London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good morning to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Saturday, November 8th, 2025.
And here you go, here’s your daily London fix.
Anniversary time, this one. Back, back, back we go. Way back. Back to November 8th, 1674. A Sunday as it happens.
London – damp, rebuilding, restless – still bears the scars of the Great Fire.
And in a modest house in Bunhill, a man lies dying.
Blind, frail, but his imagination still blazing.
John Milton.
London’s own poet of Heaven and Hell.
He’d begun life in Bread Street, just off Cheapside, in 1608 – a city boy through and through.
His father, a scrivener: comfortable, musical, ambitious for his son.
And young John – studious, stubborn, dazzlingly bright – repaid that ambition in spades.
At St Paul’s School, then Cambridge, he read like a man possessed.
Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, philosophy, music.
He studied late into the night till his eyes ached and failed – literally read himself blind.
At Cambridge, John Milton’s nickname was “The Lady of Christ’s.”
It was a teasing reference to his strikingly delicate looks and long, flowing auburn hair – and to the fact that he studied at Christ’s College.
He was handsome, graceful, a bit aloof, fastidious – and his fellow students, being hearty seventeenth-century lads, couldn’t resist the jibe.
But there’s something deliciously ironic about it.
The “Lady of Christ’s” would go on to become one of the most thunderous male voices in English literature – the poet of rebellion, fire, and the fall of angels.
Milton himself was quite aware of the nickname; he mentions that his looks “caused me to be nicknamed the Lady of Christ’s.”
It tells you volumes about him – sensitive, proud, a touch vain, already aware that he was different from the crowd.
He always believed he was destined for greatness.
Said he was “late to begin but early to aspire.”
You can picture him – pale-faced, intense, already convinced that God had spared him for something “the world would not willingly let die.”
His life was lived in the roar of history.
The Civil War. The fall of a king. The execution of Charles I.
The brief, austere dawn of the Commonwealth.
And through it all, Milton was no bystander.
He was Oliver Cromwell’s Latin secretary – the Republic’s voice to the crowned heads of Europe.
He wrote with volcanic energy: pamphlets, tracts, fierce defences of freedom.
His Areopagitica still thunders today: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience.”
Then came the darkness.
His sight went. Slowly, cruelly, the visible world faded.
But his inner one expanded.
“My mind,” he said, “is my own kingdom.”
By then he was living in Petty France, Westminster – where Birdcage Walk runs today, a few steps from St James’s Park.
Imagine him there, pacing his chamber in total darkness, the bells of the Abbey faint through the night air.
Inspiration would strike and he’d call to his daughters: “Milk me! Milk me!” – meaning: quick, take it down before the words vanish.
Half-asleep, they’d grope for pen and paper while their father dictated whole passages of Paradise Lost from memory.
Picture the scene: one candle burning, the scrape of a quill, the blind man’s voice steady and sonorous.
“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
That’s London speaking – the rhythm of its streets, the grandeur of its defiance.
And he was London through and through.
Born inside the City walls.
Educated under the dome of St Paul’s.
Working later in the power-haunted lanes of Westminster.
His footsteps mark the map – Bread Street, Aldersgate, Petty France, Bunhill. (Aside here. Wonderful London name, Bunhill. Evocative London name. It means Bone Hill. Bunhill is a corruption of Bone Hill.)
Oh and let’s not forget St Margaret’s, Westminster – the parish church of the House of Commons.
Milton knew it well. And you know something, he’s still there. In its glass today you can come face to face with him.
The great Milton Window, unveiled in 1888, shows him blind but serene, his daughters beside him, writing down his words in shafts of crimson and gold light.
Poetic justice made literal: the Puritan rebel who once defied kings now shining above the very heart of royal Westminster.
But before that peace came peril.
When Charles II returned in 1660, the Republic collapsed – and Milton, the Commonwealth’s pen, became a hunted man.
His writings were condemned to be burned by the hangman.
He went to ground in Bartholomew Close, near St Bartholomew-the-Great, hiding among the ancient stones.
Some wanted him tracked down, tried, hanged for treason.
He was arrested eventually, imprisoned for a short while.
Then came the turn of fate.
Friends pleaded for him – the great poet Andrew Marvell among them – and the Act of Indemnity spared his life.
Later gossip embroidered it into a better story: that when a list of regicides was placed before the king, Charles II paused and said, “There is something in my right hand that will not let me sign a sentence of death.”
Another version whispers that he simply said, “He’s but a blind old man – let him be.”
No record survives, but the legend fits: Milton, too dangerous to forget, too great to kill.
He went back to his writing – Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and the late sonnets that shimmer with private grief.
One of them, Sonnet XXIII, written after his second wife Katherine’s death, is among the most moving poems in English.
“Her face was veiled; yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear as in no face with more delight.
But oh, as to embrace me she inclined,
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.”
That last line – day brought back my night – could serve as his epitaph.
There’s something fitting about Milton dying in London at this time of year – November 8th.
The light dying too.
The afternoons already dusk by tea-time.
The air damp, the pavements shining.
It’s raining softly now, as if the heavens themselves are weeping.
The blind poet going into his final darkness – though perhaps he wouldn’t have seen it as darkness at all, but as the eternal light of the glory of God.
So Milton – the poet who spent his life wrestling with theology, scripture, and the divine – slipped away on the Sabbath.
Rather fitting, really: the old Puritan at rest on the Lord’s Day.
He was sixty-five.
They buried him at St Giles, Cripplegate – one of the few churches the Great Fire spared.
You can still stand by his grave today, within sight of the City that shaped him.
From Bread Street to Cripplegate: a London circle complete.
And yet Westminster holds him too.
There’s his monument in Poets’ Corner, among Chaucer, Spenser, Wordsworth, Tennyson – and his radiant likeness in that St Margaret’s window.
The City boy among the immortals.
Why remember him?
Because he made English mighty.
He showed what language could do – how it could wrestle with angels, argue with kings, illuminate darkness.
He took the turbulence of his century and turned it into thunder.
So next time you’re in Westminster, stroll down Petty France.
Picture him there – the blind poet pacing, dictating eternity to his weary daughters.
Then cross to St Margaret’s and look up at the Milton Window: the Londoner, the visionary, shining through the glass.
And listen – you might just catch it still, the deep organ-roll of his verse, echoing over the city that was both his Paradise and his Fall.
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com.
Home of London Walks, London’s signature walking tour company.
London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size walking tour company.
And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything.
It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £25 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science: you get what you pay for.
And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question: Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world?
You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world you do whatever you have to do to attract and keep the best guides in London – you want them guiding for you, not for somebody else.
Bears repeating: the way we’re structured – a guides’ cooperative – is the key to the whole thing.
It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason people who know go with London Walks, it’s the reason we’ve got a big following, a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished, in many cases distinguished professionals:
By way of example, Stewart Purvis, the former Editor (and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And Lisa Honan, who had a distinguished career as a diplomat (Lisa was the Governor of St Helena, the island where Napoleon breathed his last and, some say, had his penis amputated – Napoleon didn’t feel a thing – if thing’s the mot juste – he was dead.)
Stewart and Lisa – both of them CBEs – are just a couple of our headline acts.
Or take our Jack the Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian, Donald is, in the words of The Jack the Ripper A to Z, “internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” Donald’s emeritus now but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains up and mentors our Ripper Walk guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks Aristocracy of Talent – its All-Star Team of Guides – includes a former London Mayor. It includes the former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. It includes the Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. And the former chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, a former London Museum archaeologist, historians, university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actors, a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners (people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award)… well, you get the idea.
As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament, every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note… come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.