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, October 16th, 2025.
And for your daily London fix today – let’s do an anniversary. Back we go, 38 years. It’s October 16th, 1987. What a day.
The day Londoners woke up to chaos.
Proper, biblical chaos. Roofs gone, trees down, cars squashed, trains not running, phones dead. It looked like something out of a war film.
The night before? Nothing. Calm. Ordinary. And then – about 3 o’clock in the morning – all hell broke loose. The worst storm in three centuries slammed into London.
Wind howling down the chimneys. Garden fences flying. Rubbish bins doing interpretive dances in the street. And it wasn’t just local, by three in the morning much of southeast England was under siege from a storm no one had been warned about.
Ah yes. The Warning That Wasn’t.
We all know the line. Michael Fish, BBC weatherman, all cheerful and reassuring in his beige suit:
“Earlier on today, a woman rang the BBC and said she’d heard there was a hurricane on the way. Well, if you’re watching – don’t worry. There isn’t.”
Cut to a few hours later – roofs in Kingston flying off like playing cards. Not a hurricane, technically, but try telling that to anyone who was there.
Fish took the fall, poor man, but truth be told, the forecast models missed it entirely. There was no satellite data over the Bay of Biscay where the storm brewed. By the time the Met Office realised how fast it was deepening, it was already screaming across the Channel.
Come the small hours of October 16th, The Great Storm, as it came to be known, hit land. Stormed ashore. Crashed into Sussex and Kent and Essex and then rolled straight into London.
The capital copped a solid battering.
Gusts of nearly 100 miles an hour barrelled through London like an express train.
Streetlights flickered, trees snapped like matchsticks, buses lay stranded at odd angles.
In Kew Gardens alone, hundreds of mature trees went down. Hyde Park lost whole avenues of its great plane trees – those lovely leafy sentinels that had watched over London for a century or more. Richmond Park looked as if a giant had walked through it, dragging a stick.
Fifteen million trees across the country – gone. Gone in a few hours in one night. Last night 38 years ago. And it wasn’t just the parks. Roofs ripped from terraced houses. Scaffolding twisted like paper clips. Power lines down everywhere – half the city in darkness.
Come morning, London woke up to silence – that weird, eerie quiet after the chaos. No trains. Buses off. People walking miles to work through streets littered with branches and broken glass.
It was one of those days when you remember exactly where you were. Everyone’s got their own version: “I thought it was burglars on the roof.” “I saw a chimney fly past my window.” “The dog refused to go out and frankly I didn’t blame him.”
The Capital Shaken
For a city that thinks it’s seen everything, London looked properly rattled.
The Underground struggled. Roads were blocked for days. Even the BBC – the mighty BBC! – had power outages at its studios. The Evening Standard didn’t make it to the newsstands.
The damage bill? About two billion pounds, and that was in 1987 money. Adjust that for inflation and it’s a jaw-dropper.
Eighteen people across the country lost their lives – several in London. A reminder that even in our comfortable modern capital, we’re only ever a few strong gusts away from nature taking charge.
Aftermath and Legacy
The clean-up was immense. London’s parks looked bald. Tree surgeons worked round the clock for weeks. Some streets were transformed completely – new lines of sight opened up where trees had once stood.
Kew Gardens treated it like a botanical experiment. They studied which species survived, which didn’t, and how the woodlands regrew naturally. Out of destruction came insight.
And at the Met Office – soul-searching. Big changes followed. New computer models. Better satellite coverage. More cautious public warnings. The “Michael Fish moment” became the cautionary tale: never underestimate a British storm.
Because let’s face it – Britain doesn’t do hurricanes. That’s the Caribbean’s department. But this? This was a wake-up call. We weren’t immune.
A Memory That Lingers
Thirty-eight years on, people still talk about that night. The storm that blew the roof off the 1980s. The night the south of England got a taste of the tropics – and didn’t like it one bit.
London’s changed, of course. We’ve had storms since. But nothing quite like that. Nothing that caught us so completely off guard.
If you stand in Kew or Hampstead Heath today, some of the great trees that replaced the fallen ones are now tall again. But there’s a subtle difference in the skyline – gaps where giants once stood. A reminder of that October night when the city woke up humbled.
So yes – guardedly wishing you a happy birthday, Great Storm of 1987. You arrived uninvited, wrecked half the southeast, and gave us the most famous forecast in British history.
And, for one unforgettable night, you made London hold its breath.
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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 £20 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 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.