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 Saturday, December 20th, 2025.
And here it is, your daily London fix.
Well, that’s the refrain. I say it every day. But it’s a lot of stretch to say this one’s a London fix. We’re going way off piste on this day of days. And truth be told, it’s not London and it’s not yours. Not your fix. It’s more mine.
And above all it’s more for – it belongs to – a little girl who’s about a quarter of a way around the world. Near enough to 6,000 miles from London. In Changmai, in Thailand, to be exact.
It’s for – it belongs to – that little girl. And her parents. One of whom is James, my youngest son.
So, yes, this one’s unashamedly personal. Because that little girl is our first grandchild.
And she’s on her way. So this Saturday, December 20th –
or, yes, it could be Sunday, December 21st –
it’ll depend on how long the labour is – this Saturday (or maybe Sunday) is that baby girl’s day. That’s where my head and heart is right now. And in consequence that’s why this podcast is what it is. Mary came up to my study an hour ago and said “the waters have broke, she’s on her way.” My immediate reaction: ok, it’s Saturday, December 20th. Her birthday. Her day. I’m going to do a piece about her day. Something she can listen to somewhere up the road a piece. A few years from now.
Do a piece about Saturday.
Second thought was – and I like complications like this, they’re right up my street – second thought was Saturday’s the Jewish Sabbath. Sabbath in Hebrew means to rest, to stop working. It’s the day God rested. God blessed the day. And declared it holy. So that’s of all right. But of course my thought was, ‘day of rest, yeah, but right now Judy – the baby’s mum – for sure isn’t resting. She’s labouring away.
And I thought, ok, I’m going to do a bit of labouring as well. Going to find out about Saturday. Why is it called Saturday? What makes it Saturday? What is it about Saturday? What sets it apart? What’s distinctive about it? Get some answers to those questions and whip the whole thing up into a confection. Into this day’s podcast. So here you go, here’s a podcast about this day of the week, this blessed day, this holy day.
Here’s the googly – Saturday’s the old god at the end of the week.
It sits there at the edge of the week like an old man on a park bench. Everyone else is rushing past, briefcases flapping, alarms screaming, emails multiplying like bacteria. Saturday just raises an eyebrow and says, calmly, you’ll get here eventually.
It – Saturday – is the strangest day of the week. And the most revealing.
Every other day is named for something brisk, bright, or bossy. The Sun. The Moon. War gods. Thunder gods. Love goddesses. Saturday alone belongs to Saturn, the slowest, oldest, most brooding character in the planetary line-up. Saturn – Saturday – has got zero interest in your productivity hacks or your inbox. He deals in time. Long time. The kind that makes emperors nervous.
Saturn is the god of ageing, harvests, cycles, limits. He’s the one who reminds you that everything ripens, everything rots, and everything eventually stops. Which makes him a curious patron saint for the day most people use to sleep until noon and eat crisps in bed.
But that mismatch is exactly the point.
Saturday was always different. In the ancient planetary system, it sat at the top, or the edge, depending on how you drew your cosmos. Saturn was the outermost visible planet, crawling slowly against the stars, taking nearly thirty years to complete a lap. Slow meant distant. Distant meant powerful. Powerful meant terrifying.
You did not rush Saturn.
And then there’s the Jewish Sabbath, already sitting there, immovable, immemorial, a day that says no. No work. No making. No pushing. Just being.
Bit rich, that, isn’t it. At least in the case of our daughter-in-law, who right now is doing some serious work, some serious making, some serious pushing.
Anyway, let’s see if we can get this day of the week properly birthed.
Here’s the skinny. When the Romans grafted their planetary week onto the existing religious rhythms of the Mediterranean world, Saturday got anchored to something older and stronger than empire.
You can rename festivals. You can repaint temples. You do not easily move a sacred day that tells people to stop.
So Saturday became a curious hybrid. Saturn’s day, yes, but also the Sabbath’s shadow. Pagan time-god meets biblical rest day. An old Roman deity sharing the sofa with a Jewish commandment, both silently judging you for checking your emails.
Christianity never quite knew what to do with Saturday. Sunday it could handle. Sunday could be rebadged, polished, dressed up as the Lord’s Day. Saturday was trickier. Too Jewish to erase. Too pagan to baptise. So it was left slightly awkward, slightly unclaimed.
Which is why it feels the way it does.
Truth be told, Saturday is not holy, exactly. (Unless you’re Jewish.) But it’s not ordinary either. It exists outside the usual moral economy of the week. On Saturday, the rules wobble. Breakfast becomes brunch. Clothes become optional. Time loses its sharp edges.
You can feel Saturn at work here. Saturn’s the god who blurs beginnings and endings. He eats his own children, after all. Linear progress is not really his thing.
Think about how Saturday behaves. It doesn’t point forward like Friday, fizzing with anticipation. It doesn’t glare at you like Monday, demanding obedience. Saturday loops. It stretches. It expands. Hours slip sideways. You look at the clock and it’s committed some sort of fraud.
Morning arrives, but without urgency. Afternoon drifts in like a cat. Evening looms sooner than expected, slightly smug.
This is Saturn’s gift. Time without sharp purpose.
The Romans associated Saturn with a golden age, a mythic period before labour, before hierarchy, before the grind. Once a year they celebrated Saturnalia, when roles reversed, masters served slaves, gambling was allowed, and order loosened its tie.
Sound familiar?
Saturday is Saturnalia’s descendant. A weekly, watered-down echo, but the same impulse. We dress down. We bend rules. We allow a little chaos. We permit ourselves to be inefficient.
Which is why modern life finds Saturday so hard to colonise.
Capitalism has had a go, obviously. There are shopping Saturdays, productivity Saturdays, self-improvement Saturdays. Entire industries exist to monetise your supposed free time. But notice how defensive people get about it.
“Don’t book me Saturday morning.”
“I’m not doing errands on Saturday.”
“I need at least one day.”
That instinct is ancient. It’s Saturn whispering that time is not only for use.
And then there’s this.
Saturday is also the only day that regularly disappoints. The Saturday you planned never quite arrives. You meant to read, to walk, to rest, to think. Instead you reorganised a drawer and fell asleep on the sofa.
Again, Saturn. The god of limits. The reminder that human plans are optimistic sketches, not binding contracts.
And yet, when Saturday works, it really works.
A long lunch that drifts into dusk. A market wander with no shopping list. A museum entered without urgency. A city heard rather than conquered. These are Saturnine pleasures. Slow pleasures. Mature pleasures. Not the fireworks of Friday night, but something deeper and steadier.
Sunday may claim moral authority. Friday gets the glamour. But Saturday gets the truth.
It tells you who you are when nobody is watching the clock.
Which is why Saturday sits where it does, at the edge of the week, guarding the boundary. After it comes Sunday,
reflection, reset,
the quiet intake of breath before the plunge.
Before it comes Friday,
noise and velocity.
Saturday’s the hinge.
So next time you wake on a Saturday and feel slightly unmoored,
slightly out of step,
don’t panic.
You’re exactly where you should be.
You’re inside the domain of an old god who doesn’t hurry, doesn’t optimise,
and does not apologise.
Saturn’s not here to make you efficient.
He’s here to remind you that time, like all good things, is meant to be lived in, not just spent.
Happy birthday, Josephine. From your American (and British) grandfather.
And now, beside myself with excitement, I’m going to cast a bit of bread on the waters. Repeat the remark that I’ve sometimes shared with the occasional walker these last few weeks. It’s this: This little girl is going to grow up speaking four languages: Chinese, English, Thai and Breakdancing.
Huh, breakdancing, you say. Yeah, well, it’s proud grandfather’s silly joke. Our son, who’s about to be a dad, is a world-class breakdancer. Kid can spin on his head 32 times without his hands touching the floor once. Yeah I know, go figure. Make of it what you will that’s a dad who can keep a toddler amused.
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.