London walks London stories : discover the city's hidden gems with the original walking tour company

244 Pages·2009·2.8 MB·English

by  Tucker

CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
Thamesis: David Tucker
Tale of Two Cities
The Famous Square Mile: Judy Pulley
The City at Night: Peter Glancy
Literary London
Shakespeare’s London: Shaughan Seymour
Bloomsbury: The Heart of Literary London: Brian Hicks
London’s Villages
Highgate Village: John Mahoney
Old Hampstead Village: David Tucker
Old Kensington Village: David Tucker
Old Chelsea Village: Brian Hicks
Old Soho and its Pubs: Ed Glinert
Mystery and Secrets: Hidden London
Secrets of the City: Hilary Ratcliffe
Secret Westminster: David Tucker
The Royal City
The Old Palace Quarter: Angela Down
A Right Royal Route: Richard Roques
South of the River
Historic Greenwich: Nick Day
Lambeth – Somewhere Else London: Adam Scott
Early and Medieval London
The Origins of London: Kevin Flude
Life in the Medieval City: Sue Jackson
Of Law and Newspapers
London Legal: Tom Hooper
Fleet Street: Adam Scott
Sinister London
Jack the Ripper: Donald Rumbelow
Haunted London: Shaughan Seymour
Dickens’s London
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: Jean Haynes
Author Biographies
Index
Copyright
About the Book
On the surface a buzzing twenty-first century metropolis, London is a city
bursting with history, heritage and culture. Look beyond the black cabs and blue
plaques, and the myriad irresistible and surprising stories that have shaped
London suddenly come to life.
London Walks is the award-winning original walking tour company. Written by
the expert and knowledgeable guides who lead the walks, London Walks,
London Stories is the perfect way to discover the city’s rich history and hidden
gems.
Explore London’s literary life, from Shakespeare to Dickens. Tread cautiously
through dark alleyways to Jack the Ripper’s haunts, and uncover London’s more
sinister secrets. Enjoy a pint in a Soho pub, and prop up the bar with Dylan
Thomas or Karl Marx. Take a trip down London’s historic Thames – from
Westminster to Greenwich, the home of time itself.
London Walks, London Stories offers a fascinating glimpse of the capital’s rich
history – for those who love London, by those who know it best.

For Mary (Poppins):
‘Practically perfect’, she made it home …
FOREWORD
By Rick Steves, author of Europe Through the Back Door and thirty other
European travel guidebooks
The best way to see a city is not just on foot … but on foot with a good
guide. A local person who lives in a great city can shine a light on its soul.
Where I come from, you can wander lanes and parks, and gaze at balconies and
street signs, and there’s little to say. But in a city like London, movers and
shakers of Western Civilisation walked the cobbles, sipped beer in snugs, and
shaped our past.
London lends itself to walks as well as any city in Europe. It’s a city of
towns and villages which grew together while maintaining their personality
quirks. It’s a city still roamed by the spirits of Romans and the proud Celts they
put down. It’s a city that inspired literary greats. It’s a city that stood up to a
battering in the darkness of the Second World War and refused to break. And,
it’s a city that confounds tourists without a guide.
For twenty years, as a visiting and curious and sometimes overwhelmed
traveller, I have enjoyed David Tucker and his band of London guides. Each has
a passion that carbonates the slice of London they share. And they have helped
me appreciate the many facets of their city.
Now, with this collection of essays, these guides take their gift to travellers
and amplify it so that we can all, wherever we are, sit back and enjoy a little
slice of one of our world’s great cities.
INTRODUCTION
DAVID TUCKER
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!
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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