
the lonely teacup left
at the wrong angle.
She’s the sort of person
who doesn’t just hear the bell tolling; she hears the pause between
the tolls.
London, meanwhile, is
auditioning to be her first muse.
Not the glamorous London of sweeping river views and
sunlit domes.
No.
Her London is the close-up one: glimpsed through fog,
felt through boots on wet pavement, overheard through the wall
as the neighbours have
a dramatic disagreement
over sausages.
The grit,
the tenderness,
the odd flashes of beauty –
it all gets woven into her imagination like threads she pockets for later.
And of course,
her poems aren’t city panoramas.
She doesn’t do civic pride.
She doesn’t do, “Ah, London – behold its majesty.”
No.
Christina Rossetti zooms in.
She gives dignity to the small details the rest of us tramp past
on our way to
somewhere allegedly important.
And nowhere is that clearer than
in her poem “A London Plane-Tree,” one of the loveliest, quietest
salutes to the city ever written.
Here it is:
Green leaves, a fresh green;
Bright yellow leaves, a golden fall;
Thick leaves in winter’s whirl;
A plenteous leafage, summer all.
I loved them in the woods, and now
They deck the pavement’s dreary brow;
A city tree, that cracks the stones
And takes its freedom where it can.
Now that is London in a nutshell.
Or in a leaf, really.
She takes the city’s
least glamorous citizen –
the plane-tree,
scruffy,
smog-proof,
beloved by pigeons for
all the wrong reasons –
and turns it into a portrait
of grit with a hint of grace.
She starts with nature in
its proper setting – the woods – where trees behave.
Then she brings us back to London, where nothing behaves.
And yet the tree persists,
cheerfully disobedient,
cracking the pavement like
a polite anarchist.
“Takes its freedom where it can” – there’s a London motto
if ever there was one.
And that’s Christina Rossetti
all over: soft voice, firm insight.
A poem that shrugs lightly but leaves a bruise you don’t notice
until later.
But London isn’t all plane-trees and poetic epiphanies.
Christina grows up
to see its shadows too.
She volunteers in Soho,
helping women Victorian society labelled “fallen” –
as if they’d accidentally tripped and needed a plaster.
She sees hardship that could flatten
a weaker spirit.
She sees sorrow
that doesn’t wash off.
She doesn’t sensationalise it.
She doesn’t sermonise.
But it deepens her.
You can feel that moral weight in
her restraint.
She knows that kindness is
rarely loud and almost never easy.
And when the world
becomes too much –
and for Christina,
with her sensitive nerves and
fierce inner weather, it often does – she seeks not escape but quiet. Regent’s Park becomes
her sanctuary.
There’s a lovely imagined image of her there:
sitting under a plane-tree,
hands folded,
watching ducks behave with
absolute disregard for dignity,
letting the noise of the city fade
to a gentle hum.
Not countryside quiet.
London quiet.
A small circle of
calm inside the urban whirl.
Christina Rossetti
spends almost all her life in London. Lives here,
works here,
breaks here,
heals here.
And when the end comes in 1894, London wraps its arms around her one more time and
places her in Highgate Cemetery – among ivy,
angels,
foxes,
and monuments
trying very hard to
outdo one another.
There’s a plane-tree nearby.
Of course there is.
The city knows its own.
So how do we celebrate her birthday?
Not with trumpets –
she’d have blushed herself
into fainting.
Not with banners –
she’d have apologised to everyone for the fuss.
No, we honour Christina Rossetti by doing something small.
Something quiet.
Something almost embarrassingly simple.
We notice something.
A leaf that refuses to fall.
A kindness no one else clocked.
A little patch of beauty
in the day’s clutter.
A thought that arrives softly
but stays.
That’s her gift.
That’s her magic.
She taught us that
you don’t have to be loud
to be luminous.
So happy birthday,
Christina Rossetti –
London’s gentlest thunderbolt.
And the next time you
pass a plane-tree, give it a nod.
Chances are it’s nodding back.
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 £25 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 Jack the 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.