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Story time. History time.
Top of the morning to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Tuesday, September 30th, 2025.
Right then – September 30th. One of those dates that history seems to underline in red ink. Twice over. Two moments, eight years apart, that stand like bookends. The first: 1938, Neville Chamberlain waving his piece of paper outside Number 10, promising “peace for our time.” The second: 1946, the judges at Nuremberg beginning to read the verdicts on the Nazi leaders — judgement day for the worst crimes the modern world had ever seen.
Together they make September 30th a kind of moral crossroads: hope on one hand, reckoning on the other.
1938: The Man with the Umbrella
So. London, September 30, 1938. Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, has just flown back from Munich. First-class bit of theatre right there – the first Prime Minister to fly to a summit abroad. He’s been negotiating with Hitler, Mussolini, and the French. The issue on the table? Czechoslovakia. Hitler wanted the Sudetenland – a slice of Czechoslovakia where many spoke German. He threatened war to get it.
Chamberlain, desperate to avoid another bloodbath like the First World War, struck a deal. The Sudetenland would go to Germany. Hitler signed a piece of paper promising no more demands. Chamberlain clutched it like a talisman.
He arrives back at Heston Aerodrome, crowd cheering, and then to Downing Street, where he gives the famous line: “I believe it is peace for our time.”
Peace for our time. It sounded so good. Britain erupted in relief. Crowds waved, strangers hugged, church bells pealed. For a brief, intoxicating moment, war was off the table.
But it was an illusion. Hitler, of course, had no intention of stopping. Within six months he had gobbled up the rest of Czechoslovakia. Less than a year later, he invaded Poland.
Today, we hear Chamberlain’s phrase as bitterly ironic. Peace for our time – a promise broken almost before the ink dried.
But – here’s the twist. At the time, most people were grateful. No one wanted war. The trenches of 1914–18 were still an open wound. Chamberlain bought a year. A year in which Britain rearmed, built radar, expanded the RAF. Without that year, the Battle of Britain in 1940 might have gone very differently indeed.
So – appeasement. A dirty word now, but in 1938, the country sighed with relief.
1946: The Reckoning
Fast forward. Same date. Eight years on. September 30, 1946. Different stage, different players. Nuremberg, Germany.
The war has been fought. Six years of carnage, 50 million dead, the Holocaust revealed in all its horror. Now the victors – the Allies – are trying something unprecedented. Not just punishing a defeated enemy, but putting its leaders on trial in a court of law. Crimes against peace. Crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg Trials.
The main trial began in November 1945. Twenty-two top Nazis in the dock: Göring, Hess, Ribbentrop, Keitel – the big beasts. Over 200 witnesses. Miles of film and documents. The world’s first war crimes tribunal.
And on September 30, 1946, the judges began to read the verdicts. One by one. They took two days to get through them all. Eleven sentenced to death, including Göring (though he cheated the hangman with a cyanide capsule). Others got long prison terms. Three were acquitted.
For the first time in history, leaders of a state were held personally accountable in a court for launching aggressive war, for systematic murder, for crimes against humanity. It set a precedent – the idea that “just following orders” is no defence, that individuals have responsibility. It’s where the phrase Nuremberg principles comes from.
The Marriage of the Two Dates
Now, put those two September 30ths side by side. What a contrast.
In 1938, words of reassurance: peace for our time. In 1946, words of judgement: guilty, guilty, guilty.
One man with a piece of paper. Eight years later, men in the dock.
One moment of desperate hope. The other, a grim reckoning.
And yet – they belong together. Because without the first, the second doesn’t make sense. Chamberlain’s appeasement was an attempt to stave off the abyss. It failed, but it bought time. And when the abyss came, when Hitler unleashed his war, the world responded not just with armies but with a determination that such crimes should not go unpunished.
The paper waved in 1938 was flimsy, empty. The judgements read in 1946 were heavy, indelible.
Together, they trace the arc of the Second World War — from the hope of avoiding it, to the moral response after it.
The Poignancy of September 30
It’s tempting to sneer at Chamberlain. To see him as the naïve man with the umbrella, duped by Hitler. But remember the mood of the time: millions praying not to send another generation to the slaughter. He embodied that longing.
And it’s tempting to see Nuremberg as inevitable, as if the Allies had no choice. But in truth, it was revolutionary. Victors in history usually just punish, or execute, or impose treaties. Here they built a courtroom. They set down a record, in evidence and testimony, of the crimes. They made law out of vengeance.
So September 30 is a day of contrasts: relief and sorrow, illusion and clarity, promise and justice. One date shows us how fragile peace can be. The other shows us how necessary accountability is.
A Walk Through Time
Imagine standing on Downing Street in 1938, swept up in the cheers, the hope, the sense that the world had stepped back from the brink. Then imagine, eight years later, standing in that Nuremberg courtroom, hearing the cold, steady words of the verdicts, realising that the brink had been crossed, and humanity itself had looked into the abyss.
September 30 is the bridge between those two visions: the best hopes of mankind, and the worst revelations of what mankind can do.
And perhaps that’s why the date is so powerful. It’s not just about Hitler or Chamberlain or Göring. It’s about us – the longing for peace, the need for justice. Two moments, etched into one day, reminding us that history has a long memory.
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, , the former Editor (and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And , 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.