London Walks

Following on from yesterday's podcast about the London place-name "Bayswater", David opens up another front on that field of action: the ancient (it's Anglo-Saxon) place-name suffix "ee" (or "ea" or "ey"). TRANSCRIPT London Calling. David here. “To see London, you have to hear it.” Quoting myself there. That sentence – to see London you have to hear it – is how I opened London Walks, London Stories, the London Walks book, all those years ago. Thought long and hard about it. Should we have a keynote? If so, what should it be? And should we sound it right at the beginning? Did a bit of pondering and decided yes, we should. And yes, we should lead with it. That was the hard part. The easy part – it only took me two weeks – was figuring out what the keynote should be and fashioning what I hoped was a ringing, arresting, opening sentence. To see London you have to hear it was what I came up with.  And that’s all by way of saying, that sentence and indeed this podcast is a kind of stern light – maybe the first of a string of stern lights – to yesterday’s filleting of the London Placename Bayswater. Those of you on the other side of the Atlantic, do you know the English verb chuffed? It means very pleased. I was well chuffed by an email that came in a few hours ago in response to yesterday’s podcast about the word Bayswater. And I must say, doubly chuffed because the email came from a New Yorker. Because, let’s face it, some of them can be a little bit stiff-necked about New York’s preeminence, or so they take it to be a given, in the Great Cities of the World Sweepstakes. His remarks were in response to what I’d said about New York street names – that they’re a little bit tedious, not overly imaginative – compared to London’s place names. Anyway, here’s what this Noo Yorker said. Boy you hit the nail on the head today.  And to think you pointed out a nail that I didn't even know existed let alone be bothered by how much it was sticking up. When we take the subway from the Upper West Side to Midtown we get on at the 77th St station with stops at 72nd, 66th, 59th, 50th and 42nd.  That's on the #1 train if local, the #2 or #3 train if express. In contrast to get to Westminster from West Hampstead – it’s my understanding that you live in West Hampstead – you stop at Swiss Cottage, St John's Wood, Baker St, Bond St and Green Park.  On the Jubilee Line for heaven's sake. Like the difference between watching a Secret Service agent standing in front of the White House door, and the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace! As my Hist of Sci prof said - England is full of texture. And then he added – this has to be one of my all-time favourite postscripts: P.S. I am a little mad because you've made me aware of yet another significant way in which NYC can't compare to your home town.  (With the one exception that I wish you'd grant - Central Park over Hampstead Heath.  But - damn - there's that comparison of dull and enervating vs stimulating names again!)” I didn’t have the heart to write back and say, “yes, I know what you mean, it wouldn’t do to call it Central Heath would it? But as park’s go it is very impressive.” Anyway, I think we’ve started a hare here. Not about the merits of a park over against a Heath – but the joys and delights and London placenames. Finding out about London placenames – it’s a little bit like learning a foreign language. It makes for a richer experience. It opens doors of meaning and understanding.  So here’s another attainment in the To See London You Have to Hear It Skill Set. A suffix this time. A very old suffix, Anglo-Saxon as it happens. The suffix Eee. You open your ears you hear it all over London. Chelsea, Putney, Stepney, Hackney, Hornsey, Battersea, Bermondsey, Thorney, and so on. It means, the rising ground up above surrounding wetlands. Often an island or promontory. I think my favourite of those is Thorney. Thorney Island. You know where Thorney Island was? It’s where parliament and Westminster Abbey are today. Hundreds of years ago that was an island. An island covered with bramble bushes. Ergo the first part of the name: Thorney Island. Thirteen centuries ago or thereabouts somebody called it “that terrible place”. Well, it was unprepossessing, low lying, damp, covered with bramble bushes. Didn’t have a lot to recommend it. And you know, there are probably a few isolated instances of people today saying, don’t kid yourself, that leopard’s not changed its spots – it’s doing a damned good job of living up to that moniker: thorney. 

London place-names can often unlock the DNA of a neighbourhood or district. They're an x-ray of the past. Bayswater is a perfect case in point. David "guides" the name Bayswater in this podcast.  

This one's the result of a happy accident. I (David) was doing my Hampstead Walk a couple of Sunday mornings ago and up ahead an artist had set up his easel and was "rapt" (Shakespeare's word). He was in what I later discovered he calls "the zone" – the act of creation. The painting was (is) very beautiful. And, look, myself and my two walkers were a bit forward. We got to him and stood back away and watched him work. And then we were even more forward: we spoke to him. I was aware that maybe just then we were "three persons from Porlock" (it's a Coleridge reference, I mention it in the interview) but the scene – the street, his painting, himself – it was so delightful we frankly couldn't resist. Well, lucky us. He turned out to be a wonderfully generous guy – as well as a superb artist. His name is Matthew Phillips. A dual national (like me, American and British), he lives in Hampstead. I ended up asking him if he'd let me interview him. The answer was a very generous, "yes." This podcast is the fruit of that moment and the interview it gave rise to. I loved every minute of the interview, learned all kinds of fascinating things about light and "wet on wet" painting and practical aspects of the "craft" and getting "narrative" into buildings and judging colour and what goes into a commissioned work, etc. etc. You can find out more about Matt and see some of his work by clicking here, bringing up his website: www.MattPhillipsArt.com And he regularly exhibits at various galleries, including his home gallery, Hampstead's Aeon Gallery. www.mattphillipsart.com Instagram:   @mattphillipsart.com QUOTES "when you're planning a painting part of the thing is to be flexible with the environment" "you have to contend with a myriad of changing factors" "the changing light is a big factor" "Van Gogh painted it top to bottom" "I tend to decide what the direction of light is" "you can get too dogmatic" "it gives you a fresh communication with the subject" "the hardest thing is more the time of day" "paint the bits that I know will be in shadow" "a building down in central London I'd love to do a painting of" "I"m not terribly interested in buildings themselves" "I try to infuse narrative into them" "drama into the bricks and mortar" "it has to have an emotional human narrative content to it as well as being an interesting building in terms of its fabric" "it also about the clarity of light" "the quality of light there is crystal clear" "it is a diffused light" "I began to fall back in love with London" "it was then that I started turning my eye to London in a way that I hadn't done before" "it gives things a more muted hue that I really appreciate now" "I'm with Turner on that" "light could be the main focus of one's work" "that was actually a commission for someone" "the human factor is what's so interesting to me" "more importantly trying to capture the soul of the person" "it has to come from an internal place" "how vibrant the colours are that I'm using" "I mostly use oils...I like to paint wet into wet" "you get a tide mark with oil" "there are real benefits to painting outdoors" "I sculpt as well...do some welding" "I have my backpack with my paints, my palette" "need to keep direct sun off the surface of the canvas because it really alters one's judgment of colour" "better to paint in shade" "I don't mind a bit of debris in a painting" "where do you go to the toilet, can you abandon your station?" "every single thing is a micro decision" "you're keeping a piece of work within a bracket of light and time of day" "time and space kind of drifts away" "the wonderful coastlines of western Scotland" "an impression of them at that moment that they're sitting with you and trying to capture how they're feeling"    

Up in Hampstead, Memorial Day comes 52 times a year for David. TRANSCRIPT London calling. David here. Today’s Memorial Day in the United States so I thought I’d do a personal –  a David, a London-based, a from London Memorial Day piece for today’s podcast.  As it happens, every Sunday is a memorial day for me. So the where’s and when’s and why’s and what’s and who’s of those weekly acts of remembrance are part of what I’m going to set out here.  And let’s get it said that the British equivalent of the American Memorial Day is called Remembrance Sunday. It takes place on the Sunday closest to November 11th. Up and down the land there’s a service. And a two minutes silence at 11 o’clock.  That Sunday because November 11th is of course Armistice Day.  Armistice Day. That very name – if you open the furnace door of its meaning – should sear. It doesn’t anymore. You can’t see the word anymore for the terrifying, sharp-edged bayonet that it is. It’s been so encrusted with use that it’s been blunted, dulled. It’s lost its shiny, scary, razor-sharp edge. And that’s by way of saying, an armistice is not necessarily the end of a war. Strictly speaking it’s an agreement by warring parties to stop fighting – almost like a truce – while attempts are made to negotiate a lasting peace.  The word itself interests me. You can of course hear the word arms in armistice. And the second part of the word stice comes from the proto Indo-European root sta, which means to stand, make or be firm. You get the same root in the word solstice. The solstice is the point at which the sun seems to stand still. Well, the armistice was when the arms, the guns, stood still, fell quiet.  But yes, you take the word for what it means, it’s deeply disquieting. And of course history would show that armistice was in fact the right word. Because in less than 21 years Britain, France, Germany and in time virtually the whole world would be at it again. Any way you look at it, it’s horrifying. And I’d say that timeline makes the nightmare somehow even worse. World War I – industrialised slaughter. The lost generation. Lost because of the meat grinder of that war. And then just over 20 years later – the allotted time span for a generation is 25 years – so it wasn’t even a full generation later, the next generation was on that treadmill heading into the bloody maw of modern warfare. I sometimes wonder about that five-year difference. Scientists say it takes 25 years for the human brain to fully mature. (Aside here, when they were little I used to tease my kids: what’s it like having a brain that’s only 80 percent developed? The answer to that was usually a punch to dad’s midriff.) But anyway the point is that 25-year-olds are pretty much fully mature. I think you could say they’re less tractable than 20-year-old boys.  Anyway, two personal memorial day-like memories. I grew up in a small town in southwestern Wisconsin. 1960s. Yes, you got it. Vietnam War. There were a 129 kids in my high school graduating class. We graduated in 1964. 129 kids, 64 boys. Two of those boys – two boys of the 64 of the Class of 64 – were killed in Vietnam. And that war, what was all that about? The other memorial day type memory took place about thirty years ago. Our three were under 5. We went to France. Went to those D-Day beaches. And to the cemeteries. The cemeteries. Endless – as far as the eye could see – white crosses. And, yes, a few stars of David. Endless fields of white crosses. And we were there with those little kids of ours. And our lives were so full, so full of joy, so full of life. And I remember so clearly my first thought when all of that came into view. That thought was, “my god, all the unborn children.” Anything else to add before we turn to my weekly memorial days in Hampstead? Yes, maybe this. I am an anti-militarist. That said, I hasten to add, when I was a journalist we had more than a few politicians and military men making their way through that newsroom. And one day it occurred to me, “I’ve never met a politician I’ve liked. And conversely, I’ve never met a soldier (or an airman or a naval guy) I haven’t liked.” I say that for what it’s worth. I’m not sure what the dynamic was there. I think it may have had something to do with my sense that the politicians were more often than not telling porkies, telling lies. And that the military guys were telling the truth. I remember mentioning that to a naval commander’s wife on a walk and she said, “yes of course, in the military you have to tell the truth, you can get people killed if you don’t.” Ok. Let’s go to Hampstead. My Sunday morning walk. Like every place in the country Hampstead has war memorials. Three of them that we pass. We pause before two of them. One is outside the parish church, St. John’s. There are four tablets on wall just before you step into the churchyard. There are about 80 names on those tablets. Twenty names per tablet. Every single one of those tablets will have at least one pair – sometimes two or three pairs – of names. Brothers. Or perhaps cousins. Or fathers and sons.  I saw – but didn’t see – that war memorial for 40 years. Just walked by it. Thousands of times. And then one day, six months ago or so, one of the names caught my eye. Ernest Lifetree. That’s such a beautiful name. I wanted to know more Ernest Lifetree. So I did some research. Turns out, he got started in my neck of the woods, West Hampstead. Fordwych Road was where his boyhood home was. His was a Jewish family. That wonderful surname – Lifetree – was an anglicised version of what had been a German name. They were a Middle Class. Father owned a small factory. They prospered. They ended up in West Hampstead’s grandest street, Crediton Hill. Two tablets away there’s Arthur Cullen. Arthur’s mother was Ada Cullen. She was a charlady. Lived in a handsome house I show people five minutes before we get to St. John’s. The Tall Towne House it’s called. It’s in Perrin’s Lane. How was it a charlady got to live in that fine house. I’m pretty sure Ada was given a couple of rooms in the basement in return for looking after the house. The 1911 Census Return tells us she was living there with her three teenage kids, a daughter and two sons. Arthur was one of her sons. His name is on that tablet, not a hundred yards from the house where his mother charring, trying to do her best by her three kids. So you could say Arthur was a working-class kid. And then the last tablet along has the names Donald Tripp and Cyril Tripp. They were brothers. They were upper class. Donald Tripp had a twin brother. I tracked the twin brother’s life. He died in 1947. The executor of his will was one Donald Tripp. That’ll have been his son. So here’s the surviving twin trying to keep his dead twin alive, in a sense, by naming his son after him. So moving.  Several things come together here. We’ve got a working-class kid, a middle-class kid and an upper class. So the full social range of Hampstead is there. A lot of those young Hampstead men – boys is probably a more accurate term – were in a unit that came to be known as the stock broker brigade. Because it was Hampstead. A lot of rich kids up there. Though Arthur Cullen certainly wasn’t a rich kid. And I almost can’t bear to mention what happened to the Stock Broker Brigade – within about 18 months of them marching off to the trenches, nearly half of them were dead or badly wounded. Half out of some 750 in total. The death total for Covid so far in Britain is about one in 400. Many of them very old, very unwell people – not that that in any way lessens the horror of these past 13 months. But 300 or so bright, fit young men from one small community. Well, I”m not going to belabour the obvious. Years ago I read something that made a lasting mark in my mind. The author said, “we die three times. We die when we die. We die when we’re buried. We die the last time our name is spoken.” I’ve resolved that I’m going to keep Ernest Lifetree and Arthur Cullen and Donald Tripp from dying that third time, as long as it’s possible for me to do so. So we stop there every Sunday morning on my Hampstead Walk. Spend a minute or so there. Look at those names. Hear those young men’s stories. The other war memorial is a tiny tablet on the wall of a very small block of what would have been council flats. They’ll mostly be privately owned now. There are actually two small blocks of flats there. About 60 flats in total. They’re very hard to find. It’s a very attractive little Hampstead nook that’s impossible to find. It feels like you’re wending your way through private grounds. I suppose technically those grounds are somewhere between public and private. But anyway, this little tablet is impossibly moving. For two reasons. 1. It’s affixed there on one of the two buildings that those 50 boys lived in, grew up in. There are 50 names on the tablet. Ten of those names have crosses beside them. Those ten boys were killed. So the other two war memorials are each in a very different zone from this one. One’s on the wall that fronts the churchyard; the others right up at the top of the hill where the three main Hampstead roads meet. So they both are in a public place. But not the one on the wall of the small block of council flats. You’re looking at where those kids lived. Where their parents were when the telegraph came. Where the neighbours were. Some of whose sons came back alive. Though God knows how injured – mentally or otherwise – some of the survivors may have suffered. The school those kids went to, is right there, just over the way. The grounds we’re standing in are the grounds those little boys will have played in. The gate we open to leave that little estate is the gate those youngsters will have been in and out of countless times. And then one last time for some of them. That’s one thing. The other thing is the names. There are two Moodys on that little plaque, three Martins, three Kitchens, three Wards, two Williams, two Wilsons, five Rouses.  Two of those Rouse boys were killed. Two of the Ward boys were. And so on. Yes, brothers. Or possibly – distant possibility – fathers and sons. Or cousins. Two small buildings. 60 flats. 50 youngsters. Ten of them killed.  There are entire libraries of books and documents about World War I. You want a distillation of the folly and futility of war – of the catastrophe that the Great War visited upon humankind – you need do no more than stand in front of that humble little tablet on that little block of council flats in that out of the way little back corner Hampstead. Stand there for a minute or so and think about the Rouse family. And the Ward family. And the Wilsons. And the rest of them. Ok, that’s my Memorial Day say from here in London. 

David on tourists' London as opposed to Londoners' London. AKA how to read the London room. Transcript London calling. David here. Somewhere in Shakespeare there’s a scene – this is from memory, alas, I haven’t been able to get a bead on the play, let alone track down the exact scene – anywhere somewhere in Shakespeare-land there’s a passage in which a nobleman, speaking to a fellow nobleman, talks about the little people, the ordinary people, how they’re always prattling about the deeds of the high and mighty.  Put me in mind, ever so slightly, of myself and my fellow guides. And indeed, our walkers. That moment in Shakespeare came to mind because of yet another, Covid-induced epiphany. I was out on one of my neighbourhood walks – this past 13 months I’ve walked these parts – West Hampstead, Hampstead, St. Johns Wood, Kilburn, Little Venice, Queens Park – walked these parts more in 13 months than I’d walked them in 40 years. And I needs must say, very rewarding it’s been. I know my neighbourhood and its environs a whole lot better than I did before Covid clamped its fangs in our lives.  And inevitably it seems to me, it’s occurred to me that if I hardly knew my neck of the woods, well, then how little do visitors know it. In short, I realised – and here it is in epiphany form – that 99 percent of London – and the life Londoners live– is the dark side of the moon for visitors. Which brings to mind a line from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, “What is the city but the people?” And what followed from that “dark side of the moon” realisation – the 99 percent realisation – is that in many cases visitors probably know visitor’s London better than most Londoners know it. By visitor’s London I mean the West End and St. James’s and Mayfair and the City and Knightsbridge and Kensington and Hampstead and Marylebone and Bloomsbury and the Bankside. For two weeks of the year in late June/early July you can probably add Wimbledon to that list. And I suppose Kew and Richmond and yes, Bayswater and Notting Hill and Holland Park. And that pretty well covers it. And, yes, that London – tourists’ London – a lot of tourists probably do know it better than a lot of Londoners know it.  Londoners’ London and tourists’ London – the city (called London) that those two groups of people know – well, the obvious dichotomy there put me in mind of Kipling’s great line east is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet. The next step on from that of course was my wondering whether that great lock “never” can be unlocked. In the way of these things, my mind, my London memories, whirled back many years. Nearly 40 years ago, I should think. To that summer when my best boyhood pal and his wife came to visit us. Ron and I had grown up in a town of 5,000 people in southwestern Wisconsin. His wife Jody was a Wisconsin farm girl. I came to London. Ron and Jody went, by gosh, to Oshkosh. They were teachers. I think Ron had never been out of the midwest. And Jody perhaps never out of Wisconsin. And we had a great time. It was fun showing them round London. And for sure, they were very interested in, they liked what they saw. You know, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, the Changing of the Guard, the Tower of London, the British Museum, the National Gallery, some West End theatre, a Thames cruise, all the usual suspects.  But what struck me so forcibly was Jody’s reaction – in particular – to quotidian stuff, ordinary, daily life stuff. She responded almost viscerally to the doll’s house size of our fridge. Its only about three feet tall. Hers back in Oshkosh was probably eight feet tall. And they had a ten foot long freezer in the cellar. Well, she’d never been out of Wisconsin so it follows really that you just assume that what you’ve got and the way you do things in Wisconsin is par for the course elsewhere. And in that same vein, it was a bit of a jolt to her that we food shopped every day. It was as if all of that made a bigger impression than the wonders of the Tower of London or the Changing of the Guard. I could see the penny dropping. That life in Oshkosh was much more “convenient” – a big shopping trip once every two or three weeks to the Mall and then home to that huge fridge and freezer. But on the other hand, HELLO, David and Mary eat fresh food every day. How other people live. That’s a big part of what travel’s all about, what you get from it.  There’s a spectrum there. Ron and Jody were very green. I’m obviously a long way toward the other end of the spectrum. I’ve lived here for half a century. I’m pretty well acclimated. And I’ve been aware from the get-go that those first 20-odd years in Wisconsin were their own advantage in figuring this place out. I have a younger sister who in a childhood accident lost an eye. Don’t worry, didn’t slow her down a bit. She’s immensely successful. But even as a little kid I understood that having both eyes provided you with perspective. Helped especially with depth perception. Well, having those 20 odd years in Wisconsin gave me perspective – that my fellow Britons didn’t have – on my adopted home, London, England, the United Kingdom. Its practices and mores and beliefs and customs and ways of doing things and feeling about things. So that’s been an advantage. But there’s also a slight disadvantage. Relocating yourself, as I did. Uprooting yourself and moving to another country, you never become a native. You’re never completely at home with subtle cultural nuances. It’s a little like speaking a foreign language. If you learn a foreign language as a small child – before, say, the age of six – your accent’s going to be perfect. Learn it after the age of six you’re always going to speak it with at least a slight accent. Well, the same principle applies to transplanting yourself – in my case from Wisconsin to London – as an adult. You’re always going to have an accent in your grasp of your adopted home’s nuances and mores and sensibilities, etc. So what that’s meant, in my case, is that I’ve surrounded myself with friendly natives. Londoners I can call on to explain some of the really subtle stuff to me. Stuff that they understand, that they get, instinctively and completely naturally. They just know how to read the room, so to speak. My read will always have a slight accent to it. So they help me out with that.  I’m talking of course about my English wife Mary – always sounds strange to me that phrase, as if I’ve also got a Ukrainian wife and a Nigerian wife and a Peruvian wife, I don’t have, needless to say, I just have one wife and she’s English. But anyway, yes, Mary helps out with my imperfect “cultural/nuances” accent. As do my fellow London Walks guides. To varying degrees. Adam’s a huge help. We’ve got a lot in common. but there are also huge differences. In common, we’re both journalists, though he was a print journalist, I was a television journalist. We’re both incomers to London. The difference is I’m of course an American and Adam’s a Scot. So he gets it about all kinds of things – the stuff comes naturally to him, being a Brit – that I read less than perfectly, that I read with my American accent. So I call on Adam. Get him to shed light on matters the answers to which aren’t in any guidebook. Aren’t on Wikipedia. Or Quora. Really fine-grained, subtle cultural stuff. But no less interesting for being fine-grained and subtle.  So where’s this going? Well, this has really been leading up to an announcement, of sorts, about where this podcast, on occasion, is going. I thought, I’m going to see if it’s possible to make this podcast, from time to time, a satellite that goes round to the dark side of the moon. Shows it to visitors. Yes, that dark side of the moon, the 98 percent of London that visitors never see. In some cases, that’s real estate, London neighourhoods that visitors never get to. In other cases, it’s figurative London. The internal London landscape that’s in most Londoners’ heads. So look out for some of those trips to the dark side of the moon. They’ll be coming up here occasionally. First one later this week. I’m interviewing Adam on Wednesday. The piece should go up here a day or two later. Oh and there are other goodies to look forward to. I’m interviewing a London artist on Thursday. Interview Concepcion of Seville Walks tomorrow. And Federico of Madrid walks later this week. So, yes, good stuff coming.  See you then.  

A David gallimaufry TRANSCRIPT London calling. David here. Another gallimaufry tonight. Thought I’d start with an addendum to yesterday’s podcast, which was mostly about the British slave trade and in particular my surprise that they were all at it. By “all” I mean household names in the London pantheon. Famous 17th-century Londoners. People that we as guides talk about a fair bit. Because they’re good copy. There are good stories about them. And because they’re very much with us 350 years later. And not just in our history books. There are statues of many of them. A lot of them have streets named after them. They figure in televised period dramas and films. And so on. And what jumped off the page at me was that in many years of encountering these people – reading about them, listening to radio programmes about them, going to lectures they figured in, etc. – this particular aspect of their lives, well, it was the dark side of the moon. I had no idea they’d piled right in – got there first, really – when slavery as a business opportunity set up shop in London.  Indeed, an American chap who listened to the podcast got in touch, and said, “Oh, I was really surprised – taken aback – by your innocence – surely, that’s something you should have known – we all know that Thomas Jefferson had slaves and George Washington had slaves, and on it goes.” And maybe native Britons do know. This could be one of those lacunae that goes with the territory of being what I am, an incomer, an immigrant. You didn’t go to school over here (well, I did, but not until I was in my 20s, a graduate student – and in any case a Brit would never use the word school when referring to university), Anyway, you didn’t go to school over here, you didn’t watch the television programmes your British contemporaries watched when they were growing up, etc. So naturally, you’re playing catch-up from Day One. Come over here, as I did, in your early 20s, your native-born contemporaries have a 20-year head start on you. So, yes, maybe bred and born Brits do know that Samuel Pepys and John Locke and Lord Craven and Dukes and Admirals and Kings and Queens had their snouts in the slavery trough from Day One. I’ll find out. I’ll ask some of my fellow London Walks guides: did you know that our Swiss Army Knife Restoration favourite – Swiss Army Knife because there are so many different uses you can put him to when you’re guiding – our Swiss Army Knife Restoration favourite Samuel Pepys piled right in as soon as the opportunity to make money from the slave trade pitched up on these shores? Or what about Queen Anne’s speech to parliament on the 6th of June 1712. All eyes on Her Majesty there in the mother of parliaments – hanging on her every word – and probably nodding assent, maybe even standing up and clapping, when she came out with this gem, “I have insisted and obtained that the asientio or contract for furnishing the Spanish West Indies with negroes shall be made with us for 30 years.” A few days later there was a torchlight procession through London to in celebration. Getting that contract was like being awarded the Olympic Games. The particulars were 4,800 slaves annually for 30 years. And it wasn’t just London and Londoners who had reason to celebrate. The deal handsomely wetted the beak of the Spanish King. He got 33 and a half pesos in silver for each captive delivered safe and sound.  How’s that old saying go, behind every great fortune there’s a great crime. Anyway, yes, I’ll find out if my English colleagues – Tom and Judy and Simon – were in fact learning this stuff in school. And if it was part of the curriculum, I’ll ask: “did your teacher give you an idea of the numbers involved? That the cargo in human beings in those British ships may have been as many as 3 million people. And did the teacher mention that England was deemed by a court to have “too pure Air for slaves to breathe in.”? And when I’ve finished with my inquisition I’ll of course add, “mustn’t feel too bad you guys, don’t forget that on my side of the Atlantic – well, what was my side of the Atlantic – President George Washington was a slave owner. And President Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner and a paedophile.” That’ll make them feel better. Moving on. I thought I’d do a quick where are we, what’s the state of play with London Walks 13 months into the Covid era. Bad news first. Still losing money over fist. As long as we’ve got some to lose, well, it’s just money. No big deal. The crunch will come – and, alas, it gets closer every day – when the piggy bank is empty. So, yes, the good ship London Walks is still going down. All we’ve managed to do is slow the rate of descent ever so slightly. Haven’t been able to stop. Well, we’ll see what the future holds. That said, we can certainly hold our heads high. Inevitably, we’ve taken to likening London Walks to the legendary Windmill Theatre. The Windmill’s wartime boast was “We never closed.”  Aside here: the Windmill was in fact a strip club – famous for introducing nude showgirls to Britain. So, sure enough, it wasn’t long before “We never closed” became “We never clothed.” Anyway, yes, like the Windmill London Walks never closed. Well, we did probably for a couple of weeks right after Covid first touched down last year. But then the ever-inventive, imaginative Adam came up with the idea of virtual tours…and that was it, we were off to the races, Covid or no Covid, Lockdown or no Lockdown. And what a rainbow rainbow rainbow of creativity it’s been from this remarkable group of human beings, these wonderful guides. They’ve now created – and given – well over 300 different virtual tours. And not just London virtual tours. We’ve done them in Stratford and Salisbury here in England. And we’ve gone overseas: have done them in Paris, Athens, Rome, Venice, Tuscany, Naples, Athens, Turkey. And Madrid and Seville are in the pipeline. You heard it here first. What else? Well, there’s this. The London Walks daily podcast. We’ve produced – and broadcast, if that’s the term – well over 400 of them now. If you’d asked me 12 months ago how long we’d be able to keep putting them out I would have said, I don’t know, maybe about 30 episodes…can’t imagine that we’ll be able to maintain this pace. Shouldn’t think it’ll be too long before we have to cut back to once a week.” I was wrong. All pretty impressive, if I say so myself.  Impressive. But not the main thing. The main thing – well, let’s use the big league or premiership term: signings. The superstar guiding talent we’ve added to the London Walks roster. When this is all over, I’m going to look back on it and say, “Covid? Remember it well. That was the year we got Steve, Anna, Rick Jones, Leo, Fiona Jane. I mean, Steve’s the author of the Lonely Planet Guide to London and now he’s a London Walks guide. Rick was the Evening Standard’s Chief Music Critic for years – and now he’s a London Walks guide. Leo – Leo, the funnest, bubbliest guide ever – Leo, our sixth Guide of the Year Award winner. Leo, now a London Walks guide. Anna – superstar Anna – 25 years taking groups to Rome, Venice, Florence. That’s right, it’s Anna who’s created those hugely popular – and wonderful – virtual tours in Rome and Venice and Tuscany. Yes, Anna’s now a London Walks guide. Our guides – it’s always been our strongest suit – it’s what London Walks is famous for – “the best guides in London” – because, after all, it all comes down to the guiding – as that journalist said – I think it’s my favourite quote of all – we’ve gleaned a lot of them over the years – I see each of those great quotes as a pennant in a row of championship pennant running round the top of our stadium – anyway, yes, my favourite is that one, “If this were a golf tournament every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.” That was said years ago. How would that same journalist put it today, with our much stronger line-up. How’s the saying go, it’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow some good. The ill wind of Covid’s brought us these world-beating guides. So, yes, a year-on, that’s the state of play.  Or is it? No, I haven’t just remembered, haven’t forgotten. I’ve purposely saved it for last. You guys. Our walkers. Your support and encouragement and warmth – without it, without you, none of this would have been possible. London Walks wouldn’t be here today. So this is to say, “thank you.” A heartfelt thank you.  A heartfelt thank you – and an unashamed request. Please stay with us. Stand by us. And if you can, spread the word. Thanks again. C’est tout.

David in a reflective mood. This one ranges over the slave trade, the three wise men, the gobsmacking stuff he (David) is finding out about London and some notable Londoners from a book he's reading that's, well, enthralling him.

This is a slice of the pie from David's Hampstead & Hampstead Heath Virtual Tour. The pole star of David's guiding is a remark by John Constable: "we see nothing till we truly understand it." So in this excerpt, you find out, for example, the role topography played in "preserving" Hampstead and Hampstead Heath. You find out about some of the major "players" in the saving of Hampstead Heath – and what was so remarkable about their hand and how they played it. In short, you "see" Hampstead better because you understand it. QUOTES "he was the key player in the saving of Kenwood" "what's completely indulgent is my showing you this. This portrait is literally five feet from where I'm sitting now" "that's the last piece of the puzzle, that's what they finally saved in 1925" "they had to get the northern heights...and they did" "I love the fact that I have a personal connection with the saving of Hampstead Heath" "all kinds of extraordinary threads come together" "in today's terms he'd be Bill Gates" "that's George V" "this is a very interesting image" "it's a fascinating social document, just that one image"    

David takes a close look at the man behind the name Downing Street. And my goodness, look what he's found. It's like turning over a stone and finding some deeply unpleasant stuff crawling around underneath it. Deeply unpleasant is understating it – it's nasty in the extreme, what the history and biography yields up. So much so it's at least arguable that the name should perhaps be changed. Like toppling a statue and deep sixing it.

This is the start of David's Sights & Secrets of Kensington Virtual Tour. For the record, it's very similar to how his shoe- leather-on-pavement walking tour of Kensington opens. MONEY QUOTE "London specialises in hiding the best of itself"

This is Part II of the route David would take for a feast of a London journey from the Abbey Road Studios (where Richard P.'s Beatles walks end) to Baker Street Station. A car-free journey of discovery and hidden places and water and wildlife and fresh air and Londoners' London and flowers and greenery and breathtaking set-piece architecture. This Part – Part II – is set entirely in Regent's Park. It's David's route across Regent's Park. You're going to walk across Regent's Park – and you want to get the most out of it – this is the route he'd recommend. It is, in his considered opinion, the route with the best payoffs in terms of beauty, variety, interest and surprises.

This is very prescriptive. It's David out walking and talking, walking the route he'd recommend if, at the end of the Beatles walk, you don't want to take the Tube back into central London. It's very detailed, very exact, this – full of practicals, full of advice. David tells you exactly how to do it if you fancy the best way of making your way back into central London from the famous crosswalk and the Abbey Road Studios in St. John's Wood. It's a three-segment journey. Starts with a very short bus ride. And then it's a walk along the Regent's Canal. Those two elements make up Part I of this 2-part podcast. Part II, which will go out tomorrow, will give you third element: the transition from the Regent's Canal to Regent's Park and the walk through Regent's Park to Baker Street Station. It's basically eye-candy all the way as soon as you get off the 139 bus. And the bus journey is a quickie, just two stops. There's lots of nature. Lots of wildlife, Lots of flowers and green. Lots of water. To say nothing of lots of variety, lots of off-the-beaten-path London. Which is by way of saying, the route has been thought through very carefully. Should you plump to act on this recommendation you'll be a happy bunny. You'll get a lot out of this walk, see a lot of London – see some London that most Londoners don't see, let alone tourists. It's recreational in every sense of the word: including the all-important one, it re-creates us, restores us, refreshes us. MONEY QUOTES "you'd think you were in Savannah, Georgia – it's that lush and the mansions could be right out of the antebellum American South" "best eyries in London" "we very quickly get to the water feature" "a wart-hog and a gang of hyenas" "great fun to have them insulting us"

Very simple, really. This podcast began life as an email David sent to a walker who rang up to say she and three friends were going on his Kensington Walk and could we recommend a place where they could get a bite to eat. TRANSCRIPT London calling. David here.  Let’s talk food in Kensington. And chowing down al fresco in Kensington.  And yes, by my standards this one will be fairly brief. But eminently practical. Including, yes, some directions.  Basically, I’m going to read out a letter – okay, an email – I wrote to one of our walkers. Her name’s Renee. She and her three friends will be some of my very first walkers back out on the streets. Now that the happy day has arrived – I’m writing this on April 2nd – now that we’re back doing live, outdoor, shoe-leather-on-pavement London Walks once again. Having been forced – like the rest of the country – to hibernate pretty much all winter – we’ve finally slipped the surly bonds of the Tier 4 restrictions. Anyway, Renee rang a couple of days ago to say that she and her friends were coming on the Thursday afternoon Kensington Walk. When she rang she asked if we could recommend a place where they could get a good sandwich. Or, depending on how they feel, maybe a bit more. A light repast.  I said, “send us an email, Renee; we’ll give it some thought, make a couple of enquiries; and get back to you.” Make some enquiries because, well, it’s not a simple matter just now. There’s no indoor dining – has to be outside tables for the next few weeks. And cafes, restaurants – well, every one of them has its own hand to play. Some are kaput. Some are walking wounded. Some are full of fight and raring to go.  So I had some phoning to do, wanted to make some enquiries for Renee before I set down anything in black and white for her and her friends. And then when I got the note written and emailed off to Renee, I thought, “ah, you know, I think I could maybe put this up as a podcast – especially if I accompany the podcast with the transcript.” Because while what I’ve said to Renee was tailored for her and her friends –at the same time it’s probably got wider applicability – I’d say pretty much the same thing to anybody who asks me for a steer about getting a bite to eat in Kensington. Anybody who asks that most unerring of culinary questions, where would I personally go if I wanted some nosh in Kensington. And in particular, in the neighbourhood of my Kensington Walk.  And look, I said to Renee, these are all places I know, they’re places I regularly frequent. For what that’s worth. And what is it worth? Well, maybe something. The point being a recommendation from a guide – or a local – and I spend so much time in Kensington – have done so for decades – I just about qualify as a local. Certainly an honorary local. Anyway, a recommendation from a local is a different matter altogether from somebody getting up on a little Trip Advisor dung heap and going cock-a-doodle-doo. Cock-a-doodle-doo from somebody who’s never been to Kensington before. Whose experience of Kensington restaurants and cafes is limited to one meal in one restaurant. But who sees fit to pronounce – to hold forth – on Trip Advisor – about where to eat in Kensington. Talk about the blind leading the blind. Restaurant critic I’m not. But I’m also not a Tripe Advisor wind-bag. If I recommend a restaurant that recommendation is grounded in repeated, lived experience. Which is, after all, the real test – these are places I go back to. In marked contrast to some of their fellow culinary operators in Kensington to whom I’ve been to only once and wouldn’t return to.   Okay, here’s what I wrote to Renee. Hello again, Renee. David of London Walks here. My numero uno recommendation would be Locanda Ottoemezzo. Even the name delights me. It’s Italian of course. A locanda was an old fashioned Italian inn where you could also get food. And Ottoemezzo is Italian for 8 1/2. The name of the great Italian director Frederico Fellini’s 1963 cinematic masterpiece. Apparently Fellini said up until then he had directed 7 1/2 films. So Ottoemezzo –  8 1/2  – well, the name of the film was like an opus number. Anyway, that’s by the way – although when you’re in there you really do feel as though you’re in Italy. And gustatory-wise – well, take it from me, you’re tasting Italy. So yes, my numero uno recommendation is Locanda Ottoemezzo, the little Italian deli-cafe at 2-4 Thackeray Street, which is just a six-minute walk from High Street Kensington Tube (the meeting point for the Kensington Walk). Directions: out of the Tube, turn right, take the first turning on the right into Derry Street. Derry Street leads straight down to Kensington Square. Then go halfway round Kensington Square – it obviously doesn't matter which way round you go, but the "less rebuilt side of the square" – and thus slightly more picturesque – is the side that Derry Street leads straight into. Anyway, halfway round the square – the opposite corner from where you enter the square – is Thackeray Street. It's a very short street leading out of the southeastern corner of Kensington Square. Ottoemezzo is just along on the left. Now look, I just spoke with them. They will have two or three "sidewalk" tables. But like everybody else they're in a state of flux and uncertainty at the moment. So they're not taking bookings. They might do of course once the hurdle of April 12th is reached. Their telephone number is 020 7937 2200. But even if you can't book – or if you get there and the tables are taken – Do. Not. Despair. My strong recommendation would be to get a sandwich or whatever and then head to St. Mary Abbots – the parish church, it's very near. It has lovely gardens that will be open, that have benches, and providing it's not raining cold ropes (as the French say) it's the perfect Kensington place to tuck into the tastiest toasted sandwich this side of Tuscany. That would be the Fellini. Yes, fits doesn’t it. Anyway, it gets my strongest recommendation. It’s the one I plump for eight and a half times out of ten.  To get to St. Mary Abbots from Ottoemezzo go back to Kensington Square, turn right, walk straight up the east (the somewhat redeveloped) side of the square. When you leave the square it becomes Young Street. Young Street is, to use the Americanism, just one short block up to High Street Kensington. When you get up to the High Street you'll see St. Mary Abbots over the way and just slightly to your left. Cross over to it. (Cross at the lights – careful, that's a busy intersection.) Walk through the arch on the left (I think it likely that the church and thus the cloistered entry there will still be closed so you'll have to plump for going through the arch and along that tiny little street, which is a cul de sac. At the far end – the sac end of the cul de sac – there is a way through for pedestrians. And that will bring you out into those lovely little church gardens. Perfection achieved! A blissful spot to have your sandwich. And it's just a two-minute walk from there to the Tube Stop where I'll meet you at 2 pm. Plus all of that will be fun because I'll be going over much of that same ground with you on the walk and you'll be – I'm confident – astonished at how much more you'll see once you start "seeing it through my eyes." Having been there earlier will give you a benchmark to measure all of that by. Ok, if you don't like Italian, other possibilities are: the Greek deli (Menoo) on the corner of Holland Street and Kensington Church Street. Not cheap but very tasty. Say hello to Pannos for me. No outside tables but even closer to those St. Mary Abbots gardens than Ottoemezzo is. You want a top of the line Greek coffee – Pannos is your guy. But he also does really good Italian coffees. And look, I’m going to be very frank now, loo-wise – well, it’s as if they don’t exist at the moment. But worry not, I’ve got an in with an establishment en route on our walk – and if anybody’s bursting, well, a nod from me and it’s problem solved Moving on… There's a very fine Indian restaurant called Chakra at 33C Holland Street. Menoo (the Greek place) is at the eastern end of Holland Street – Chakra is only 80 yards or so west of Menoo. Along Holland Street. They have an outside dining area. But if things aren't up and going – well, they do takeaway stuff and, again, you're just round the corner from those St. Mary Abbots gardens. And the food is fantastic. Their butter chicken is probably primus inter pares on their menu. That’s their main Punjab dish. But if you’re not in a north India mood, well, head for the far south – try their Goan prawn curry. The other thing is Chakra’s well and truly off the beaten path. They don’t get tourists in there. Tourists don’t get back there. They can’t find it. So its customers are locals. And that in itself is a top top recommendation. It’s a wise old piece of advice that heads-up that says if you walk into an Italian restaurant and it’s wall to wall tourists – no Italians – make your excuses, turn around and get the hell out of there. Well, it’s roughly the same principle with Chakra. It’s frequented by locals, people who live in Kensington. That’s all you need to know. Pub-wise. I'd say the Scarsdale (it's a little further afield, maybe about 400 yards west of the Tube stop. It's down the left hand, the eastern side, of Edwardes Square). Has an outside dining area. And it is, really, the best pub in the area. Olde worlde, comfortable, a hidden gem. And Edwardes Square itself is 210-year-old perfection. Or you could try the Builders Arms. At 1 Kensington Court. A two-minute walk from Ottoemezzo. They also have an outside dining area. The food – I've eaten at all of these places, I never make culinary recommendations unless I can speak from personal experience – the food at the pubs is perfectly good, honest-to-goodness pub grub. Not haute cuisine but it certainly hits the spot if the pangs are rearing up on their hind legs and gnawing. Last recommendation would be Maggie Jones’. Great history. Not a show-stopper from outside. But the interior is so easy on the peeps. Whichever way you direct your gaze it’s eye-candy. Traditional, rough-hewn. Like an old fashioned English inn. Or even an old ship’s hold. And as for the food – well, don’t put in there if you’re looking to lose weight. I’d describe it as English comfort food. And it’s got a great history – the obvious clue is in that name, Maggie Jones’. I talk about it on the walk.  Now unfortunately they don’t have outdoor tables. Their website says they are doing takeaways. So you’ll have to check closer to the time. They are also – like all the others – perfectly positioned to avail yourself of the alfresco dining area I’ve singled out for you, the gardens of St. Mary Abbots. They’re at 6 Old Court Place. Old Court Place – yeah, another name that gets my vote. It’s very very close to the Tube stop, though you have to know where you’re going to find it. Anyway, to close this out, I tried ringing all of the above for you but the only ones who answered their phone were  Ottoemezzo and Chakra. They're all readily Googleable, searchable – by name. Any probs/further questions don't hesitate to get back to me. And see you on the 15th! Looking forward to it. Bliss, to be out walking/guiding again. Mary said she'll book you in. So you'll get an email confirmation from her. Hope this helps. Albestest, David London Walks    

Hornets is my favourite tiny shop in London. It's extremely high-quality, "previously owned" menswear – Savile Row, Jermyn Street, you get the idea. You'll find it – we find it on my Kensington Walk* – down a tiny, secret little passageway just off Holland Street in Kensington. It's run by one of my all-time favourite characters in London, the actor (and raconteur) William Wilde ("Bill"). I caught up with Bill – at Hornets of course – on March 24th. With Bill you just hit the Record switch, point the mic at him and sit back and enjoy the ride. Great guy. Great voice. Great (vast) fund of stories. Great fun to hang out with. Heading back to Hornets at walk's end (at the end of my Kensington Walk) is my reward to myself. Bill and his partner Landy (the Brazilian model Orlando) brew cups of tea and break out tins of biscuits and cushions come out for us to sit on the low wall opposite the shop and we just sit there and natter away. It's bliss. *And if you're not in London, no worries – because my Sights & Secrets of Kensington Virtual Tour goes to Hornets, we meet the gang (Bill, Landy, Chris, Mark, etc.). Good time.

Subtitle: Two very old photographs and an ancient place name – David gets back. A rumination about how London changes. And how our understanding and appreciation of it changes. Narrowing the focus, it's about Kensington. And zeroing in even closer, it's about the place name Kensington. David's the narrator (and guide and author). His Sights & Secrets of Kensington Virtual Tour is the jumping-off point. TRANSCRIPT London calling.  David here. Funny the memories we retain, the stuff that sticks around in our mind. Sometimes for a very long time.  Some of them, it’s easy to understand why they’re, in the attic of our mind. Others – no accounting for. I think of that very expensive education I had – all those hours in university lecture halls and classrooms. Being, well, lectured at. Dutifully “taking notes.” Plowing through the reading. Writing the papers. Cramming for the exams. And how much of what was being shovelled in actually stayed in? Very little, if truth be told. Pretty much in one ear and out the other, but I think I enjoyed it while it was going through. Anyway, yes, this is leading up to a London Walks matter. For some reason I was thinking about a Philosophy course I took as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin. Remember the professor. Ivan Soll. He was out of Princeton, as they say. Had done his doctorate there under the tutelage of Walter Kaufman, who was quite a big deal, I believe, in American academic philosophy circles back then. I remember Professor Soll saying to us on Day One, “Please forgive me if I accidentally slip into German – I’ve been in Germany all summer.” My God, were we – a bunch of, for the most part, wide-eyed innocents from deep in the heart of the American Midwest. In due course I got a little older, a little savvier, perhaps a little bit more sophisticated myself and then I’d got it, he’d put a move on us. And it had worked. Anyway, no harm done. But thinking about Professor Soll’s course – this over half a century ago now – I’ve realised his throwing us that Googly – that’s a cricket term, my fellow Yanks, that’s my own version of I might accidentally break into German – anyway, I’ve realised Ivan Soll’s springing his Ich bein Berliner number on us is one of only three things he said that semester that’s still with me. Happily the other two are, yes, philosophy points. I remember him saying, it was an important moment in the history of western philosophy when some Greek philosopher (was it Heraclitus?) said, “you can’t step in the same river twice.” Reason being “universal flux” – must be careful about that pronunciation – everything’s always changing. The river you step in today isn’t the same river you stepped in yesterday, And then Professor Soll wowed us by telling us a few centuries later another Greek philosopher had a light bulb moment, he realised “you can’t step in the same river once.” Because – it’s obvious isn’t it – love it that it took a few centuries for the idea to gell – can’t step in the same river once because even in the act of stepping in it it’s changing. The river you submerge your ankle in is not the same river your toe entered a half-second before. Well, that was fun. Glad I remembered that. And I think about it in relation to what I do now and have been doing for the last four decades. London Walks. The simple fact of the matter is a walking tour is like a river. It’s in a sense a living, organic thing. It’s changing all the time. Unless it’s paint-by-numbers guiding. Which we don’t do. To use a ‘big’ word I’ve got a weakness for – we eschew that sort of guiding. We’re not 20-year-old college students who are given a script and a route and told to “get memorising.” So, thinking of my Kensington Walk. Which now has an altar ego, so to speak – my Kensington Virtual Tour – anyway, thinking of my Kensington walk, even I am impressed at how much it’s changed over the years. London Walks had a Kensington walk when I joined, as a guide, in 1980. It was guided by Tony. Friendly Australian. Civil servant. Nice guy. I went along on his walk and, yes, pretty much learned the ropes from him. Truth be told, I didn’t rate it very much. But then I don’t think Tony really had his heart in it – of all of us, he was, by a fairly good margin, the least committed guide. Didn’t stick around too long.  So, anyway, yes, I had the bare bones of a Kensington walk, from him, from Tony. And then it just took off. Not dramatically so. It wasn’t an overnight conversion. It almost crept up on me. I just kept finding out more and more about Kensington. And the more I found out the greater its hold on me. My interest in the place just went right on ripening. And of course I started experimenting with the route. Modifying it. Changing it. The which is absolutely par for the course. Walks are living things. They talk about sculptors finding the sculpture, the figure, the form in the block of stone. Or pianists exploring a score. That passage, what if I play it this way? Isolate this note ever so slightly. Well, it’s the same thing with a walking tour. And with a walking tour guide. You can’t step in the same river twice, you can’t – or you don’t – do the same walking tour twice. Huge advantages to that of course. For you, the guide, it keeps the flame of your interest alive, keeps it burning. Keeps you engaged. Keeps it fresh for you. And that’s all to the good for your walkers. Getting stale, losing interest in what you’re doing, in the material – just phoning it in as the saying goes – that’s the kiss of death. You shouldn’t be doing. It’s not good for the walk. Not good for your walkers. Not good for you.  And that brings me to the home stretch – and two specific points – about that Kensington Walk. Both points are – here we go again – universal flux points. Foot in the rivers points. Yes, rivers plural. There’s no such thing as the same river. No such thing as the same Kensington. Universal flux in Kensington slapped me up the side of the head earlier this year when I had the good fortune to find two very old photographs of the same stretch of High Street Kensington. I show them, in succession, on the Kensington virtual tour. They are jaw-dropping artefacts. Especially in juxtaposition.  The older photograph was taken in 1865. The second one was taken in 1897. Let that sink in. They’re just 32 years apart. In the scheme of things that’s not a particularly big span of time. But OMG – oh my god – they’re barely recognisable as the same scene. The only thing that gives the game away is the curvature of the street. Everything else about them is different. We compare and contrast them. Go through them point by point. It’s a good exercise. It’s a revelation. It’s like watching a time-lapse film of, say, a foetus developing from a sperm cell and an egg to a baby. A major major eye-opener. How could High Street Kensington have changed so much in just over 30 years. And why? What were the drivers behind that? Well, suddenly the lights go up, the understanding comes flooding in. All down to the differences in those two pictures. The other point has to do with the name Kensington. Now I’ve already done a podcast about this. When I was working the Kensington walk up into a virtual tour I was digging around in Kensington’s early history. And it’s common knowledge that the name Kensington is very old and several derivations have been advanced. But anyway, I came across one that was new to me. And it was love at first sight. It was just so perfect. Not least because of the “fit” with what I was saying about Kensington Palace. So that “new to me” derivation of the name Kensington was the one that found its way into my Virtual Tour. With the rider attached that nothing’s definite – everything about that name is an educated guess. Anyway, I eventually got around to looking back at where I was with that name 15 years ago, when we wrote the London Walks book. Kensington was one of the five chapters I did in the book. And of course I well knew that back in 2006 I did not know about my 2020 discovery that Kensington very well could have as its root two old old Anglo Saxon roots meaning, when put together, “royal victory”. I wanted to see what I was saying about the name in 2006. The whole shebang another reminder that walks change, our appreciation and understanding and view of any given London neighbourhood is not set in cement. So I dug out the book. Reread the chapter. And was very pleasantly surprised. Surprised first of all because it’s – in my opinion, and of course yes, I’m biased, I’m an interested party – anyway, pleasantly surprised because, yes, it’s stood up. Most guidebooks have a shelf-life of a year or so. This one’s 15 years old now and it’s still a good read. The fruit, that, of its conception, its underlying framework. We wanted it to be a good “read” first and foremost – rather than a bog-standard guidebook.  And I was also pleased – and, truth be told, relieved – that it’s still doing us proud because I had our designer produce a handsome PDF of the Kensington chapter of the book and I send it out to my virtual walkers at walk’s end. A little prezzie, a forget us not, if you will, a token of our appreciation that they’ve gone on a London Walks virtual tour, that they’ve had our back during this desperately tough time for a walking tour company. And I was also bemused to discover that back in 2006 I’d put the derivation of the name at the end of the chapter. Something counter-intuitive about that. You’d think the name would be what you’d lead with, the opener, the first move on the chessboard. But in the event it wasn’t. It was how I closed out the chapter. How I brought it in for a landing. And I think it works. It’s only four short paragraphs. So I’m going to read it to you to close out this podcast. Anyone who’s listening and who one day perhaps goes on the virtual tour of Kensington, well, you’ll have two chocolates in the box to choose from as regards that magical London name, Kensington. Magical because of its evocative powers. As I’m confident this passage from the book demonstrates. This the very end of the Kensington chapter. Here goes… [And then at this point – to wrap up this podcast – I read those four short paragraphs that close out the Kensington chapter of our book London Walks, London Stories]

This podcast is an out-take from David's Hampstead & Hampstead Heath Virtual Tour. It's got "a wider range" than any other podcast we've done so far. From Hampstead to Italy to Germany to the Alps to Java to Niagara Falls to Madagascar. It's got a jaw-dropping cast of characters and an "almost defies belief" tiara of vignettes.  TRANSCRIPT London Calling.  David here.  It’s out-take time.  That’s out-take as in a scene that ends up on the cutting room floor. Recorded but not included in the final version. In this instance, a scene from my Hampstead Virtual Tour. Which, 11 months in the making, is now ready to go. The second dress rehearsal was yesterday. Talking it over afterward with our friends who watched it, I said I was a little concerned that it’s maybe pushing it length-wise – it runs to about 70 minutes, I’d like to bring it in at just over an hour. They said, well, if you wanted to make a cut you could take out – even though it sure was fascinating – the bit about Leigh Hunt and Byron watching Shelley’s body being cremated on that beach in Italy. I’d put that episode in because of Leigh Hunt lived in Hampstead – in the village within a village – the Vale of Health, as it’s known – and he plays a major supporting role in the John Keats story. And of course – Keats and Hampstead, well, that’s hand in glove territory. And of course all along I had in the back of my mind Edouard Fournier’s famous painting, The Funeral of Shelley – showing the cremation. And Leigh Hunt is of course depicted in that painting. As was Byron. They were both there. And inevitably my thinking was, this medium – virtual tours – it is so visual – it’d be criminal negligence not to show that image. And talk a bit about that episode when we’re there in the Vale of Health, where Leigh Hunt lived. So in it went. But, yes, it’s a three or four-minute episode – and I was concerned the length of the virtual tour – so snip snip, onto the cutting room floor it went. But it is such a fabulous tale – indeed, the whole Leigh Hunt story is a rich feast – I thought, I’m not keeping what I’ve found out to myself, that material deserves an airing. A story that’s got Byron, Shelley, Hunt in it. A story that’s got a young woman losing her virginity in a graveyard.  A story that’s got a heart that survived a cremation and ended up wrapped in the page of a love poem in a desk drawer. A story that’s got the Niagara Falls rapids being swum. A story that’s got a vegetarian eccentric who refused to wear overcoats and underwear. A story that’s got a grown man marrying the 13-year-old daughter of a Greek warlord and neither husband nor teenage (barely teenage) bride spoke a word of the other’s language. A story that’s got people periodically digging up the corpses of their relatives and dancing with them.  How do I keep that story to myself?  And then of course the penny dropped – for god’s sake, you can at least get a podcast out of it. So here we are. That’s what this is. This is an out-take from my Hampstead Virtual Tour. We’ll start with Leigh Hunt. He’s the point of incision. Both in terms of narrative and location. He’s got a blue plaque there in Hampstead.  Now most people probably haven’t heard of him. Unless, like me, they “majored in English”, as we used to say. What did I know about Leigh Hunt from that English Lit background. Very little, really. I knew that he was a crusading journalist and minor poet. I knew that he’s chiefly important for discovering and nurturing talent. And that he discovered and nurtured a huge talent. John Keats. He published Keats’ first volume of poems. He introduced Keats to his circle of friends – poets and artists. He introduced Keats and Shelley. Those three went for walks on Hampstead. Those three walked where we walk on my Hampstead Walk. I knew that Leigh Hunt helped Keats bear up against the vicious criticism that his verse drew from certain quarters. Some of it extremely ad hominem. Keats was very short, barely 5’ tall. Height was very much a class consideration in those days. Crowded, unsanitary living conditions, poor diet – the poor almost never had the commanding figure of the rich. They seemed stunted in comparison. John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the very imposing Lord Ribblesdale sums up the matter perfectly. Keats was from a humble background, son of a stable keeper. Keats was a surgeon’s apprentice. And here you have to make a mental adjustment. Today, being a surgeon is a prestigious profession. Two hundred years ago it was anything but prestigious. Really, the only thing that made surgery socially acceptable was the invention of anesthesia. Prior to that the socially grand regarded it with something like sneering derision. Just one step above butchering hogs. These were, if you will, the cultural wars of the early 19th century. Those on high regarded poetry as their property, it wasn’t to be sullied by the touch of a stable-keeper's son. That attitude – and that viciousness – was crystallised in one reviewer’s summation: “Get back to your blood and your bandages, little Johnny Keats.” And that was about all I knew about Leigh Hunt. Except that he had financial problems all his life. He needed looking after. There was something childish and irresponsible about him right across the trajectory of his life. For a time he lived in Chelsea. At 4 Upper Cheyne Row. The house is still there. His friend and neighbour was Thomas Carlyle. In fact, Hunt put the Carlyles onto their house, 24 Cheyne Row, just round the corner from Hunt’s house. The Carlyle’s lived for years. Today, Carlyle's House is one of the wonders of the National Trust treasure chest. Famously, Thomas Carlyle only visited the Hunt’s once at their house. Carlyle was fastidious. The Hunt’s had a huge family. Hunt’s wife Marianne was an alcoholic. Carlyle came away disgusted. He said, “the Hunts are living in studied squalor.” And just two other Hunt notes that I carried forward from my Keats seminar at the University of Wisconsin all those years ago. Enter Charles Dickens. And one of his great masterpiece novels, Bleak House. In the novel there’s a preposterous character named Harold Skimpole. A self-described man-child, Harold Skimpole is a parasitical aesthete. That’s right, you got it in one. Dickens based the fictional character Harold Skimpole on his friend Leigh Hunt. Hunt did time – at Horsemonger Lane Jail – for libeling the Prince Regent. Called him "a fat and foolish Adonis of 50." That seven-word put-down was Hunt pulling his punches. Here’s the full-on onslaught. Well, part of the full-on onslaught. Hunt said the Prince Regent was – and here I’m quoting – “a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity.” The palace just couldn’t turn a blind eye to that. A prosecution for libel followed in no time. The charge sheet read: “intention to traduce and vilify his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, Regent of the United Kingdom, and to bring his Royal Highness into hatred, contempt and disgrace.” Hunt was found guilty of, quote, “a foul, atrocious and malignant libel.” Into the slammer he went. With a £500 fine – a lot of money then – as the cherry on the sundae. In the end, though, the prison sentence maybe wasn’t too onerous. Hunt’s wife and their little boy moved into prison with him. They let him put rose-patterned wallpaper on the cell walls and clouds and blue sky on the ceiling. He furnished the “accommodation” with a piano and his bookcases. He was visited by a lot of the leading lights of the literary, artistic and intellectual world of the day. Jeremy Bentham, William Hazlitt, Charles and Mary Lamb, Thomas Moore. It was Thomas Moore, incidentally, who penned one of the all-time great lines about London: “Go where we may, rest where we will, eternal London haunts us still.” No question about it, Hunt was a leading radical of the day. Three years earlier, in 1810, the government had tried to get him – tried to shut him up (shut his mouth – ok, his pen – and shut him up bodily) - tried to shut him up over an article he’d written that denounced military flogging. The article was titled “One thousand lashes.” Think about that quantification: not one lash, not ten lashes, not 40 lashes – one thousand lashes. Anyway, Hunt was prosecuted. And that time he was successfully defended. That case – the hoopla surrounding it – was what led to the Shelley-Hunt friendship. Shelley – yes, that Shelley, the great Romantic poet, who, like Keats and Byron, died ever so young – Shelley was a student at Oxford. Word of Hunt’s liberal sensibilities and courageous stand – taking on the government – reached that young Oxford undergraduate. When Hunt was acquitted Shelley introduced himself, sent Hunt a congratulatory note and just like that the friendship was underway. Anyway, that’s about the extent of it – that’s pretty much what English types know about Leigh Hunt. For my Hampstead Virtual Tour, I did a bit more digging. And was amazed – and indeed, delighted – to find out that Leigh Hunt was an American. His father was a Philadelphia lawyer; his mother the daughter of a Quaker Philadelphia merchant. And so we come to the rub: Leigh Hunt’s father was an outspoken British loyalist. These were the 1770s. That British loyalist had to fly the coop – he came here – in 1776. The year of the Declaration of Independence. It was a close-run thing. Leigh Hunt’s father narrowly avoided being tarred and feathered.  And maybe these things run in families. Leigh Hunt’s radicalism – opposition to the powers that be – almost certainly was learned at the knee of his father. And it turns out his father was not good with money. Was feckless. Pursued by debt collectors. And sure enough, locked up in the King’s Bench Prison because of his debts. So many threads come together here. Hunt’s father being locked up for debt – well, a generation down the line Charles Dickens’s father would be locked up for debt. And the Dickens family moved into prison with John Dickens. There’s just a whole lot of reverberations in the Leigh Hunt story. But to get to the precise moment of my virtual tour that ended up on the cutting room floor, we have to jump to Shelley’s death by drowning on July 8, 1822. Off the northwest coast of Italy.  Leigh Hunt was there. He’d been summoned by Shelley. They were going to meet up with Byron. The three of them collaborate on a new periodical called The Liberal. English for an English-speaking audience, but conducted there in Italy. Give you an idea how difficult traveling conditions were 200 years ago. Hunt set sail for Genoa on November 15, 1821. Storm blew up, drove them back to port. They had to spend the rest of the winter in England. Finally, May 13, 1822 they try again. This time they make it, arriving nearly a month later, on the 15th of June. Shelley is ecstatic. He greets Hunt, “I am so inexpressibly delighted!—you cannot think how inexpressibly happy it makes me!” They get to Leghorn on July 1. And then they go to Pisa. Byron has a castle there. They stay there with him. A week later – July 8 – Shelley is dead. Drowned. Another remarkable Englishman of that period – a man who’s now largely forgotten – Edward Trelawny – organises the search for the bodies. Ten days later Shelley’s badly decomposed body washes ashore on a beach near Viareggio. Identifiable only by the clothing and a copy of Keats’ long poem Lamia in a jacket pocket. Italian regulations at the time stipulated that the corpse has to be cremated almost immediately. And that brings us to the painting that had a cameo role – before ending up on the cutting floor – in my Hampstead Virtual Tour. It’s a painting by a French artist named Louis Edouard Fournier. It’s titled, simply, The Funeral of Shelley. The funeral being the cremation. And what I strongly recommend is that you bring up, online, a reproduction of the painting. So you can see what I’m talking about. And see why I felt I just had to put that image into this visual-centric medium of Virtual Tours. Just look at the Wikipedia page for Louis Edouard Fournier. Fournier spelled F O U R N I E R.  What you see is Shelley’s corpse being cremated, smoke coming off it. The three men standing there are, left to right, Trelawny, Leigh Hunt and Byron. The kneeling woman is Shelley’s widow, Mary. It’s a very arresting image. Draws you right in. And holds you.  And – wait for it – lies to you in just about every respect. Not that it matters in the least. In fact, it’s better that he lies. The lies make it a much greater painting. Let’s have a look. As the great painter Constable once said, “We see nothing till we truly understand.” Let’s understand so we can see. See why Fournier did what he did.  He painted the scene in 1889. That’s 67 years after the event. As you can see, Fournier depicts the day as gloomy and overcast. And cold. Those heavy overcoats the mourners are wearing. In real life, it wasn’t gloomy and overcast. This was Italy. In July. The sky was blue. It was hot and humid. Well, there’s a completely different feel to it, isn’t there, if he makes it a bright, breezy sky blue day. Secondly, Shelley’s corpse. It looks peaceful. It looks good. It wasn’t peaceful. It didn’t look good. It was terribly bloated. The bits of it exposed to ten days in the Mediterranean and the attention of the sea creatures – well, let’s be polite and say it was badly decomposed. And leave it at that. As for Leigh Hunt, he was there. But he wasn’t there – not there on the beach. He stayed in the carriage. You can see the carriage there in the background. As for Byron, he was so disgusted by the condition of Shelley’s corpse – the hot muggy day didn’t help – that he didn’t stick about. He almost immediately stripped down and went for a swim in the sea. Nor was Mary Shelley, the widow, there. For health reasons. My god, what a summer she’d had. Just a month she’d had a miscarriage. She lost so much blood she almost died. Shelley had made her sit in a bath of ice. That’s what saved her. Poor Mary Shelley. Five pregnancies. Only one child survived. Her own mother died when she, Mary, was a newborn. Eleven days old. Anything else? Well, yes, no harm in reminding one and all that Mary Shelley was the author of Frankenstein, the great prototype of the Gothic novel. And to that I’d add – something that’s not widely known – Mary Shelley lost her virginity in the graveyard of St. Pancras Old Church. Just north and west of King’s Cross and indeed St. Pancras railway stations. Let that sink in – if that’s the mot juste – Mary Shelley lost her virginity to the great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in a graveyard. Shelley shagged Mary in a graveyard. Mary gave birth – so to speak – to Frankenstein.  Personal story: Mary and I and other members of Mary’s family scattered the ashes, first of Mary’s father and then of her mum, in that graveyard. Why there? Because Mary’s dad, the legendary BBC producer and writer, played in that churchyard when he was a kid. He grew up a couple of hundred yards away, in Sandwich Street, in King’s Cross. I remember Mary’s brother Antony saying, ‘Dad was always a Londoner through and through. He always wanted to be part of London. Now he is. Eternally.” And that may have been the most layered moment I’ve experienced in half a century in London. Because the immediate event, the scattering of the ashes, was centre stage. But I was also – this is the simultaneity of London – thinking, on a couple of other channels in my mind – we’re scattering Charles’ ashes where Dickens sets that great grave-robbing scene in A Tale of Two Cities. And scattering them in the shadow of the Hardy Tree – the tree that has scores of old tombstones stacked up around its base. Because the railway was cutting a swath through there the burial ground had to be dug, the remains disinterred and relocated. Thomas Hardy who would of course become the great Victorian was then a 25-year-old apprentice to an architect. It was his job to retrieve and relocate those old headstones. And there they are, to this day, around the base of the tree. And scattering them where Shelley shagged Mary – where the creator of Frankenstein lost her virginity. Phew. London. And that brings us to the mysterious fifth person – if you count Shelley’s corpse as one of the five – in the Fournier painting. Edward Trelawney, a now pretty much forgotten English writer and adventurer. Let’s just play a few of the cards in his extraordinary life. Trelawny’s a Londoner. He’s born on November 13, 1792. In, we believe, his grandfather’s house, No. 9 Soho Square.  When he was 13, Trelawny joined the Navy. He circumnavigated the globe. Saw action, as the saying goes. In the English attack on Java in 1811 – he’s 18 years old – he’s wounded in the knee and the face. The musket ball stayed in his knee for 33 years. Talk about literary connections, the great poet Robert Browning witnessed the musket ball being cut out of Trelawny’s knee in 1844. Trelawny attracted lead. Fourteen years after the Java attack Trelawny would be shot twice a point blank range. Once in the jaw. He refused treatment. And healed up good as new. Trelawny married 19-year-old Caroline Julia Addison in 1813. Three years later she left him for a much older lover. The divorce proceedings went on for two years, were very public, very humiliating. Trelawny hunted in the Alps. Trelawny moved to Italy. That’s where he met Byron and Shelley. Trelawny was the last person to see Shelley alive. Through his telescope as Shelley’s schooner, the Don Juan, sailed off, disappearing into that squall off Leghorn on July 8, 1822. It was, as I’ve already mentioned, Trelawny who found the corpse. It was Trelawny who snatched Shelley’s unburnt heart from the flames. More on that in just a minute. It was Trelawny who fell in love with Mary Shelley’s half-sister, the mother of Byron’s deceased daughter Allegra. It was Trelawny who later proposed to Mary Shelley. She refused him. It was Trelawny who married the 13-year-old daughter of a Greek warlord. Neither bride nor groom spoke the other’s language. It was Trelawny who purchased 15 women and set a harem. Which he soon grew tired of. This was in Greece.  Trelawny got across the Atlantic. He swam the rapids at Niagara Falls. And that’s not the all of it with Trelawny.  But let’s get back to our painting. Take another look at it. Trelawny and Leigh Hunt are shown wearing greatcoats. They weren’t. It was July, remember. July in Italy. It was very hot. But there’s more to it than that.  Trelawny eschewed overcoats. And underwear. Trelawny never wore overcoats. Trelawny never wore underwear. Trelawny was a stranger to personal hygiene. He wasn’t bothered by lice and dirt. Tolerating stuff like that, that was manly. Also manly, to his way of thinking, I suppose, was having an affair with a teenage girl when he was 66. And where is he today. Next to Shelley, in the protestant cemetery in Rome. He died in Sompting, near Worthing, in England. This was in 1881. He was 89 years old. In accordance with his wishes, his corpse was transported to Gotha Germany, where it was cremated. And then the ashes were taken to his final resting place, next to Shelley. In Rome. As for Shelley’s heart. Why didn’t it burn? One theory is that it had calcified thanks to a bout of tuberculosis. Which of course was what killed Keats. Consumption they called it then. Trelawney gave it Leigh Hunt. Mary Shelley, Shelley’s widow, wanted it. Leigh Hunt wasn’t going to give it up. Byron leaned on him. Financial pressure. Leigh Hunt caved. Mary Shelley got it. She tucked it into a silken shroud and carried it around with her for years. Eventually she retired it. Wrapped it in the page of one of Shelley’s last poems, Adonais, and put it in her desk drawer. It was found when she died. It was eventually buried in the family vault with their son, Percy Florence Shelley, when he died in 1889. In Bournemouth. And that brings us to the end of this outtake. Except for maybe a moment to pause and wonder at the business of our relationship to our ancestors. Shelley’s heart. The Victorians would take locks of hair from the deceased and weave them into rings or bands. But hey, these things are relative. In some parts of Madagascar people dig up their dead relatives every few years and have a dance with them. And on that, well, Gothic note. Good night from London. Good night from the cutting room floor – the out-takes closet – of London Walks. Sleep tight. Discover more about literary London London has been home to many influential writers and playwrights in its long past. Discover this rich history in person and come with one of our professional guides on a literary guided walk of London.

Exactly what it says on the tin TRANSCRIPT London Calling. David here. Ok, this one’s fairly personal. Personal. And angry. So you’ve been warned. Switch off now – proceed no further – if you’d rather not go where I’m going to take you.  Undecided? Well, if it’s a factor – it’s not long, this podcast. It’s no more than 14 or 15 minute listen. And hey, no way I would ever put up on the London Walks podcast something that’s 100 percent personal. This isn’t 100 percent personal. Some of this cup of bitterness runneth over into “this is London today territory.” And some of it touches on matters of London history. That’s why I’ve written it up and am putting it out. The tale starts at home. My house. Our house. An ok, in-betweener size – not big, not small, – comfortable late Victorian terrace house in West Hampstead. We like it a lot. Nine rooms, garden, roof top terrace, small attic, cellar. Solidly built. Great location. Wonderful street. We’re happy bunnies here. Have lived here a long time, getting on for a quarter of a century.  Next door – similar house – there lived Monica and Miles, a lovely old Irish couple. They died a few years ago. Their daughters sold their house. And then it was sold again. To a guy who buys up old houses and “converts” them. With that word “converts” in inverted commas, quotation marks as Americans say.  The “developer” – I’m starting to hate that word – the developer, Mr. Money Bags converted the house next door to nine studio units. Each with its own toilet and basin, each with its own shower, each with its own kitchen unit.  In the words of Rob, our plumber, “up to 18 people, nine toilets, nine showers, – etc. for a four inch outflow pipe that was designed for one or two toilets – basically that’s a mismatch. The existing plumbing infrastructure isn’t equal to the demands being put on it. It’s going to be overwhelmed. There are going to be problems.” And there have been. Twice in just over a year. The final piece to the ugly puzzle is topography. We live on a hill. We’re downhill from the “converted” property. So gravity gets in on the act. Fluids flow downhill. Yup. So that’s twice our previously bone-dry cellar – bone dry for over 20 years – has been flooded with sewage from next door. A lake of urine in our cellar. Twice in 18 months. The first time Thames Water took the rap. Kicking and screaming. They didn’t want to. You can imagine, a day digging up a street, doing repairs, paying three crewmen – it’s not cheap. But the blockage was apparently just over the line in their bailwick. So they had no choice. The culprit that time appears to have been wet wipes. Which I’m told don’t break down, don’t distintegrate. Down the toilet they go and then they end up bunching up – that coagulated mass grows. Clogs things up. Sooner or later you get a blockage. Well, that tumour of wet-wipes made it as far as Thames Water territory before it pitched camp. So Thames Water had to step up. We took that as a small mercy. We didn’t fancy trying to take on the wealthy developer. Visions of legal costs, delaying tactics, wearing us down, etc.  Anything else? Yes, turns out there was no planning permission for what’s happened to next door, a court action was brought by the council, the outcome of which – well, we don’t where all that got to. We do know where the conversion’s effluent gets to. A couple of days ago we opened the cellar door and sure enough, the monster was back. Another lake of urine. We wouldn’t have known until the stench told its ugly tale. They’d obviously flooded – flooded’s a genteel word in the circumstances – they’d obviously flooded next door. We got the overflow. The ankle-deep overflow. Mary happened to look out the window and saw a couple of workmen hovering over a drain. She went out and ask them what’s going on? They said, “the basement’s flooded.” That sent her to our cellar door. To discover what had been visited upon us. The which discovery occasioned a second flood, a second overflow. Of tears. If Mary hadn’t looked out the window and seen those workmen – and asked what they were doing – well, what do you think the likelihood our neighbour – I use the word neighbour advisedly because he isn’t of course – but what do you think the likelihood is our neighbour would have told us, “we’ve had a blockage here, maybe you should check your cellar.” That’s right. No chance at all. That scenario – something’s broken. Greed, absenteeism, “their problem not mine”, “I can get away with it because I can get away with it – and because my pockets are deep”  – those are signposts on the road to what ethologists call a ‘behavioural sink.’ Look it up. Anyway, back to the foetid lake… Wading into it – carrying soaking stuff – if only it were soaking with water, we should be so lucky – up the cellar steps, through the kitchen – yes, it’s every bit the horror-show you’re imagining – through the kitchen and out the back door to the garden. To dry. And then be thrown away. Rob the plumber came round. It got pumped out. And things are where they are. Needless to say we’ve been on to the Council. Of course they’re beleagured, ham-strung right now because of Covid. There’s a Shakespeare phrase I’m particularly fond of  – in fact, I’m in the process of writing about it for another podcast – the phrase, it’s from Hamlet, is, “when sorrows come they come not single spies, but in battalions.” I’m partial to the phrase and, yes, I occasionally tweak it. That’s nervy, eh. David of London Walks subbing Shakespeare. Anyway, you can pick and choose. Shakespeare’s word was ‘sorrows.’ And, yes, ‘sorrows’ works in this context. But you could also say ‘troubles’. “When troubles come they come not single spies, but in battalions.”  In this instance, the battalion called Covid. And then, for us, the second wave – wave being the mot juste – the second wave of a lake of neighbours’ urine in our cellar. And they’re not even proper neighbours. They’re temporary occupants of a “London conversion.” Of studios. Conversion is the word for it in more senses than one. It’s converted our spirits, our equanimity, our peace of mind, our sense of well being. It’s converted how we feel about our home.  And finally, it’s converted something else. This is what we discovered an hour ago when we were out in the garden, clothes-pins on our noses, looking at the stuff we carried up out of our cellar. This is the “conversion” that’s prompted our most recent email to the council planning and environmental departments.  The “conversion” that’s prompted me to write this podcast.  The “conversion” that’s pushed this matter over the line from the personal to something of wider concern, of historical concern.  What I wrote to the Council official puts the matter succinctly.  I’m going to quote the email in its entirety. It’s short.  That email – which I’m about to read out – will be the knell that tolls the end of this podcast. The email is illustrated with a photograph I took this morning. A photograph of a completely ruined century-old album of late Victorian photographs. The email goes like this. It’s headed up with the subject line: Mental health as well as physical health Dear Ms. Ryan, Several beyond price, very old, of historical note* - this one, for example, is dated 1916 - family photo albums have been destroyed in the lake of urine “Mr. Property Developer’s little earner” sluiced into our cellar. They should have been safe. They were stored in a zipped up professional photographer’s “roller” in our bone dry cellar. Rollers of that standard protect expensive camera gear from the elements. But they are not proof against being submerged in a lake of urine. Something precious and irreplaceable has been destroyed, irretrievably lost – not just to our family but to our (Hampstead’s, Camden’s, London’s) collective historical memory. In time those albums would have gone to Kenwood or Burgh House or Fenton House or perhaps the British Library. These documents, these pieces of the past, have been lost, destroyed – compliments of this utterly selfish, clumsy, grasping, crude, mindless, o’erweening greed and carelessness. In a word, this barbarism.  In profound sadness. Signed (by me, David) And then there’s an explanatory footnote. *Mary’s great grandfather – her maternal grandmother’s father – was very wealthy. She, ‘Granny’, grew up in Parkfield, now known as Witanhurst, “the second largest house” in London (after Buckingham Palace). Mary’s great grandfather sold the house to the magnate Arthur Crosfield, who was the key player in the saving of Kenwood and “the Northern Heights of Hampstead Heath” The photographs bore witness to – told the story of – a lost world, the world of a large and very prosperous late Victorian and Edwardian family and household in the second largest house in London. A house of no little importance to the London story generally and the Hampstead and Camden story in particular.  

For the anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth, David does a pull-together. It's a tale of two manuscript finds, of the Battle of Arnhem, of favourite professors, of a couple of virtual tours, of Harvard and London Universities, of John Keats, of Zoom, of Daphne du Maurier, of personal recollections, of the Victoria & Albert Museum, of academic tenure. TRANSCRIPT London Calling. David here. A couple of days ago Mary and I changed the lampshade on the light in the hall.  It was the highlight of the week. So exciting. Something different.  Ok, I’m being facetious, needless to say. But there is a large measure of truth in the general point that our lives have been cabined, cribbed, confined by Covid. That phrase – cabin’d, cribbed, confined – isn’t mine, needless to say. It’s Shakespeare. Macbeth. But it puts the matter perfectly. We are all more or less under house arrest now. On a very short leash. My personal, first-hand world – first-hand as opposed to what I see on a screen or hear over the airwaves or “encounter” between the covers of a book – my personal, first-hand world has shrunk to approximately a 2-mile radius of my house. Going into central London – we live a mile or so north and west of Regent’s Park – going into central central London – which is three to four miles from West Hampstead, where we live – going into central London, that’s a real treat, a really big deal. Earlier on in this “plague year” I was of course doing it fairly often – I’d go in on the bus or the Tube – but that method of conveyance, well, for me, I’ve called time on it for now. Thanks to this new, apparently much more contagious strain of the virus. And because – not to put too fine a point on it – so many more of my fellow Londoners are now vectors – carriers – it’s like pyramid selling, this wretched thing – for the Evil One who’s now stalking all of us. I remember last summer – surely we all do this – sizing up the odds. At the time I think it was something like one in a thousand Londoners had it. Well, I’ll take my chances with those odds. But when it got to 1 in 30 – well, that means every time you get on a bus there’s a fellow passenger who’s a carrier. And of course one in 30 now– well, we should be so lucky. Word has it that it’s now 1 in 20. Or even one in 10. Me? Yeah, you got it. Those odds I don’t like. That’s a game of Russian roulette I want no part of, even if, yes, it’s a Ruger GP 100, i.e., a revolver whose cylinder holds ten rounds rather than a six-shooter. So, no double-decker bus journeys or Tube rides for this lad. For the time being at any rate.  That said, I’m wild with excitement today because I’m thinking there’s a pretty good chance Mary’s going to drive me into Kensington and Knightsbridge. I’ve tracked down the childhood home of Boy Browning and I’m going to get a photograph of it. Who’s Boy Browning, you ask? And why am I interested? Well, you’ve all heard of Daphne Du Maurier, the famous novelist. Boy Browning was her husband. He had a distinguished, much-decorated military career. His proper name and title was Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Arthur Montague Browning. He’s credited with being “the father of the British airborne forces.” And to ring a bell that you all know, it was Boy Browning who, when the Allied Operation Market Garden – the centrepiece of which was the famous Battle of Arnhem – when Operation Market Garden was being planned by Field Marshal Montgomery and other high ranking Allied officers – it was Boy Browning who said, memorably and famously, “I wonder if it’s a bridge too far.” The “boy” was right of course.  Anyway, I want to take a look at Boy Browning’s boyhood home in connection with my upcoming Hampstead Virtual Tour. On it I’ll be talking about – and guiding – Daphne Du Maurier’s childhood home, Cannon Hall, one of the grandest houses in Hampstead.  And Hampstead, well, that starts another hare in my world. Today – February 7th – is the anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth. February 7th, 1812. Dickens of course has important Hampstead connections – is there any part of London that doesn’t have Dickens connections? But the point here is not the Hampstead connections. It’s my personal connections, the David connections. I’m in London – I’ve made my life in London because of Charles Dickens. Now today being the 209th anniversary of Dickens’ birth we are doing, for a huge Zoom audience in America, a Dickens Virtual Tour. Simon is guiding it. And Simon has asked me to come along, make a “guest appearance.” Which I’m going to do. For four reasons. 1) because Simon’s asked me. 2) Because Simon’s tours are unfailingly excellent – so informative and so entertaining. He’s one of the brightest stars in the London Walks constellation, Simon. 3) because our customers like it when, as quite often happens these days, they get two or even four or five guides for the price of one. And 4) because I very much like – more than like, need – the social dimension of our virtual tours. Seeing all those new faces – from all over the world. Well, it’ll be from all over the United States, this evening. Mingling, chatting, comparing notes – asking the question, “how’s it been for you over there?” That kind of thing. This connects up of course with the point I was making right at the outset that our lives are now so cabbin’d, cribbed, confined that a chance to see some new faces, meet some people who aren’t in our “bubble” – well, that’s a consummation devoutly desired. It’s manna. An oasis-in-the-Sahara moment.  And the Dickens story, I’ll be relating, well, it connects up, obliquely, with my Hampstead Virtual Tour. On the tour I will of course be talking about Keats and Hampstead. Wentworth Place as he knew it. Today it’s known as the Keats House Museum. Where he spent the so-called Great Year – September 1818 to 1819, a period of astonishing fecundity, months in which he turned out eight or ten of the greatest poems in the language. I’ll speak of course about him sitting under that tree writing Ode to a Nightingale. That will be – for reasons that I’m keeping under wraps at the moment – a tour de force moment on the tour. Let’s just say, I’ve made a find. But anyway, the personal connection to start with goes back to the 1960s, my days as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin. We all have our “undergraduate heroes”, as they’re usually called. Professors whom we all but worshipped. My undergraduate hero was one Alvin Whitley. Like me, he was a small-town kid. Not from Wisconsin, though, from Texas. He was exceptionally bright. Went to Harvard. And then – this will be about 1950 or 51 – he was in his early 20s – he got a fellowship that brought him over here, to England, to research. I often think about him being here in 1951. How grim it must have been. How battered England will have been. The war just six years back in the rearview mirror. Circumstances so straitened that rationing was still the order of the day. In fact, the post-war rationing was more severe than the rationing during the war, for the understandable reason that when the war ended, the Americans turned off the tap. And for that matter, all that – well, practically all of it – all that American military infrastructure upped stakes and went home. That was a lot of American spend to this country’s economy that almost overnight was no longer there.  So that’s when my undergraduate here, future University of Wisconsin professor Alvin Whitley, was over here. I picture him as a young, wide-eyed, small-town kid from Texas. And he’d got access to some boxes of old papers, letters, that sort of thing. On one of those old yellowed sheets was a poem. And young Mr. Whitley said to himself, “I recognise that handwriting.” It was John Keats’ handwriting. John Keats, the great romantic poet. Alvin Whitley had done a seminar course at Harvard on Keats, a seminar course during which they’d looked closely at facsimiles of a couple of Keats manuscripts. So that young American from deepest Texas knew Keats’ handwriting. He’d just discovered a previously unknown John Keats poem. It made the New York Times! The University of Wisconsin hired him. Made him a tenured professor. He was home. Safe and sound. Didn’t have to get into the publish or perish rat race. Just gave it a miss. Why not? He had tenure. And it meant that he could give his all to his lecturing, his teaching. He was the most brilliant professor. My favourite. My undergraduate hero. Fast forward a quarter of a century. It’s mid-1970s and I’m over here working on my Ph.D. My Ph.D. not from the University of Wisconsin or some other American university. From UCL. University College London. The oldest and most prestigious college in the London University solar system. This is the tale Simon wants me to tell on his Virtual Tour of Dickens’ London this evening. I get to be a guest speaker for five minutes. My cameo role. I was working on Dickens’s twelfth novel, A Tale of Two Cities. The manuscript of which is in the V & A, the Victoria & Albert Museum. I was doing a manuscript study. I was collating the manuscript against the first published edition. It’s a demanding undertaking, that. In the first place because it’s usually anything but easy reading someone else’s handwriting. And this was extremely close read. I’d read three words in the manuscript and then move my eye to that first published edition and read the same three words. And of course you’re looking for changes, alterations. You can imagine the eye strain. I could only do about 90 minutes a day. But it’s a very interesting undertaking. Because what it means is you’re effectively looking over Dickens’ shoulder when he’s “correcting the proofs”, as the saying goes. What are the proofs. He will have sent the manuscript off to the printer. They will have set it – produced a printed version. That printed version is called the proofs. The proofs go back to Dickens and he reads through them. Proofreads them – that’s where the word “proofread” comes from. He corrects them, makes sure they haven’t made any mistakes, makes any changes he wants to make, etc. So, yes, you’re looking over Charles Dickens’ shoulder while he’s working on the proofs of A Tale of Two Cities. That in itself is pretty exciting if you’re a bookworm. And when you find a difference between what he wrote in the manuscript and what’s there in the first published edition, well, that’s like panning for gold and spotting a gold speck.  But it gets better. In this case. What happened to me personally, there in the V & A, with that manuscript. At three places in the manuscript I noticed that the page “felt funny”, felt different. Those pages felt a little bit heavier. They felt thicker.  I thought, “what’s this?” And then I realised. Normally when Dickens decided to change something in his manuscript he would cross out what he’d first written and interline. Fancy word, it just means above (or below) the crossed out bit he’d write the revised words. The words he wanted to replace what he’d crossed out. But in three instances – the three I’m talking about – the changes he wanted to make were so substantial that he got a blank piece of paper and pasted it over the passage that he wanted to rewrite. And then he did rewrote. He wrote his revised version on the blank piece of paper.  Thrilling moment for me. I remember it so well. Sitting there in the beautiful reading room, the light streaming in through those tall windows. And there on the desk – in front of me – a priceless manuscript. The manuscript of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. And I’d discovered something about that manuscript. I knew something about it that nobody else knew. I knew that underneath those “paste over” pieces of manuscript were three passages that Charles Dickens had written that nobody, except for Dickens himself, back in 1859, had set eyes on. It was my personal Howard Carter moment. (Howard Carter was of course the Egyptologist who discovered King Tut’s tomb.) I took the manuscript up to the desk, summoned the head librarian, and said, “look at these three pages – see how they’re thicker – they’re thicker because they are two pieces of manuscript stuck together. What he first wrote is underneath the stuck on layer. If you can get your conservation department to lift off the topmost layer - we (notice, the pronoun, I was so careful with that pronoun, I made sure it was plural) – if you can get your conservation to lift off the topmost layer we will have brought to light something tht Charles Dickens wrote that no one has ever seen before.” About six weeks later the letter from the V & A came thudding into my mailbox. “Dear Mr. Tucker, the material you requested to see are now ready for your inspection.’ It was so British, so formal – I loved it. And sure enough, I toddle along to the V & A and there it was. My discovery. And if you think about it, it was my Alvin Whitley moment. It happened to me at about the same time in my life that it happened to him in his life. I suppose you could say, I’d become my own undergraduate hero. And lots of good things came from it. I of course had no trouble getting it published. It was maybe the best Dickens find of the decade. And there’s no question but it set me up very nicely for my viva, the oral defense of my Ph.D. thesis. Publication – that’s the ultimate validation – in acadaemia. Anyway, that’s the white-hot core of the tale. Already there are quite a few connections there. Looking back to that favourite professor and to Keats and Hampstead. And of course there are further convergences, not the least of which is I came to this country, I’m in this country – this is home now, it has been for a very long time – because of Charles Dickens. Indeed, Charles Dickens was my entree to London Walks. Ian, who owned London Walks at the time, didn’t want an American guide. But I knew a little bit about Dickens. And London Walks does a lot of Dickens Walks.  So, yes, a coming together, a pull together. A seminal moment in Boy David’s life. Now I’ve got to lay this down and head off to 31 Hans Place, the address where a seminal moment took place in Boy Browning’s life. He was born there. Keep well, everybody. Buck up. Days are getting a bit longer. We’re going to get through this. We’re going to break the surly bonds of house arrest. Drive the wooden stake into the black heart of Covid.

David's been diving again. Diving for pearls in London lagoons nobody else knows about. And sure enough, he scored. Found twenty-five of them. Brought them up. And here they are. Never been seen before. Ok, that's a fanciful way of saying I've been doing some primary documents research. London documents. And have made some pretty special finds. Satisfying in so many ways, one of them being this is our secret, yours and mine. Nobody else has been where I've been the last couple of days, nobody else will have seen this stuff. (I like seeing stuff other people don't get to see.) And that's all I'm going to say by way of introduction. Ok, maybe a couple of quotes: "suddenly, there it was, staring me in the face" and "Stranglers, London" and "their never-ending reproductive capacity" and "there's a lot of London flavour here" and  "the perpetual-motion machine from hell." And that's all. You can listen if you want. Or, if you'd rather read it, here's the transcript. TRANSCRIPT London calling. David here. Out of left field, this one.  London Telegraphic addresses.  Huh? You might well, huh?  Telegraphic addresses are history now. History that’s largely forgotten.  But if you’ve got a taste for the quirky, the quixotic – the London quirky – they’re more than a little fun.  And they’re instructive: they tell us a good bit about our town back then. And as it turns out – about our town today. There’s a lot about long-forgotten London telegraphic addresses that’s awfully familiar. And it’s not just London of yore that telegraphic addresses shed light on – they also shine a light on our fellow Londoners back then. The people whose turn it was before us. And, sure enough, we see ourselves – our behaviour – in them. Now this might be self-indulgent, but I’m going to chart how I got here, how I got to London telegraphic addresses. Doing a podcast about them.  Like Hansel, I’m going to follow the bread crumbs in the moonlight. Through the enchanted forest better known as London.  The jumping-off point was going on Karen’s Inside Covent Garden Virtual Tour a few nights ago.  One of the important stops on her route is Maiden Lane, which runs parallel to The Strand, one block north of it.  (Historical-lexical aside here: are most of you aware that the word ‘block’ in that sense is an Americanism? The Oxford English Dictionary, pursing its lips here, stiffly defines it as: “the quadrangular mass of buildings included between four streets.” And for the record, sure enough, the earliest known use of the word ‘block’ in that sense comes out of Philadelphia in the year 1796.) Anyway, yes, Maiden Lane is one block north of the Strand. Halfway up to the Covent Garden Piazza. And it’s not just one stop on Karen’s Inside Covent Garden Tour, it’s two. Both of them great fun.  The big hitter of the two stops is Rule’s Restaurant, London’s oldest restaurant.  Somehow – it was a miracle then and it still is a miracle – Karen talked Rule’s into letting her bring her walkers inside. And not just barely over the threshold – five feet through the front door for a quick peek and back out you go. They’re in there for a good 30 minutes. And they’ve given Karen and her walkers full access. The run of the place. All three floors. It’s a Behind Closed Doors tour de force. No other groups – let alone the general public – are allowed in there. They’re setting up for the day and their classy old restaurant is anything but a public thoroughfare. Karen’s walkers get to see parts of that restaurant that even their diners don’t get to see. So, yes, a tour de force. Of its kind – cracking open closed doors – it’s probably the single most magnificent feather in that particular London Walks cap.  Anyway, that stroll along Maiden Lane to Rule’s got this old London Walks warhorse pawing the ground. When Karen bade us farewell I decided to poke around a bit more in Maiden Lane. Even though, yes, I guide it myself. Know quite a bit about it. But Karen’s tour, well, it was like blowing on a dying ember in a fireplace. The feeling you get from watching that glow brighten up, that’s the best kind of “burn, baby, burn.” So I started panning. (Yes, that was a metaphorical gear shift.)  I started panning and sure, enough, almost immediately there’s a speck of gold. And there was more where that one little speck came from. The speck of gold was that 120, 130 years ago Maiden Lane was chock-a-block with theatrical agencies. Makes sense when you think about it. Right there, not a stone’s throw away on The Strand and the Aldwych and Drury Lane – and nearby on St. Martin’s Lane and Charing Cross Road – were a dozen or more theatres. They’re still there. So Maiden Lane is just off-stage, as it were. The perfect situation for a theatrical agency. A troop of theatrical agencies. Birds of a feather and all that.  Then more specks of gold: the endless ads for chorus girls and other pantomime performers, etc. There weren’t enough of them. They couldn’t get enough of them. And suddenly, there it was: staring me in the face. Theatre was different in those days. In musicals and pantomimes there were three different “categories” of performers: the principals, the singers and the dancers. If you were a singer you weren’t a dancer. And vice versa. Today, you’re both. Everybody has to be able to do everything. One consequence of that, the shows we see today have much smaller companies than their predecessors a century and more ago. Now having that come into focus was ok, but what I enjoyed more was when I got to the bottom-line of those ads: Telegraphic Addresses. And what fun they are. Now I suppose I was primed to have a soft spot for them because of a moment on my Hampstead walk. There’s an old “ghost sign” on a shop up there. It’s a survival, a relic from the past. And easy to miss so I always make sure everybody’s gaze gets zero’d in on it. The sign reads: HAM 9932. It is of course an old, old telephone number. And every time I see it I can’t help but think: ‘something’s been lost in our digital era’. 07956 - 381 - X-X-X. What does that tell you other than that it’s someone’s cellphone number in the UK. It’s bland. It’s colourless. It’s odourless. It’s cold and unfeeling. Robotic. But HAM 9932 – HAM is of course short for Hampstead. You rang that number you knew you were ringing someone in Hampstead. You wanted to ring Buckingham Palace it was VIC followed by four digits. VIC for Victoria. You wanted to ring someone in Bloomsbury it was MUS followed by four digits. MUS for British Museum. HAM 9932, VIC 1234, MUS 5678 – they’re like comfortable, much loved old bedroom slippers, those telephone numbers. Whereas 07956-381XXX – well, have you you read Kafka’s The Castle? It’s a book about alienation. About unresponsive bureaucracy. This beginning to sound familiar? It’s a book about the frustration of trying to conduct business with non-transparent, seemingly arbitrary controlling systems. You got it – Phone numbers as we know them are right out of Kafka’s Castle. Faceless, relentless, mindless, zombie-like – their never-ending reproductive capacity the perpetual-motion-machine from hell. They’re unique all right but snowflakes they’re not.   So, yes, I’m a big fan of old telephone numbers.  I’m charmed by them. I have a soft spot in my heart for them.  It was on the cards, then, that I was going to welcome telegraphic addresses to that party. London’s like that. You poke around in the woods and suddenly you hit a wonderful berry patch. Thanks to Karen’s Inside Covent Garden Virtual Tour I chanced on a berry patch of glorious telegraphic addresses. And here I am, a day or two later, fingers and shirt and mouth stained with goodness.  Ok, we’ve come through the woods – I’ve brought you back to that berry patch I found. Let’s have a look, have a sniff, have a taste. There’s a lot of London flavour here. Arguably the most famous London telegraphic address is Everything, London. It’s the telegraphic address for Harrods. You can see they had a decision to make with that one. Perhaps the coldly logical – the obvious thing to do – would have been to use their name as their telegraphic address. Harrods, London. That’s what their neighbour Harvey Nichols did. The Harvey Nichols telegraphic address was, yes, Harveys London. The Times newspaper’s telegraphic address was Times, London.  Times, London. That’s a Rock of Gibraltar of a telegraphic address. Harrods, London would have been of that order. But Everything, London is, I think, better. It says, “our name is so well known we don’t need to say it.” It says, “we’re not just a big shop in Knightsbridge, we’re Everything, London.” To my ear – and this is one of those matters that’s of course open to debate – if Times, London is a Rock of Gibraltar. Everything, London is Mount Everest.  Or how about this one? Firm’s long gone, completely forgotten. But they sure swung for the fences with their telegraphic address. You have to admire them. The firm was the Allan Line Passenger Booking Office. Their telegraphic address was Everywhere, London. (Come to think of it, Everywhere, London is a telegraphic address that’d be right at home here – it’s a banner we’d be more than happy to run up the London Walks flagpole.) And you want one that resonates with charm, you can’t do better than the telegraphic address of the legendary, the centuries-old Whitechapel Bell Foundry. Chimings, London. How perfect is that.  Or a certain Charles Hall and Co. Their line was boots. They made boots. They didn’t have the name recognition of The Times – or Harvey Nichols. So when they grabbed the telegraphic address Tenderfeet, London – well, they didn’t put a foot wrong.  Or Aldous Son and Co. They were ventilating and sanitary engineers. You could reach them at – wait for it – Exhaust, London.  And the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company for sure had somebody who got it about the power of words, of favourable associations. Their telegraphic address was: Milkmaid, London. There was a nurse’s agency that knew what it was doing when they bagged Divine, London. No nonsense, engine-room, serious, workaday, hard-edged London – that was the world of shipping. London as a port. There wasn’t a lot of fancy footwork there in the matter of telegraphic names. They just went for what it was, what they did.  Towboat, London. Towage, London. Skiffs, London. Telegraphic addresses that left nobody in any doubt about what they were all about.  I suppose there may have been just a hint of glamour in the telegraphic address Arrival, London. It was the address of a steam and ship broker. But hey, Arrival, London that’s 99 parts hard fact to one part glamour. What about Thomas Cook, you ask. Well, they were in Fleet Street – in newspaper-land, teller of tales London, make up stuff London – rather than down on the waterfront in gritty, hardcore London. They were a travel agent. The world’s first travel agent. They hit on a telegraphic address that said, “we got a deal for you.” Coupon, London.  My favourites though – apart from Chimings, London – were the telegraphic addresses on Maiden Lane.  Maiden Lane, back where we started. The telegraphic addresses of those theatrical agencies. They’re fun. But you sure can smell the greasepaint. And what I like about them is they’re unashamed about it.  Footlights, London, for example. Or Impressario, London. Or Stagery, London.  Or Popular, London. Or Stagedoor, London. Or dramatique, London. Or Theatricals, London. (They were a wig supplier). The Cinderella in the group was Cleaning, London. They were a theatrical cleaning and dyers outfit. But for one that you’d be sure to pick out of the chorus line - that you sure weren’t going to forget - Stranglers, London gets my vote. That was the Arthur Shirley’s Plays agency. (Note to self”: find out who Arthur Shirley was. Was he a long-forgotten playwright? Or an agent?)  But in the horse race in my head, it’s the variety agents – that make the running.  In third place: Squeak, London. In second place: Slick, London. And the winner is – FIDGETY LONDON.  Coda time. I started this by saying these long-forgotten telegraphic addresses tell us a lot about our town back then. And about our fellow Londoners back then. And that we can see ourselves in them. What they were getting up to, how they comported themselves when they took their turn on the catwalk, well, it’s so familiar, isn’t it? It’s us. We can turn to Shakespeare here. As always. “What’s in a name?” Romeo asks. “What’s in a name?” Well, rather a lot. The single most powerful word in all of our lives is our name. Think about the instinctive reaction we all have – how we jerk our heads about – when our name is called. Even – as happens from time to time – when it’s not us being addressed. But a stranger in our general direction who also happens to have our name.  And indeed how important it is to have a name we like, are comfortable in. I found out years ago that my name, David, is an old Hebrew name and it means “the beloved.” I liked hearing that. Somehow I’ve always felt that in some very real sense the name I was given set me up very nicely. Or think of the trouble people go to to come up with a good Instagram or Twitter or Facebook handle.  No question about it, here – at London Walks – we rejoice in the name London Walks. And as for getting the URL walks.com – well, in this game that’s as good as it gets. Being able to say, “our email address is: [email protected]" – to paraphrase an expression that’s well and truly current these days, we won it, we’re glad to own it.  And now I”m going to hit a button and send this cable, this telegraph, on its merry way. Consider it a late Christmas present, like a box of chocolates. London chocolates. One of them called Chimings, London. Another Milkmaid London. Another Divine, London. Another Popular, London. Another Everywhere, London.  Enjoy. Good night. And good Londoning.

David convincingly makes the case that the best house in London looks out over Hampstead's No. 1 pond What it's got is unique...

This podcast builds on a point Chris made in yesterday's "Today's the second day of Christmas..." This one is by David and, yes, it's called God's Assassin. Transcript:  God’s Assassin God's Assassin. That's what this podcast is called. That's who stars in it. So, yes, London Calling. David here. In yesterday's Twelve Days of Christmas Podcast we learned from Chris that pigeons are actually on the marquee of that famous Christmas Carol. You know the drill: on the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me two turtle doves... In fact, the first seven days of Christmas we could be in a bird sanctuary. Six of the first seven gifts are various feathered friends. But anyway, Pigeons are on the marquee of the second day of Christmas because it turns out there's no scientific difference between doves and pigeons. They belong to the same aves ei vuhs. A-vuss family. In fact, the so-called common pigeon also answers to the two names: rock pigeon and rock dove. But rock doves – ok, that's enough of that, let's call them pigeons – they were yesterday's fare. They don't have star billing in this podcast. The star of this show is called God's Assassin. Yes, that’s right. God's assassin. That’s what they call him. But he’s got some other names as well. Or aliases if you prefer. So, yes, let’s name names. Rufus, for example. That’s his, er, Christian name. Like that one a lot. Sounds right, doesn’t it? Rufus…rough…ruffian. There’s more. In a court of law it’d be Rufus Harris. Not that he’ll ever be in a court of law. Anything else? Yes. Rufus has got a moll. Her name is Imogen. And look, let’s sing like a canary here. When “God’s Assassin’s” got a “job” to do Imogen’s right there with him. Helps him case the joint. Steadies him when it’s all over. Is his getaway driver. Not to put too fine a point on it, Rufus is high strung. Imogen keeps him on a short leash. Rufus may be the trigger man but Imogen’s the one who keeps the show on the road. [Anything you’d like to add, Mr. London Walks guide?] Yeah, sure. That sobriquet “God’s Assassin” came about because Rufus is in Westminster Abbey twice a week. Contrition? Asking forgiveness? Hardly. He’s there to do a job. I mean, c’mon, why do you think they call him God’s Assassin? But that’s enough preliminaries. I (me, David, aka Mr. London Walks guide) have been face to face with God’s Assassin. Now it’s your turn. Here he is. [Ok, this is a podcast, I'm not on camera, I can't turn to Rufus, or show a photograph of him. Well, actually I can. If you look at the transcript of this podcast on walks.com right at this point in the transcript you'll see a photograph of Rufus] Did you look? Yeah, Rufus is a hawk. And, sorry. Couldn’t resist overturing him that way, folks. No more fancy footwork, though. To be precise, Rufus is a Harris Hawk. His twice-weekly job at the Abbey is to lay down the law – enforced with extreme prejudice if need be – to pigeons. The Abbey roof is off-limits to them. Rufus and Imogen, his handler, are up on the Abbey roof twice a week. Tending to business. You could say, I think, that Rufus has a full and varied London life. Rufus takes care of business all over London. Ranging from – no surprise, this – Trafalgar Square to – wait for it – Centre Court and the rest of the All England Lawn Tennis Club at Wimbledon. Turns out that the Harris Hawk isn’t native to this green and pleasant land. They’re from America. (Geez, these Americans, coming over here and making life miserable for our pigeons.) The really interesting thing about them is that they’re one of the rare birds who hunt in packs. That’s why he’s perfect for the job. Teamwork comes naturally to him. And get this – he thinks Imogen is part of his pack. Here he is with that special member of his pack. [Yes, I'm directing you back to the transcript again. To the second photograph. It's a photograph of Rufus with that special member of his pack. With his moll. His handler. Imogen. And since Rufus's eyesight is about eight times sharper, eight times more powerful than the sharpest human eye, well, what gives? In Imogen’s phrase, “food is the main motivation.” Imogen feeds him – apart from what he catches on the wing. That’s the main way she pulls his jesses (look it up – and while you’re at it look up Shakespeare’s use of the word in Othello). A steady diet of day-old chicks. Baby quails and baby chickens. And since you’ll be at least as tender-hearted as I am, you’ll be pleased to know, as I was, that the day-olds aren’t alive when Rufus sits down at the lunch counter. You want to know more, well, go to Imogen’s and Rufus’s website: avianenvironmental.co.uk Finally, is there a London Walks point anywhere in here? Yes, sure. Stuff like this is what you get from London Walks guides. And the clincher – you’re only going to get it from a top-flight guide. “Summer job guiding” – paint-by-numbers guiding – lowest common denominator guiding – ain’t going to get you there.

David's got a thing about Dickens. Dickens was life-changing for him. Dickens is the reason he's in this country. Indeed, Dickens is the reason David got into London Walks. Ian, who owned London Walks at the time, did not want an American guide. But David knew something about Dickens (University College London Ph.D. on Dickens, publications, etc.). This podcast is a long long way off from all the Christmas Dickens fare that's been knocking about. This is some good old fashioned "lit crit"– some taking the measure of the greatest novelist the English language has ever produced. It focuses primarily on David's favourite novel, Our Mutual Friend. But there's also some Thailand, some breakdancing, some Covid-19 (inevitably), etc. It's bareback riding the waves of four of the most extraordinary descriptive passages in all of English Lit.

London Walks guides know things about London other people don't know. Two London Walks guides – David and Justin (Justin's the London Walks James Bond expert) – were out "scouting locations" in Mayfair on December 11 with filmmaker Jon Klein. Twenty-fours later Justin was doing a James Bond walk that was going to have along a couple of former Bond girls and Daniel Craig's double. So, naturally, that walk got filmed. And on a certain little-known but very special Mayfair street David and Justin started swapping stories about what they know about that street. This podcast is the result. Transcript: Swapping Stories London Calling. David here. Must be ten, maybe 15 years ago now. And I can’t remember who the guide was Mary was talking about. But I remember what she said. “He knows things about London other people don’t know.” She said it about a specific London Walks guide. But in fact, it’s applicable to every single London Walks guide. And that brings me to last night. And the title of this podcast. Swapping stories. Two London Walks guides and a filmmaker were out walking last night. In Mayfair, as it happens. The two London Walks guides were me, David, and Justin. Justin’s our James Bond expert.  The filmmaker was Jon Klein. Interesting guy, wonderful guy, Jon. Thirty years ago he was the guitarist for Siouxsie and the Banshees. Over the last decade or so he’s reinvented himself as a filmmaker. My daughter Katy knew Jon. She introduced him to us. And one thing led to another. Result: he’s made probably about two dozen of the thirty or so London Walks video trailers.  We’ve been very lucky with all of that. Jon came along at the right time. Or I suppose you could say we hooked up with him at the right time. He was just starting out as a filmmaker and that meant that, really, we could afford him. Were we to come along now, he’d be out of our price range.  But in the way of these things, a friendship developed, Jon became part of the London Walks family, part of the London Walks team. One of the few “civilians” – that word’s in inverted commas – to ever gain access to the inner sanctum. The inner sanctum is “the guides’ party.” We hold them twice a year – a Christmas party and a midsummer party. The reason for those parties is that guiding isn’t like most jobs. When I was a journalist we all worked in the newsroom – unless we were on an assignment out in the field, either in the UK or overseas. So we rubbed elbows with our colleagues in that newsroom every single day when we worked. Guiding isn’t like that. A guide is a lone wolf. You don’t see your colleagues. Very much anyway. So we hold those biannual parties to get everybody together. At least a couple of times a year. Yeah, let’s use the cliched phrase: amongst other things those two parties are team building occasions. But the point is they’re very much “restricted access” occasions. Exclusive’s the word. They’re for London Walks guides and only London Walks guides. You can count on the fingers of one hand the “civilians” – inverted commas again – who’ve received a rare and coveted invitation to a London Walks party. Coveted because – a lot of the guides being thesps, being actors – they do “turns”. Toward the end of the evening the party turns into a variety show. Shaughan, for example, always writes and performs monologues that are an absolute hoot, Simon does his wicked and gobsmackingly perfect Dame Edna Everage impersonation – he did one for Mary’s birthday weekend – this is that weekend. That most recent impersonation, it’s hot out of the oven,  will go up here on this podcast one of these days. So you don’t need to take it from me, you’ll hear for yourself how pitch-perfect Simon’s Dame Edna is.  Adam does some of his stuff with his guitar and that rich singing voice of his.  Andrew is a professional standup comic. So we get a comic routine. Well, you get the idea. The bottom line is a London Walks guides party is a good time. There’s a lot of talent there. As I said, the evening turns into a pretty special variety show.  But – bears repeating –  the guides’ parties are  “in-house”, as it were. Outsiders don’t get in. Well, four or five “civilians” have been invited, have got into that magic circle over the years. And it’s a real honour. And Jon Klein, our English filmmaker, is one of them. That’s how family Jon is, how much we rate him. Don’t know if you noticed that adjective that just floated by. Our English filmmaker. That’s because we’ve also got a gifted American filmmaker. A wonderful guy from Mississippi named Jim Albritton. Jim’s made getting on for a dozen London Walks trailers. And how we wish he lived in London. We only get him when he’s over here. More’s the pity. Very much looking forward to Jim’s next trip to London. May it be sooner rather than later. Anyway, if you get a chance, take a look at their stuff on www.walks.com. I joke about Jon that there’s something uncanny about him and that camera of his. He turns out with that camera, stuff happens.  The single best example is the film he made of the distinguished crime historian Donald Rumbelow’s Jack the Ripper Walk. Donald is, as The A to Z of Jack the Ripper puts it, “internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” And Don’s a London Walks guide. So for sure, we made a film of Don’s Ripper walk. A film shot by Jon Klein. Anyway, London Walks has conducted that Jack the Ripper walk thousands of times. But we’ve only filmed it twice. The first time it featured Don. (Steve Noonan, the Royal Shakespeare Company actor, featured in our second Ripper film.) Anyway, the night Jon was filming Don’s Ripper walk – that night – I mean, you can’t make this up – there was a six-foot five-inch punk with a pink mohawk on the walk.  The only time we’ve ever had a six-foot-five-inch punk with a pink mohawk on the walk turns out to be the night Jon Klein is out there with his camera.  It’s uncanny. It’s become a thing. We talk about it here. Jon turns out with that camera stuff happens. And as a matter of fact, that night was an embarrassment of riches. Because for good measure someone else on the walk brought along their Dalmatian, what used to be known as a fire engine dog. White dog black spots. They were visuals to die for – and it just landed in our lap, just happened. Something uncanny about Jon Klein. He turns up with that camera stuff happens. So I’m really looking forward to talking to Justin tomorrow. And then to Jon. Because Jon was out filming Justin tonight. Which is why the three of us were out last night. We were scouting locations, so to speak. There’s a big association of professionals – I’m not going to go into any more detail about who they are – who’ve booked Justin for a whole series of James Bond walks for their members. Tonight was the second one in the series. I found out yesterday morning that a couple of former Bond girls – from Live & Let Die and Octopussy – were going to be on tonight’s walk. As was Daniel Craig’s double. And a saxophonist who did a number for us at a private club.  Well, you can imagine. I was salivating. I don’t care how flat broke we are – don’t care how much red ink we’ve hemorrhaged since last March – I said to myself, “Whoa! no way are we going to pass that one up.  Former Bond girls on Justin’s Ian Fleming – 007 walk – Daniel Craig’s double on Justin’s Bond walk – no way we’re not putting Jon Klein on the case.” So that’s what we were doing last night. Out in Ian Fleming’s and James Bond’s London. Scouting locations. Justin showing Jon where he’d be standing, letting Jon get a feel for the light, etc. Which brings me to the label I stuck on this podcast. Swapping Stories.  And put me in mind of Mary’s remarking about that London Walks guide all those years ago, “he knows things about London other people don’t know.” We were near the end of our scouting locations jaunt – moving along a not particularly well known Mayfair street – and Justin and I started, well, swapping stories. Jon was bemused no end.  It must have been sort of like watching a long rally in a tennis match. As it turns out there are several good Ian Fleming-James Bond connections in that street. That’s why Justin took us there. I know that street fairly well. And I had no idea that all that James Bond stuff is there, oven-ready as it were. But as it turns out, some of the stuff I know about that street was news to Justin. Passing Number 15, I said, “well, I might have one for you Justin.  Did you know that exactly a century ago – 1920 – Bruce Ismay, the fabulously wealthy shipowner, moved into this house.  And lived here until he died in 1937.  Bruce Ismay? Name ring a bell?  Let’s zero in: The White Star Line.  Let’s zero in even further: the Titanic.  Bruce Ismay of course was one of the survivors. Came in for a lot of stick because he got himself a place on Collapsible C, one of the Titanic’s four canvas life rafts.  Collapsible C was in fact the third to the last boat to leave the ship on the starboard side.  Bruce Ismay got himself onto that life raft knowing full well that there were a lot of people, including women and children, remaining on the lower decks. 705 people survived. Bruce Ismay, the owner of the White Star Line, was one of the 705. Over 1500 people weren’t so fortunate. They went down with the Titanic. Parting thought, According to family members, the Titanic was never mentioned in Ismay's presence. And then on the next corner, the house of the famous American actress Tallulah Bankhead. During the eight years, in the 1920s, that she was in London. She was known as the Wham from Alabam. Naughty girl. Had over 500 love affairs. With men and women. She once said, “Daddy – Daddy incidentally would go on to become the Speaker of the House of Representatives – anyway, Tallulah Bankhead said, “daddy warned me about men and alcohol, but he never warned me about women and cocaine.” And it wasn’t just her sex life that was in the fast lane. This southern belle smoked over a hundred cigarettes and consumed two bottles of bourbon a day.  Marlene Dietrich, who did some pretty fast-living herself, called Tallulah Bankhead “the most immoral woman who ever lived.” It just gets richer and riper, the Tallulah Bankhead story. Tallulah had her own lion. Not in London, in the States, but still.  Her own lion named, wait for it, Winston Churchill.  The lion ended up in the Bronx Zoo when, as Tallulah put it, he began biting people’s ankles.  But talk about the limelight, talk about being a 1920s superstar. Her fans were known as “the gallery girls.” And when the Wham Alabam made an entrance the gallery girls were ecstatic. They’d chant, Tallulah, Tallulah. Or sometimes, Tallulah, hallelujah. Two final notes. Incredibly, this 1920s superstar was still glowing embers if not ablaze in a completely different, much more recent era. The 1960s. Her final public appearance was in 1963 on the Johnny Carson show with, wait for it, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. And finally – and this is probably the primitive, unreconstructed male in me, but I cannot walk by that house, look at that front door, without thinking about one of Tallulah Halleluah’s party tricks, which was to throw a party there, and when guests arrived and rang the doorbell, she’d answer the door, stark naked. Not always. But often enough to whet appetites, shall we say. Well, I hope you can see why filmmaker Jon Klein was bemused when he walked along that Mayfair Street last night with two London Walks guides.  And Justin and I got in the London Walks guides’ equivalent of a long tennis rally. And no, I don’t know who won the rally – and whether the winner came at the net or was a passing shot from the baseline.  I do know that I like seeing London through the eyes of my colleagues. That’s it for tonight.  Good night one and all. All the very best to all of you. 

A London miscellany. Something a wee bit different. David's been reading the newspapers (3 December 2020). Here's what caught his eye this morning. Having a good soak in a couple of newspapers – one national, one local – it's a good way to take the pulse of a people, of a country, of a capital city, of a neighbourhood, of a polity. What they're looking at, what they're remembering, how they see their leaders, what's going on, both nationally, and in the case of the two Hampstead stories, locally. Transcript: London Calling. David here. Let’s kickback tonight. I’m in the mood for a London miscellany. Miss Cell Anie if you’re British, Miss ah Lanie if you’re American. Anyway, yes, a London miscellany. The London equivalent of the 7th-inning stretch at an American baseball game. Thought I’d take a look at a couple of this morning’s newspapers. At what my eye fell on and was struck by. What this Londoner – this American Londoner – ruminated about for half an hour or this morning. What this Londoner, in a couple of cases, was delighted by.  We live in – and rejoice in, are comforted by – a Golden Age of British political cartoonists. Aside here: we’ve got on the team – the London Walks team – an expert on British cartoons, past and present. That’s Adam. Adam, the London Walks Renaissance man. The multi-gifted Adam. The only person I know who talks like a well-written magazine article. (So you can imagine what a joy a conversation with Adam is.) Brilliant, award-winning guide. Writes like a dream. Encyclopedic knowledge of London. Musician and music-historian. Regularly does long-distance – 25 miles or so – walks across London. Good photographer. Got a great eye. So maybe it doesn’t come as a surprise that he’s also a gifted amateur cartoonist. Me, I’d like to be really good at just one thing. You need more than the fingers on one hand to count the things Adam excels at.  So, yes, I’ve walked you back round to the matter of Adam and cartoons – his being an expert on them. In fact, he’s done what I wouldn’t have thought was possible – he’s created a London Walk – and a parallel virtual tour – on the subject of London and its cartoons and cartoonists. Anyway, Adam maintains that not since Rowlandson and Gillray and Hogarth – savagely brilliant cartoonists, all of them – has London rejoiced in such a crop of deadly assassins as today’s cartoonists. And the 007 of them all – the one with the License to kill – is The Guardian’s Steve Bell. Take a look at his stuff, you’ll see what I mean. Steve Bell’s genius is to see something in any given politician that is both penetrating and preposterous – truthful and savagely funny – and just riff on that look, again and again. So, for example, he always depicted David Cameron as wearing a condom over his head. I suppose it was that high, shiny forehead and Cameron’s Teflon manner that led him to that characterisation. Mrs. Thatcher – with that steely, slightly demented eye of hers – he always served up as looking like a rooster on amphetamines. John Major was always shown with his knickers outside his trousers. Well, you can probably guess what’s grabbed him about Boris Johnson. He’s given him an arse for a face – an arse topped to the north with an unruly mop of blonde hair. No eyes, no nose, no ears – just an arse under that out of control mop of blonde hair. What does that say about what Steve Bell sees in – and thinks of – the man who’s currently occupying the highest office in the land? Well, our Head of State is of course the queen. But – as Steve Bell puts it – the Head of Government in the United Kingdom is an arse. A plump arse – both from the neck down and the neck up. A plump arse with blonde hair. Anyway, this morning Steve Bell piled it on. He popped a William Tell hat on the messy blonde bouffant on the arse. Let that sink in: in the eyes of the greatest living British cartoonist, the current occupant of Number 10 Downing Street is An arse with a blonde mop wearing a William Tell hat. Why the William Tell hat? Well, Steve Bell’s fitted out our plump prime minister with another accouterment. He’s got him wielding, aiming and firing a longbow. But instead of an arrow it’s a syringe that he’s about to loose in the direction of – well, who knows? Brussels? The Eu? His political opponents? Joe Biden. All to do of course with the hoopla about the Covid vaccine. Turns out though that the PM misfires.. Because in the second frame Johnson is shown with the syringe sticking out of his shoe. He’s shot himself in the foot.  And for a coup de grace Steve Bell shows the world the prime minister’s singularly unattractive, very pudgy thighs. In short, Steve Bell’s done what the rest of us – to a man and a woman – would rather not do  – see Boris Johnson with his trousers round his ankles. Yes, something’s gone wrong. It’s classic British farce. The arse has shot himself in the foot and his trousers are round his ankles. It’s savage, it’s merciless, it’s genius. Once seen, never forgotten.  What else? Because this is a London miscellany. Well, The Long Story in this morning’s Guardian was by John Hodgman, a colleague of mine in the WTN newsroom, back in the days when I was a television News Editor. It’s a coming up to the 50-year anniversary piece about the 1971 Ibrox disaster in Glasgow. A crush among the crowd at an Old Firm football game that led to 66 deaths and more than 200 injuries. It’s a harrowing account. A first-hand account. John was there. I also learned from it – none of us knew this in the newsroom – that he’d been born a protestant but was brought up, as a protestant, by Catholic parents. In a catholic neighbourhood in Glasgow. In those days. Let that sink in for a minute. Moving on…I learn from this morning’s papers that Germany has, on a per capita basis, five times as many critical care beds as the UK. And that London – privileged London – has more critical care beds, on a per capita basis, than any other area in the country. Which, surely, is one of the reasons the London mortality rate has been comparatively low.  More miscellany.  Let’s turn to the other paper, the Ham & High Express. Its Headline: Creperie Rivalry on High Street. And the other front-page story is titled: “Heath bosses sorry for reprimanding girl, 10, over jam fundraiser.” Creperie rivalry first. La Creperie de Hampstead is a Hampstead institution. It’s a stand tucked in right next to the King William IV pub on the High Street. A stand selling and serving, yes, crepe – those thin and delicious French pancakes. Always has a great long queue, patiently waiting for a serving of crepe. La Creperie de Hampstead can name drop like crazy. Judy Dench has stood in that queue. Ditto Pierce Brosnan, Ditto Harry Styles, etc. Now, because of Lockdown the King William IV, the pub that’s right there, hard by the creperie, has of course been closed for the last month. The creperie, operating out of a stand, did not have to close. As the struggling and resentful publican says, “they’ve had the benefit of being open and having no competition.” So, lo and behold, the pub has set up its own creperie, not 10 feet away. It’s operating out of a “pop up shop” – a tent, really – right beside Le Creperie de Hampstead. A pop-up shop selling – bears repeating – crepe. You can imagine the resentment, friction, the fireworks. More seriously, it’s a measure of how straitened times are for shops and pubs and their like. Our final item in this London miscellany might well be our blue ribbon winner. It’s about 10-year-old Olivia. Turns out Olivia’s been picking blackberries on Hampstead Heath and making jam out of them. She calls her product Wildwooders’ homemade blackberry jam. Comes in two sizes – a £10 jar and a £6 jar. In recycled jars, one hastens to add. The jam’s gone down a treat. Olivia’s raked in nearly a £1,000. Turns out it’s a fundraising gig. Olivia calls it Pick for Parks. Because she passes the money on to the parks – with an entail that the dosh needs to be put toward improving the park’s children’s play area. So far, so good. But here comes the villain of the piece. The City of London. The Hampstead Heath bosses. Yes, the City of London is in charge of Hampstead Heath. They run the show.  Love the email the City authorities sent to Olivia when they got wind of Wildwooders’ Homemade Blackberry Jam. Yes, make sure you read between the lines – it’s so carefully worded – they were well aware that they were on a hiding to nothing. Here’s what the email to 10-year-old Olivia said: “While we are sure your jam is very delicious there are a few issues with foraging that we need you to be aware of. Foraging berries can be damaging to biodiversity – wild animals and birds rely on the berries as a source of food. It is also in breach of our bylaws which say you should not forage anything from the Heath. While we are relaxed about people picking a small amount of berries we would not want to encourage anything more. We are very grateful that you want to help improve and conserve the Heath – it is inspiring  that at a young age you are already thinking about helping others.” Olivia burst into tears when she opened the email.  And then she went public. Or perhaps one of her advisers went public.  The result: a quick climbdown from the Heath bosses – from the mighty City of London.  What the British call a reverse ferret.  As the Ham & High headlined it: “Heath bosses apologise to girl, 10, after reprimanding her over jam fundraiser.” Pulling their syringe out of their shoe, they “apologised for any upset.” Good on the Ham & High, I say. As Chicago Evening Post journalist Finley Dunne put it, 127 years ago, “the job of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Bursting into tears a distant memory… Comforted, even emboldened – Olivia, gets the last word, “I don’t want to pick a fight, but I’m going to keep going.” Well, maybe not the last word. This is my podcast – this London Walks guide’s podcast – so I’m going to round this one off by saying, I love this story, and yes, good for you, Olivia. But also a big yes to the thought – hope there’s enough to go around, hope the birds and the wild animals get enough to eat. That’s all for tonight. From London. From “never a dull moment” in London. 

Listening to this is like being knighted. You'll arise and go forth – to the Abbey.

No need to beat around the bush with this one. Finding out about Tania's Cafe is worth the price of admission of the Hampstead walk all by itself. And "finding out" is very much to the point. Guarantee you you almost certainly won't find it off your own bat. It's maybe London's most hidden cafe. It's down a secret alleyway. You go past a tiny little Piaggio van – you couldn't get a normal size vehicle in the passageway but that little van does fit, just. And of course the vehicle itself is a bit of Hampstead culinary history because it was out of that little van that Ghassan started his business. As he tells us in the interview, his stock in trade was coffee and waffles. Well, just past the van is the not much larger "unit" that he operates out of today. It's also doll's house size. There's a counter inside where two people can sit and there are two very small tables out front. I know Ghassan very well and indeed I know his delightful son Mohammed who helps out from time to time. Ghassan's place is often my port of call after I finish my Sunday morning Hampstead walk. And what a reward. The speciality – well, one of the specialities – is the spinach triangles his wife makes. Yes, I know – spinach triangles – how could spinach triangles be anything special, you might well ask. I mean after all, it's just spinach in that unleavened Middle Eastern bread – the kind of comestible that's ubiquitous in Middle Eastern cafes and delis. and cafes. And for sure, as foodstuffs go they're pretty ho-hum in those places. In those establishments they taste like, well, like spinach. Spinach with cardboard. At Ghassan's, though, they're – well, it's like the difference beteween a £400 bottle of wine and a bottle of Blue Nun. The flavour is fresh, complex, delicious. Sensational, really. It's a moving target. It just keeps coming – and indeed altering on your palette. I've never had anything like it. There's citrus with other, subtler, more complex flavours peeking out behind the citrus. I'm sure someone who knows more about these matters would be nodding sagely were I to run the flavour chromatic scale – the ingredients – past them. Ok, if you insist, i.e., for anyone who is one of those culinary whiz kids, the flavouring ingredients are: lemon juice, summac, cumin, rosemary and zaatar. But look, don't just look, try it. One bite and you'll get it. And the rest, well, the whole establishment is like a culinary Aladdin's cave. Everything is delicious and everything is special. And visually appealing, the bottles, the packaging. Some of it not to be had anywhere else in London. How cool is is that? And the whole time you're getting a steer from someone who loves his wares and knows what he's talking about. For example, if you ask Ghassan about his "bread dips" – about eight different flavours – he'll counsel you to only ever serve same with white bread. Brown bread, wholemeal, etc. "drains away" the flavour. That's the kind of expert advice, the nous, you're never going to get from a "shop floor worker", a "hired hand" in a supermarket. Dare I say it, it's absolutely akin to walking tours. It's local knowledge – it makes a world of difference. And as for that "Miracle Juice" of his – well, as Ghassan says, it's made of ten fruits and six vegetables. A bottle of Miracle Juice to accompany a couple of Spinach Triangles – well, it's taste buds bliss. By all means, join me at Ghassan's little cafe at walk's end on a Sunday morning, if you're so inclined. But if you have to rush off but would like to catch up with Ghassan some other time, here are the contact details:  Tania's   12 Heath Street   London   NW3 6TE    Tel. 07964 323 723   [email protected]    

This one's David doing his thing, brooding over words. In this case – it's Halloween after all – the words 'goodbye' and 'Halloween'. With some creepy history and a great moment in Eng Lit thrown in for some seasoning. Transcript: London Calling. David here. David creaking open some word doors. Getting into their darkest recesses. On Halloween. “When we say goodbye on Halloween what we’re really saying is ‘God be with you’. Tease the word goodbye apart and it comes into view, like a print coming up in a darkroom: God be [with] ye. The ‘with’ is completely elided, but for the rest – well, it’s all there. And as for Halloween – well, again, if you trust your ear you can hear the trumpets of the past. Hallow is short for Hallowed. And een is an elision of evening. So it’s the Evening of the Hallowed. The hallowed being the saints, the saints honoured on All Saints Day – November 1st. And the rest of the silent majority get in on the act on All Souls Day – November 2nd. So we’re really talking a Festival of the Dead here. And why at this time of the year? Well, souls schmouls and saints schmaints – because the cultural roots of all of these goings-on go down a lot deeper. Down into a distant Celtic past. That territory is pagan – and that means light, sun-worship. And this time of the year – well, we’re all very aware of it – the light is high- tailing it out of these northern climes. And with the onset of some serious darkness, well, the Celts believed that at this time of the year the bourne between this world and 'the beyond' got real thin. Thin enough for spirits – for the ‘departed’ – to pass through. So think of October 31st  as a membrane. A membrane ‘they’ can come through. Come through and get in amongst us. And they do. You might well see one or more of them on the Halloween ghost walk. Or hear them. Or sense them. It has been known to happen. And no, I’m not making this up. We’ve got the video and the audio to prove it. And now on another note, a related note… “For some serious, how about this little set of reflections. It was in the Middle Ages – in the West – that relations between the living and the dead underwent a major change. The ancient world didn’t like its corpses. It feared them, was repelled by them. That’s why the Romans, for example, buried their dead outside their towns and cities. Along the roads that led into the countryside. The Middle Ages dansed to a different macabre: their dead were integrated into the urban space. Every town, every village was built around a church and a cemetery. And historians think that the cemetery might well have antedated the church. So when we go into those churchyards on Halloween night we’re, well, turning our back on the classical world and 'going mediaeval'. It’s Hello Wallace but Goodbye Marcellus!” Or if you’re of a literary bent how about goodbye Horace, hello Horatio. Horace being the roman poet, Horatio being Hamlet’s best friend. And particularly to the point here - Horatio’s there with the two soldiers, the two sentries, there on the battlements of Elsinore at the witching hour – and sure enough, he sees the ghost. Actually if you’re going to be a purist about it Horace and Horatio are the same name. Horace is Horatio anglicised. But for our purposes – and I think we can safely say, for Shakespeare’s purposes – Horatio couldn’t be better named. His name means “hour” – man of time, keeper of the hours. So who better to have on hand when that ghost, that rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward them on those dark and wind-buffeted battlements. That hour come round, that thing coming toward them, its chains clanking like a striking clock, who better to have on hand, than the keeper of the hours. God be with you. Goodbye.

David's been poking around in the undergrowth of history. This podcast introduces you to a resident of Kensington you hadn't heard of – but will be blissfully glad you got to meet her.

Charles Chilton MBE – "the one true genius the BBC ever produced" (Daily Telegraph) – was the best-loved London Walks guide of them all. Hardly surprising since "he was the most gifted storyteller I've ever known" (David). This podcast rejoices in a few great Charles Chilton anecdotes as it tells, very briefly, the remarkable and inspiring story of Charles' life. It takes as its jumping-off point the cameo role Charles plays in the podcast yesterday about Adam's Musical Marylebone Virtual Tour. Transcript London Calling. David here. This one’s close to home. In fact, it doesn’t get any closer to home. It is home. It’s a piece about a father and a daughter. The father is the man who had a cameo role in yesterday’s podcast. Yesterday’s podcast was a clip from Adam’s wonderful Musical Marylebone Virtual Tour. Two-thirds of the way through the tour Adam gets us to the BBC, which is right on the edge of Marylebone. So there’s every reason for paying a call to the BBC. That was the section of the tour that we put out on yesterday’s podcast. In it, Adam sheds a lot of light on the BBC’s “complicated” relationship with popular music. And one of the figures in that story is the father in the father-and-daughter pairing I referred to at the start of this set of remarks. He was, in the words of the Telegraph’s obituary, Britain’s first DJ. And Adam told the story about Lord Reith, the first Director-General of the BBC, carpeting the then very young man – Britain’s first DJ – and indeed yanking him from the programme because he had a Cockney accent, a working-class London accent. Mary and I attended Adam’s Musical Marylebone Virtual Tour – I recorded it get a section for our podcast – and if you listen very closely to the podcast you can hear Mary gasp a second before Adam introduces the gentleman in question. And then she titters two or three times when Adam recounts the story. Ok, now to come clean… Britain’s first DJ – as the Telegraph put it – was Mary’s Dad, Charles Chilton, the legendary, as he became, BBC writer and producer. She gasped because in his Virtual Tour Adam put up a photograph of a very young Charles Chilton a second or so before he started to talk about him and Mary of course instantly recognised that the face on the screen was that of her then 20-year-old father. Well, that’s the preamble to this, another in this occasional series of Let Us Now Praise – and Remember – Wonderful Guides. Mary’s dad was the most gifted storyteller I’ve ever known. Which is why it was only natural that when we took over London Walks in 1990 and were casting about, trying to figure out who we could get to guide a weekly Sunday morning Hampstead Walk, we thought of Charles. That’s my walk now, indeed it’s my favourite walk of all. But back in 1990 – London Walks was flat on its back, we had just taken it over and were trying to save it, revive it – I wasn’t free to guide a weekly walk on Sunday or any other morning. My main career, my full-time career – I was a News Editor in a television newsroom – was still going full tilt and I was on call every other Sunday morning. So I couldn’t be that Hampstead guide. Mary couldn’t because she had three young kids at home. Who could we get to do it? And suddenly it came to her – she said, “I know who can guide that Hampstead Walk – my Dad can guide it. And he’ll do it better than anybody.” And of course she was right. Charles was 73 at the time. Still extremely active. He’d been retired from the BBC for eight years but was still doing occasional programmes for them as an independent producer. Anyway, he was game. And sure enough he was brilliant. He was everybody’s favourite guide. Guided it for 14 years, until he was 87. And wanted to carry on beyond 87 but Mary’s mum, Penny, made him stop. Two of many stories spring to mind. He became very famous in Israel because a big newspaper there had done a travel piece on London and that walk had figured in it – the journalist had sung Charles praises to the sky and beyond. And delightfully he’d noticed – and had written about – the fact that Charles wore his socks outside of his trousers. It was a kind of hiking outfit that he often donned when he walked up from West Hampstead where he lived to guide the walk. That walk up to Hampstead and then the walk itself and then walking home – I suppose taken all together it was a bit of hike – must have covered three or four miles anyway – so why not put your hiking gear on, including your woolen socks correctly worn outside your hiking trousers. But this is apparently not an everyday look in Israel – in fact the Israeli writer had never seen anything like it before – socks outside the trousers, must be an English eccentric – so it went into the article. Every Israeli who read it remembered that detail. They’d turn up for the walk. And suddenly Charles would come striding up – socks on the outside – and their excitement level would go right up, there he is, it’s him, his socks are outside his trousers. And then another tiny – and for us, fun – chapter from Charles’ days guiding the Hampstead walk was we’d sometimes get a phone call from a middle-aged often American man, he’d say, “I’m 55 – I don’t walk all that much – how far do you walk on a London Walk?” We had a set response. We said, “look, our hilliest walk, the Old Hampstead Village walk, is guided, every Sunday morning, by our oldest guide, 85-year-old Charles Chilton.” The idea was that if Charles was equal to it at 85 they probably would have been up to it if they were in their 50s. We maybe should have said to them that he was extremely fit octogenarian. But, hand on heart here, we didn’t always – we wanted the custom. Fortunately, no one’s ever keeled over. But let’s tell a bit more of the Charles Chilton story. Tell it for its own merits – it’s a fascinating tale. Charles was effectively orphaned by World War I. He was a King’s Cross Cockney. Brought up his grandmother. They were desperately poor. His grandmother over the course of her long life never even got as far out of King’s Cross as Oxford Street. Charles’ father was a young British soldier – 19 years old – when he was killed at Arras. His wife, Charles’s mother, was pregnant with Charles when he was killed. She then died not so many years after. The death of his father would lead, forty-some years later, to Charles writing Oh What a Lovely War. He wanted to find out about the last months of his father’s life, find his grave in France. He researched it, tracked the movements of the unit. And then to climax it, the family – Mary was a little girl – went to Arras. To find the grave. He found it. But he didn’t find what he thought he was going to find. He thought he’d find a grave with a stone, a cross, with his name on it. Instead he found a huge stone monument, the size of a building, with over 36,000 names on it. Thirty six thousand 500 – approximately – British soldiers who were vaporised by heavy artillery. There was nothing left of them, nothing to identify, nothing to bury. So what Charles found was his father’s name on the monument. The shock of that, the tsunami of emotion loosed by that moment of recognition, led him to write the radio programme that became the musical and the film Oh What a Lovely War. And to elaborate just a little bit on Adam’s tale about Charles as the first British DJ. It was jazz music. It was going out late at night. As Adam said, it wasn’t on the BBC bigwigs’ radar. But it attracted a tremendous following, admiring letters flooded in. And the BBC brass suddenly took notice that it was being presented by this youngster with a Cockney accent. And of course in the 1930s that wasn’t kosher at the BBC. The only accent acceptable was an RP accent – a cut glass, King’s English accent. Word finally got to the top man himself, Reith, the Director-General, he listened. And was appalled. Summoned Charles to his office. Made the mistake of asking Charles, “what kind of accent do you call that?” Charles said, “it’s the accent of the capital of the British Empire.” Reith for once was flummoxed, speechless. But he recovered sufficiently later on to issue an order, “get him off the air.” It all came good though. What a career. What an ascent. He joined the BBC as a 14-year-old messenger boy. The BBC was in its infancy – it had only been in existence for five years. Charles rose through the ranks to become a legendary and much-loved writer and producer and sometime broadcaster. Yes, he got back on the air. The Telegraph profiled him about ten years before he died. In its profile the Telegraph described Charles as “the one true genius the BBC ever produced.” Not bad. And let’s get his daughter, Mary, my wife, back into the tale. Eight years ago I was invited to Buckingham Palace. Got to meet the Queen. Got photographed with her, etc. Which was great. But the biggest thrill of the night was getting to see “the staircase.” I’d heard about it for many years. I said Mary’s dad was the finest storyteller I’ve ever known. And sure enough he had a Buckingham Palace story he loved to tell. It had to do with his invitation to the Palace. When he was awarded his MBE. Mary and her mum went with him. Mary was sixteen at the time. Sweet sixteen. Gorgeous. Now what you must know is that Mary is a dancer. A real dancer. A proper professional dancer. Ballet. Still goes to professional dance classes three times a week. Dance is in her, it’s right at the core of her being. And when Mary’s happy – or when Mary’s excited – Mary dances. Well, Mary was 16. Her Dad was at Buckingham Palace getting an MBE. Mary was happy. Mary was excited. And suddenly there was that great staircase in front of her. So in Charles’ telling, she danced up one side of the staircase, danced across the top, and danced down the other side. And the staircase, both sides of it, was lined with Guardsman, soldiers in formal dress uniform. And as Charles told it – it’s of course possible that he heightened the story a little bit – but as Charles told it, each one of those red-coated, ramrod straight guardsman gave a low wolf whistle as Mary danced by them. Good night folks. Stay well, Stay safe. Stay happy. Please don’t forget us. We shan’t forget you.

This one's discursive, laid-back and piquant (in places). David goes a Londoning. Here's what he brought back.

A man on the street, ordinary life report (by David) about London. What it's like here now (October 2020). What it looks like, sounds like, feels like.

The Wall Street Journal interviewed David today. They wanted to find out what it's been like for a small business in this Covid era, what our response has been, where things stand now, what we think the future holds for us (for London Walks), etc. This podcast (talk) is a synopsis of what David told them. He said, "the entire experience can be crystallised in the figure £450. Better write it down."

David put his foot in his mouth on his Kensington walk. But it worked out ok. In supporting roles: Thackeray, Churchill, Vanity Fair and an English cavalry officer or two.

Right round the world there's probably half a million walking tour companies. The price of admission to go on a walking tour won't break the bank. But the opportunity costs of a walking tour are very expensive. So it's important to do what the wealthy do as a matter of course – get the best (the poor man always pays twice). In this instance, track down the best walking tour company wherever you are, use their guides. How do you do that? David and Mary – not in their capacity as the London Walks commanding officers but in their capacity as experienced travelers – have put together a checklist that's a big help in sorting the wheat from the weeds. This podcast is Part 2 – the second instalment – of that checklist.

Once seen never forgotten, the striped house. It's back in the news. She's now suing her lawyers. David reports.

David was out walking the eerily quiet streets of central London today. What he saw put him in mind, first, of Malaga and then of one of the "nodal, defining moments of London's history. A nodal, defining moment that's preserved in stone. AKA London's long, colourful, dramatic – hell, yes, let's get some adjectives into this parade – history crystalised in a single word

High quality walking tours – how do you sort the wheat from the chaff? This podcast is the first of a series of guidelines that will stand you in good stead. A checklist, really.

Ok, it's a top-up to yesterday's 9 Buckingham Gate piece. But, yes, Boris Johnson, plays a cameo role. And there's other good stuff, ranging from house prices to 'the least inhibited tongue in Europe'

David's been digging. Digging in a seriously old money neighbourhood. "If you live in a 24-room house across the street from Buckingham Palace... a century and more of world history flows from that as a matter of course."

This one's very David. It's quixotic, quirky, whimsical, fun and, yes, pensive. And it makes some extraordinary connections. In other words, a perfect autumn equinox piece. And at the end – some very good news indeed. Keep your fingers crossed.

Catalogue title:  Virginia Woolf Diary Entries – Scene-setter for Simon's Blitz Anniversary Virtual Tour A final scene-setter for Simon's Blitz 80th Anniversary Virtual Tour. This is two diary entries made by the great novelist Virginia Woolf in September and October 1941. Made just hours after air raids that hit London very hard and in particular Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury. Indeed, the second attack reduced her and her husband Leonard Woolf's house in Tavistock Square to rubble. Virtually nothing was salvageable. The diary entries are vivid, powerful, felt, graphic. They get us very close to those terrible times. Click here for details about Simon's Blitz 80th Anniversary Virtual Tour.

Storytime! Full title: The London Sky has been a battlefield – a scene-setter for Simon's Blitz Anniversary Virtual Tour A short talk followed by a great read. This is the second of three scene-setters for Simon's upcoming Blitz 80th Anniversary Virtual Tour. The read is a favourite passage from my favourite book on London, V.S. Pritchett's London Perceived. Click here for full details about The Blitz 80th Anniversary Virtual Tour

You are listening to the words of CBS correspondent Quentin Reynolds, who filed daily reports from London during the Blitz. This podcast – from London on October 12, 1940 – is a scene-setter for Simon's 80th Anniversary Blitz Virtual Tour, which takes place at 7 pm on Sunday, September 13.

Full title:  Niagara Falls Drowning, Swimming the English Channel, Rule Britannia, Inspector Clouseau (Pink Panther) and Sitting Bull Adam's London Walks' musical London expert. He's got a peach of a walk called Musical Covent Garden – from Thomas Arne to Frank Zappa and Beyond. This podcast is David's little scene-setter for the Musical Covent Garden walk. Click here for full particulars about the Musical Covent Garden Walk

This podcast – by David – is a two-parter. It opens with David's final thoughts about The Great Fire of London. It's the last of his four scene-setters for his colleague Simon's Virtual Tour, "London's Burning". Which takes place at 7 pm on Sunday, September 6, 2020. Full details on www.walks.com Click here for particulars about the London's Burning Virtual Tour The second part of this podcast takes stock of the situation generally six months on from the onset of "Covid Season." Long and short of it is, "this is a once in a lifetime opportunity for walkers"

This is David's third and final scene-setter for London's Burning, Simon's Virtual Tour of the Great Fire of London. It's flecked with fascinating sidebars – the spark that got across the Thames and set fire to a stables in Southwark, the Inn in Fish Street Hill that caught fire, the hugely destructive fire on London Bridge (why they were both lucky and unlucky with that fire). But chiefly, this podcast focuses on the point where the three armies of flames converged, the place where the monster fire really started (hint, it wasn't Pudding Lane). Here's the link to London's Burning, Simon's Virtual Tour of the Great Fire of London.

The second scene-setter for Simon's upcoming Great Fire of London Anniversary Virtual Tour (it goes on Sunday, September 6th, 2020 at 7 pm). This podcast, by David, zooms in on Pudding Lane, where the fire began, and rakes through, minutely, the ashes of the first two hours of the fire. (Big thanks to Christopher Burns – and Unsplash – for the featured image.) Click here for the particulars for London's Burning – Simon's Virtual Tour of the Great Fire of London Anniversary.

This podcast is David's scene-setter for Simon's upcoming London's Burning – The Anniversary of the Great Fire of London Virtual Tour. It asks – and answers – what was the London of September 1, 1666 like? The London that would be no more in a matter of hours. Click here for lots of information about the Virtual Tour itself.

A reminiscence. Accompanied with some reflection. And a panegyric. David remembers the three Js – June, Jean and Joan. Late, great London Walks guides.

Hampstead. The pond in the woods. Two white swans. The poet. The loss. The grief. The remembering. The beauty. The transfiguring. David takes you there. Transcript: London Calling. David here. This is the London Walks Daily Podcast for August 17th 2020. Hampstead Heath has about two dozen ponds. My favourite pond is the Vale of Health Pond. The Vale of Health is the village within a village, the village on the Heath. My Sunday morning Hampstead Walk goes there. The stop just before our visit to the Vale of Health is what I call The Roof of London. That walk goes to five “viewing platforms”, as I call them. From those viewing platforms you can see all the way across the Thames River Valley. You can see the southeastern rim of the “bowl of hills” that London nestles in. That southeastern rim is 26 miles in the distance. Beyond that is the Weald of Kent. Ten miles beyond that is the sea. And of course in the nearer – well, by nearer I mean to five to ten or twelve miles away – distance is the full London panorama, all of it spread out before us. To use the American term, standing there we’re in London’s “Skybox”. It’s the most wonderful vantage point. Anyway from there we walk down across Hampstead Heath to and into that tiny little village within a village, the Vale of Health. We make a couple of stops in the Vale of Health – it’s very pretty and full of interest. And then we head up out of the Vale of Health. But partway up the hill that takes us up and out of the Vale of Health we take a little detour. We go for a walk in the woods. A walk in the woods that takes us to Vale of Health Pond. I think that stop – there in the woods – looking out over that pond – I call it, very American of me, this, London’s Walden Pond – I think that stop is my favourite stop on the whole walk. And that’s really saying something. Because every single stop on that walk is special. Extra special. But I like it so much that I photograph it every Sunday morning. I want a record of Mother Nature’s doings, week by week. How age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety. My walkers always have wonder written all over their face when we get to that little clearing in the woods, looking out over the pond. And I always ask them, “how bucolic do you want your London?” You’re only four miles from central London. And then I say something like, “I write the London Walks leaflet. And the website. And if you read the blurb for this walk, in the penultimate sentence I speak of a pond with two white swans on it. And this is the pond. And those two were so reliable that I could confidently put that sentence in there. Because we’d see them every week. But, alas, they’re no longer there. I just haven’t had the heart to disappear them – because for me they’re still there. They’re there in my mind’s eye. They’re still there not just because they were very beautiful – in this very beautiful setting – but also because their story was very moving. And very sad. Here’s the tale... They were going to have a family. There was a nest. Eggs in it. One day a dog came too close to the nest. The male swan, the cob, went for the dog. There was a terrific fight. The male swan lost the fight. He lost his life. The dog killed him. And then, a week or two later, a fox got the eggs in the nest. The pen – the female swan – I could hardly bear to think about her. She lost her mate, her husband. And then she lost the chicks that they were going to have together. I used to see her by herself, moving across the pond. And I’d weep. At least inwardly. I remember telling the tale one Sunday morning to my walkers and there was a lady on the walk who was almost overcome with sadness. And she blurted out, “oh, the poor thing, she must be desperately lonely. Somebody should call the RSPB – the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds – and tell them about her, get them to bring her a new partner. And somebody in the group who knew better, piped up and said, “no, that wouldn’t be a good idea at all. If you brought her a male swan that would be a dead male swan within a week. She’ll be perfectly capable of getting her own mate. And she’ll do it in her own good time.” And that brings me to Danny Abse. Danny Abse was Welsh. And Jewish. He was a doctor. And a poet. He died in 2014. He was 91. He lived in Hampstead for many years. In 2005 Danny and his wife Joan were driving home from a poetry reading. Another car smashed into their car. Joan was killed. For a year after her death, Dannie Abse kept a diary.  The diary is a living record of loss. Of loneliness. Of grief. And it’s a looking back. A reflection on the past. It ends with his poem Lachrymae. That title – Lachrymae – is a Latin word that means tears. Or dirge. From the sap or gum that certain trees exuded. The trees were, well, weeping. It’s the most perfect, the most beautiful, the most moving poem. I’ve memorised it. I give it to my walkers, there in that little clearing in the woods, looking out over the pond, the pond where the swans were. And then just the one swan. The widow. And remember that Dannie Abse lived in Hampstead. He will have known the story. The poem is about the swans. And about Dannie Abse and his wife. About loss and beauty and love and life. It goes like this: ‘She is everywhere and nowhere now that I am less than one… …Now, solemn, I watch the spellbound moon again, its unfocused clone drowned in Hampstead’s rush-dark pond where a lone swan sings without a sound.’