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. Every last one of you. Wherever you are. It’s Saturday, November 9th, 2024.
This one’s going to short and sweet. And I’ve well and truly given the kaleidoscope a good turn and a shake. This one’s not coming from NW6 or Fitzroy Square or the Cafe in the Crypt in Trafalgar Square. I’m well and truly off-piste. I’m 3,250 miles from London. I’m looking at date palms. And beyond the date palms, the Red Sea. And across the Red Sea – barely visible – Saudia Arabia. It’s 24 degrees Centigrade. That’s 78 Fahrenheit. The skies are blue. The only sound is gentle waves washing against the beach and whisper of a light breeze. Nature sounds as opposed to the familiar, low, ever-present, background rumble that is the London soundscape.
You want to put a name to it, I’m just outside a tiny Bedouin city called Dahab. In Egypt. Though it’s a stretch to call it a city. For that matter, Bedouins, as I understand it, don’t have much truck with cities. Anyway, Dahab’s claim to fame is it’s the free diving capital of the world. And it has some of the best scuba diving and snorkelling under the sun. Under the sun, indeed.
Anyway, let’s see whether there’s anything London Walks to be wrested from this couldn’t be less London setting.
I said this would be short and sweet. What I propose to do is revisit, briefly, that Charles Lamb passage – that letter he wrote to Wordsworth – that we dwelt on a couple of days ago. And as long as we’re at it, it’s perfect fit, in one spot, with a piece of the Enobarbus speech, that we also looked at, in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.
The Charles Lamb passage is his loving catalogue of the sights and sounds of London. The carnival of London. Dickens sounded the name note in his lapidary line, “what inexhaustible food for speculation the streets of London afford.”
Anyway, I’m going to read – well, re-read, as it happens – that parade of a sentence to you. And then we’re going to focus, very briefly, on the one word I didn’t understand.
Here’s Charles Lamb’s catalogue of the delights of London.
“The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the very women of the town; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffeehouses, steam of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes – London itself a pantomime and a masquerade – all these things work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power of satiating me.”
He’s almost free-associating, isn’t he. I note in particular how “the wickedness round about Covent Garden” leads on immediately to “the very women of the town”. The point being that Covent Garden at the time was famous – or infamous if you will – for its brothels. Its “women of the town.” Lamb says it, but ever so circumspectly.
But anyway, the sore thumb word – the word that puzzled me – is that gerund “cheapening” in the phrase “parsons cheapening books.” Cheapening is a very old word. The Oxford English Dictionary tracks it back to the 1530s. You have to dust the word off a bit because its meaning – in the sense that Charles Lamb used it – is now archaic. It meant, says the OED, “to bargain or bid for (goods); to offer to buy; to offer a price for; to ask the price of.” So that’s what the parsons are doing. They’re in various and sundry bookshops cheapening books, they’re asking, “how much is this book?”
And of course the word “cheap” is a potent London trigger word. Quick history lesson here: Cheapside was the chief marketplace of medieval London. Cheap –the root of the word – was the Old English word for market. The trades, the crafts, the goods, the merchandise were all there – or just off Cheapside. The poetry of those streets is plain and honest to goodness but oh so evocative. Bakers in Bread Street, Goldsmiths in Goldsmith Row, Fishmongers in Friday Street (at no little risk of belabouring the obvious, on Friday you didn’t eat meat, you ate fish), dairymen in Milk Street, goldsmiths in Goldsmiths Row, poulterers in poultry. And so on. Well, I think London Calling can go down Cheapside one of these days and come calling. We’ll make a full-fledged tour of the most important street in the City of London. Take proper survey of Cheapside and its history. Suffice it to say here that in Dickens’ day Cheapside rivalled the West End as a shopping centre.
And maybe some of those parsons Charles Lamb cast an affectionate eye over were cheapening books in Cheapside.
But let’s end by savouring how Charles Lamb ends that sentence. “…all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me.”
Did you hear it? That’s the very magic Cleopatra works on Marc Antony. Lamb is talking about London. Shakespeare – well, Enobarbus – is talking about Cleopatra. But it’s the same thought. Charles Lamb says London feeds me, without a power of satiating me.
Last time we stopped by here we quaffed the beginning of Enobarbus’ resounding response to Maecenus’s playing the card, “he’s got to leave her…’Antony must leave her utterly’.”
Enobarbus says, “Never; he will not:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety…”
Now consider what Enobarbus goes on to say:
“Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies.”
It’s the exact same thought as Charles Lamb’s pronouncement about London: “it feeds me without a power or satiating me.”
And there you have a morsel of Lamb, a sprinkling of Shakespeare, a close reading of London from the land of Cleopatra.
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.