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 Monday, August 18th, 2025.
Cue the London Calling Book Club Corner. It’s Delianne’s turn today. Delianne’s our royal watcher par excellence. So this one’s right down the pike. But let’s hear it from Delianne. “I’m about to start the new Andrew Lownie book ‘ENTITLED’ – great for Past the Palace!”
And from one remarkable woman to another. Today’s August 18th. August 18th is St Helena’s Day.
Another way of putting that, today is the Feast of St Helena.
This whole business of holy days and feast days and saints and what not…it makes for a pretty dense thicket. My personal Get Out of Jail Card with all that is the notion that every day is sacred. Jewish tradition, for example, has a saying that, “this is the day the Lord has made,” meaning all days belong to God. Similarly, in Celtic Christianity and Eastern Orthodox thought, creation itself is holy, so every dawn is charged with blessing.
But what about today’s dawn, August 18th? St Helena’s Day. She was the mother of Constantine and she’s revered for the pilgrimage she made to the Holy Land when she was about 70 years old. This was in the 4th century. That pilgrimage certainly bore fruit. She made quite a find, did our Helena. Tradition has it that she discovered the True Cross – the very wood of Christ’s crucifixion. Which is why she’s usually depicted holding a big wooden cross.
Let’s get specific. We think the year was 326 A.D. Helena gets to Jerusalem and starts asking questions. She gets the red carpet treatment because she’s an empress, remember. She’s like a grandmother-detective.
Local Christians take her around. Point out the traditional Christ story sites. They get to the site of a pagan temple to Venus. A pagan temple Emperor Hadrian had plonked down about two centuries earlier.
As far as the local Christians were concerned though, it was an interloper. It was covering up something hugely important: there it was, a temple to the Goddess of love, sex, desire, beauty, fertility squatting on the spot that was the holy of holies. The spot Christians venerated as the place of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus.
The Empress was horrified. Said we can’t have that. She said knock that thing down and get digging. So Hadrian’s Temple came down and excavations commenced. And what do they find: a rock-cut tomb (believed to be Christ’s) and nearby, three wooden crosses.
So that’s a pretty good start. Three crosses, three executions. Jesus and the two thieves. The good thief and the bad thief. But the problem was, which was which. Which was the true cross? Nothing for it but to run some tests. A sick woman is fetched. Or, according to another tradition, it was a dead man who was being carried to burial. Love it. The Empress interrupts a funeral procession. “We’re going to borrow that corpse for just a minute.”
The sick woman – or the corpse – take your pick – touches the first cross. Nothing. Touches the second cross. Nothing. But the third: well, big bang. The woman was healed. Or the corpse revived. Take your pick. In either case, they must have been well pleased. Especially the corpse.
Anyway, that was good enough for Helena. And for the bishop of Jerusalem, who was in attendance. The Empress said, ‘we wanted a sign, we got a sign. A dead man baling on his funeral, telling the mourners to carry on without him, he’s buggering off to the wine shop to do some serious partying, that is a big time sign – the forty foot high flashing neon variety – we’ve just discovered the true cross, ladies and gentlemen.
And it wasn’t just transformative for the corpse. It was also transformative for the church, for Christianity. For starters, Constantine ordered the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on that site. It’s still there today, in rebuilt form. And it was pilgrimage time for the true cross. Fragments of it were sent to Constantinople and Rome. Some of it, though, stayed there in Jerusalem. And just like that it was off to the races with the cult of relics. That practice, that syndrome mushroomed from there on out. Helena’s discovery put relics at the very heart of Christian devotion.
Anything else? Absolutely. Remember, the true cross was keeping company. There were three crosses, remember. The True cross and the crosses of the good and bad thieves. Manifestly another sign. That, namely, Helena was efficacious is discovering thieves. Contemporary connection. Shoplifting in this country is at an all-time high. There are roughly 55,000 thefts a day. Shopowners are saying it’s out of control and that they’re getting virtually no help from the police. You thinking what I’m thinking? Maybe UK shopowners should take the law into St Helena’s hands.
And you certainly have to take your hat off to her. Remember, she was an old woman when she went on her pilgrimage and made what’s arguably the most important find in Christian history. Is it any wonder she’s the patron saint of archaeologists? Arguably she herself is the primal archaeologist, the world’s first archaeologist. People invoke her who are searching for lost things. She’s sort of a saintly detective. For good measure, she’s the patron saint of the Holy Land. And of Emperors and converts. Her Constantine, remember, was a convert. And she’s the patron saint of divorced people and difficult marriages. That’s because Constantine’s father divorced her for political reasons and she bore it with dignity. Roll it all up into one package, what have you got? You’ve got Empress-Indiana-Jones-meets patron of the lost and lonely.
And there’s one more thing. The site – the holiest site in Christendom – after all, it’s where Jesus was crucified, buried and rose from the dead – the site is just outside the city wall of Jerusalem on a northwesterly bearing. Which explains why the London church, St Sepulchre’s, stands where it stands. It’s just outside Newgate, the northwestern gate in the London wall. So the old London church is on the same bearing and is the same distance – it’s a perfect London echo of the site of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. And another connection. Knowing that, it makes perfect sense that crusades to the Holy Land formed up and set out from St Sepulchre’s in London.
Well, that’s our main course today. It’s petit four time. And sure enough today’s petit four tray has some great London connections. This one was about Helena’s pilgrimage 1600 years ago. Turns out today, August 18th, is the anniversary of another pilgrimage. On August 18th, 1773 Dr Johnson and James Boswell set out from London on a pilgrimage of sorts: their seven-week tour of the Hebrides. And another petite four – bearing in mind St Helena and marriages – well, turns out that today, August 18, 1782 was the day William Blake married Catherine. No a perfect connection, though, because St Helena’s the patron saint of difficult marriages and Blake’s and Catherine’s was a happy marriage. Biblical through and through, though. As I said in that recent podcast, the two of them loved to go out in the back garden completely starkers and play at being Adam and Eve. Well, it’s London, isn’t it.
Ok, sign off coming up. This one didn’t turn out at all like I expected it to. I went into it thinking it was going to be a piece about London’s blue plaques. But I got sidetracked didn’t I. Fell amongst thieves, so to speak. The Blue Plaques piece went onto the back burner. It can wait, it’ll keep. Pretty good chance I’ll do it tomorrow.
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 £20 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 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.