Pumpkins and Skeletons: Photos of Halloween in London

As part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, I recently reached a small milestone, as the last set I uploaded, “The Open-Air Street Artists of Ashby Mews, Brockley,” was the 50th set I have uploaded since I began this project in May.

Those 50 sets contain my first 1,001 photos, and although it will take tens of thousands of photos to try and capture in any meaningful sense London’s streets and buildings, its houses, shops and offices, its parks and rivers, its skies and its forgotten places, and the movements of the people who bring these places to life or are crushed or belittled by them, in all 32 boroughs and the City of London, I have another 213 sets that I have photographed over the last three and a half months, but haven’t yet had the time to upload, containing over 4,500 more photos from the trips I have been making on an almost daily basis, so I do feel that I am making some meaningful progress.

For this 51st set, I decided, topically, to upload a handful of Halloween-related photos taken over the last few weeks — some from shops in Brockley, in south east London, where I live; some from a visit to Covent Garden with my family; and others from a visit last week to North End Road in Fulham, the first of what will eventually be many trips to cover west London, which is the most difficult area of London for me to reach from the south east. The set is completed with a few photos from Halloween itself, as celebrated in south east London.

I hope you enjoy these snapshots of the annual Halloween ritual, of the marvellous seasonal blooms of pumpkins and squashes, and, in one instance, of the flurry of firework selling that precedes Bonfire Night, traditionally held on November 5 to commemorate the killing of Guy Fawkes, but now stripped of its anti-Papist associations, for the most part, and held on the nearest Saturday before the 5th.

I’ll be on Blackheath with friends and family on Saturday evening, for the annual — and always impressive — firework display arranged by Lewisham Council (which was formerly run in conjunction with Greenwich Council as well, until they rather disgracefully decided to stop providing any funding).

As for Halloween, I hope yours was as much fun as mine. My son and a friend of his went trick-or-treating in our neighbourhood, as seen in the last photo in the set, as did numerous other local children, and we then had a delicious meal with friends after our cauldron of sweets was emptied by the ravenous hordes. I can’t say that I entirely approve of trick-or-treat, which was imported wholesale from the US sometime on the 1980s, but I’ve always loved the ghoulish paraphernalia, and, in a deeper sense, of course, Halloween and the Catholic Day of the Dead, celebrated with such aplomb in Mexico, find an ancient pagan echo in Samhain, one of the cross-quarters of the Celtic year, when the animals that could not be kept over winter were slaughtered, and a great feast held.

Between 1996 and 2005, when I travelled extensively in Britain in search of ancient sacred monuments, and chronicled the beliefs of the various counter-cultural groups who had become attached, in particular, to Stonehenge and Avebury in Wiltshire, I met many people — Druids, Wiccans and various other land-reforming mavericks and iconoclasts — who were drawn to the wheel of the ancient year, and I also grew to appreciate the power of a calendar founded in the movements of the sun, and the rhythms of nature. It is a part of myself that, in some ways, I regret neglecting, as my life has settled into something much more urban and technological.

My relentless bike rides — and my ongoing attempt to map London, in images, and also internally, through my camera and through first-hand experience — may just be a way of trying to reclaim something of that fascination with nature and place that drove me in those years of exploring ancient sacred places.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.