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 Thursday, February 26th, 2026.
And here it is.
Here’s your daily London fix.
Hmmm. How shall we get this one underway? How about a little wager.
I’ll bet you a fat sleek glistening £1 coin you didn’t know this one.
Ok, curtain up.
Let’s begin with a small act of Georgian suspense.
Picture a respectable Londoner in buckled shoes and a wig of moderate ambition.
He has just been handed… a piece of paper.
Not gold. Not silver.
Not even a reassuring handful of coins with the proper clink to it. Paper.
And he is expected to believe it is money.
You can almost hear him muttering the 1797 equivalent of FFS.
And what do you call this?
Because on February 26th, 1797 the Bank of England did something quietly revolutionary. It issued the first £1 note.
The moment Britain was invited to trust its economy to what, in harsh light, looked suspiciously like a well-brought-up receipt.
And the reason was not convenience, or modernity, or some visionary fintech brainstorm.
(Fintech, by the way, is simply shorthand for financial technology.
In other words, money that has learned how to use a smartphone.)
No.
The real reason was panic.
High-grade, wartime,
keep-calm-and-carry-on panic.
What People Used Before the £1 Note
Up to this moment, everyday money in Britain was solid, reassuring, and heavy enough to pull your breeches southward.
Gold guineas.
Silver shillings.
Copper pennies.
If you were paying anything of consequence, you were counting out coins like a small portable avalanche.
Paper money did technically exist before 1797.
The Bank of England had been issuing notes since the 1690s.
But here’s the crucial thing.
They were big denomination notes.
£10. £20. £50. £100.
These were not for buying a chop or settling the tailor’s bill.
They were for merchants,
bankers, and the well-heeled.
And they were handwritten.
Each one.
Like a very expensive thank-you note.
The humble £1 note changed everything.
Why 1797 Changed the Game
The backdrop is properly dramatic.
Britain is at war
with Revolutionary France.
The country is nervous.
Watchful.
Slightly twitchy around the edges.
Then in early 1797
comes a genuine financial scare. People begin rushing to
the Bank of England
demanding gold
for their high-value banknotes. Classic bank run behaviour.
Entirely rational.
Financially terrifying.
Prime Minister
William Pitt the Younger steps in.
The government effectively tells the Bank
to stop paying out gold.
This becomes known as the Restriction Period.
From 1797 to 1821
the Bank of England will not convert its notes into gold on demand.
But that creates an immediate problem.
If people cannot easily get gold,
they need something to circulate in its place.
Enter the £1 note.
Ok, what Was a Pound Worth 230 years ago?
Now here is where the mind does a small somersault.
One pound in 1797
was serious money.
Proper money.
Roll-up-your-sleeves money.
A skilled worker might earn about a pound a week.
A labourer rather less.
In modern purchasing power
you are looking at something in the region of £80 to £100,
depending how you measure it.
But psychologically
it carried even more weight.
A pound was not loose change.
It was a meaningful sum.
So asking the public
to trust a flimsy scrap of paper representing a week’s wages
was, shall we say,
a bold social experiment.
And what, you ask, did the First £1 Notes Looked Like
If you’re imagining something
sleek and colourful,
gently adjust expectations.
The first £1 notes
were gloriously plain.
Almost aggressively so.
They were:
Yes, handwritten.
Each note
bore the cashier’s signature
filled in by hand.
Mass production, Georgian style.
They looked less like modern money and more like an unusually formal laundry receipt.
Not, at first glance,
the sort of thing that screamed unforgeable.
And you can bet,
the British public,
being the British public,
did not immediately fall upon paper money with cries of delight.
There was scepticism.
Wariness.
A certain tight-lipped
Georgian doubt.
Many people preferred coin.
Hard coin.
Coin you could bite
if the mood took you.
But necessity is a persuasive tutor. Gold was scarce in everyday circulation.
The government was backing the Bank.
And gradually, grudgingly,
the notes began to circulate.
By the end of 1797
the Bank of England had issued roughly two million £1 notes.
Two million small acts of faith.
Ok, was there ounterfeiting?
Oh Yes
Where there is paper money,
there are forgers
reaching for their quills.
And the early notes were,
frankly, tempting targets.
They were relatively simple.
Mostly text.
Not yet protected by the
elaborate
anti-counterfeiting wizardry
we see today.
Forgery became a serious problem. And a hanging offence, incidentally. Georgian Britain did not mess about when it came to the currency.
There were trials.
Executions.
Grim little morality plays
in which the state
made it abundantly clear that improving the nation’s banknotes at home was a very poor career move.
Over time the Bank responded by making the notes more complex
and harder to copy.
But in the early years
it was very much an arms race between printer and forger.
And the Second Note?
The £1 note was quickly followed by another practical innovation.
In 1797 the Bank also introduced the £2 note.
Not because anyone had been clamouring for it
in quite those terms,
but because the shortage of coin meant the economy needed
a useful range of
smaller paper denominations
to keep commerce moving.
Paper was stepping in
where metal had stepped back.
And Britain was learning,
slightly nervously, to live with it.
And while we’re at it, let’s have a modern touch.
The Curious Matter of Note Sizes
Fast-forward to modern Britain and you will notice something quietly distinctive.
Our banknotes are different sizes. The higher the denomination,
the larger the note.
This is not decorative whimsy.
It’s practical design.
And it reflects centuries of careful monetary evolution that began,
in everyday life,
with moments like February 1797.
Once you start issuing notes in serious volume,
recognition matters. Trust matters. Design matters.
Money, after all,
is theatre backed by law.
The Quiet Revolution
So the next time you pull a crisp note from your wallet,
spare a thought for that February day in 1797.
For Pitt the Younger,
keeping his nerve.
For Bank of England clerks
hunched over desks
signing notes one by one.
And for suspicious Georgians
turning a
flimsy rectangle of paper over
in their hands and thinking… really?
Because the modern cash economy begins not with a technological triumph
but with a moment of wartime nerves and institutional improvisation.
A small piece of paper.
A large act of trust.
And Britain,
very Britishly,
getting used to the idea
one cautious transaction at a time.
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 emeritus now, but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains and mentors our guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks aristocracy of talent includes a former London Mayor. The former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. The Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. The former Chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes a former Member of Parliament, three terms at Westminster. 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 palaeontologist.
It includes Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre actors. 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.
As that travel writer famously put it, if this were a golf tournament, every name on the leaderboard 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.
Good walking.
And good Londoning.
See you next time.