London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good morning to you, London Walkers.
Wherever you are.
It’s Friday, January 2nd, 2026.
And here it is. Here’s your daily London fix.
Twenty-four hours later and we’re still hanging with Samuel Pepys. It’s the merest bagatelle. An amuse-bouche. But it comes compliments of Sam.
In the way of these things I turned the page on his diary. Wanted to see what went into Round 2 of his diary. January 2nd, 1660. It begins: “In the morning, before I went forth, old East brought me a dozen bottles of sack and I gave him a shilling for his pains. Then I went to Mr Sheply, who was drawing of sack in the wine cellar to send to other places as a gift from my Lord, and told me that my Lord hath given him order to give me the dozen of bottles.”
And, yes, in places it’s a more data please entry. Who are these people? Who’s he talking about? Well, allow me to perform some introductions.
Basically this is a peek behind the curtain at some of the household of Admiral Montague. Sir Edward Montague, the Earl of
Sandwich. Pepys here calls him “my Lord.” Montague was a big hitter in Restoration London. He was a member of the Council of State, co-General at Sea and Commissioner of the Admiralty. Pepys was one of the many planets in orbit round the Montague sun. Montague was a generous benefactor and patron of Pepys.
Old East – Mr East – was a porter at Montague’s Whitehall lodgings.
And the other name – Mr Shepley – he was also on Team Montague. He was one of the Admiral’s servants.
But that’s all in passing. What caught my eye was the booze. The dozen bottles of sack. I’ve had a passing acquaintance with sack for 60 years now. Ever since I got stuck into Shakespeare as an undergraduate. But I never bothered to get down and dirty with it. Get it sharply into focus. Get a good taste of it so to speak. And I thought, why not, let’s find out about sack. What was that stuff? Let’s imbibe some sack. So here you go, here’s your tasting, here’s your crash course on sack.
You care to hazard a guess how many times Pepys mentions sack in his diary. Half a dozen you say. Fifteen? Think again. Pepys mentions sack 44 times in his Diary.
Forty-four. That is not a casual drink reference. That’s a relationship.
That’s a substance – a commodity –that keeps turning up in a man’s days the way friends, habits, and temptations do.
And once you notice that, sack stops being a footnote and starts being a guide.
Follow sack and you follow London, moving through time, growing up, sobering a little, but never quite losing its taste for warmth and conviviality.
What makes sack especially revealing is that it has three great London spokesmen,
each belonging to a different age. One fictional, two real, all indispensable.
Shakespeare’s greatest comic character Falstaff drinks sack. Pepys lives with sack. Dr Johnson thinks about sack.
Between them, they map three Londons and three ways of understanding pleasure.
So what was sack?
Sack was wine, but not just wine.
It was a broad category of fortified white wines imported chiefly from Spain and Spanish territories, above all from Jerez in Andalusia and the Canary Islands. In modern terms, think sherry, but don’t narrow it too much.
Sack in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ranged widely.
Dry or sweet.
Pale or dark.
Nutty, honeyed, raisiny,
sometimes sharp, sometimes lush.
It could be refined or robust.
You ordered sack knowing roughly what you were getting, but never exactly.
The taste would have been warming and aromatic,
deeper and stronger than ordinary table wine.
Fortification gave it heft and stability.
It travelled well, which mattered in an age when most wines did not. Sack arrived in London in good condition, and that alone helped make its reputation.
The word itself is a mongrel.
It may come from the Spanish saca, meaning a drawing off or export of wine.
It may owe something to the French sec, meaning dry.
It probably absorbed both.
London was very good at absorbing things and renaming them to suit itself.
Sack begins its great London career in the age of Shakespeare,
and here it belongs unmistakably to Falstaff.
In the taverns of late Elizabethan and Jacobean London,
sack is loud, expansive, boastful. Falstaff doesn’t sip it.
He baptises himself in it.
Sack warms the blood,
sharpens the wit, and makes a man gloriously pleased with himself. This is a theatrical city,
alive with playhouses and
public houses,
where language sparkles and appetite is a virtue.
Falstaff’s sack is performative.
It belongs to a London that loves bravado and excess,
that delights in wit and noise.
Sack here is about vitality.
It’s social fuel.
Ale sustains you,
but sack animates you.
By the time we reach Pepys,
the city’s changed.
Sack hasn’t disappeared,
but it has come indoors.
Pepys’s London is Restoration London,
and sack is woven into daily life. He drinks it at home.
He drinks it at dinners.
He drinks it with colleagues and friends. And he drinks it when he’s pleased with himself.
He drinks it when he’s anxious, when he’s tired, when he’s in need of comfort.
Forty-four mentions. That tells us that sack is no longer just a tavern indulgence. It’s part of the rhythm of the day.
Pepys never explains sack.
He never pauses to define it. Everyone knows what it is.
That tells us it’s readily available, socially acceptable,
and culturally legible.
Sack arrives by ship up the Thames, through the Pool of London,
it’s rolled into cellars,
tapped in taverns,
poured in private houses.
This is a drink inseparable from the city’s trade, its docks,
its merchants, its clerks.
Pepys likes his sack sweetened, sometimes mixed with sugar or eggs to make a posset.
Sack is pleasure, but it’s also medicine.
In a cold, damp city,
fortified wine is prescribed for fatigue, colds, and low spirits. Alcohol still wears a medical coat. Sack is restorative, or at least plausibly so.
What’s striking is Pepys’s tone.
He doesn’t boast about sack.
He notes it.
It’s neither heroic nor shameful.
It’s simply there. Part of the daily furniture.
Sack in Pepys’s London is social glue and private solace.
Less swagger than Falstaff,
more self-awareness.
This is a city learning to look at itself in the mirror.
By the time we reach Dr Johnson, sack has sobered up.
Or perhaps London has.
In Johnson’s eighteenth-century city, coffee houses dominate intellectual life. Aside here: you know London Walks has a new walk coming on stream in a few weeks.
Called The Coffee House Big Bang, it debuts on March 14th. It’s got a nifty aka: Coffee, Conversation & Commerce: How London Became the Centre of the World. What’s not to like.
Anyway, yes, in Dr Johnson’s 18th century London coffee houses dominated intellectual life.
Conversation, argument, clubs, and reputation matter.
Sack, now usually called sherry,
is still known and still drunk,
but it’s treated differently.
Dr Johnson speaks of wine in terms of health, habit, and moral consequence.
He knows its comforts, but he distrusts dependence on it.
Dr Johnson’s London is reflective. Sack is no longer sung or
confided in. It’s assessed. Discussed. Weighed.
Fortified wine is often recommended for the weak or elderly, and Johnson,
who knew poverty and illness, understands its value as sustenance. But there’s no Falstaffian delight here,
and none of Pepys’s domestic intimacy either.
Sack has become a topic of conversation rather than a companion.
And that arc tells you almost everything you need to know about London’s development.
Falstaff’s sack belongs to a city of performance and appetite.
Pepys’s sack belongs to a city of work, ambition, and private life.
Johnson’s sack belongs to a city of thought, restraint, and argument.
Same drink. Different cultural work.
By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,
fashions shift again.
Port rises. Claret returns.
The word sack narrows, eventually becoming almost synonymous with sherry.
But its great London moment stretches across centuries,
leaving its mark on language, on literature, and on daily life.
What makes sack such a perfect lens is that it sits at the crossroads of trade, taste, status, and pleasure. It comes in through the docks.
It’s poured in taverns.
It appears on the stage.
It turns up 44 times in one man’s private diary.
It survives long enough to be moralised over by London’s greatest talker.
So when Pepys casually notes that he took a glass of sack,
don’t imagine some dusty historical curiosity.
Picture a glowing amber liquid in candlelight.
A warm room. Talk flowing. London humming outside.
And a man who knows perfectly well that one glass may not be the end of the matter.
Falstaff drinks sack.
Pepys lives with sack.
Dr Johnson thinks about sack.
Three Londons. Three centuries. One drink, quietly telling the story of a city growing up.
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.