London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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A very good afternoon to you, London Walkers. One and all and wherever you are. It’s Friday, March 14th, 2025.
I’ve got the bit between my teeth with these old maps of London, so you can expect a run of London Calling podcasts mining that seam.
Which, come to think of it, is in character – it’s true to form. How’s my bio entry read? David “breeds enthusiasms, broods over words and is ‘unmanageable’.” That last was a manager’s verdict about me in one of my yearly performance assessments when I was in the newsroom. You can bet I loved that. Wore it – still wear it – as a badge of honour. Unmanageable was what I wanted to be.
Being ‘manageable’, that’s like being tamed, broken. Snip snip.
Anyway, broods over words – and indeed breeds enthusiasms – both of those are pretty good descriptors, pretty good fits with the groove I can feel myself getting into with these old maps. The words in this case being the names on the map. London place names.
And for that matter, all of that also chimes with my deep and abiding interest in distilling experience – some of it at any rate – into commonplace book entries. And look, truth be told, that way of putting it – distilling experience – is a euphemism for my wanting to preserve experiences – thoughts, memories, occurrences – rescue them from oblivion.
So, yes, here we go, this one’s principally about Regency London again, what that old Regency map tells us about it – but it’s going to be the main entry in my Commonplace chapter headed up March 14th, 2025.
In which connection, warm-up acts first.
The other day a tabloid headline caught my eye,
Trump Gets the Hump. Nobody does headlines like the British tabloid press. And that surname – Trump – well, it’s red meat for those tabloid editors. The story was that Trump was miffed because King Charles III saw Zelensky before he saw him, Trump. Precedence and all of that.
Precedence. It’s almost the same sound as the word Presidents. Anyway, the point was Trump came second to Zelensky and was personally affronted, took that as a slight. Or so the tabloid story maintained. I had a hunch about the hump. What most interested me about the headline was my sneaking suspicion that phrase – gets the hump – is an anglicism, is dyed in the wool English. Well, English English.
I was pretty sure the word hump in the sense Trump gets the hump isn’t used over there, would only be dimly understood on the other side of the Atlantic. Wanted to make sure about that so I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary. My hunch was right. Hump – in that expression, “gets the hump” – means a fit of ill humour or vexation; sulks. Perfect isn’t it. The narcissistic man-child in the Oval Office demonstrably – more or less daily – sulks.
And sure enough, it’s not an American expression. It gets into the stream of the English language – the English language this side of the pond – in 1727. And – love this – it’s the great novelist Daniel Defoe – author of Robinson Crusoe – who first uses the word that way. Defoe wrote in his pamphlet Protestant Monastery, “Under many Hardships and Restrictions, many Humps and Grumps.” And as long as we’re at it, that Defoe pamphlet – its full title was “The Protestant Monastery: Or, a Complaint Against the Brutality of the Present Age” – is right up our alley here because its focus was the perceived disrespect towards elders in contemporary society. Disrespect – his sense of being disrespected – being the alpha and omega of this particular Trump hump.
So there you have it, Daniel Defoe takes to the stage in 1727 to introduce a brand new player in our linguistic lineup: getting the hump. Anthropomorphise this moment – see it as the Linguistics Oscars Ceremony – I wonder what the actor in question would look like. Our photo shows Getting the Hump shaking hands with Brad Pitt while George Clooney looks on. I’m pretty sure Getting the Hump wouldn’t have matinee idol good looks. A character actor rather than a leading man.
Anyway, to close this out, all of the other OED – Oxford English Dictionary – entries for getting the hump are Anglicisms. So my hump hunch was right. It’s not an expression that has spread its seed here and some of those seeds wafted across the Atlantic and taken root over there.
And for a second Commonplace Book entry, an email’s just come in from one Mary Joy. She’s asking about our Mrs Dalloway’s London walk. She says, “I came across your tours and noticed that you are hosting a walk for Mrs Dalloway’s London on May 14th of this year!
“I just wanted to ask if this is the only time you’ll be hosting this walk? I had initial thoughts of maybe visiting London in July but am eager to fly over in the spring if that’s when you’re hosting this special walk!”
Well, we’ve got some joy for Mary Joy. She’s going to get an email from us in a couple of hours asking her when she’d like that walk to be scheduled? What date would best fit her travel plans? And we’ll take it from there. If we can, we’ll put it on for her on a date that she’d like it to run.
Obviously, we’ll give it some steers, maybe nudge it a bit. Our recommendations don’t have to be locks but, for example, if there’s a Wednesday that works for her it would be ideal to do it on a Wednesday because it was on a Wednesday that Mrs Dalloway went for her walk and gave her party that night. And for that matter – very much for that matter – there are interesting reasons why party day was a Wednesday. Which I shed light on when we do the walk.
But anyway, I like it very much when we’re able to do this. We can’t always manage it. But we often can. This walk’s a good case in point. Last year a Canadian academic wrote in, said he very much wanted to go on the walk but wasn’t going to be here when it was scheduled to run. Was there any chance of our putting it on when he was here. And sure enough that’s what happened. I call that London Walks’ legendary white glove service. And it pleases me no end when we can serve it up.
Bottom line: people who go on London Walks are really nice people, special people. And if it were me, I’d be pleased as punch, I’d feel pretty specialif I could say, “they put that walk on just for me.” We want them to feel special. Because they are. So we do our best.
Third Commonplace Book entry, I’ve been reading Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry. She’s the former Poet Laureate. In connection with the British expression “get the hump” there’s this delightful Carol Ann Duffy poem. It’s titled Mrs Icarus.
Goes like this:
I’m not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he’s a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock.
Mrs Icarus got the hump.
And of course the immediate point here is the word pillock is in the same paddock as get the hump. It’s another bit of British slang that hasn’t crossed the Atlantic.
You gotta love the OED. It fastidiously, dryly defines the word pillock as Chiefly British colloquial (mildly derogatory). A stupid person; a fool, an idiot.
It’s been knocking around in that sense since 1967. It took it about 400 years to find its way to that meaning. Originally, it’s a Scottish word. Pitches up in 1568. And meant penis. It bounds onto the stage of the English language in a work called Satyre by one D. Lindsay. You can call it a fanfare, that grand entrance. And all things considered it’s not bad at all. Here’s the sentence (pity I can’t do it in a Scottish accent): “Me think my pillok will not ly doun.”
Words that might have been uttered by that other great Scotsman, James Boswell, 200 years later. Yes, that Boswell, the author of the greatest biography in the English language, The Life of Samuel Johnson. There certainly was life in Boswell’s pillock, he was arguably the randiest Scotsman to ever come London’s way. Was constantly and forever humping – that word again – London ladies of easy virtue and then getting in a blind panic about catching something. Something they tried to treat with mercury. In the parlance of the day, a night with Venus a lifetime with Mercury.
But you can riff with that word pillock. Back to Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, it begins “I’m not the first or the last to stand on a hillock…” Hillock of course means little hill. And – third definition, this – a hump (see what I mean) – a hump, bump, protuberance or prominence on any surface.
And we’re off to the linguistic races. Turns out a variant of the word pillock – which of course rhymes with hillock – was pillicock. And here’s the kicker, many modern editions of Shakespeare – and indeed the great lexicographer Eric Partridge – claim the expression pillicock hill refers to a woman’s mons veneris.
Well, we should spend some more time in the company of that pillock Icarus. I’m thinking of W. H. Auden’s great poem Musée des Beaux Arts. But time’s getting on. We can table that one for another day.
Time for the promised map work. Richard Horwood’s 1813 map of Regency London. And let’s put down a marker, plant a flag, Charles Dickens was a tiny tot – one year old – in 1813.
A contemporary admirer of Horwood’s Map said, it “enables us to see the bearings and quality of each district, and, perhaps more easily to discover the parts where improvements are most wanted.”
Let the very core of that remark sink in, it let’s us “see the…quality of each district.”
This evening we’ll be running the Along the Thames Pub Walk.
How about if we see – get the measure of – the quality of where that walk takes place. The Bankside district. Appropriate not least because in just a few years’ time – 1824, when Charles Dickens is 12 years old – his father, John Dickens, will be arrested for debt and put in the Marshalsea prison. Put in prison in that neighbourhood, where our walk goes tonight. The Dickens family – with the exception of that 12-year-old boy – will move into the Marshalsea with John Dickens. The boy Charles Dickens – he’s living in a room by himself in Camden Town and working twelve hours a day, six days a week at Warrens, the blacking warehouse just off the Strand, by the river Thames, every Sunday, his day off, the boy Charles Dickens will walk where we’ll be walking tonight, will walk through that neighbourhood
to visit his parents and brothers and sisters in prison.
So our greatest novelist knew the neighbourhood very well. What was there, what was the quality of the neighbourhood where his father was locked up? Where, in effect, his family was locked up?
Astonishingly, to this day, 200 years later, Dickens would recognise the layout of the neighbourhood, be familiar with many of the streets. A lot of the buildings are gone of course. But their names have survived. And in quite a few cases even the buildings have survived. We go along Clink Street. Dickens will have gone along Clink Street. Evocative that name, isn’t it.
That Bankside area – part of the larger district known as Southwark – was infamous in so many respects. Brothels and prisons and playhouses and Bear baiting in Shakespeare’s day. They left their mark. Left their mark in street names. Street names and place names that were there in Dickens’ day. Are still there today. It was a neighbourhood of prisons. Five of them. The most infamous was the Clink Prison.
The name Clink has been imprinted on the English language. It’s a byword for prison. Imprinted on our language means, it goes without saying, imprinted on our history, imprinted on our culture. It is, at no little risk of belabouring the obvious, imprinted on our mind as surely as it is on Horwood’s map and on the street signs that tell us we’ve just set foot into Clink Street, where the Clink Prison stood. Similarly names like Bankside of course and Bear Gardens and Rose Alley and Cardinal Cap Alley – we’ll go along or go by those streets tonight. And Winchester Yard of course. And St Saviours – we call it Southwark Cathedral today – and St Saviour’s Dock, where the replica of the Golden Hinde, the ship on which Sir Francis Drake sailed the high seas, circumnavigated the globe nearly four and half centuries ago.
There it is, in St Saviour’s Dock.
And of course The George, London’s last remaining galleried coaching inn, where our walk will end.
Now that and more is all there. To this day.
And it gives us a good idea of the quality of the district.
But looking at Horwood’s map is like opening the door of a crypt – or a slaughterhouse – and momentarily – perhaps more than momentarily – being stunned by the pungency of what rushes at us. Smells and sounds and associations.
The Anchor Tavern is on our route tonight. Two hundred years ago the Anchor Brewery was there, as was the old inn that is still there. And behind the Anchor Brewery, Deadman’s Place Burying Ground. The boy Dickens would have known it. Would have shuddered as he walked by it. The Anchor wasn’t the only brewery. The Wheatsheaf Brewery and the United Public Brewery were on the boy Dickens’s route to the Marshalsea Prison. The Black Horse Brewery was nearby. Just four of a good many breweries over there. Yeast, malt, fermentation all those smells Dickens would have taken in. Literally taken in. Some of them pleasant aromas, others sulphorus. It was an industrial neighbourhood. A hard-edged industrial neighbourhood. There was the Vinegary Manufactury. There was Tan Yard. Tanning animals hides – that’s a made-to-order recipe for foul odours.
There was Timber Yard. And Horseshoe Alley. Think of Joe Gargery in Dickens’s novel Great Expectations. Joe Gargery was a blacksmith.
There was an Iron Foundry. It stood right by the Wheatsheaf Brewery. There it is on Horwood’s Map. There was Soap Yard and Fishmonger’s Alley. And several burial grounds, not just Deadman’s Place. There was the Mad House. It was part of Guy’s Hospital.
For me, though, there’s one street name I cannot get over. Rochester Street.
Before they came to London Dickens’ family lived in Rochester, down in Kent. Those few boyhood years in Rochester were the happiest years in Dickens’s entire life. Which is really saying something when you think of the astonishing literary and social and financial success he achieved as an adult.
As splendiferous as those adult successes were, as cosseted and exalted as Dickens the famous novelist was, those attainments were as nothing compared to the idyllic wonder and joy and ecstasy of that brief childhood in Rochester.
On his way to and from the Marshalsea prison to visit his family, Dickens will have walked by Rochester Street. The very name of the street would have been like an arrow in his heart. Because from that happy, safe childhood in Rochester the Dickens’ had come up to London and in no time at all this was what had befallen them. In particular, had befallen that little boy. It was like an expulsion from Eden. He’d gone from Rochester heaven to London hell. Practically overnight.
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.