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exactly Richard Branson but we all have just one story and
this is mine.
I spent the first year finding my feet and guiding public
walking tours on my home patch of Greenwich where I’d
qualified as a local guide during the 1987 hurricane. Most
of the other guides on the rota were retired and guiding as
a hobby. I was 24 and needed to eat.
There were lots of free training classes back then for the
budding small business. I went on telephone skills courses,
marketing master classes and an unnerving and slightly
1920s Ludgate Circus
unpleasant sales course run by a viciously competitive
Gordon Gekko type. To keep the wolf from the door
I taught adult education local history classes and
conducted telephone hotel surveys. The breakthrough
came when Anthony Weaver, Director of Clerkenwell
Heritage Centre, suggested doing coach tours of the up
and coming London Docklands. Back then Clerkenwell
was unknown. Anthony reasoned that if visitors could be
attracted to the exciting new Docklands next door, they
might be encouraged to return and discover Clerkenwell.
It’s a marketing strategy widely used now but I think
Anthony was one of its earliest exponents.
Adverts were placed and I guided my first tour of
Docklands on 9 April 1989 for Plumpton Motor Coaches
from Sussex - the inspiration for Camberwick Green’s
Trumpton. It went rather well and one or two ladies asked
for my number saying that their church group and their WI
respectively would enjoy such a tour. And, as they say, like
Topsy, it grew. What other tours do you do? Have you got
a leaflet? Looking back now twenty five years later I think
I was enormously lucky. I was led by my life-long love
of London and its history and when it came to running a
business ignorance really was bliss because it just never
occured to me to be at all daunted.
As a free-range London child I had roamed London armed
only with a red bus rover and an emergency tuppence for
the phone box. The museums were free, unaccompanied
children were not frowned upon in the Abbey and best
of all my friend and I worked the tourists in the Wimpy
Bar on Villiers Street at Charing Cross. We’d order the
cheapest item on the menu between us (a toasted tea cake
or a bowl of Heinz soup) and wait for the Americans to
fall for our Little Cockney Sparrows double act and buy us
beef burgers as they were known in 1971. Happy days!
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