GUIDED TOUR OF LONDON
A guided tour? Of the city I live in? I’d usually be sceptical. I’ve never regarded a flock of smartphoneraising tourists with anything approaching envy. The places I’m most likely to see them – Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square, presumably M&M’s World – are also the worst places in London.
Yet Shaughan Seymour’s guided tour of “hidden London” was enlightening and entertaining. Seymour, for whom business is picking up again after months without American tourists, whisked eight of us through the ancient streets of the City, dispensing plummy-voiced anecdotes, songs and quips as he did so.
We begin on Fish Street Hill, which is just outside Monument Tube station. “This was the busiest street in the country for many years,” says Seymour. And presumably the smelliest.
This part of London used to be bursting with specialised markets, traces of which you can spot in the nursery rhyme that goes, “‘Oranges and lemons!’ say the bells of St Clement’s”.
It’s sad to think of all that variety, colour and bustle being replaced by Prets and glassy office buildings. History still lurks among the banality, though. Outside the church of St Magnus the Martyr is a 2,000-year chunk of timber from the Thameside wharf built by the Romans. This part of London, the patch of land at the northern end of London Bridge, is more dense with history than anywhere else in Britain. “Shakespeare, King Alfred and Chaucer all walked here,” says Seymour.
He shows us the London Stone, a 167lb limestone rock of mysterious origin but great historical repute. Housed behind a window on Cannon Street, the rock was first mentioned in official documents in 1100, was referred to by Shakespeare, and is said to have been brought to London by Brutus, thought in medieval times to be the first king of Britain. “So long as the stone of Brutus is safe,” went the saying, “so long shall London flourish.”
We see the homes of the livery companies, their coats of arms hinting at their trades, and we visit several other beautiful churches, a couple of them designed by Sir Christopher Wren in the great rebuilding that followed the Great Fire. “And the church of the patron saint of coffee: St Arbucks.”
We see Samuel Johnson’s house and hear some of his ruder wisecracks. A woman once told him, “Sir, you smell!”, to which the compiler of the first dictionary of English retorted, “On the contrary, madam. You smell; I stink.”
We pass the evermagnificent St Paul’s as well as the similarly august Daily Telegraph Building, which is an art deco office built in the 1920s that used to house this very newspaper. It’s been a fascinating tour, one that has turned the humdrum into the historic. And those who could benefit the most – those who could do with feeling enriched and excited by a city that can be ugly and atomising – are not the tourists, but the locals.