Walton composed this work from 1931 to 1935. Sir Hamilton Harty conducted movements 1-3 on December 3, 1934, and the completed work on November 6, 1935.

If Façade gained Walton notoriety at 22, and Belshazzar won him respectable acclaim at 29, Symphony No. 1 sealed his fame at age 33. Urged by Sir Hamilton Harty (who was then conductor of the Hallé Orchestra at Manchester), he began the symphony in 1931 and by the end of the next year had movements 1 and 2 in short score. During this time, however, a Swiss liaison with Imma von Doernberg, daughter of a prince and princess, was souring, and she left him. Between the "malicious" scherzo (Presto con malizia) and the lyrically "melancholy" slow movement that follows (Andante con malinconia, misspelled "malincolia" in Walton's score), he met Viscountess Alice Wimborne who, although married at the time, became his lover until her death in 1948.

The symphony still had only three movements in 1934, which Harty insisted on premiering with his newly acquired London Symphony. Despite the composer's misgivings, they had a great public and critical success, and were in fact given two more performances; these resolved him to finish the work. He had planned in his head how most of the finale would go, but hung himself up partway in. When he asked his friend and colleague Constant Lambert how to proceed, the answer was: Write a fugue. To Walton's plaint, "But I don't know how to write one," Lambert replied, "There are a couple of pages on the subject in Grove's Dictionary." The result was a dam-breaking fugue three minutes into the movement before the pace switched from Brioso ed ardentemente (spiritedly, ardently) to Vivacissimo, leading to a return of the Maestoso materials that began it. The finale provided a powerful culmination of this implicit tribute to Sibelius. When the work was new, much was made of "jazz influences," especially in the first two movements. But the music's rhythmic energy is characteristically Waltonian, just as motivic themes and their organic growth from tiny cells echo Sibelius. The opening movement (Allegro assai)—after a horn call that simultaneously suggests Strauss' Zarathustra and one of Holst's Planets—builds from a three-note motif played by the oboe to a sonata structure of impressive size and contrapuntal complexity, in which B flat major succeeds B flat minor. The scherzo is chiefly (though not exclusively) in E minor as it hurtles forward in 3/4 time, one beat to the bar, with a false ending followed by five silent bars, then a cursory codetta. This is Walton's "Imma" movement, just as the ensuing slow movement reflects an emotional void, and grows thematically out of a single C sharp that haunts its duration. The finale finds Walton's sanguinity restored with its march-like Maestoso. Throughout the work he achieved signature sonorities with a standard Brahms orchestra to which only two percussionists and a second timpanist in the finale were added.

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