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 November 5th, 2025.
And here it comes, your daily London fix.
As promised, it’s a second helping of St Mary le Bow.
Where we left off with it a couple of days ago didn’t really do it justice. I’m going to put that right, right here and now.
Because if ever there was a London church that earned a proper encore, it’s this one. A thousand years of history, a tower that’s seen rebellion and royalty, a dragon that’s ruled the skyline since the days of Blackbeard, and bells that still tell London who it is. St Mary-le-Bow isn’t just a church – it’s a compendium of the city’s story, bound in stone and bronze and sound. So, sit back, get comfortable, put your feet up, you’re now going to get to know London’s most important parish church way better than any casual tourist. Or casual Londoner for that matter.
Here we go, we’re going to pick it up where we left off.
The first time St Mary-le-Bow makes the news is 1091, and it makes it in style. A hurricane tears through London and blows the roof clean off the church. Cue thunder, lightning, terrified monks, and bits of Norman masonry flying down Cheapside. That’s how Bow bursts into history – with a bang and a gale.
By the late Norman period it’s back on its feet – rebuilt and renamed “St Mary de Arcubus,” Mary of the Arches – a nod to the great stone bows of the crypt that supported the upper church.
Those arches gave Bow its name, its strength, and, in time, its fame.
From the thirteenth century onwards, it was one of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s “peculiars” – churches in the City that answered directly to Canterbury rather than to the Bishop of London – and the Court of Arches, the Archbishop’s top ecclesiastical court, sat right here beneath the floor.
Fast-forward a hundred years and St Mary-le-Bow is a City landmark.
Its steeple dominates Cheapside and its bells are so powerful they can be heard all the way to Hackney Marshes.
They ring out the City curfew – that deep, slow, brassy voice that tells medieval London it’s time to douse the candles and head indoors.
In 1196, the church becomes the stage for one of London’s first populist uprisings.
William Fitz Osbert – a sort of thirteenth-century protest leader, loud, charismatic, dangerous – rallies the poor against the City’s rich.
When blood is spilt, Fitz Osbert flees here, up into the tower, but he’s dragged out, tried, and strung up on a gibbet outside the church.
A rebel hung where he once sought sanctuary.
And that wasn’t the last royal or political drama to play out here.
This was one of medieval London’s landmarks – a building that loomed large in every sense.
In 1271, Henry III’s son, Prince Edward – the future Edward I – marries Eleanor of Castile here.
It must have been a sight: a blaze of banners, the street thronged with cheering Londoners, the air thick with incense and torch smoke.
Twenty-seven years later the same Edward, now a king and a conqueror, holds a parliament at Bow to celebrate his victory over the Scots at Falkirk.
This was never just a parish church – it was a front-row seat to English history.
Then tragedy.
That same year – 1271 – the tower collapses, killing twenty people.
The church is rebuilt, only for fresh scandal to follow.
In 1284 a goldsmith named Duckett flees inside to claim sanctuary from a mob.
They drag him out and murder him on holy ground.
Justice is swift – sixteen men hanged, one burned – and the church is closed until it can be purified and re-consecrated.
And still the story rolls on.
In 1311 a wooden viewing gallery built for a joust to celebrate the birth of the Black Prince collapses.
Queen Philippa and her ladies-in-waiting are hurled to the ground in a tumble of velvet and splinters.
Miraculously, no one dies.
The present-day balcony on the tower is a quiet nod to that day of royal chaos and laughter.
Then – 1666.
You can guess what happens next.
The Great Fire sweeps through and Bow burns like everything else.
It was considered the City’s second most important church after St Paul’s, so it was among the first to be rebuilt.
Enter Christopher Wren – the man who turned a disaster into a skyline.
Someone once said of him, “If God meant to show man what genius looked like in stone, He sent Wren.”
And Wren pulled out all the stops here.
The tower is pure showmanship – a masterclass in classical architecture, using all five of the ancient orders: Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite.
It’s said to have cost as much as the rest of the church combined – and worth every penny.
The mason-contractor was Thomas Cartwright, one of London’s finest stone-carvers.
The finished tower rose in 1680, the year Pachelbel wrote his Canon and the pirate Blackbeard was born.
And since we’ve mentioned him – Johann Pachelbel, PAH-kuh-bel – a German composer and organist from Nuremberg, born in 1653, died in 1706.
He was a generation before Bach, and in fact taught Bach’s elder brother.
So you could say the musical line runs straight through him to the master himself.
He’s remembered today for one piece above all others – the Canon in D –
that graceful, looping bit of Baroque harmony you’ve heard at a thousand weddings and in half the world’s adverts.
It’s the sound of order and light, of calm and balance.
So yes, it’s rather fitting that Wren’s tower went up the same year Pachelbel wrote his masterpiece – one man building harmony in sound, the other in stone.
So much for our aside. Let’s hit the high C of that Tower.
Up there, crowning the whole thing, Wren planted his dragon – nine feet long, gleaming gold leaf, wings spread, tail curling.
It’s both weathervane and guardian, a symbol of the City itself.
Under each wing, the red cross of St George.
From its perch 220 feet above Cheapside it’s seen everything from sedan chairs to skyscrapers.
London’s own sun-worshipper, turning with the wind, catching the light.
Jacob Hall, the Restoration stuntman, famously climbed up and danced on its back to cheers from below – pure seventeenth-century bravado.
That dragon’s been up there since before the United States existed.
Older than the Declaration of Independence, older than the Liberty Bell – though both owe something to Bow, as we’ll see.
That spire – Wren’s second tallest after St Paul’s – soared sixty-six metres into the sky.
Hatton, writing in 1708, called it “an admirable piece of architecture, not to be paralleled by the steeple of any parochial church in Europe.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Time and tide did their work.
The upper spire was rebuilt by George Gwilt in the early nineteenth century; Arthur Blomfield restored the interior in the 1860s.
Then the Blitz arrived.
Bow took a direct hit.
Only the tower and the outer walls stood.
When the dust settled, it was rebuilt again, 1956–62, by Laurence King – a modernist with a spiritual streak.
He sheathed the tower round a steel spine and filled the church with John Hayward’s luminous stained glass.
Down below, the Norman crypt still holds the line.
Its great stone arches are the reason for the name – the bows of Bow.
Wren barely touched it; he thought it was Roman and told them simply to use it as a burial chamber.
For two centuries the only way down was through a trapdoor and a ladder.
Gwilt built the present staircase.
In the north-west corner you can still see a fragment of medieval stair – maybe the one that led to the first tower.
And here’s a lovely little mystery.
In 1912, two stones from the crypt were sent across the Atlantic as a gift to Trinity Church in New York – that grand Gothic pile at Wall Street and Broadway.
It was a gesture of kinship: both churches enjoyed the same privileges, granted by William of Orange.
Trinity, designed by Shaftesbury-born Richard Upjohn, was for years the tallest building in America – a skyscraper before the word existed.
The New York parish later confirmed the stones arrived, but no one knows where they went.
Somewhere in Lower Manhattan, a bit of London sleeps unseen.
For centuries the crypt was also a courtroom – the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Court of Arches – where clerics and lawyers wrangled over broken vows and dodgy wills by candlelight.
The name stuck: the Court of Arches.
The echo of those voices is still in the stone.
St Mary-le-Bow is still the Archbishop’s City headquarters; he visits several times a year.
And the connections keep coming.
Captain John Smith – yes, that John Smith, founder of Virginia, saviour of Jamestown, friend of Pocahontas – was baptised here.
So was Admiral Arthur Phillip, founder of Sydney.
London’s fingerprints, halfway round the world.
Now, the bells.
For centuries, to be “born within the sound of Bow Bells” meant you were a Londoner through and through – a Cockney in the grand old sense.
Only later did the definition retreat eastward.
Dick Whittington heard them, legend says, as he trudged out of London, defeated.
“Turn again, Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London!” they called – and he did.
They echo too in Oranges and Lemons:
“When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey.
When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.
When will that be? say the bells of Stepney.
I do not know, says the great bell of Bow.”
Those bells have been London’s soundtrack for nearly a millennium.
Before the eighteenth century, road distances to Lewes were measured from Bow’s door – mileposts along the way marked with a little cast-iron bow and four bells.
From the eighteenth century onward, Bow’s bells were cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry – the same workshop that made Big Ben and the Liberty Bell.
The foundry itself finally closed in 2017; the building’s still standing, but empty, its future uncertain.
London’s oldest continuous craft, silenced – though the bells of Bow still ring.
The present set, twelve strong, dates from 1956, replacing those lost in the Blitz.
Each bell carries a Biblical inscription; take the first letters together and you get “D Whittington” – London’s wink to its favourite Lord Mayor.
And here’s a lovely postscript: a 1926 recording of the Bow Bells became the interval signal of the BBC World Service during the war, a sound of home for listeners scattered across the globe.
You can still hear it before some broadcasts today – London calling, literally.
So when you stand outside St Mary-le-Bow, look up at that spire.
Think of the storms and the fires, the rebels and royals, the dragon and the bells, the parliaments, pirates and preachers, the thousand years of London life stacked stone upon stone.
It isn’t just a church – it’s a survivor, a storyteller, a show-man in stone.
And if you’re born within the sound of its bells, you’re a Londoner by right.
Which feels about right.
Because St Mary-le-Bow doesn’t just mark the heart of the City – it is the heartbeat.
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.