New York Times Article

The following is the text and picture that featured in a half-page article of the Sunday edition of the New York Times in February 1987:

A Cabby's Guide to London

From Buckingham Palace to Islington it's all familiar ground the "Blue Badge" experts

By STEVE LOHR

To Stanley Roth, London's streets and buildings are fragments in a vast historical mosaic of literature, culture, architecture, people and habits.

"Every street in this splendid city has it story to tell" says Mr. Roth gesturing from the driver's seat of a beige London taxicab. "The history lingers still - the way people dressed, looked and talked. It's all here alive, if you have the knowledge and the imagination.

Mr. Roth has both in abundance. A day spent under Mr. Roth's tutelage cruising some 80 miles around London is an intellectually invigorating and physically exhausting experience, such is the pace and scope of his fact-packed commentary, which, he insists is never the same twice.

He is a Government accredited guide who also happens to be a licensed cabdriver. There are about 500 active guides in London who have passed the rigorous training program that allows them to wear the Government's identifying blue badge, according to the London Visitor and Convention Bureau. The guide course is six months' worth of evening classes and Saturday field trips, committing to memory the details elaborations and oddments associated with London's museums, landmarks and byways that help bring history to life. Some university graduates who hold the blue badge say the course was more intellectually demanding than earning a degree.

Many of London's guides work for large tour operators, shepherding groups of tourists around London. But others hire themselves out to individuals, couples or small family groups.

These guides, available through booking agencies or operating as freelancers, can tailor tours to the individual. With a personal guide, you can cover more ground, literally and figuratively, than as a member of a group. You can skip familiar sites, ask as many questions as you like, avoid crowds and visit less explored sites.

To become a London cabdriver a candidate must finish what is known as "the knowledge", which typically consists of two years of full-tome, unpaid study spent memorizing the shortest routes to and from thousands of locations among the city's 6,000 streets.

Of London's 19,000 cabbies, about 60 are also Government-accredited guides like Mr. Roth. He is also a collector of antiquarian books, mostly about London, who often spends his days off scouring the back rooms of the city's many shops that sell used and rare books. "I'll buy a book if it contains one line I can use", he explains. "If it adds one line to my patter, it's paid its way."

 

The variety of his tours reflects the breadth of his London lore: the city's authors, artists, the city's socioeconomic development, countryside and ethnic areas. "I can give tours on just about anything the person in the back seat wants," he says.

Like a good teacher, the 50-year old Mr. Roth is intent on imparting his knowledge, and his entire enterprise is geared to that end. His cab, for instance, is one of the few in London that runs on gasoline, instead of the cheaper diesel fuel. The engine runs quieter on gasoline and his patter, as a result, is not drowned out.

Mr Roth, dressed in a gray suit and sporting a boutonnière, set a brisk pace on a recent Saturday. Lunch was 15 minutes for a sandwich at a coffee shop. "We stop briefly, so we can get more in," he said. "People pay me to show them London, not as a luncheon companion."

His commentary is partly a barrage of intriguing historical detail. Driving past a statue of Queen Anne, we're told that she had 19 pregnancies and that her coffin was 4 feet 8 inches square. Passing New Zealand House on Trafalgar Square, we learn that it was the former Carlton Hotel and that Ho Chi Minh worked there as a kitchen porter soon after the turn of the century.

Until a bit more than a century ago, when embankments were built to narrow the River Thames, the Strand, as its name suggests, was indeed the water's edge. It was also on the Strand in 1634 that a Captain Bailey got permission to hitch horse-drawn carriages to a maypole and offer rides to passers-by - the origin, says Mr. Roth, of London's taxi trade.

Cruising past Buckingham Palace, Mr. Roth points out, "Two sentries in and no flag means that the Queen is away." Driving by some of London's guildhalls, he notes that trade guilds, such as those for fishmongers and goldsmiths, were first set up in the 12th century to maintain quality standards and to limit the number of people practicing a trade, thereby propping up the wages of its practitioners. The guilds gave the language the word "masterpiece", which the craftsmen who fashioned it hoped it would the last as an apprentice. If it was good he became a master; if inferior, it was smashed and the apprentice tried again.

In some areas of London, whole rows of windows on residential buildings are bricked up. The reason, according to our cabby-guide, is that in the early part of the 19th century the government levied a tax on windows to help pay for the Napoleonic wars.

A Roth tour abounds with literary references yet the drive includes more than the witty quotes and historical one-liners, memorable as some of these may be. Mr. Roth also stresses broader themes and more general descriptions of why certain parts of London were first settled and how they have changed over the years, both physically and culturally. Passing through Highbury, for instance, we're told that in the late 1800's it was billed as the "New Mayfair," intended as a place where the nouveau riche could move and be treated like the upper class, with servants attending. But after World War I that notion became a casualty of the gently social revolution in Britain, when people back from the war didn't want to be subservient to others anymore. So Highbury's elegant terrace houses were divided into apartments, as most remain today.

Islington, an area that became very fashionable in the 18th and 19th centuries for its good water, is dotted with open spaces, small squares and gardens, islands of greenery. In fact, Mr Roth notes, so is much of London, a city of 735 square miles, more than twice the area of New York City in which more than 10 percent is open space.

"This is London - spread out," he says. "We're different than Parisians and New Yorkers. Each Londoner wants his own place and plot.

Through the centuries, London has been the most open of European cities to immigrants of various kinds, from refugees fleeing religious persecution to others simply searching for a better life. This has brought diversity and vitality as well as tensions to London, transforming the thousands of urban villages that make up the city.

During World War II the East End was subjected to particularly heavy bombing and the destruction led to large-scale evacuations. One of the evacuees was Mr. Roth, then a 5-year-old, whose family was moved to housing outside Cambridge. "That's probably why I don't have a London accent," he noted.