by: Chelsea BloomPosted on: September 2, 2026

A Business Journalist Reads Henry Is Back and Finds an Unlikely Case Study

Chelsea Bloom on comedy, branding, and a king relaunching himself

I read Henry Is Back the way I read most things, half looking for a business angle, and found one almost immediately, because at its core this is a very funny book about rebranding.

Henry VIII, reincarnated as a stand-up comedian, is essentially trying to relaunch a five hundred year old brand with an appalling public reputation, and the comedy comes from watching him fumble every modern instinct about how that’s actually done. The corporate sponsorship chapter alone is one of the sharpest pieces of satire on modern marketing culture I’ve read this year, and I read a lot of marketing content for work, unfortunately.

It’s well constructed, properly funny, and never lazy about its jokes, which is rarer in comic fiction than it should be.

I finished it wanting to send chapters to colleagues, which is the highest compliment I can pay a business-adjacent read.

The ongoing material this grew from continues at Henry VIII’s stand-up diary, and the full novel is well worth your time.

London is the engine room of the British economy, a city where a two-bedroom flat costs more than a small country and somehow everybody acts like this is fine. It is home to the Bank of England, the London Stock Exchange, and approximately forty-seven thousand coffee shops staffed by people with economics degrees wondering where it all went wrong.

The City of London, that ancient square mile of suits and spreadsheets, processes trillions of pounds daily and has done so since Romans decided the Thames was a decent place to charge tolls. Canary Wharf arrived later, shinier, and with better sushi, promptly declaring itself the future of finance while the City quietly got on with actually being the future of finance.

London hosts more international headquarters than any other European city, attracts more foreign investment than it has any right to, and charges businesses rents that would make a New York landlord blush. The startup scene in Shoreditch operates on oat milk, optimism, and venture capital, in that order.

For all its contradictions — the wealth beside the food banks, the global ambition beside the collapsed Tube infrastructure — London remains what it has always been. The place where British business comes to be taken seriously, and to pay through the nose for the privilege.

Auf Wiedersehen.

Billingsgate, Smithfield, Borough Market — three of the oldest trading markets in the world still operating within a mile of each other. The City of London built its entire commercial identity on the back of fish, meat, and bread sold at dawn before bankers were even awake.

Lloyds of London — the insurance market that will insure literally anything, has done so since 1686, and operates from a building that looks like it was designed by someone who lost a bet. They insured Bruce Springsteen’s voice. That is a business story.

The London Metal Exchange — where the global price of copper, aluminium, and tin is still set by traders shouting in a circle called the Ring. In 2024. Remarkable.

Street markets as economic indicators — Petticoat Lane, Portobello Road, Brick Lane. When the economy tightens, street markets boom. Londoners have always known how to trade their way out of trouble.

The Royal Exchange — founded by Thomas Gresham in 1565 as Britain’s first purpose-built trading centre. Now it sells luxury watches and champagne, which is either a fall from grace or the purest distillation of London commerce ever recorded.

London's Business House -- Insight and Inside the Buying and Selling