Companies House files William Hanson’s trade under “other education not elsewhere classified”, a category roomy enough to hold a manners company, a podcast called Help I Sexted My Boss and a TIME100 Creators citation.
The common assumption about the British man on TikTok who explains when to stand and how much scent to wear is that he arrived with the app. William Hanson arrived some years before it. He is director of The English Manner, a London training company that says it has taught etiquette since 2001. He has said the interest began in childhood, when his late grandmother gave him an etiquette book and he read the whole thing. The videos are where most people meet him. The company behind them is older, quieter and on the public register like any other.
What is known about him comes from three places, and they deserve different degrees of trust. TIME profiled him in July 2026. Companies House holds his company’s paperwork. His own website supplies the rest: the records, the reach and the grander clients, all of it his account of himself.
Who is William Hanson?
He is a British etiquette coach, author and podcaster, and since July 2026 he has had the most modern credential going. TIME named him to its 2026 TIME100 Creators list. Rachel Brodsky’s profile for the magazine called him “something of a millennial Emily Post” and gave his age as 36.
His website calls The English Manner his “day job”, which is a charming way to describe the thing that pays for the hobby, or possibly the other way round. The same site says he holds two Guinness World Records for etiquette, set in 2012 and 2019. It does not say what for, which suits a man in his line of work. A good host never makes the guests ask.
What does William Hanson actually teach?
He teaches the small decisions that people fear getting wrong, delivered as if there were never any doubt. TIME’s chosen example was cologne: two pumps for day, three for night. That is the whole method in miniature. A rule is offered, a number is attached, and the viewer leaves feeling slightly more competent than before.
The company’s brief is wider than cologne. By its own account, The English Manner runs training, seminars and presentations worldwide for corporations, schools, universities and individual clients. His publisher’s author biography adds VIP households and multinational companies. The live show takes the grandest line of all: according to the blurb on his TikTok profile, it is on a mission to counter toxic masculinity and “re-civilise the nation”.
The idea underneath it all is old-fashioned and rather sound. Etiquette is the set of conventions, and manners are what you do with them when someone else is in the room. Hanson has made the case in interviews that a person cannot really be well-mannered without knowing something about etiquette. You may decide to break a convention, and sometimes you should, but you have to know it exists before breaking it counts as a choice.
Is etiquette just snobbery with better cutlery?
This is the question every etiquette coach is asked, usually by someone holding their fork correctly. The suspicion is understandable. For most of its history the rulebook served as a fence, and people inside it saw little reason to hand out copies.
Hanson’s business depends on handing out copies. Three million strangers on TikTok cannot all be invited to the same dinner, so the rules have to work for anyone who learns them. That changes the tone. A rule explained to everyone becomes a courtesy rather than a password.
None of this makes him a revolutionary. The content is recognisably traditional, and the cologne ration would not alarm anyone’s grandmother. He has changed who gets told the rules, and how early.
What is The English Manner, and did he found it?
He did not found it. The firm’s own history begins in 2001, and it marks 25 years in 2026, describing itself on its homepage as the UK’s most established etiquette and training institute. That is a description the company wrote about itself, as most such descriptions are.
The current company, according to Companies House, was incorporated on 25 October 2019 under the name East-West Etiquette Limited and became The English Manner Limited on 19 November that year. Another company held the English Manner name from 2015 until that same November and now carries the East-West Etiquette name. The two simply traded places.
Its registered office is on Regent Street, which is about as respectable an address as a manners business could want. Both his website and the company describe Hanson as director. The company is active and files its accounts on time: its filing history shows the accounts for the year to 31 October 2024 lodged in June 2025.
There is a pleasing symmetry in a protocol company keeping its own paperwork in order. It would be awkward otherwise.
How many people follow William Hanson in 2026?
By TIME’s count in July 2026, he had 3.9 million followers on Instagram and another 3.1 million on TikTok, where he posts as @williamhansonetiquette. He also has a large following on Facebook. His website claims his tips reach more than nine million users across the three platforms. That is a reach claim, which is a different animal from a head count, and it is his own.
His X account, by contrast, has gone quiet. The short-video platforms suit what he does far better. An etiquette lesson works best when you can see the hand position, the raised eyebrow and the pause before a correction, and none of that fits in a line of text.
What books and podcasts has he made?
His most successful book is Just Good Manners, published in the UK in September 2024 by Century, a Penguin Random House imprint. According to his website, it became an instant Sunday Times bestseller. His earlier titles include The Bluffer’s Guide to Etiquette, Entertaining (2018) and Protocol To Manage Relationships Today (2020). There is also Help I S\xted My Boss (2023), which his site says was another Sunday Times* bestseller.
That book grew out of the podcast of the same name, which he co-hosts with Jordan North. TIME describes North as a radio personality, and his website calls the show a twice-weekly comedy podcast. It is an advice show, broadly, in which a man who knows the correct way to address an ambassador hears problems that no ambassador has ever had.
The second podcast is the better dinner-party fact. In 2021 he launched Keeping Up Appearances: The Luxury Podcast, which spent five series, concluding in June 2024, working through every episode of the BBC sitcom. It returned in early 2025 as The Luxury Podcast, now co-hosted with Jonathan Vernon-Smith. Few people have read a sitcom that closely for etiquette lessons. Fewer still have turned the exercise into five series.
Where should a newcomer start with his rules?
The book is the obvious place, and the most complete. Just Good Manners came out in paperback in August 2025 at £10.99, and it sets out at length what the videos can only touch on in a minute. The videos are fine for the cologne and the cutlery. The book is for the questions that arrive at nine o’clock on a Friday with a guest list attached.
Its price makes it the cheapest seat in a classroom whose other pupils, by the company’s own account, include royal and diplomatic households.
