No doubt due to the warm reception of his cantata Belshazzar's Feast at the 1931 Leeds Festival, Walton was asked again to contribute a cantata to the festival in 1937. For the resulting work, In Honour of the City of London, Walton took his text and title from a poem by the sixteenth-century Scotsman William Dunbar. The words, like the score for chorus and orchestra to which Walton sets them, brim with the bustling energy of the English metropolis, the inventory of sights and sounds coalescing into a undulating sonic cityscape of evocative orchestrational textures and thematic gestures.

From the beginning, where Walton opens the scene with a broad orchestral sweep and Dunbar (in Chaucer-era English that Walton maintains in his setting) proclaims London the "Soveraign of cities," the element of motion in the work seems relentless. Walton's singers must continually deviate from their arching melodic lines to navigate sudden leaps into registral extremes, almost as if plotting out points on a skyline. Likewise, Walton frequently disrupts rhythmic flow by introducing hemiolic triplet figures into established quarter- and eighth-note passages.

As one might expect from Walton, slightly overstated musical word painting figures prominently on the textural and thematic level. When Dunbar speaks of "famous prelatis in habitis clericall," for example, Walton introduces a melody drawn from plainchant (though the pizzicato accompaniment tempers the musical anachronism). This kind of depiction occurs less frequently, however, than the less pictorial sweeps and arcs that follow Dunbar's adulatory sentiments in a more general way. In fact, some critics, likely used to hearing Walton's hyperbole being employed for caricature as much as for nostalgia, hear Walton's ebullience as a bit forced.

The only point at which the frantic texture and pace settles down is in the fourth verse's tranquil descriptions, sung by women's voices, of the boats and waterfowl floating peacefully down the Thames. After a fugato interlude, however, Walton's basses and tenors assume a more forceful voice in describing the "lusty bridge of pillars white" that spans the river and the regal processions of nobility who have trod upon it. Listeners who found his musical rendering overblown were surely recalling, from a few years before, a widely popular and much more restrained setting of the same poem by fellow English composer George Dyson.

If Walton's score is unfavorably busy, it only reflects Dunbar's attitude, which is unusually enthusiastic; the poet, after all, was a Scot, writing in English instead of Gaelic. In fact, the poem did not arise spontaneously from the pen of an Anglophile, but rather was commissioned from Dunbar as part of an effort to secure a certain royal wedding engagement. Still, Walton seems to adopt the poet's sentiments without reservation and his work is thoroughly exhilarating.

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