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 November 3rd, 2025.
And here we go, here’s your daily London fix.
Right in the thumping heart of Cheapside stands St Mary-le-Bow – the church whose bells don’t just ring, they define what it means to be a Londoner. These are the Bow Bells, the old couvre feu chimes that once told medieval Londoners when to bank their fires and head to bed. From Norman arches to Wren’s steeple, from Dick Whittington’s legend to Blitz-time rubble, this is the story of London’s curfew bells – the sound that kept the city safe and, in time, gave birth to its very identity.
The Sound of London
Stand on Cheapside on a grey London morning and listen. The traffic hums, buses hiss, voices bounce off the glass and stone. Then suddenly – there it is. That bright peal rolling over the rooftops: Bow Bells. The heartbeat of the City. Those bells don’t just ring; they declare. They say, “You’re in London, mate.” Because to be born within sound of Bow Bells – that’s what makes you a true Cockney. Not your postcode, not your accent. The sound of those bells.
But here’s the thing most people miss. Those weren’t just any bells. They were London’s curfew bells. And that, right there, is the key to everything.
Take the word apart: curfew – from the Norman French couvre feu, meaning “cover fire.” Every medieval town had its couvre feu bells. When you heard them ring, it was time to bank your hearth, smother the flames, make the place safe before you turned in. London, with its timber houses and thatched roofs, was one careless spark away from catastrophe.
The first written record of Bow Bells serving as London’s curfew dates to 1469 – a civic order decreeing that the bells of St Mary-le-Bow should ring out at nine o’clock each evening, warning Londoners to cover their fires. The couvre feu – the curfew – was literally sounded from the earlier medieval tower, the forerunner of Wren’s. That tower, with its famous peal, stood in the heart of the City, right here on Cheapside, long before the Great Fire reduced it to rubble two centuries later.
So which bells would you choose for the job? Not the bells of All Hallows by the Tower – too far east, down by the river. Not St Martin within Ludgate either – its very name gives it away. Within Ludgate. Ludgate was the western gate in the old London Wall. Good for the west, yes, but useless for those living near the Tower.
You needed bells right in the middle. Bells that could reach every corner of the old Square Mile. You needed St Mary-le-Bow. Smack-bang in the centre of London.
When those bells rang, every hearth in the City was banked down. The sound of Bow Bells was the sound of London saying nighty night. Getting ready to turn in, go to sleep, safe from fire.
And from that simple nightly ritual, a legend grew. To be born within the sound of those curfew bells was to be a Londoner through and through.
That’s why, centuries later, Dick Whittington – homesick and trudging away from London – half way up Highgate Hill – heard Bow Bells calling him back: “Turn again, Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London.”
The bells weren’t just bells anymore. They were identity itself.
The Phoenix of Cheapside
Like London, St Mary-le-Bow has burned and risen more times than you can count.
The first church went up in Norman days. About 1080. It was built by Lanfranc, William the Conqueror’s Archbishop of Canterbury. We don’t know for sure, it may have replaced a building of Saxon origin. It was constructed out of the same stone as William’s Tower of London, imported from Caen. Its name came from the great stone arches – or “bows” – that supported the crypt: Sancta Maria de Arcubus, St Mary of the Arches. Londoners, being Londoners, turned that into St Mary-le-Bow.
Fire got it in 1196. The Great Fire of 1666 finished the medieval church off entirely. Enter Christopher Wren, with his genius for resurrection. By 1680, his new St Mary-le-Bow was rising skyward, calm and confident – 235 feet of Portland stone, classical columns, and that splendid spire pointing heavenward.
The Blitz flattened it again in 1941. Only the steeple stood. But London never leaves its own for dead. The church was rebuilt – stone by stone, faith by faith – and in 1961 the bells rang once more. Twelve of them, cast by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, singing out across Cheapside like a defiant chorus line.
Inside the Arches
Step inside and you’re in a space that breathes calm and light. Wren’s creamy stone. Tall Corinthian columns. Sunlight glancing off brass. Yet it’s not a museum – it’s alive. There’s daily worship, lunchtime services for the City crowd, concerts, talks. Down below, in the crypt, there’s The Café Below – tucked under those same Norman arches that gave the church its name.
And history clings to the air down there. You’re sitting in the old Court of Arches, once the Archbishop of Canterbury’s court of appeal. Bishops, heretics, scandalous clerics – they all trod those stones. Milton prayed upstairs. Pepys poked around after the Great Fire. Wren himself likely stood there, quietly pleased with what he’d done.
The Sound That Survived
It’s worth pausing on the irony: the very bells that once warned Londoners to bank their fires now symbolise the city that burned and rose again. The curfew bells became the comeback bells.
Today, when Bow Bells ring, they roll down Cheapside, over Bank, past St Paul’s, and out beyond the old city wall. Their notes are clear, confident, utterly London. The sound of couvre feu turned into Cockney. The sound of curfew turned into identity.
When those bells rang at nine in the evening back in 1469, London banked its fires. When they ring today, London remembers its soul.
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.