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 Thursday, November 13th, 2025.
And away we go, here’s your daily London fix.
This one’s about Clapham. Mentioned it yesterday. Reason for it: our new guide Dr Stephen King. Stephen’s created a Clapham Common Tour. In Stephen’s words, Clapham Common is an Uncommonly Interesting Common. Talking it over with him it’s achingly obvious that it’s got London Walks written all over it. So, yes, it’s common into the fold. It’ll debut on December 19th. Thereafter it’ll be a monthly. Over the course of the winter it’ll run on January 11th, February 8th, and March 15th.
So this podcast is something in the way of a scene setter for our new Clapham Common Walk. It – the podcast – answers to the name, The King, the Booze-up and the Birth of Clapham. Curtain up. Here we go.
Let’s roll the reel back a thousand years. London, 1042. The year everything shifts. The year the Danes bow out, the English crown flickers back to native hands, and – wonderfully – the whole thing hinges on a party that gets a bit out of control.
Picture it. Lambeth, then a riverside village – a little upstream from the City, across the Thames from Westminster’s side of things.
Wooden houses, reed thatch, the smell of ale and mud and smoke.
It’s the wedding feast of the daughter of a wealthy settler called Osgod Clapa – a name you could only get in the early Middle Ages. Osgod the Clapper, the Boozer, the Big Handed.
Nobody’s quite sure what “Clapa” meant, but it fits him. He was a warrior, a landowner, and very likely one of those great loud, back-slapping Londoners who could drain a horn of mead faster than you could say “Skål!”
And the guest list? Top drawer. The king himself, Harthacnut, last of the Danish line that had ruled England since Cnut the Great, is in attendance. That’s right – the same Cnut who supposedly commanded the tide to go back, and who ruled an empire stretching from London to Denmark and Norway.
Now, Harthacnut’s reign hadn’t exactly been glorious. He came to the throne after his father Cnut’s death, but spent years away in Denmark fighting off rivals. When he finally made it to England in 1040, he wasn’t greeted like a conquering hero. He arrived with a fleet of warships and promptly imposed a brutal tax to pay for them. Not a winning strategy. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – not a publication known for its tact – described him as “a very harsh king.”
So by 1042, Harthacnut’s reputation is hanging by a thread. He’s 24, overweight, probably gouty, definitely fond of the ale jug.
And here he is at Osgod Clapa’s big do in Lambeth, making merry, surrounded by warriors, nobles, and the kind of London merchants who can drink a Dane under the table.
And then it happens. The king lifts a cup to his lips – maybe his tenth, maybe his twentieth, the accounts vary – and collapses. Dead before he hits the rushes. The chroniclers say it was “in the act of drinking.” Some add “with a terrible convulsion.” Others, more bluntly, “he died of excess of drink.”
So there it is. The Danish dynasty in England ends not with a battle, not with a conspiracy, not with a whimper – but with a hangover that went too far. The Viking era snuffed out at a wedding party in Lambeth.
In that instant, the crown passes to Edward, son of Æthelred the Unready – the old English line restored. Edward the Confessor, as he’ll later be called. The man who builds Westminster Abbey, plants the seed of royal Westminster, and sets the stage for William the Conqueror. All because Harthacnut couldn’t handle his drink.
And Osgod Clapa? The man whose daughter’s wedding provided the stage for this royal exit? He’s one of those London figures who vanishes into the mist of legend. We know he was a powerful man in the city – a warrior, a retainer of Cnut, and owner of lands south of the river. His name survives in Clapham – “Clapa’s ham,” Clapa’s settlement. A bit of his farm or estate gave its name to one of the great London suburbs.
After Harthacnut’s death, Osgod’s luck ran out. He backed the wrong side in the messy politics that followed. Within a year or two, he was exiled – possibly to Flanders, where a lot of dislodged Vikings washed up. But his place-name lived on, long after the man himself vanished.
Imagine that. One of the great modern symbols of London domesticity – prams, coffee shops, yoga studios, estate agents with wide grins – all named for a Danish warlord whose daughter’s wedding ended in a royal booze-fuelled death.
It’s a proper London story, that. High drama, low comedy, a touch of tragedy, and an aftertaste of irony.
And think what London was like then. Still a timbered city inside its old Roman walls, the river alive with barges and ferries. Lambeth was a riverside hamlet across the Thames, and Clapham was farmland, fields, a scatter of wooden huts and hedgerows. A walk from London Bridge southwards took you through marsh and meadow, past windmills and streams, into country.
For centuries Clapham stayed rural. A few farms, a small village church, nothing more. By the seventeenth century, it had become a retreat for the well-off – close enough to London for business, far enough away for fresh air. In the eighteenth century it was fashionable: big villas around Clapham Common, genteel society, the famous “Clapham Sect” – those evangelical reformers who campaigned to end the slave trade.
The Common itself became a kind of lung for south London – its great green field holding back the tide of urban sprawl. Then came the railways, the terraces, the Victorians. Clapham filled with clerks, teachers, shopkeepers, all riding the new trains to work in the city.
By the twentieth century it had seen everything: wartime damage, post-war decline, then a wave of revival as London expanded again. The name that began with a Viking in a fur cloak ends up on Tube maps, estate agent boards, and reusable coffee cups.
And it’s still got that curious mix – a bit posh, a bit down to earth, a bit knowing. A place where you can feel London’s pulse and still find trees, light, and the echo of the old Common.
So next time you pass through Clapham, maybe on a Saturday morning surrounded by joggers and dog walkers, spare a thought for its namesake. Osgod Clapa – the man who threw a wedding so wild it ended a dynasty. The man who gave his name to a corner of London that’s lasted a thousand years.
London remembers, in its names, its corners, its quirks. The Danish kings are long gone, their halls turned to dust. But the stories? The stories hang in the air. Lambeth, Clapham, the Thames. The wedding feast that changed history.
And if you stand by the river at Lambeth, the November air damp and grey, you can almost picture it – the firelight flickering, the mead flowing, and a young king raising his cup one last time. A thousand years ago this week, London’s destiny changed – at a party.
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.