London still has – thank heavens – some 2,000 gas lamps. And even in the 1980s there was still one gas-lamp lighter at work! His beat was the Temple area, part of the lawyers’ quarter. He made his rounds every evening at dusk. He carried a long pole – his lighter. With it he’d reach up and catch and open a turncock of sorts. That would release the gas. Then he’d turn the implement in his fingers and apply a lighted taper to the newly released gas, which blossomed into flame. Then he’d be around again, first thing in the morning, implement in hand, to extinguish the flame. Purely by chance I happened to be in the Temple area that day in the mid-1980s when the work crews were going through there, fitting out each of the gas lamps with a timer, a clock, which would do the job automatically. I was strangely moved. The thought being: a hundred years ago there would have been hundreds if not thousands of gas-lamp lighters in London, earning their livelihoods, supporting their families. And here we were – in the middle of the ninth decade of the twentieth century – and it had come down to one last gas-lamp lighter. He was the last of the Mohicans. And he was about to be made extinct.
We don’t have gas-lamp lighters any more – but we do still have gas-lamp clock winders. They wind the clocks – and adjust the lighting-up and extinguishing times – for London’s remaining gas lamps. And there’s one gas lamp in London where we – the public – can be, however momentarily, a gas-lamp lighter. We can turn it on and off. But you’ll have to go on Angela’s walk to find it!
Now all of this is by way of saying that London Walks® guides are, after a fashion, latter-day gas-lamp lighters. Picture it: the lamplighter’s figure moving along a London street in the gloaming and one by one the street lamps coming out like stars. And you think there’s no romance to London? So that’s what we do – light things up for people. Both out on the streets of London when we’re guiding, and here, in these pages.
Local knowledge, knowing where to go when – you can’t beat it. How did the thirteenth-century poet Rumi put it? ‘Whoever travels without a guide needs two hundred years for a two-day journey.’
WHERE TO READ THIS
No question about it: the wonderful Café in the Crypt at St Martin-in-the-Fields, the old church in Trafalgar Square.
London Walks® is the oldest urban-walking tour company in the world. It is by common consent the best urban-walking tour company in the world.
A great walk is accretional in the sense that a guide’s understanding of a neighbourhood grows, develops, gets richer and richer over time. It takes years – this is England, after all – but in time a guide will become part of the furniture of a given neighbourhood, will become accepted and trusted by the locals. And that’s when the ‘magic’ really starts to happen. Because the locals will then open up to the guide, sharing fascinating titbits with him or her about the neighbourhood. It’s that sort of connectedness that sets London Walks® apart.
When it came to thinking about a book based on all the accrued knowledge and feel for the city, we wanted something different from the bog-standard walking-tour guidebook. What we wanted was it to be a great read. In short, we wanted it to be an armchair read as well as a useful on-the-street guide. This is why each chapter has a little ‘side bar’ suggesting where you might read that particular section. The idea being – for readers who are in London at any rate – you can read the chapter while seated comfortably in, say, the Founders Arms or in front of the great fourth-floor windows of Tate Modern with their wonderful panoramic view out over the Thames and across to the City skyline (those are the two recommended reading ‘spots’ for my chapter on the Thames that opens the book), and then go out and do some exploring on your own. The French have the word for this sort of thing: flânerie. We wanted the London Walks® book to be one that would allow for some flâneuring. Read and then explore on your own. Flâneuring allows for happy accidents, for discoveries.
We also wanted the guides’ individual voices to come through. London Walks® is like a symphony orchestra: a team of great people that works together brilliantly. But within that orchestra every guide is also a solo and we wanted a range of voices, because that is London Walks®, the result of a richness – and indeed collegiality – you get when you have a team of seventy or so world-class guides simultaneously tilling their own rows and working together.
And we wanted the thing to shine with intelligence. Another contributing factor to London Walks®’ reputation is the intellectual audacity of the guides. Some of that, of course, is attested to by their professional qualifications, the guides comprising authors, a barrister, a physician, a roll-call of award-winning Blue Badge guides (not to mention Chief Examiner of the Blue Badge course), PhDs, distinguished London historians, archaeologists, journalists, broadcasters and more. And they are experts in the tours they lead. As the New York Times unerringly put it many years ago, ‘London Walks® puts you into the hands of an expert on the particular area and topic of a tour.’ That’s what we’ve done on the pavement for nearly half a century. And it’s what we’ve done here on the page. Among the contributions, our ‘Jack the Ripper’ chapter by the distinguished criminologist (and London Walks®’ Ripper guide extraordinaire) Donald Rumbelow, who is, as The Jack the Ripper A to Z put it, ‘internationally recognised as the leading authority on the Ripper’. Then there is the gifted actor Shaughan Seymour – ‘the best ghost walks guide in London’ – who has of course contributed a haunted London story; distinguished barrister Tom Hooper MBE on London and its history in law; cutting-edge journalist Adam Scott and Fleet Street; leading London archaeologist Kevin Flude and Roman London; and ‘One-man London gazetteer’ and renowned London historian Ed Glinert and his Soho chapter. And so on. Regrettably the remarkable resource the guides comprise can be represented only in part in this book – it just isn’t possible to include contributions from the full complement of guides – but a superb representation it is.
When you’re marinated in the cask the way our guides are, inevitably London becomes part of you. There’s an exceptionally pretty little row of white cottages in Hampstead. You look at them with their splendidly colourful doors – red, green, yellow, pink – and you think for a moment you’re on a Greek island. Anyway, in front of one of them there’s a low iron gate and the vegetation – the tree – beside it has grown round some of the bars in that gate. It has literally ingested them. Iron bars and tree have become one. Well, that’s a pretty good metaphor for London Walks® guides and their material.
I also want to acknowledge the origins of this book, in the shape of Steve Barnett. The book’s concept was his, as was the idea of stories within a framework of chapters. Together we hit on the notion of a structure of paired stories (well, five stories in the case of the chapter on London’s villages, and the chapters on the Thames and Dickens stand alone) in order to better explain the city and its history. London is so big, and so deep – Henry James spoke of its ‘inconceivable immensity’ – that it can be difficult to conceptualise.
What it all adds up to is that London Stories is a different kind of guidebook. Some of the information is well known – the landmarks and signposts along the road of London’s history – but there is much that will be new to readers. And, of course, it’s all in the telling, which is what London Walks®’ guides do best.
London for me – and for my colleagues – is an enchanted forest. It’s full of wondrous strange music and echoes, past and present. In short, my London is also Chaucer’s London and Shakespeare’s London and Donne’s London and Pepys’s London and Dickens’s London and Boudicca’s London and Mrs Pankhurst’s London and Churchill’s London and John Lennon’s London and so on. And that’s the London – those are the Londons – that we explore on our walks. And in these pages.