Walking into the British Empire

I tried to find out what went wrong in City during the financial crisis of 2008. I found things started going wrong quite a lot longer ago.

The clues as to where a lot of the wealth came from in the City are all over the place if you want to look.

I walked into the history of the British Empire. Literally.

Let me explain. I started doing tours around the City of London. The tours I were leading weren’t supposed to be about the Empire. But this was the story that shouted out at me from every street corner. The story that was written into the place names, even if it was omitted from any of the blue plaques.

This was a story that I found impossible to ignore.

Except it wasn’t a story that is just part of history, it was the present.

I understand this statement may not seem to make sense.

The Empire ended, armies packed up, walked away. Yes, much has changed. But don’t let that hide from you some of the things that have stayed the same.

They used to say the streets of London are paved with gold. It’s just no one seemed to be clear exactly where the gold, real or metaphorical, came from. The clues were there — our coins were called a Guinea named after the part of the world the gold came from. As Tony Warner points out on one of his Black History Walks the…