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 St George’s Day. April 23rd, 2025.
Our main course today is something in a way of an update about the big project Charlie’s working on, The Ultimate London Walk.
But let’s get started with a handful of appetisers. The odds and ends in the title of this ‘cast.
And no surprise this, given my predilections, they’re mostly about language, the way it preserves history. Duke Theseus in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream says “imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.”
And how does the poet’s pen do that? What are the raw materials he’s working with? Words of course.
So I woke up this morning thinking about Nick Day. Nick Day the well-respected, seriously good actor. Nick’s had a marvelous career. Royal Shakespeare Company. Royal National Theatre. No end of West End productions. A lot of television. And a fair number of films. Now every so often Nick does a spot of guiding for us. In theatre parlance, Nick’s almost never ‘resting’ – so it’s a rare treat for us to get him to guide, say, his Theatreland Walk for us. But occasionally we do draw to an inside straight and hit it. And glory be when it happens, because it means we’ve got one of the first eleven, so to speak, of his generation of actors doing a walk for us.
Anyway, thinking about Nick I started to wonder about his surname: Day. Turns out the name Day has nothing to do with the 24-hour period, the unending drum roll span of time from year Dot out to the crack of doom. It took us a long time to get a bead on – get the measure of – an hour or a minute. Not so a day.
No, the name Day refers to an ancestor who worked in a dairy. You can drill down even deeper. A dairy was where a dey – that’s spelled d-e-y – carried out her duties. And who or what was a dey, d-e-y? It, that d-e-y rendering of the word day comes from an Old Norse word for a maid, a maid who was a servant. And what was her job, the dey’s job? She kneaded the dough and made the daily bread.
So there you go, you meet up with Nick Day – maybe ask for his autograph outside the stage door – you can hit him up with this tale, “hey, Nick, you aware of the derivation of your surname?” No question but that’ll be the most interesting autograph request he’ll get in a long career of them.
Moving on. It’s now two days – that word day again – two days since the Pope died. And today – St George’s Day – does double duty as Shakespeare’s birthday and deathday – well, I’m reminded of that 17th century reckoning: “the death day of the body is the birth day to eternity.”
Passing mention just then of St George. Every day is both a teaching day and a learning day – and I’ve just learned that the feast days of most saints occur on their death days. Shines a useful light, that bit of lore. And yes it’s a fit with St George. His birthday to eternity was the 23rd of April in the year 303. In short, today – St George’s Day – is the anniversary of his death day.
Two final bits of small change for this odds and ends warm up act. Our ghost walk – indeed some of our other walks as well – anyway, our ghost walk in the City of London goes into some pretty spooky places. Old graveyards, churchyards. And these days, London is awash with foxes. The London Wildlife Trust reckons there are about 10,000 foxes in London. It’s a potent combination, eldritch, tenebrous London, alleyways so old they’re cobwebbed with time, an ancient churchyard in the gloaming, a great guide telling chilling tales from beyond the grave, hearing those tales fully aware that we’re standing on the dead, standing on a fen of undisclosed horrors, well, given that combination I think I’d just as soon not see a fox suddenly go darting round the corner. And why is that? Because back then – back in the days we’ve time travelled to – foxes were thought to under the spell of witches. Or to be witches. In animal shape.
Final thought – and this is the creepiest one of all – once heard, never forgotten and it sure is disquieting, you have to hope to God it’s not true – this final chilling thought comes from the American poet Louise Gluck. Who died a couple of years ago. And yes, that’s germane. Here’s why it’s germane. Louise Gluck said, “it is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the deep earth.” It’s shiver up the spine stuff, that idea. And I’m afraid it’s now branded on – seared into – my mind. And maybe henceforth yours, compliments of this podcast. Every time I go into a City of London churchyard, I’m wondering, what am I really in the presence of here – is this place replete with consciousness – consciousness that has survived from hundreds of years ago – the consciousness of thousands of Londoners – buried in the deep – and not so deep earth I’m standing on. Or we in – or at the gate of – hell. As redefined by Louise Gluck? It’s terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the deep earth.
Ooh, that’s enough of that. Let’s move on.
Here’s our main course. This is an update on The Ultimate London Walk that Charlie’s working on. The walk that’s going to be done in stages and will traverse – go all the way across – London. There’s no other walk like it.
Here’s what Charlie says in a recent email.
Hi David,
To keep this one simmering, here are my answers to the questions you posed in the café
Why do it?
Well, a dozen good reasons immediately come to mind. Here they are.
1. Be the first – in the billions of journeys across the capital no-one has ever done this one
2. View the city like never before. Instead of just admiring that grand old tree that’s London you are travelling through its bole – experiencing every ring of its growth. It’s a new way of seeing.
3. Discover so much of the unknown city – hidden in the well known
4. Achieve something you can be proud of – bookending London by walking north boundary to south, Hertfordshire to Surrey.
5. Do something big – one and half marathons – but do it small – in manageable bites. You won’t be collapsing with exhaustion
6. Explore without getting lost. You have a guide
7. Absorb the peace of the many green spaces that interlace the cityscape
8. Get a sense of the scale of London historic urban footprint – the largest in the world
9. Tick off some of those fabled villages which coalesced into London
10. Enrich your experience of London’s communities, its built environments, its natural habitats
11. Drop in and drop out, you can choose which sections to come on
12. Log the best of what you discover to return with friends and family
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.