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 November 6th, 2025.
And here we are, here’s London Walks serving up your daily London fix.
Let’s push the envelope this morning. Today – November 6th – belongs to St Leonard. You’ll forgive me if I get a bit misty-eyed about him, because Leonard’s one of those half-forgotten saints who really ought to be brought up from the vasty deeps every now and then and given a good airing. He’s the patron saint of blacksmiths, coopers, greengrocers, prisoners of war, slaves, and women in labour.
Now there’s a congregation for you. Blacksmiths hammering away in their forges; coopers tightening hoops round barrels; greengrocers arranging apples in pyramids; women bringing new life into the world; and, at the far end of the human experience, prisoners and slaves longing for freedom. What a line-up. It’s as if Leonard said, “Right, I’ll take the lot – the workers, the weary, the worried, and the chained.”
A thousand years ago he was a French nobleman who chucked it all in to live as a hermit near Limoges. His reputation for kindness spread – he’d pray for captives, and they’d miraculously find their chains unlocked. That knack for liberation made him the go-to saint for anyone in confinement, literal or otherwise. You can see why medieval Londoners took to him: a city of apprentices and artisans, of women giving birth in cramped tenements, of debtors cooling their heels in prison cells – all would have felt they had a friend in Leonard.
And London had plenty of Leonards. At least four churches bore his name, each with its own story. Two of them are now ghosts in the city’s street plan, two still stand – though not in their original medieval form.
There was St Leonard Eastcheap, also known as St Leonard Milkchurch. First mentioned in 1214. Stow says it got its “Milkchurch” tag from one William Melker – “an especial builder thereof.” A lovely touch, that: a man literally putting his name on the milk bottle.
Its patron was the Prior of Christ Church Canterbury, so it was what’s called a peculiar –
under Canterbury’s wing, not the Bishop of London’s. Yes, that’s right, another peculiar. Yesterday we took survey of the famous St Mary le Bow. And you’ll recall, it too was a peculiar under the aegis of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Anyway, St Leonard Milkchurch went the way of so many: burned down in the Great Fire of 1666, and never rebuilt. Today you walk through Eastcheap and there’s not a hint of it. The city swallowed it whole.
Next came St Leonard Foster Lane, first mentioned in 1278. Another parish lost to the flames in ’66, and again not rebuilt.
London’s church bells must have sounded oddly thin after that inferno; dozens of parishes simply gone.
Then there’s St Leonard Streatham, out in what was once deep countryside. Dr Johnson knew it well – he was forever at Streatham Park with his good friends the Thrales. The church was founded in the twelfth century, rebuilt in 1830, and still stands proudly on the High Road. You can almost hear the rumble of Johnson’s coach pulling up outside, the great man himself descending ponderously and muttering something suitably gruff and affectionate about his hosts.
But the crown jewel in the Leonard collection is St Leonard Shoreditch. Founded, we think, in the twelfth century, rebuilt by George Dance the Elder in the 1730s. Dance looked west to Wren’s masterpiece St Mary-le-Bow and thought, “I’ll have a bit of that.” So Shoreditch got its own Bow-inspired spire, a white-stone rocket rising above the rooftops, visible from the City and beyond. You can still spot it today, peeking through the glass and graffiti.
And in the churchyard – wonderfully – the old village stocks and whipping post are still there. Solid, weathered, quietly shocking reminders that punishment in the old parish was a very public affair. The locals would gather, tut, maybe jeer, perhaps even pass a tankard round while the miscreant served his sentence. London justice with a dash of street theatre.
And theatre brings us neatly to St Leonard Shoreditch’s roll call of the departed. This was the actors’ church before St Paul’s Covent Garden claimed the title. Richard Burbage, Shakespeare’s leading man and the builder of the Curtain Theatre, lies here. So does Gabriel Spencer, the actor killed in a duel by Ben Jonson in 1598 – the very same Ben Jonson who went on to write Volpone and The Alchemist and end up buried upright in Westminster Abbey. Spencer’s grave, a few feet of Shoreditch soil, tells the darker half of that story.
Will Sommers, Henry VIII’s jester, also rests here. The king’s fool, whose wit outlasted his monarch’s temper. And in a different century altogether, three of John Keats’s brothers were baptised at St Leonard’s font. From jesters to poets: the full human comedy under one roof.
Walk round the church today and you feel time stretching in both directions. The Georgian tower watching over street art and coffee shops. The spire a kind of compass needle for anyone who wants to find the older, deeper Shoreditch –
the one of playhouses and pilgrims rather than pop-ups and prosecco bars. If you stand by the gate and listen, you can almost hear the clink of a blacksmith’s hammer from Leonard’s old congregation, the murmur of a cooper fitting staves, the chatter of a greengrocer packing up his stall. Ordinary Londoners, his people.
So yes, on this November 6th, let’s give St Leonard his due. Patron of the workaday and the worn-down, of the chained and the child-bearing, of everyone trying to make a living or a life in a tough old city. His name may be half-forgotten on our maps, but his spirit – the spirit of the everyday Londoner – is still very much alive.
If you fancy meeting him properly, head to Shoreditch. Find that tall white spire George Dance raised to the sky, walk among the gravestones, tip your hat to Burbage and Sommers, and give a quiet nod to the saint who looked after London’s grafters.
Happy St Leonard’s Day.
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.