Welcome to this special edition of Senses of Direction where, today, we’re sharing stories about one city in particular: London. We’ve dropped a pin on the UK’s capital to celebrate the launch on Wednesday of our first ever Kickstarter project.
The focus of our project is a new set of features for the growing number of curious locals that take VoiceMap tours regularly – sometimes every weekend. We’re going to give this community early access to new tours, as well as a say in what we publish next.
We’re starting with the UK because we already cover 82 destinations there and we see an opportunity to offer something truly comprehensive, with a pipeline of new walks, drives, museum tours, and train trips.
In London itself, our count of tours has more than tripled since 2019 and today’s edition of Senses celebrates the “city of villages”. There’s the award-winning author Zadie Smith talking about her neighbourhood, a collection of iconic photographs, musings on what it means to be a Londoner, and three locations from VoiceMap’s latest tours there, pointing out the city’s foundation stone, a poetic guide to Covent Garden’s prostitutes, and a flat shared by Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles.
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For your sense of place | Zadie Smith’s NW
Zadie Smith’s fourth novel, NW, was the second book the award-winning writer set in North West London. Smith grew up a couple of miles from Kilburn, where NW’s four main characters’ lives play out after they’ve left their childhood council estate.
“Nothing happens in these books,” she announces with a smile, in an interview soon after the book came out. And, in a way, she’s not wrong. It’s her sense of place that lights up each page. That, and a cast of unconventional and often unlikeable characters who play music on hi-fis and hang out near Camden Lock.
Smith grew up in what was effectively a village. “What would happen is you’d build a tube stop, and then the village would follow it.” Neighbourhoods like her own Willesden sprouted around newly-built stations, as London’s underground transport network was expanded in the late 1800s.
“If you don’t look properly [the North West] just seems to you like a grubby bit of 21st century London – but if you look up the buildings are from the 1890s and onwards. The train stations are from the 20s and 30s, the churches are sometimes medieval… There are these layers of English life there – despite all our attempts to tear it down and reconstruct it. It’s my only chance of knowing somewhere fully, and I think that’s true of writers, particularly English writers: that they are obsessively local.”
? Watch Smith’s wide-ranging interview at the 2013 Louisiana Literature Festival, and listen to this podcast in which she looks back at her debut novel White Teeth 25 years after its release. Here’s a delightful fan-created video featuring interview excerpts interspersed with scenes from around North West London – with lines from NW. (Start at 00:40.) NW is available on Amazon (US or UK).
For your sense of the iconic | London in 10 iconic images
Few cities defy classification in the way that London does. But this collection of ten vivid images captures a series of diverse moments across history that, together, is greater than the sum of its parts.
Herbert Mason’s London Blitz, St Pauls, 1940 takes us back to the chilling era when the city did what it could to ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’. There’s the black, white and grey City of London, 1951, in which the photographer’s lens reflects “the elegance, the style, all present in front of always changing fog.”
The instantly recognisable picture of The Beatles on the zebra crossing outside Abbey Road Studios pops with colour. And, from the same decade, there’s a vibrant scene at “one of the most multicultural [carnivals] on the planet,” in “Londoners” Notting Hill Carnival.
Enjoy The Independent Photographer’s collection of London in 10 iconic images.
For your sense of belonging | You’re a Londoner
One of the first things I heard when I lived in London was how, in time, anyone who called the city home could also call themselves a Londoner. It’s not an uncomplicated idea. But still, it might be the most beautiful thought I’d ever heard echoed in London’s grey-brown streets – and one which I hope rings true for at least some of the many who aspire to a sense of belonging in the city.
Writer Guy Gunaratne dances gracefully with this slippery subject in You’re a Londoner, a life-affirming essay that’s written as if addressed to their daughter, “a third-generation child of an immigrant’s son.”
“It’ll be a while before you realise your grandparents are two of the most fascinating people you’ll ever likely meet. Your grandad rode nationalised rail when he first arrived. He stood amazed at the NHS back when it was properly funded, and the floors were still new. He used to smoke cigars, and his shoulders still shake when he laughs. Your grandmother, having arrived much later, can’t tell you about the Grunwick strikes, or the Bradford 12, or the Bhuttos. She can tell you about Ravi Shankar live in London, after the Concert for Bangladesh. She can tell you about raising two boys while working shifts at a supermarket in Willesden Green. She can tell you about making do with what little she had, and how so much of her life seems a miracle.”
? Read You’re a Londoner, which is accompanied by 24 intimate and arresting family photographs, here.
For your sense of history | The city’s stones, sins and backstories
It was tempting to peruse the whole library of 120 or so VoiceMaps available in London, to single out my favourite tracks. Instead, I browsed our three newest tours in the city and, happily, found stories from three different chapters in its history.
You can hear about the mysterious London Stone and the uncanny numerology that links it to the Great Pyramid in this tour of London’s “curious history”. In Spectacle, Sin and Uproar: A Hidden History of Covent Garden, you’ll find out how this was the most notorious red-light district in the metropolis, where a directory of the sex-workers in the area was published by a failing poet each year. Listen here.
Lastly, Paul French shares the backstory of one particular flat in Marylebone which has counted Ringo Starr, John Lennon and Yoko Ono as tenants – as well as Jimi Hendrix. It’s now “hallowed ground to Beatles fans”. Browse the whole tour, Marylebone’s Garden Squares: From Village Green to Georgian Grandeur, here.
Until next time, thanks for travelling with us!
Best Wishes,
Claire van den Heever
We’re building something new for the curious locals that use VoiceMap regularly, close to home. It’ll include early access to new tours and community features that let you choose what we publish next. When we launch it, it’ll be part of a subscription service, but if you back us on Kickstarter, you’ll get credits you can use immediately, to download any of our nearly 2,000 tours.