London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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Good evening. From London. It’s August 4th, 2024.
Today’s pin…news from London, what’s new in London.
The BRA awards are coming into view. And please don’t get the wrong end of the stick. That’s not BRA awards as in, well, you know…it’s BRA awards as in the annual British Restaurant Awards.
Lots of categories: Best New Restaurant, Best Chef, Best Luxury Restaurant and Restaurant of the Year.
As always, London restaurants are making a fist of it. Take that first category, Best New Restaurant: no fewer than six London restaurants are the shortlist. And you might want to bear in mind that fuhgeddit, it’s not going to be possible to get a table at the one that takes the honours. So I’m mentioning them now while they’re not solidly booked out for the next 18 months. The six are: Akira Back at the Mandarin Oriental in Mayfair. Akira Back’s number is a fusion of Japanese and Korean cuisine.
Then there’s the Arlington in St James’s. They describe their fare as European inspired.
There’s Kioku by Endo at the Old War Office on Whitehall. How do you go wrong with a Japanese menu and dramatic views of the London skyline in one of the most beautiful let alone historic old buildings in London.
There’s Koyn Thai in Mayfair. Exactly what it says on cover. The different cuisines of northern, central and southern Thailand. And finally, there’s London’s newest afternoon tea hotspot, Laduree in Covent Garden.
Have at ‘em ladies and gentlemen. This is London. This place is built for pleasure. And believe me culinary delights are high up on the London pleasure list.
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Moving on, today’s Random – in passing I’ll be talking about Virginia Woolf’s servants on Wednesday’s Mrs Dalloway’s London walk. Here’s a stop you in your tracks London historical factoid. In 1851 – the year of the Great Exhibition – one third of all the young women in London were servants. Another third were prostitutes. And that doesn’t mean that the remaining third were upper class ladies being waited on hand and foot by all those servants. The upper classes were a tiny minority. The remaining third were mostly made up of wives of ordinary working Londoners, the daughters of tradesmen and so on.
But as statistics go they don’t come much more sobering than those two thirds of all young London women were either prostitutes or servants.
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But here’s one that is more sobering. And this is today’s Ongoing. The Great Famine in Ireland in 1845 was the greatest loss of life anywhere in Europe since the Black Death. And the thing is, Ireland produced a huge amount of food that year. Eggs, cereals, meat. And no end of fish hauled in from the sea.
In the worst year of the potato famine Billingsgate, the London fish market, sold 500 million oysters, a billion fresh herrings, 100 million soles, 498 million shrimps, 304 million periwinkles, 33 million plaice and 23 million mackerels. As fish catches – and fish markets – go Billingsgate was a mountain range of fish. Not an ounce of that rich sea harvest made its way to those starving people in Ireland.
Ditto all Irish produced land grown food – almost none of it went to the Irish. It was exported. Made a fortune for the food producers. The big land owners who looked the other way while one and a half million people starved.
The three oldest statues in Parliament Square are of 19th century prime ministers: Derby, Palmerston and Sir Robert Peel. Knowing what I now about Peel, I’ve got a pronounced aversion to his statue. Irish people had been starving for months. Peel and everybody else in a position to know knew that was the case. But he wasn’t going to do anything about it. He said, “there is such a tendency to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting on them is always desirable.” Tell that to one and a half million people who are starving.
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.