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 Sunday, November 16th, 2025.
And here it is, your daily London fix.
I’m going to spring one on you tonight. This one’s a gotcha. Coming out of left field.
You ready for this? I’ve called it: The Codpiece: When Size Really Did Matter.
Ah yes, the codpiece.
The sixteenth century’s answer to
“look at me.”
A little flap of cloth that started out as something practical and
ended up as something positively operatic. An accessory that shouted
before you even opened your mouth.
Forget mobile phones, forget Lamborghinis – this, my friends, was the Renaissance’s original status symbol.
Picture it. London, say 1540.
You’re strutting down Cheapside,
hose tight as drumskins,
and the eyes of the world –
or at least the eyes of every washerwoman and merchant’s daughter – are not exactly on your face.
They’re riveted a bit lower.
There, jutting out
in splendid, padded, ostentatious glory,
is your codpiece. Your personal billboard. Your manifesto in cloth.
The codpiece began innocently enough.
In the late 1400s, men wore hose –
basically tight-fitting leggings – t
hat were split down the middle and
tied to the doublet.
Practical problem:
how to bridge the, er, gap.
Enter the codpiece
(from the Middle English cod,
meaning bag or scrotum).
Originally it was
a modest triangular flap of fabric,
fastened with ties or buttons,
there purely for modesty and warmth.
The Renaissance being what it was, modesty didn’t last long.
Once Henry VIII swaggered onto the scene, the codpiece went from humble cover-up
to full-blown statement piece.
Our Henry didn’t do things by halves.
His portraits –
take a look at Holbein’s famous depiction –feature a codpiece that looks like
it might have its own postcode.
Stuffed, padded, and front-and-centre,
it’s less an item of clothing
and more a declaration of royal virility.
It says, “Behold, I am England.”
And also, “Don’t mess with me,
or my tailor.”
The fashion caught fire.
Nobles and courtiers competed like
rutting stags, out-padding one another
in a frenzy of masculine display.
Some codpieces were so big
they could have been rented out as pied-à-terre.
They were lavishly embroidered, bejewelled,
and stiffened with wire or whalebone.
There were ribbons, pearls,
even tiny metal tassels.
One chronicler noted that some had
small pouches inside –
not just for the, well, obvious,
but also for coins, handkerchiefs,
love tokens, and the occasional flask.
A man’s codpiece might literally contain his fortune.
The codpiece was so prominent
it even became weaponised –
armourers crafted metal versions for battle. Picture that: Henry VIII in full plate, complete with a polished steel codpiece
that could probably deflect cannon fire.
Talk about overcompensation.
And how did women view this parade of preening masculinity?
Hard to say.
Some may have been impressed;
others rolled their eyes.
The Italian writer Matteo Bandello suggested women were
“both amused and appalled” –
not unlike modern reactions
to certain sports cars.
One can imagine Tudor wives muttering, “If only he put as much effort into the garden.”
Artists adored them.
You’ll find codpieces bulging proudly in portraits across Europe –
Bronzino’s suave young men,
Dürer’s self-assured dandies,
the whole glittering cast of
Renaissance swaggerers.
They speak volumes.
In paintings, the codpiece often points –quite literally –
toward the seat of power and fertility.
The great paradox is that these same men were often laced and padded
to the point of immobility.
They couldn’t bend,
but by God they could strut.
Naturally, the church took a dim view. Preachers thundered that
codpieces were instruments of sin,
the devil’s pennants flapping in the breeze. There are accounts of priests
denouncing them from the pulpit
while wearing perfectly serviceable cassocks.
It’s always easier to condemn than to compete.
By the early seventeenth century,
fashion shifted.
The codpiece deflated, quite literally. Breeches got longer,
doublets lower,
and the whole business was quietly
packed away in the great wardrobe of history.
Samuel Pepys, a century later,
never wore one –
though one suspects
he might have admired the audacity.
And yet, traces linger.
Every age has its codpiece.
The glittering Elvis jumpsuit.
Mick Jagger’s stage trousers.
David Bowie’s Labyrinth costume
(still making people blush decades on). Athletic cups, designer underwear,
the whole testosterone-fuelled business
of “enhancement” –
they’re descendants of the Tudor codpiece, all serving the same primal purpose:
look at me.
How were they fastened?
With ties or buttons at first,
later hooks or laces –
but really, they were fastened with bravado. The fabric ranged from fine silk
and velvet for the upper crust
to sturdy wool for the merely ambitious. Some were perfumed;
others, mercifully, detachable for washing. Henry VIII’s wardrobe accounts list separate codpieces by the dozen,
each matching a different suit –
like cufflinks, only far more…
front and centre.
So what happened
if you turned up at court
with a codpiece grander than the King’s? Dangerous territory.
There are whispers
that one courtier was quietly told
to “adjust” his before appearing again.
No one upstaged Henry.
His might have been padded,
but his authority wasn’t.
And so the codpiece passed into legend:
a relic of the days
when men dressed like peacocks
and courted danger with a wink. Outrageous, absurd,
and magnificently human.
You can’t help admiring
the sheer nerve of it.
Because the codpiece wasn’t really about anatomy.
It was about attitude.
It was a boast in brocade,
a jest in velvet,
a wink writ large in linen.
It said what every age of men has tried,
one way or another, to say:
“Size matters –
but confidence matters more.”
Now there’s a thought
to tuck neatly into your codpiece.
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.