We met Maurice Negrello (he pronounces it Morris) on Friday night when he drove us in his taxi over to Cheyne Walk on the Embankment where we were meeting a friend for dinner. I’d asked him something about the neighborhood through which we were traveling and he gave me a very thorough and complete answer, adding as we moved along, pieces of information about what surrounded us. I told him he should give tours of the city to tourists like us. He said that he did. How much? The meter plus 25 pounds. That sounded good so we engaged him to pick us up at Brown’s Hotel on Saturday at 4. Which he did. The following is a photo record of our almost two-hour tour. The cost came to 75 pounds for the meter, 25 for Maurice, plus tip. Not everyone believes in tips. We do.

First things first. As we drove out of Albemarle Street, Maurice gave us a brief history of the founding of London, by the Romans, about 2000 years ago. It was called Londinium. It was a city of about 60,000 inhabitants. By the 4th or 5th century, the Roman Empire was in rapid decline and the Romans eventually left Londinium. Within a few years it was populated by the Anglo-Saxons who lived mainly around, but not in the Romans’ Londinium. It was another six centuries before England began to form as it is recognized today when William, Duke of Normandy, now as William the Conqueror killed the English king, Harold Godwinson in the Battle of Hastings and was recognized as king (hence the Conqueror title). Thus began the Medieval period.

The London we see today, however, began forming its architectural identity about the 16th century. It was then London became an important European commercial center. This was a period of mercantilism, of forming of monopoly trading companies like the British East India Company and the Russia Company, established by Royal Charter.  The British East India Company, for example ruled much of India, and the Tudors (Henry VII, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I) ruled England. Then in 1666, on a Sunday, second of September, at one o’clock in the morning, a fire broke out in a bakery. Nearly 60% of the city was destroyed in a matter of four days. Amazingly in a city of about a half million there were very few deaths, and only sixteen were recorded.

Our guide filled us with some of this information as he began driving us through the area immediate to the hotel (Brown’s), moving through a warren of streets, across Berkeley Square and out onto Park Lane. In the Roman times and following this path was the road that criminals were walked upon on their way to execution – which could include hanging and  draw-and-quartering. Little felonies, like stealing a piece of bread was good enough for such sentences. Because the execution was so torturous, and the walk from the jail to the scaffold was so long, the prisoner was allowed to stop along the way at three different taverns to get a drink so that by the time he arrived at his mortal destiny, he was pretty drunk, and therefore somewhat girded for the pain that lay ahead. This is, according to Maurice, the origination of the term “One for the road.”
 
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