London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Top of the morning to you London Walkers.
Wherever you are.
It’s Wednesday, January 7th, 2026.
And here it is, here’s your daily London fix.
Try this for an opening.
Earth, receive an honoured guest.
That’s W. H. Auden, writing about the death of the great Irish poet, W. B. Yeats.
But the line belongs here too.
Because on a cold January day in 1619, London did exactly that.
Earth received Nicholas Hilliard.
Four centuries on, you can still feel Hilliard’s influence every time you think you know Elizabeth I’s face.
He didn’t merely record the era.
He designed its look.
He taught a nation how to see its famous people.
In miniature.
Small portraits. Huge consequence.
And today, on the anniversary of his funeral, I like to imagine one last scene.
The churchyard at St Martin-in-the-Fields.
The coffin.
The winter light.
We don’t know the day Nicholas Hilliard died.
We do know the day he was buried.
January 7, 1619.
A few prayers are said.
A small group stands close together, partly for warmth.
And London, as it always does, moves on.
Now here’s the London poetry of it.
Today the National Portrait Gallery stands on part of what was that St Martin in the Fields churchyard, its burial ground.
A building devoted entirely to faces.
Famous faces. Powerful faces. Remembered faces.
And inside that building, right now, you can stand in front of Nicholas Hilliard’s work.
Actual Hilliards.
Miniatures he painted more than four hundred years ago.
Elizabeth I.
Sir Walter Ralegh.
Francis Bacon.
Tiny portraits.
Made to be held close.
Seen exactly as he intended.
Which means that on the very ground where Hilliard was laid to rest, you can now look into the eyes of the people he made immortal.
Nicholas Hilliard was born around 1547, in Exeter, into a goldsmith’s household.
That detail matters.
Goldsmiths think small.
They think precise.
They understand surface, polish, and value.
They know that the tiniest things can be priceless.
That way of thinking never left him.
As a boy, history intervened.
England was convulsed by religion.
And Hilliard’s family circle was firmly Protestant.
So young Nicholas ends up in exile.
In Geneva.
About ten years old.
A Devon boy in Calvin’s city.
English exiles.
French spoken all around him.
And continental art suddenly close at hand.
It’s an education no school could offer.
When he returns to England, he’s apprenticed into the goldsmith world of London.
Cheapside. Westcheap.
The City’s commercial heart.
Signs swinging above shops.
Metal being worked.
Jewels weighed and valued.
And somewhere in that world, Hilliard’s particular gift declares itself.
He can catch a face.
Not just what someone looks like.
But how they hold themselves.
The alertness.
The stillness.
The inner life.
He studies Holbein. He reveres him.
He watches the foreign artists working in London.
But gradually, he forms his own convictions.
Line matters most.
Truth of line.
Shadow, he believes, is often overused.
Miniatures are meant to be viewed close to the eye.
Held in the hand.
So clarity matters more than drama.
This is not art for walls.
This is art for intimacy.
Then comes the turning point.
Elizabeth I.
Hilliard paints the queen in the early 1570s and becomes, in effect, the face-maker of her reign.
Understand what that means.
This is before photography.
Before mass reproduction.
Before screens.
A miniature portrait is personal power.
It can be carried.
Shown.
Hidden.
Given as a gift charged with meaning.
Sometimes favour.
Sometimes loyalty.
Sometimes love.
Sometimes dangerous political alignment.
Hilliard understands that world instinctively.
And he brings the goldsmith’s eye to paint.
Pearls gleam.
Jewels flash.
Gold looks heavy and real.
He even tells you how he does it. Grinding metal leaf. Mixing it. Burnishing it with a tiny animal tooth until it catches the light just so.
These are not metaphors.
They are working instructions.
By the 1580s and 1590s, Hilliard is everywhere.
Courtiers. Favourites. Adventurers. Poets.
Some famous.
Some half-known.
Many frustratingly anonymous.
And yet, for all the prestige, the money never quite behaves.
This is a running theme in his life.
He complains that English artists are poorly rewarded compared to those abroad.
Promises are made. Grants offered “in reversion”.
Which usually means later. Or never.
He mortgages income.
He juggles debts.
He takes on work he’d rather refuse.
At one point he’s drawn into a scheme to mine gold in Scotland.
It collapses completely.
Money lost. Lesson learned.
Elizabeth dies in 1603.
A world ends.
Under James I, Hilliard keeps his position, but the atmosphere changes.
Queen Anne of Denmark favours Isaac Oliver, his former pupil and now serious rival.
Hilliard continues.
Painting. Designing medals.
Still skilled. Still respected.
But he is ageing.
Late in 1618, a small detail speaks volumes.
Francis Bacon’s accounts record money paid for “old Mr Hillyard”.
Old Mr Hillyard.
Not forgotten.
But no longer central.
And soon after, he is gone.
On January 7, 1619, Nicholas Hilliard is buried at St Martin-in-the-Fields.
W. H. Auden, writing about Yeats, said this:
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
Auden meant that art doesn’t die with the artist.
It changes shape inside those who come after.
That is exactly what has happened to Hilliard.
Four centuries on, you can still feel his influence every time you think you know Elizabeth I’s face.
He didn’t merely record the era.
He designed its look.
He taught a nation how to see its famous people.
In miniature.
Small portraits. Huge consequence.
So today, on this anniversary of his funeral, I like to imagine one last thing.
The churchyard at St Martin’s.
The coffin.
The winter light.
And somewhere, tucked inside a pocket or held discreetly in a gloved hand, one of those tiny ovals.
A face.
Perfectly alive.
Painted with such care that it feels like it’s still listening.
That’s Hilliard’s magic.
He made history portable.
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 a former Member of Parliament, three terms at Westminster, bringing first-hand experience of power, policy and political theatre to the very streets where it all played out.
It includes two barristers, three doctors, two geologists, a distinguished museum curator and a former Time out Editor.
It includes authors, historians, national journalists, a former London Museum archaeologist, and university professors (one of them an eminent Cambridge University paleontologist).
It includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre actors, and two professional photographers. And last but not least, the creme de la creme of top flight professionally qualified Blue Badge Guides, including 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 here’s the clincher. We’re playing at home.
London Walks is London-based. Period.
We’re not an impersonal, faceless platform run from halfway round the world. There’s no chatbot. No call-centre script. When you contact us, you reach a real person. A Londoner. Someone who actually knows the streets you’re about to walk.
That’s not a detail. That’s the difference.
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.