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 Tuesday, September 23rd, 2025.
Usual start. Quick stop at the London Calling Book Club Corner. In the Chair today, the Keanu Reeves – that’s what we call him – the Keanu Reeves of London Walks guide. Gifted young actor Andy Hallett. Here’s what Andy’s reading.
“The book I have on the go at the moment is Dan Jones’ final book in the Essex Dogs Trilogy, ‘Lion Hearts‘.
Following the battle of Crecy in 1346 and the Siege of Calais 1346-47 under the rule of Edward III in the previous action packed books, the remaining members of the crew are back in England following ‘The Death’, that’s the plague of 1348. Each chapter begins with a 14th Century source quotation. It’s brutal, it’s action packed, it’s medieval slaughter, it’s unputdownable and perhaps the best of the trilogy. Edward III makes an appearance on my Disastrous London Walk, as does Charterhouse the setting for a 14th Century mass emergency plague pit, where perhaps 30,000 victims are buried beneath our feet.”
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Moving on. Anniversary piece today. September 23rd, 1939 – the day eternity began for Sigmund Freud. His last hours in Hampstead.
Or to spell that out. If you go to Freud’s House tomorrow morning – and I recommend you do, before our Hampstead Walk in the afternoon – you should know this: it won’t be an ordinary museum visit. It will be Day One after the anniversary of Freud’s death, 23 September 1939. And that matters. Because it means that, exactly eighty-six years ago, his lifeless body was still lying in that house. In the study. On the special invalid couch that had replaced his bed. The room would have been quiet, the garden outside just beginning to turn with autumn, the news on the radio full of troop movements and blackout orders.
And the mood of that house – that morning – is exactly what Emily Dickinson catches in four lines that are so uncanny you can almost hear them whispering through Maresfield Gardens:
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –
Between the heaves of storm. Could there be a better phrase for September 1939? London had been at war with Germany for three weeks. The air-raid trenches were dug, the barrage balloons were up, the city was blacked out at night, but the Blitz hadn’t started yet. The storm hadn’t broken. Hampstead was waiting, like the rest of London, for the bombs. Inside No. 20 Maresfield Gardens, the Freud family was waiting too – for the undertakers.
Freud’s end was not accidental, and it was not prolonged. It was deliberate. Humane. Planned. He had been living with cancer of the jaw for sixteen years – twenty-odd operations, endless pain, a jaw prosthesis that disfigured and tormented him. He had told his physician, Max Schur, years earlier: “When the time comes, you will not forsake me.” In September 1939, the time came. Schur administered a large dose of morphine on the 21st of September, enough to put Freud into deep sleep. The next day he gave another dose. Freud never woke up. This was euthanasia before the word was common, an act of mercy, and a doctor keeping a promise.
Anna Freud, his daughter, was there. So was Paula Fichtl, the housekeeper, moving silently about the rooms. And Jofi the chow dog lay near the couch, keeping watch. Martha, Freud’s wife, was too frail to be there constantly, but came in for short visits. The house would have been hushed, heavy with waiting. Dickinson’s “treading, treading” from another poem – I felt a Funeral, in my Brain – would fit here too.
When Freud died in the early hours of September 23rd, it was Schur who was present, and Anna. There is something astonishing about the understatement of Freud’s last words: “My dear Schur, you certainly remember our first talk. You promised me then not to forsake me when my time comes. Now it is nothing but torture, and it makes no sense any more.” And Schur, true to his word, did not forsake him.
Then came the practicalities. And how’s this for a show-stopping London detail: the undertakers were Harrods – yes, that Harrods. Harrods of Knightsbridge. In those days they ran an in-house funeral service right out of the store.
It’s a pleasing London touch – a London touch that almost teases us out of thought – the great man’s body taken away by the same firm that could have sold you a hamper of champagne and foie gras.
One likes to imagine the great man’s coffin being booked along with the hampers and champagne. Sadly, Harrods doesn’t seem to do funerals anymore – though if they did, you can bet it would come with monogrammed black ribbons.”
And then there’s this thought: Freud’s last rides across London were from Hampstead to Knightsbridge. And then from Knightsbridge to Golders Green.
Freud’s cremation was three days later, on 26 September 1939, at Golders Green Crematorium. It was a small wartime gathering: Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, Princess Marie Bonaparte. Gas masks carried under arms, blackout curtains still in place. Ernest Jones gave a eulogy: “He was a man possessed of a rare moral courage.” On the coffin stood a Greek urn from Freud’s own collection, chosen to hold his ashes. That urn is still there today in Golders Green, his name inscribed beside Martha’s, a pilgrimage stop for psychoanalysts and Freud-curious walkers alike.
And life went on. Anna Freud, grief-stricken but unstoppable, threw herself almost immediately into war work, running nurseries for bombed-out children. The house survived the Blitz and became a centre for child psychology. Today it is the Freud Museum, and you can walk into the study and stand where the invalid couch stood – where Freud slept, where he asked for release, where he died.
So if you visit tomorrow, don’t treat it like just another museum stop. It’s a place of occasion. Day One after the anniversary. Imagine the silence, the stillness in the room. Think of Dickinson’s “Stillness in the Air – between the Heaves of Storm.” Think of London that September morning, hushed and tense. And remember that in that very room, in that very house, Freud’s long pain came to an end – with morphine, with courage, with family nearby – and the story of psychoanalysis in London truly began.
Psychoanalysis. That word. How hauntingly appropriate it is on this occasion. The first part of the word comes from the Greek word psyche, which meant soul, spirit, breath or life. And the second part of the word – analysis. It’s another ancient Greek word. It means to release. And there it is, it was this day, 84 years ago, that Sigmund Freud’s spirit, his soul, was released.
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 familiarand the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note… come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.