I miss England. It took a lot of our history with it when we cut it adrift.
— Canadian journalist Charles Lynch[1]
Fresh out of university in Britain and flat broke, I landed a job as a tour guide for visiting American high-school students in London. After their initial disappointment with my Canadian accent — by the crestfallen look on their faces I think they were expecting the actor Hugh Grant to show them around — we set off as intrepid if similarly sounding North Americans to explore the city’s popular attractions: Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, and, with some coercion on their part and hearing loss on mine, an occasional dance club in Leicester Square.
As I prepped for my new job by reading up about London, I was struck by how oddly American it all seemed. Guidebooks frequently mentioned U.S. figures like John Harvard or Captain Smith of Pocahontas fame. There were prominent statues of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ike, and FDR. The house of Benjamin Franklin, a U.S. ambassador to Britain, bore an historic blue plaque, as did the house of John F. Kennedy, the son of one. There was an America Square, an American Church, and even a Little America.
Whether out of genuine curiosity or simple politeness, my students occasionally asked me about Canadian landmarks. Apart from Canada House in Trafalgar Square, I was hard pressed to identify any. My charges were as bemused as I was befuddled. After all if they knew anything about the “North” in their America, it was the fact Canadians remained loyal to Britain in the American Revolution and still bore the queen on our coinage as a reward. Yet there were no statues to our leaders in the capital of the Mother Country.
My unease with this national neglect only grew, living and working in London over many years. But while Canadians may not be represented by bronze statues or blue plaques at every street corner, I discovered we are not completely absent. It all depends on how you look at things. As Canada marks its 150th birthday in 2017, I felt it was high time to address a century-and-a-half neglect and create a new guide to an old city written especially for Canadian visitors.
But in preparing this book I kept in mind two realities. One is that many Canadians seem to enjoy British history these days. The popularity of TV shows like Downton Abbey and The Tudors is evidence of this. The second is that sites of Canadian interest are scattered throughout London and beyond. I had to find a way to weave in some local history and at the same time present the sites of Canadian interest in a way that didn’t have readers crisscrossing an infernally large city.
I decided to group my discoveries into seven armchair walks — one for each day of the week — and present a brief history of each area visited. To fill in the inevitable gaps that existed, I decided to look more broadly at who and what should be featured. I settled on people, places, events, objects and even architecture that had some interesting link to Canada. This included iconic figures who had left their indelible marks in London like media tycoons lords Black and Beaverbrook. On occasion physical landmarks eluded me so I had to identify interesting features that could otherwise act as prompts. Thus while the Victorian wards of Guy’s and St. Thomas’s Hospital on the south side of the River Thames have no real link to Canada, they do serve to recall a nineteenth-century medical student from Canada who studied there and became a notorious serial killer known as the Lambeth Poisoner.
Organizing this book by walks also allowed me to indulge unashamedly in the enjoyment of being a guide again, identifying the quirky and often more memorable side of history, and putting to paper my personal conviction that if one looked at London a little differently, one could find a city full of discoveries about Canada and the people who are fortunate to call it home.
My rolled and dog-eared London A to Z street guide was my faithful Jean Passepartout around the city and the inspiration for the title of this book. In telling these 101 stories about Canada’s links to London, I am struck by how little human nature has changed since Confederation. What frustrated Canada’s first diplomats to London in the 1880s still does today. What Britain’s Lord Derby said to reassure a nervous Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1860s could be the words of Prime Minister Stephen Harper to his next finance minister: “Relax. They give you the figures.”
— Reform Club, London