🍂 What to do in London this October

A sense of relief has descended on London like a gentle breeze as we (hopefully) say goodbye to the year’s intense sequence of heatwaves.

Autumn has always been a great time to visit the city. The parks are beautiful as their trees, plants and flowers shed the layers of another year gone by, and the temperatures are still pleasant enough to spend the day outside. But after the summer we’ve just had, that feels even more true this year!

Fortunately, October gives us plenty of reasons to get out and enjoy it. There are festivals, films, exhibitions and gigs across the city, some suitably strange things happening in the run-up to Halloween — and, for the first time, a little corner of this newsletter devoted entirely to things you can do for free.

And speaking of Halloween, this year we’re getting involved ourselves. On the evenings of 30 and 31 October, Walkative London will be running two limited-edition Halloween tours, exploring some of the ghost stories, grisly true history and stranger legends lurking in London’s past. More on those below. 👻

WHAT'S ON:

🎨 Bloomsbury Festival — 1–31 October

Bloomsbury Festival celebrates its 20th anniversary this year with more than 150 arts, culture and science events taking place across one of London’s most fascinating neighbourhoods.

Expect music, performances, exhibitions, talks, walks and workshops spread across more than 40 venues — with plenty of the programme completely free. If you’ve only ever visited Bloomsbury for the British Museum, October is a good excuse to explore a little further.

🇯🇵 Japan Matsuri — 4 October

For one day, Trafalgar Square becomes a celebration of Japanese culture as Japan Matsuri returns from 10am–8pm.

There’ll be traditional and contemporary music and dance, taiko drumming, martial arts, food and drink stalls, and plenty more. Best of all, entry is completely free.

🍺 Oktoberfest at Albert’s Schloss — until 25 October

You don’t have to make it to Munich to get a taste of Oktoberfest.

Albert’s Schloss in Soho is one of the few places outside Munich where you can work your way through beers from all six of the city’s official Oktoberfest breweries, alongside live oompah and brass bands, Bavarian food and the occasional questionable decision involving a very large stein.

🎬 BFI London Film Festival — 7–18 October

The BFI London Film Festival turns 70 this year, and is celebrating with a suitably enormous programme: 251 films, shorts, series and immersive works from 88 countries.

Screenings take place at BFI Southbank, the Royal Festival Hall and cinemas across central London, making this one of the best times of the year to be a film lover in the city.

🖼️ Frieze London — 14–18 October

For five days in October, Regent’s Park becomes one of the centres of the international art world as Frieze London and Frieze Masters return.

Nearly 300 galleries from around the world are represented across the two fairs, spanning everything from emerging contemporary artists to thousands of years of art history. And if the ticket price is a little steep, the accompanying Frieze Sculpture exhibition in Regent’s Park is free and runs throughout October.

📚 London Literature Festival — 20 October–1 November

The Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival returns for its 19th edition, and this year it has a rather unexpected curator: Dua Lipa.

The singer and founder of the Service95 Book Club has helped put together a programme of established and emerging writers, conversations and events across the Southbank Centre.

🚇 Ghosts of the Underground — 21 October–1 November

For Halloween, London Transport Museum is opening up a previously unseen part of the vast Second World War shelter beneath Clapham South.

The atmospheric tour combines stories of Londoners sheltering from the Blitz with eerie first-hand accounts from Underground staff and some of the ghost stories and legends that have haunted the network for generations.

🎵 LIVE MUSIC

💿 Digitalism — EartH, 10 October

German electronic duo Digitalism come to EartH in Dalston this month. Their mixture of indie, house and electro has been filling dancefloors since the mid-2000s, and EartH’s atmospheric old cinema makes a suitably unusual place to see them.

🪕 Jake Xerxes Fussell + Naima Bock — Union Chapel, 14 October

American folk musician Jake Xerxes Fussell plays the beautiful Union Chapel in Islington, joined by London-based singer-songwriter Naima Bock.

Even before anyone plays a note, Union Chapel is worth seeing: a working Victorian Gothic church that doubles as one of London’s most atmospheric music venues.

🎷 Mingus Big Band — Ronnie Scott’s, 19–24 October

The 14-piece Mingus Big Band comes to one of London’s most famous jazz clubs for six nights celebrating the music of the great bassist and composer Charles Mingus.

Formed in 1991 by Sue Mingus, the band has spent more than three decades keeping his music alive — and Ronnie Scott’s in Soho is about as appropriate a London setting for it as you could ask for.

🇰🇷 K-Music Festival — throughout October

If your idea of Korean music begins and ends with K-pop, K-Music Festival might change that.

Running across venues including the Southbank Centre, Rich Mix and the Royal Albert Hall, the festival ranges from Korean traditional music and contemporary composition to psychedelic funk, hip-hop, jazz, post-rock and video-game soundtracks.

🆓 FREE CORNER

London can be an expensive city. So from now on, we’re going to reserve a little corner of this newsletter for temporary exhibitions and events that won’t cost you a penny.

🎨 Yinka Shonibare and Thomas Gainsborough: A Conversation — National Gallery, from 15 October

For the first time, Yinka Shonibare’s Mr and Mrs Andrews without their Heads will be displayed alongside the Gainsborough painting that inspired it.

Shonibare’s headless, brightly dressed sculptural figures transform Gainsborough’s famous portrait into a conversation about land, wealth, identity and colonialism, almost 250 years after the original was painted.

📸 American Photographs — V&A

Taking its name from Walker Evans’s landmark 1938 book American Photographs, this free display explores how photography has both documented and shaped the United States.

It draws on the V&A’s collection of American photography — one of the largest outside North America — and is completely free, with no booking required.

🏛️ The Wallace Collection at War — until 25 October

When war broke out in 1939, the Wallace Collection’s masterpieces were evacuated from London for safety, leaving the grand rooms of Hertford House strangely empty.

In 1942 those empty galleries found a new purpose, hosting exhibitions intended to promote Anglo-Soviet friendship and raise money for Clementine Churchill’s Red Cross Aid to Russia Fund. This small free display tells the rather extraordinary story of art, propaganda and diplomacy inside one of London’s great museums during the Second World War.

🎸 OUR GUIDES

When they’re not walking the streets of London, you can sometimes find our guides on stage too. This month you could check out—after doing our Halloween tour!— Ivo Ramalho playing Skalloween at Signature Brew Haggerston on 31 October with his band King Punch.

🎃 LIMITED-EDITION HALLOWEEN TOURS

For two nights only, on 30 and 31 October, we’re swapping our usual tours for something a little darker.

London has had two thousand years to accumulate its ghosts, murders, strange deaths, superstitions and stories that don’t fit quite so neatly into the history books. On these special evening walks we’ll be exploring some of the best of them, with a particular focus on ghost stories, grisly true history and the uncanny.

Expect hauntings, horrible histories and some of London’s more inexplicable stories — all told in the streets where they supposedly happened.

Places will be limited, so book ahead if you’d like to join us.

Until then, enjoy October — and enjoy being able to walk around London without melting. 🍂