London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good evening to you London Walkers.
Wherever you are.
It’s Monday, January 5th, 2026.
And here it is, here’s your daily London fix.
Back we go. Back, back, way back. Back to 1066. Back 960 years. That’s 11,520 months.
Let’s get back there the hard way. A calendar with 11,520 pages. One page per month. We start at 12 noon sharp.
Get stuck in.
January 2026. This month. Rip.
And we’re away. December 2025. Rip. November 2025. Rip. October 2025. Rip. Peel those months off the calendar and drop ‘em.
Time doesn’t flow. It retreats. Each tear peels off a layer of history. Elections vanish. Wars un-happen. Empires loosen their grip.
We keep going. No pauses. No sentimentality. At this rate it’s going to take 6 hours and 24 minutes to get back to January 1066. All afternoon and then some.
By the time the sun sets shortly after 4 we’ve been tearing months off the calendar non-stop for four hours and seven minutes. That’s 7,410 months gone. Some 617 years. We’ve worked our way back to 1408. Henry IV is king. Chaucer has only recently died. Agincourt is still to come. Westminster Abbey already feels old. But we’re only 2/3 of the way there.
But the sun has set, the light’s gone. Have to pause for a moment to switch a lamp on, or light a candle. Otherwise we’d be tearing our way through time in the dark. Ah, there, that’s better. We can see what we’re doing. So back to it we go. Rip. Rip. Rip. The pile of months grows. By mid-afternoon we’re ankle deep in calendar months. Calf-deep by dusk. How deep is that pile of months by the time we get where we’re going? Knee-high? No. Waist-high? Almost. Nine hundred and sixty years – that’s nothing is it. It’s just so many words. Seven syllables readily tossed off. Airy. Easily dismissed. You think so?
Nine hundred and sixty years isn’t something you touch.
A metre-high pile of torn time is something you wade through with difficulty. And if paper doesn’t quite do it for you, try another reckoning.
Imagine each of those 11,520 months as a poker chip.
11,520 months as poker chips is a bet so high it’s physically unstable. Steady as she goes because it’s wobbling, threatening to topple over. That’s not a flutter.
That’s pushing history stacked high into the middle of the table. More history than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio. It’s a stack doesn’t sit politely on the green baize. It keeps going. A stack of poker chips that’s 38 metres high. About twelve storeys. Roughly Nelson’s Column without Nelson on top.
That’s what it takes to get back to January 1066.
But we’re there now. Westminster is hushed. Candlelit. Heavy with incense and unspoken anxiety. A king is dying.
Edward the Confessor.
Outside, England carries on with its winter business, entirely unaware that it is about to be flung into the most famous year in its history.
Edward’s death is one of those moments that feels quiet at the time and thunderous in retrospect. No battle. No bloodshed. Just an old king slipping away in his bed. And yet that moment sets in train the Norman Conquest, the Battle of Hastings, a new ruling class, a new language of power, and a country permanently changed.
So who was Edward the Confessor? And how English was he, really?
He was born around 1003 into instability. His father was Æthelred the Unready, a king whose nickname really means “poorly advised”, and whose reign was a long exercise in bad luck and worse decisions. His mother was Emma of Normandy. That detail will turn out to be decisive.
Edward’s childhood was shaped by invasion and exile. Vikings battered England again and again.
When the Danish kings Sweyn Forkbeard and then Cnut seized the throne, Edward was sent across the Channel for safety. Normandy became his home. A French-speaking court. Norman customs. Norman assumptions about how power worked.
He stayed there for more than twenty years.
By the time he returned to England in 1041, Edward was a grown man who felt, in many ways, like a foreigner in his own land. He was English by birth, Norman by upbringing. He spoke English, certainly, but French probably came more easily. He dressed Norman. He trusted Normans. His instincts were continental.
And then, in 1042, England made him king.
Why? Because he looked like continuity. He was the last adult male of the old royal house of Wessex, the line that went back to Alfred the Great. And because England was tired. After decades of turmoil, Edward seemed calm, godly, unthreatening. A man who promised peace.
In that sense, he delivered. Edward ruled for twenty-four years. England was prosperous. Trade flourished. Coinage was reliable. There were no great foreign wars. It was a reign of relative stability.
But Edward was not a forceful ruler. He was devout, introspective, prayerful. He attended church obsessively. He lavished gifts on religious houses. He cultivated a reputation for holiness that would later harden into sainthood. This is why he became “the Confessor”, a holy king rather than a conquering one.
While Edward prayed, others governed.
Chief among them was Godwin, Earl of Wessex, and later Godwin’s sons, especially Harold Godwinson. These were big, pragmatic, deeply English men who understood power as something you exercised physically and politically, not spiritually. They ran the kingdom day to day while Edward contemplated eternity.
Edward’s marriage tells its own story. In 1045 he married Edith, Godwin’s daughter. They never produced an heir. Chroniclers whisper about vows of chastity or emotional distance. Whatever the reason, the result was catastrophic.
No son. No clear successor.
Edward made matters worse by surrounding himself with Normans. Norman bishops. Norman advisers. Norman favourites. To English nobles it felt like a creeping takeover. In 1051 it erupted. Godwin was briefly exiled, Norman influence peaked, then Godwin returned backed by force and the Normans fled. Edward was humiliated and never truly forgave it.
And yet Edward’s most enduring legacy was not political but architectural. He chose Westminster, then a marshy edge-of-town site beside the Thames, and rebuilt its abbey on a grand continental scale. Stone, not wood. Romanesque arches. A statement that England belonged to Europe as much as to itself.
By the winter of 1065 Edward was dying. He was living at Westminster, in the royal palace beside the river, the Thames sliding past outside, woodsmoke and damp rising from the marshes. Just yards away, masons were finishing the abbey that would define his memory.
On December 28th, 1065, the new abbey was consecrated. Edward was too ill to attend. He lay in his chamber listening to the bells, fully aware of what they meant. This was his final act.
A week later, on January 5th, 1066, Edward the Confessor died there at Westminster. No battlefield. No drama. He was buried the next day in the abbey beside him. And with him died England’s certainty.
Edward left behind a kingdom without an agreed future. According to English sources, he entrusted the throne on his deathbed to Harold Godwinson. Harold was present. Harold was powerful. Harold was English. The Witan accepted him and crowned him king almost immediately.
Across the Channel, William, Duke of Normandy, told a different story. He claimed Edward had promised him the throne years earlier. In Norway, Harald Hardrada fancied his chances too. Three claimants. One crown.
Edward’s quiet death detonated Europe’s biggest succession crisis.
Within nine months England would face two invasions. Harold would defeat the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge, then rush south and die beneath Norman arrows at Hastings. William would win, and England would be transformed.
Edward, meanwhile, became a symbol.
His emblem says everything about how he was remembered. A cross surrounded by five martlets, small swift-like birds. Medieval people believed martlets had no legs and no feet. A bird that cannot land has to keep flying. Forever moving. Forever striving.
The belief was wrong in detail but right in spirit. Swifts and martins really do live almost permanently on the wing. They sleep in the air. They feed in the air. They even mate in the air. For all practical purposes, they fly for life.
Which makes them a perfect emblem for Edward. A king imagined as never quite touching the ground. Never fully engaged in the muddy mechanics of rule. Always aspiring. Always questing. Five restless birds circling a fixed point. Motion orbiting faith.
The Normans embraced this image enthusiastically. Edward the saint. Edward the holy king. Edward the rightful predecessor of William. His shrine at Westminster became a place of pilgrimage. English kings knelt there. The violence of conquest was softened by the illusion of continuity.
So how English was Edward the Confessor?
By blood, half English, half Norman. By upbringing, largely Norman. By temperament, more monk than warrior. And by legacy, profoundly English, if only because his death marks the end of England’s old world.
Edward stands on the threshold. One foot in Anglo-Saxon England, the other already planted in Norman Europe. A quiet, prayerful man at a thunderous crossroads.
January 5th, 1066. A king dies at Westminster beside the Thames. The bells toll. The candles gutter. And above the abbey, in the imagination at least, the martlets keep flying.
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.