London: Great Walkability, Weather Sold Separately

London is one of those cities where you can land, dump your shit in a hotel room approximately the size of an airplane lavatory, and spend the next several days walking between some of the most recognizable landmarks on Earth.

And that’s probably the best way to experience it.

Central London is ridiculously walkable. Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Westminster, the Thames, London Bridge, Tower Bridge and enough pubs to progressively make your navigation skills worse are all packed into a relatively manageable area.

The problem is that everyone else on Earth knows this too.

London is basically a giant historical theme park where the attractions happen to be real, the buildings are hundreds of years old, and nobody has figured out how to stop tourists from standing directly in the middle of the sidewalk while staring at Google Maps.

There is a lot to see here.

There are also a lot of things you’re apparently supposed to see simply because every London tourism brochure since the invention of tourism says so.

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DESTINaTION: London CITY CENTER

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FIRST, LET’S TALK ABOUT THE FUCKING WEATHER

Your opinion of London may depend almost entirely on what the sky decides to do while you’re there.

Visit on one of those spectacular late-spring or summer days when it’s warm, the sun is shining and everyone is drinking outside? London is fucking fantastic.

The parks are green. The Thames looks marginally less brown. You can walk for hours. Outdoor pubs are packed. Every photograph looks like London personally hired a tourism board to follow you around with professional lighting.

There’s just one tiny problem.

Everyone wants to visit London when London doesn’t suck.

Flights get expensive. Hotels get expensive. Crowds multiply. Suddenly you’re paying an obscene amount of money for a hotel room where opening your suitcase requires moving the furniture.

London’s high season generally runs through summer, while the cheaper months stretch across much of the colder part of the year.

Which creates one of travel’s great economic equations:

Beautiful London = expensive London.

Cheap London = meteorological depression with a side of drizzle.

I’ve found some fantastic airfare to London during the colder months.

There is usually a reason.

Airlines aren’t suddenly feeling charitable. They’re trying to convince you that spending February walking around England underneath a gray ceiling while horizontal freezing rain attacks your face is somehow a vacation.

The same problem exists across Europe. I’ve dealt with similar winter-weather bullshit photographing the Eiffel Tower in Paris, where cheaper winter travel comes with the exciting possibility that every photograph will look like it was taken through a wet sock.

So if photography, walking and actually enjoying yourself outdoors matter to you, don’t treat London’s weather as an afterthought.

It can make or break the entire trip.

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LONDON IS BASICALLY MADE FOR WALKING

The good news is that once you’re here, you don’t necessarily need some elaborate sightseeing strategy.

Put on comfortable shoes and start walking.

Central London has an absurd concentration of famous shit packed along the Thames and around Westminster. You can bounce between landmarks, neighborhoods, parks, pubs and restaurants without constantly needing transportation.

And when you’ve walked enough steps that your feet begin formally requesting asylum, there’s the Tube.

This combination makes London one of my favorite kinds of cities to explore.

You don’t really need an itinerary every minute.

Pick a general direction.

Walk.

See something interesting.

Walk toward it.

Accidentally find something else.

Stop at a pub.

Forget what you were originally walking toward.

Congratulations. You’re sightseeing.

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BIG BEN: YES, IT’S A CLOCK

Eventually you’ll end up staring at Big Ben.

Technically, everyone will immediately email me to explain that Big Ben is the bell, while the giant clock and tower are something else.

Thank you, internet.

You have saved civilization.

Whatever you want to call the giant clocky-looking thing beside Parliament, it’s undeniably one of London’s most recognizable landmarks.

And yes, you should see it.

Fortunately, seeing it requires approximately zero effort because Westminster is somewhere you’re probably going to walk through anyway.

Take your picture.

Admire the architecture.

Then continue walking.

You have successfully completed Big Ben.

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BUCKINGHAM PALACE: THE KING LIVES HERE. NEAT.

Buckingham Palace is another mandatory London tourism checkpoint.

You walk up.

There is a giant palace.

There are gates.

There are guards.

There are approximately 47 billion tourists attempting to photograph the guards.

And somewhere inside is presumably a monarch wondering why all these people are standing outside his house.

The Changing of the Guard is the big attraction, which means you can gather with an enormous crowd to watch extremely disciplined people wearing enormous fuzzy hats perform an elaborate ceremony.

It’s certainly historic.

It’s certainly British.

And if you’re already exploring Westminster and central London, it’s worth walking over.

Would I plan an entire day around it?

Absolutely fucking not.

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LONDON BRIDGE: PREPARE TO BE UNDERWHELMED

Then there’s London Bridge.

You’ve heard songs about it.

You’ve heard the name your entire life.

Surely this must be some spectacular piece of British engineering.

Nope.

It’s a bridge.

A perfectly functional, profoundly unexciting bridge doing normal bridge shit across the Thames.

Its greatest contribution to London tourism may actually be providing tourists with a convenient place to photograph the bridge they thought they were visiting.

Because the elaborate Victorian bridge with the giant towers?

That’s Tower Bridge.

And yes, they’re completely different bridges.

Tower Bridge sits about a kilometer downstream from London Bridge and was completed in 1894.

I’ve written an entire article about London’s Tower Bridge, including the apparently necessary public service announcement that Tower Bridge is not London Bridge.

If you’re only going out of your way for one of them, choose Tower Bridge.

London Bridge will survive the rejection.

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TOWER BRIDGE: THE BRIDGE YOU ACTUALLY CAME TO SEE

Tower Bridge is legitimately impressive.

It’s enormous, photogenic, unmistakably London and sufficiently ridiculous-looking that you immediately understand why everyone confuses it with the much more boring bridge upstream.

You can simply walk across it for free or visit the Tower Bridge Exhibition, where the elevated walkways give you views across the Thames and the glass floors let you look down at traffic while reconsidering whether human engineering should really be trusted this much.

If you’re lucky, you might also catch the bridge opening for river traffic.

But honestly, one of the best views of Tower Bridge is from elsewhere along the Thames.

Including, hilariously, London Bridge.

So London Bridge finally has a purpose.

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THE TOURIST TRAPS ARE PART OF THE EXPERIENCE

London isn’t some undiscovered destination where you’ll be wandering empty streets congratulating yourself for finding something Instagram hasn’t ruined yet.

This is London.

There will be tourists.

Lots of tourists.

Westminster, Buckingham Palace, Tower Bridge and the other famous attractions attract exactly the crowds you’d expect from one of the world’s most visited cities.

You’ll encounter souvenir stores selling the same Union Jack bullshit.

You’ll see open-top sightseeing buses trapped in traffic.

You’ll find restaurants whose primary culinary qualification is being located near something famous.

And you’ll witness thousands of people attempting the exact same photograph from the exact same location.

Don’t fight it.

London’s tourist bullshit is part of London.

See the famous stuff.

Take the stupid pictures.

Then keep walking.

Because the best part about London isn’t necessarily checking attractions off a list. It’s everything connecting them.

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THE HOTEL ROOM MAY REQUIRE ADVANCED GEOMETRY

London does have one additional surprise waiting for you.

Hotel rooms can be fucking tiny.

I wasn’t staying in some bargain-basement hostel when I first noticed this.

The room was perfectly nice.

There just wasn’t much actual room involved.

At six feet tall, navigating around the bed became an activity requiring strategic planning.

Open suitcase.

Lose access to bathroom.

Close suitcase.

Regain access to bathroom.

Move chair.

Open closet.

Move chair back.

Luxury.

Central London real estate isn’t cheap, and apparently every square foot has been assigned its own retirement portfolio.

The tradeoff is location.

I’d rather have a smaller room somewhere central and walk everywhere than save money on a larger room requiring a daily commute into the places I actually came to see.

You’re probably not visiting London to spend your vacation sitting in your hotel room anyway.

At least I hope not.

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THE BEST WAY TO SEE LONDON IS TO STOP TRYING SO HARD

London works best when you don’t overcomplicate it.

Stay somewhere reasonably central.

Bring comfortable shoes.

Check the weather obsessively.

Walk along the Thames.

See Big Ben.

Visit Buckingham Palace.

Photograph Tower Bridge.

Walk across boring-ass London Bridge.

Find a pub.

Get lost.

Take the Tube back when you’ve walked considerably farther than your feet agreed to.

And accept that you’re going to encounter some tourist traps along the way.

If you’re looking for more urban wandering around Europe, my Paris Eiffel Tower guide involves many of the same fundamental travel principles: crowds, expensive flights when the weather is nice, and significantly cheaper airfare when Europe turns gray and miserable. For a dramatically colder example of questionable European timing, there’s also Hogmanay in Edinburgh, where Scotland demonstrates what happens when tens of thousands of people decide freezing outside while drinking is a perfectly reasonable way to celebrate New Year’s Eve.

London isn’t exotic.

It isn’t undiscovered.

And you absolutely aren’t going to have Big Ben to yourself.

But when the weather cooperates, London is one hell of a city to explore on foot.

Unfortunately, the airlines and hotels are also aware of when the weather cooperates.

So choose your travel dates carefully.

You can have cheap London.

Or you can have beautiful London.

Occasionally the travel gods allow you to have both.

But I wouldn’t build my vacation around those assholes cooperating.