City guide · United Kingdom

London

London is a five-borough-scale capital organised around the Thames, with the historic City and the West End forming two distinct centres. Most first visits combine Westminster, the river, the major museums and the City, then use rail for places such as Greenwich, Kew or Hampstead. The useful planning rule is to group each day geographically: central stations can be close on foot, while crossing the wider city can absorb far more time than the Underground map suggests.

Practical information

Language spoken: English; Welsh is official in Wales; National practical orientation; regional and minority languages may also be used
Dialling code: +44; International calling code; local area and mobile prefixes still apply
Currency: Pound sterling (GBP); Use the official local currency; card acceptance varies by place
Emergency number: 999 or 112; Use only for an emergency; tourist assistance may use a separate number
Plug type: Type G · 230 V; Check that chargers support the recorded voltage before using an adapter
Tap water: Safe from the mains; Public water suppliers regulate mains drinking water; use cold mains taps

Planning a visit

Suggested stay: 4–5 days
Getting around: Underground, bus and Elizabeth line, paid by contactless

January: seasonal closure recorded
February: seasonal closure recorded
March: seasonal closure recorded
April: seasonal closure recorded
May: no seasonality data recorded
June: no seasonality data recorded
July: no seasonality data recorded
August: no seasonality data recorded — this month
September: no seasonality data recorded
October: seasonal closure recorded
November: seasonal closure recorded
December: seasonal closure recorded

Top things to see

Ranked by importance — sitelinks, pageviews and heritage status, not editor preference.

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Where to base yourself

District boundaries come from OSM administrative relations, so a district page holds exactly the places inside it — plus, for the islands and the coast, the nearest district by proximity.

City of Westminster

Places

2,280

Across the district

1 hr 31 min
London Borough of Camden

Places

1,193

Across the district

1 hr 43 min
London Borough of Tower Hamlets

Places

1,081

Across the district

1 hr 16 min
London Borough of Southwark

Places

1,143

Across the district

2 hours
Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

Places

823

Across the district

1 hr 30 min
London Borough of Islington

Places

820

Across the district

1 hr 22 min
London Borough of Lambeth

Places

759

Across the district

2 hr 14 min
London Borough of Richmond upon Thames

Places

590

Across the district

2 hr 49 min
London Borough of Newham

Places

617

Across the district

1 hr 53 min
London Borough of Barnet

Places

559

Across the district

2 hr 27 min
London Borough of Hackney

Places

666

Across the district

1 hr 19 min
Royal Borough of Greenwich

Places

509

Across the district

2 hr 6 min
London Borough of Bromley

Places

538

Across the district

3 hr 26 min
London Borough of Wandsworth

Places

545

Across the district

2 hr 4 min
London Borough of Hounslow

Places

417

Across the district

3 hr 13 min
London Borough of Ealing

Places

451

Across the district

2 hr 32 min
London Borough of Croydon

Places

489

Across the district

2 hr 20 min
London Borough of Haringey

Places

420

Across the district

1 hr 57 min
London Borough of Lewisham

Places

440

Across the district

1 hr 36 min
London Borough of Hillingdon

Places

406

Across the district

4 hr 3 min
London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham

Places

387

Across the district

1 hr 42 min
London Borough of Waltham Forest

Places

424

Across the district

1 hr 54 min
London Borough of Enfield

Places

319

Across the district

2 hr 27 min
London Borough of Merton

Places

280

Across the district

1 hr 57 min
London Borough of Brent

Places

316

Across the district

2 hr 3 min
London Borough of Havering

Places

282

Across the district

3 hr 18 min
London Borough of Redbridge

Places

257

Across the district

2 hr 11 min
London Borough of Bexley

Places

301

Across the district

2 hr 22 min
Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames

Places

245

Across the district

2 hr 40 min
London Borough of Harrow

Places

216

Across the district

1 hr 56 min
London Borough of Sutton

Places

216

Across the district

1 hr 57 min
London Borough of Barking and Dagenham

Places

192

Across the district

1 hr 45 min

How the city is laid out

London has two centres rather than one, and the River Thames is the line everything else is measured against.

The City of London is the older of the two. It is the Roman and medieval core, it still holds its medieval boundaries, and it is not a London borough at all: it is a separate local authority governed by the City of London Corporation, the thirty-third authority alongside the thirty-two boroughs of Greater London. Today the Square Mile is banks, insurance, churches wedged between office towers, and the Tower of London at its eastern edge. It fills on weekday mornings and empties on Friday evening, which is why a Sunday spent there feels like a different city from a Tuesday.

The West End, two to three kilometres west, is the other centre and the one a visitor actually lives in. The City of Westminster holds Parliament, Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace; north and east of them are Soho, Covent Garden, Mayfair and the theatres; west of them are the South Kensington museums and Hyde Park. Most first visits sleep in the West End and make trips into the City, not the other way round.

The river sorts the rest. The north bank carries most of what a short visit comes for — Westminster, the West End, the City, the Tower. The south bank carries one dense riverside strip and then stops: the London Eye, the Southbank Centre, the National Theatre, Tate Modern, Shakespeare's Globe and Borough Market stand in a line that is walkable end to end in an hour or so, and a few streets behind it the south turns residential.

The Circle line is the most useful mental boundary London offers. Nearly everything a three- or four-day visit wants sits inside that loop or a stop beyond it. Outside it, Greater London becomes thirty-two boroughs of housing, high streets and parks, with a handful of places worth a deliberate half-day each — Greenwich, Kew, Hampstead, Camden — reached by rail rather than stumbled upon.

Checked 2026-08-26

Getting around

Pay with a contactless bank card or phone, use the Underground and the buses, and walk more than the tube map suggests.

Transport for London divides the network into fare zones 1 to 9, and the zones a journey touches set its price. Fares are charged at the peak rate on Monday to Friday between 06:30 and 09:30 and between 16:00 and 19:00, and off-peak at all other times, with the touch-in time deciding which applies. Tube, DLR, London Overground, Elizabeth line and most National Rail services inside London share one fare system, so a visitor rarely has to think about which operator runs the train.

Capping is the reason no visitor needs a travelcard. Pay as you go with the same card or device all day and TfL stops charging once the daily cap is reached: for 2026 the adult cap for Zones 1-2 is £8.90, peak or off-peak, and £16.30 for Zones 1-6, with a Monday-to-Sunday cap of £44.70 on Zones 1-2. Buses and trams cap separately and much lower — a single adult bus fare is £1.75 with a £5.25 daily cap, and the Hopper fare allows unlimited bus and tram journeys within an hour of touching in for that one £1.75. An Oyster card does the same job; contactless simply saves buying one.

Buses are slower than the Underground and better for seeing anything. They are the only mode where a visitor watches the city go past, and on short central hops they often win outright.

The Elizabeth line changed the geography of central London when it opened. It runs east-west deep beneath the centre, stopping at Paddington, Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road, Farringdon, Liverpool Street and Canary Wharf, and it reaches Heathrow directly. Its trains are longer and less frequent than a tube line's but far faster across the middle of the city.

Walk more than the map implies. The Underground diagram is a schematic, not a scale drawing, and central stations sit far closer together on the ground than on paper — Covent Garden to Leicester Square is a famously short walk between two stations one stop apart, and Bank, Monument, St Paul's and Cannon Street are all within a few minutes of each other. A journey of one or two stops in Zone 1 is usually quicker on foot than down the escalators and back up.

Airports are the part visitors underestimate. Heathrow is the closest by rail: the Piccadilly line reaches central London in about fifty minutes and runs between 05:00 and 23:30, while Heathrow Express covers Paddington to Terminals 2 and 3 in fifteen minutes. Gatwick, Stansted and Luton are outside London entirely and are reached by mainline rail from Victoria, Liverpool Street and St Pancras respectively, each of them a train ride of half an hour or more before the London journey even starts. Budget for the connection at the London end as well as the train, and never plan a same-morning arrival against a fixed booking.

Checked 2026-08-26

Common questions

How many days does London need?

Four to five. Three days are enough for Westminster and the abbey, the West End and the river, and the City with the Tower of London at its edge. A fourth day buys the South Kensington museums or the British Museum at a pace that is not a forced march, and a fifth buys one place outside the centre — Greenwich, Kew or Hampstead. London punishes compression more than most capitals because its two centres sit kilometres apart and its best-known sights each absorb half a day rather than an hour.

When is the best time to visit London?

May, June and September. London has a temperate oceanic climate in which precipitation is fairly evenly distributed all year round, so no month is reliably dry and choosing by rainfall is wasted effort. Choose by daylight and crowding instead: the long evenings of late spring and early summer give a visitor several extra usable hours a day, and September keeps most of that light after the school holidays have emptied out. Winter is dark by mid-afternoon, which shortens a sightseeing day more than the cold does.

Do I need an Oyster card, or is contactless enough?

Contactless is enough. A contactless bank card or a phone or watch wallet is accepted as pay as you go across the Underground, buses, trams, DLR, London Overground and the Elizabeth line at exactly the adult rate an Oyster card charges, and it caps in the same way. The only requirement is to touch in with the same card or device every time, because capping and the Hopper fare are worked out per card. An Oyster card is worth buying only for a traveller whose bank card charges foreign transaction fees, or for children needing a Zip photocard.

How much does a day of travel in London cost?

Less than most visitors expect, because Transport for London caps the daily total. For 2026 the adult pay-as-you-go cap is £8.90 a day for Zones 1-2 — the same figure peak or off-peak — and £16.30 for Zones 1-6, which covers Heathrow. Travelling only by bus and tram caps far lower, at £5.25 a day on a £1.75 single fare. There is also a Monday-to-Sunday cap of £44.70 on Zones 1-2. A visitor who stays in the centre and uses the tube freely will hit the Zone 1-2 cap on a heavy day and pay less on a light one, which is why buying a Travelcard in advance rarely saves anything.

What is the quickest way into London from Heathrow?

Heathrow Express, if speed is the only consideration: Heathrow's own site gives fifteen minutes from Terminals 2 and 3 to London Paddington, with trains every fifteen minutes and tickets from £10, and Terminal 5 five minutes further. The Piccadilly line is the cheap alternative and reaches central London in about fifty minutes, running between 05:00 and 23:30 with Night Tube on Friday and Saturday, though it does not serve Terminal 4 at night. The Elizabeth line is the middle option, running direct from all Heathrow rail stations through Paddington and the centre to Liverpool Street and Canary Wharf. Heathrow Express is deliberately excluded from TfL's caps and Travelcards, so its fare is on top of whatever else the day costs.

How long does it really take in from Gatwick, Stansted or Luton?

Longer than the airport name suggests, because none of the three is in London. Gatwick's own site gives thirty minutes on the Gatwick Express from South Terminal to London Victoria, twice an hour. Stansted's own site gives fifty minutes on the Stansted Express to London Liverpool Street, every fifteen minutes, and warns that Oyster is not valid to or from Stansted even though contactless is. Luton adds a step: London Luton's own site gives under four minutes on the Luton DART shuttle between the terminal and Luton Airport Parkway station, and the mainline train to St Pancras International runs from there. To any of those figures a traveller must add the journey across London at the far end, which in rush hour is not the small part.

Which part of London should a first visit stay in?

Somewhere inside or just outside the Circle line, on the north bank, within walking distance of a station served by more than one line. Bloomsbury, Fitzrovia, Covent Garden, Westminster and South Kensington all satisfy that and put a visitor inside the West End rather than commuting into it. The City of London is cheaper at weekends for a reason: it empties, and its restaurants close with it. Staying far out to save money trades the saving back in fares and in the hour a day spent underground, and London's evenings are the part a short visit loses first.

Turn this list into a plan

Set your days, your pace and the hours you actually want to be out. The planner works around closing days and travel time, and leaves room to eat.

Plan London

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Practical information

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The Old Vic

His Majesty's Theatre

The Theatre Royal

London Palladium

Hammersmith Apollo

London Coliseum

O2 Academy Brixton

Royal Court Theatre

Apollo Theatre

Savoy Theatre

Theatre Royal Haymarket

Wigmore Hall

Adelphi Theatre

Aldwych Theatre

Dominion Theatre

Lyceum Theatre

Sadler's Wells Theatre

Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

Roundhouse

Sondheim Theatre

Almeida Theatre

Fortune Theatre

Palace Theatre

Shepherd's Bush Empire

Young Vic

The O2 Arena

Ambassadors Theatre

Cambridge Theatre

Duchess Theatre

Duke of York's Theatre

Garrick Theatre

Noël Coward Theatre

Novello Theatre

Piccadilly Theatre

Queen Elizabeth Hall

White Cube

Gielgud Theatre

Golden Boy of Pye Corner

Statue of Oliver Cromwell

Victoria Palace Theatre

Prince Edward Theatre

Wilton's Music Hall

Apollo Victoria Theatre

Cadogan Hall

Duke of York Column

Harold Pinter Theatre

Hippodrome

Lyric Theatre

Playhouse Theatre

Regent's Park Open Air Theatre

Wyndham's Theatre

Traffic Light tree

Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art

Prince of Wales Theatre

Trafalgar Theatre

Vaudeville Theatre

Waterloo Vase

Gillian Lynne Theatre

Statue of Amy Winehouse

Orleans House Gallery

Iraq and Afghanistan Memorial

Shaftesbury Theatre

equestrian statue of Charles I

Equestrian statue of the Duke of Cambridge

New Wimbledon Theatre

Phoenix Theatre

Richard Coeur de Lion

St Martin's Theatre

Boadicea and Her Daughters

Cockpit Theatre

Fourth Plinth

Statue of Charlie Chaplin

South London Gallery

Elfin Oak

Hackney Empire

Michael Faraday Memorial

Richmond Theatre

London