London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
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A very good evening to you, London Walkers.
And if I were putting out the usual call sign my next three words would be: Wherever you are.
But just for fun – and a change – let’s spell out where you are.
Well, where some of you are. I’ve just had a look at the analytics for yesterday’s London Calling podcast, the one titled This weekend. Gosh. A worldwide audience. That podcast was listened to all across the United States. And of course by homebodies here in the UK. And by people in Canada, in Australia, in Japan, in the United Arab Emirates, in Portugal, in the Netherlands, in Poland, in Italy, in Germany and in France. That’s twelve countries and four continents (if we count Australia as a continent). So twelve countries down, 183 to go. Or if you prefer, four continents down, four to go. And as time goes by there’ll be quite a few more countries added to that list for that piece. And almost certainly three more continents. Though I have my doubts about whether we’ll ever get Antarctica up on the trophy wall.
Anyway, so, yes, a very good evening to you London Walkers, all over the world.
It is of course Sunday, May 11th, 2025. My hunch is today might just take the honours for the whole of this year. This fine day – this perfect day – might well turn out to be the handsomest day of the year weather-wise. I did my Hampstead Walk this morning and walking across the Heath, it was like moving through a dreamscape. Birds were singing. Everything was green. The temperature was a perfect 20 degrees Centigrade. And the sky was cerulean. There wasn’t so much as a wisp of a cloud. We kept saying to one another – and to ourselves – what a day.
And that perfection – so rare in London – got me thinking about what day of the week it was. Sunday. And got me thinking about the word itself: Sunday. We of course take the names of the days of the week for granted. After all, in a year we have 52 Sundays. In the biblical life span of three score and ten years we chug our way through getting on for 4,000 Sundays. And really, for the most part we never give the actual word – the name – a moment’s thought. It’s just Sunday. Plain old Sunday. The day after Saturday, the day before Monday, the last day of the week, the last day of the weekend. Church and Sunday School day, though that’s much more ardently the case in the United States than it is here. This is probably the most secular Western country in the world.
Think of the great Victorian poet Matthew Arnold’s poem, Dover Beach.
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Arnold wrote Dover Beach in 1851. Darwin’s Origin of Species pitches up just eight years later. Like a seismometer, Matthew Arnold picked up the tremors. He sensed the seismic shift that was coming. A simple, unquestioning belief in the biblical verities was coming unstuck. The Sea of Faith was retreating. Like an ebb tide.
That was 175 years ago. Here certainly – though hardly in much of the United States – the sea of faith, for many, has ebbed even further in the intervening seventeen and a half decades.
In a famous pronouncement Winston Churchill once described the Soviet Union as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that taking Sunday for granted the way we do – never seeing it clearly – means that it’s something of a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
And maybe because the air was so clear and the light so fine this morning up in Hampstead, I started to think about what the word Sunday actually means. It is of course pagan. The day of the sun. Is that not the case with all of our days of the week. Monday is Moon Day. Wednesday is Woden’s Day. Thursday is Thor’s Day. Saturday is Saturn’s Day. Etc.
There’s confusion about Sunday, whether it’s the first day of the week or the last day of the week. For the most part, I think we regard Monday as the first day of the week. But I think biblically Sunday is the first day of the week. And that makes sense. You could say that Sunday is primus inter pares. First amongst equals. How does the biblical story of creation begin? Genesis is the first book of the Old Testament. Its first words are: In the beginning. Genesis itself is a Greek word meaning: beginning.
Here are the first five verses. And yes, this is the classic version, the King James Version of the bible.
[1] In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
[2] And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
[3] And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
[4] And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
[5] And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
It’s worth taking a really close look at those 89 words,
What do they tell us? Right out of the blocks – the first verse – God creates heaven and earth.
But God doesn’t speak until the third verse. And what’s his first utterance: Let there be light.
Where’s the light come from? That’s something of a mystery. The automatic reflex is, ok, light…that means the sun. But light at the beginning of Genesis seems to be disembodied from the sun. God doesn’t get around to creating the sun until the fourth day of creation – verses 14 through 19.
Here’s what we’re told.
14] And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
[15] And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
[16] And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
[17] And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
[18] And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
[19] And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
Anyway, be that as it may, the first commandment, so to speak, is Let there be light. Until he hits that light switch, God is, well, in the darkness. You can’t help but feel for him. He can’t see what he’s doing. And frankly he makes a bit of a hash of it. Yes, he creates heaven and earth. But earth is without form. And void. And darkness is upon the face of the deep.
It won’t do. God is in a sense buried alive – cabined, cribbed, confined in utter darkness. He’s not just prompted to speak. He’s got no other card to play. It’s almost a cry of desperation: Let there be light. And that cry does the trick.
His hitting that light switch is transformative.
He can see. And he can appraise. And God saw the light, that it was good.
And once there’s light, he can go to town. Do some seriously good work. No more bumbling. It’s a break-out. He’s no longer thrashing about, buried alive in that all-enveloping, utter darkness. He gets on with it. He divides the light from the darkness.
He calls the light Day, and the darkness he calls Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And for our part. we have to make of it what we will that there’s light but no source of light. God doesn’t make the sun until the fourth day.
It’s a conundrum that in the words of the great romantic poet John Keats dost tease us out of thought.
But I wouldn’t get my knickers in a twist about it.
The important thing is light – wherever it comes from – is the key that unlocks creation. Let alone life. The greatest British artist of them all, J.M.W. Turner, knew very well where light came from and how important it is: Turner’s dying words were, “the sun is God.”
Which, when you get right down to it, is a four-word pagan catechism.
I’m no theologian but I’d say there’s a shadow that accompanies both Judaism and Christianity everywhere. And that shadow is recognising the power of the sun and venerating it as a god. That most elementary of pagan beliefs.
You see it for example in the alignment of churches – just about all of them are on an east-west axis. The sun – s-u-n – rises in the East. The son – s-o-n – son of God, it’s a homophone of course – ascended in the East. And his return – the second coming – will be in the east. The alignment of churches – the Christians’ houses of worship – is just one of several instances of Christianity appropriating to its own uses and purposes pagan beliefs.
Now what’s all this got to do with what a fine day, today, Sunday, May 11th was? Well, sometimes you have to luxuriate in the language. Have a good soak in the words. So, Sunday is the day of the Sun. And light – which is what we get from the sun – comes first. As we learn from the fourth verse of the Book of Genesis. Once there’s light, the floodgates open. Everything flows from it, light.
And sure enough, Genesis underlines the obvious, draws the distinction between day and night. Day is when there’s light.
So Sunday, it’s not just that it’s got pole position – not just that it comes first. The very word Sunday doubles down as it were. When you say Sunday you’re in effect saying “sun…sun”. It’s almost a mantra. The second “sun” because the defining feature of day – as opposed to night – is light. And we have the sun to thank for daylight.
Yeah, bears repeating: Sunday. The word itself is a mantra. Sun…sun.
A mantra…and, I’d say, an invocation. And for that matter, a giving of thanks.
Anything else? Well, it was so green on Hampstead Heath today. All that photosynthesis. Thank you very much sunlight.
Inevitably that great London factoid came to mind. To wit: there are so many trees in London that ecologically it’s classified as a forest.
And where there are trees there are birds. As I said, on our walk across the Heath we were accompanied – serenaded – every step of the way by bird song. Recently, my great American pal who practically worships New York’s Central Park was of a mind to rough me up because he and his grandson had gone birdwatching in Central Park and had bagged, so to speak, 37 different species. He climbed down though when he looked up bird life on Hampstead Heath and discovered the Heath is home to 180 bird species.
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.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.