London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good day to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Halloween! October 31st, 2025. And here it is, your daily London fix.
Doorbell rings. Door answered. Trick or Treat.
Just for a change, howzabout a tricky treat. Here we go. You ready?
Some mothers do have ’em.
And some dates do too.
October 31st.
What is it about this date?
It’s got a flair for the dramatic.
A taste for the uncanny.
The calendar equivalent of a thunderclap followed by a grin.
Take 1517. October 31st, 1517. Halloween.
A monk.
A hammer.
A church door in Wittenberg.
Martin Luther nails up his ninety-five theses and rattles the foundations of Europe.
That thud of iron on oak echoes across centuries.
No pumpkins. No ghosts.
Just revolution in the making.
Then 1940. Halloween, 1940.
The Battle of Britain ends on October 31st.
Trick or treat? Those tricky Brits and their radar and whatnot.
No treat for the Luftwaffe.
After months of dogfights, the skies are finally clear.
The monsters are gone. The island still stands.
A night of masks and fear turned into a night of survival.
1984. Halloween, 1984.
Indira Gandhi assassinated by her own bodyguards.
A nation shudders.
And one more for the road. ON Halloween in 1926 – Harry Houdini – the great escape artist – takes his final bow.
The man who could wriggle out of anything meets the one lock he can’t pick.
He’d promised to send a message from beyond if he could.
For years afterwards, séance circles waited in the dark, listening.
The world’s most famous skeptic dying on the night when the veil is thinnest.
So yes, some dates do have ’em.
And October 31st seems to collect them.
But then, that’s Halloween for you.
It’s all about thresholds.
Moments between. Edges of things.
Its name sounds harmless enough – All Hallows’ Eve –
the evening before All Saints’ Day.
“Hallow” meaning holy.
“Eve” meaning evening.
Polite. Respectable.
But underneath that church Latin hums something older, wilder.
Long before saints or sermons there was Samhain.
The Celtic turning of the year.
Summer to winter. Light to dark.
The harvest in. The fires lit.
Animals brought home from the fields.
But Samhain wasn’t just about farming.
It was about the unseen.
This was the night when the veil between worlds grew thin.
The dead could walk abroad.
The living might glimpse what lay beyond.
So people dressed up – to fool the spirits.
They wore masks, smeared ash on their faces, lit great bonfires.
They left food out, lanterns in the window –
a polite way of saying, “You can pass through, but don’t linger.”
Then came Christianity, calendar in hand, ready to tidy things up.
All Saints’ Day on the first of November.
All Souls’ Day on the second.
And the night before – the hallowed eve – became Halloween.
But you can’t quite tame the wild.
You can bless it, but it still smells of woodsmoke
In medieval Britain and Ireland they went “souling.”
Children and the poor knocking on doors, offering prayers for the dead
in exchange for small round cakes – soul cakes.
That was the original trick or treat.
The costumes weren’t superheroes or skeletons –
they were disguises to keep the ghosts guessing.
And when the Irish and Scots carried Halloween across the Atlantic,
America took one look and said, “We can work with this.”
Out went the turnip lanterns – hard as cannonballs, miserable things to carve.
In came the glorious orange pumpkin.
Perfectly hollow, perfectly spooky.
The bonfires became porch lights,
the soul cakes became candy bars,
and a night of superstition became the world’s biggest fancy-dress party.
By the 1950s Halloween had its own look –
plastic masks, black cats, grinning pumpkins, ghost stories.
A pagan whisper reimagined in neon and sugar.
But wherever you find it – a Cornish village, a Chicago suburb, a Tokyo bar with fake cobwebs –
it keeps that sense of wonder.
Because Halloween isn’t really about horror.
It’s about permission.
To play with fear.
To laugh in the dark.
For one night we all agree to be frightened.
Safely.
Happily.
We flirt with the dark, knowing it can’t actually reach us.
Ghost stories, haunted houses, horror films –
they’re all our way of saying,
“See? We can face it, and still laugh.”
And it isn’t just an Anglo thing.
In Mexico, Día de los Muertos – the Day of the Dead –
turns mourning into a fiesta.
Altars piled with marigolds, sugar skulls, tequila, and song.
Families picnicking in cemeteries, welcoming their ancestors home.
In the Philippines, Pangangaluluwa – children going door to door
singing for souls in purgatory,
a haunting echo of medieval souling.
In Austria, bread and water left out for wandering spirits.
In Japan, Obon – lanterns set afloat on rivers,
guiding ancestral souls home through the dark.
Different continents, same heartbeat.
The living and the dead, face to face, just for a moment.
And maybe that’s why October 31st keeps attracting the big moments –
Luther and his hammer, the end of the Blitz, Houdini’s curtain call.
Halloween is about thresholds,
and thresholds are where the action happens.
Where the old world ends and the new one begins.
Every great story starts there.
(Slow now. Almost a whisper.)
So what is it about this date?
Maybe it’s that the world feels slightly thinner on this night.
The air sharper. The shadows more alive.
You can almost hear time creak on its hinge.
(Softly, final rhythm.)
You light the candle.
You open the door.
And for one enchanted evening,
the ordinary world steps aside to let the extraordinary through.
Because some dates do have ’em.
And none more than this one.
October 31st.
The day when history, mystery, and mischief all come out to play.
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 £25 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 Jack the 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.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.