London walking tours ★★★
Guided walks and docent-led tours of London
I am a fan of walking tours in any city, but in London above all.
I try to take at least one new tour every time I visit the city (on one week-long visit, I managed to squeeze in eight of them), and am always learning something new and fascinating. Even better, London walking tours typically only cost £10–£20 each.
I've compared perfectly pulled pints of bitter at a rouge's gallery of London's oldest pubs, traced the bloody history of Jack the Ripper through the East End with a retired beat cop (and one-time curator of the City of London Police's Crime Museum), and had a crash course in the development of British theatre from the era of itinerant players and passion plays in the shade of St. Paul's to the Elizabethan Golden Age of Shakespeare's Globe.
I'll never forget how, on one literary-themed tour, the guide was leading my tiny group of five along what seemed to be an ordinary street when suddenly she disappeared. Then she popped back into view and beckoned us to follow her into what looked like a shadow on the brick wall but turned out to be the entrance to a tight, twisting passageway between two buildings. (I swear JK Rowling must have based the entrance to Diagon Alley on this spot.)
At the end of the squeeze was a quiet courtyard where the guide pointed to a small metal grating. Peering down, I could just make out a vaulted underground brick room through the murk. The guide explained this was part of a debtor's prison, similar to the long-vanished one at Marshalsea where Charles Dickens' father was once incarcerated (and which featured in Little Dorrit and other Dickens classics).
Had I been on my own, I would have strolled right past that "shadow" on the wall.
So take my advice: Take a walking tour of London.
How to find and book top London walking tours
Below are the best resources to find London walking tours, from the inimitable (and bargain-priced) LondonWalks.com; to the premium but excellent docent tours of ContextTravel.com led by academics, historians, and PhDs in the subject at hand; to the fun and often playful subjects—Harry Potter, street art, Beatles, ghosts, gangsters, chocolate, James Bond, etc.—available from the tour brokers at Viator.com and City-Discovery.com.
ToursWalking Tours Tours
These might include Walking tours
More toursActivities, walks, & excursions
- Viator.com - Best one-stop shopping site for all sorts of activities, walking tours, bus tours, escorted day trips, and other excursions. It is actually a clearinghouse for many local tour companies and outfitters, and since it gets a bulk-rate deal on pricing (and takes only a token fee for itself), you can actually sometimes book an activity through Viator for less than it would cost to buy the same exact tour from the tour company itself. (I once booked a Dublin pub crawl via Viator and later discovered that I saved about $1.50; also, the tour turned out to be sold-out, and they were turning away the folks in front of me in line, but since I had a pre-booked voucher I got in.)Partner
- Londonwalks.com - Since the 1970s, the gold standard in city walking tours and museum tours—and cheap, to boot. Just meet your guide at the appointed time and place (usually a Tube stop), pay your £10 (students or over 65s are £8; under 15 free), and prepare for a good two hours of amazing cultural insight and historic anecdotes. If you plan on taking three or more walks, buy a "Frequent London Walker" card for £2 from your first guide, then each subsequent walk costs £8. They also run popular excursions outside London for £18. Note that the fee just covers the guided tour; you pay for any admissions (or, for excursions, travel expenses) yourself.
- Contexttravel.com - This bespoke walking tour company doesn't even call its 200 tour leaders "guides." It calls them "docents"—perhaps because most guides are academics and specialists in their fields: history professors, archeologists, PhDs, art historians, artists, etc. Groups are miniscule (often six people maximum), and most docents can be booked for private guiding sessions as well. They aren't always the cheapest tours, but they are invariably the best. People rave about Context.Partner
- City-discovery.com - Chief rival to Viator (though with a less spiffy interface and often sub-par text descriptions), representing many of the same tours (at the same prices). However, it also seems to cover more destinations, especially secondary ones. When it comes down to it, City-Discovery and Viator have maybe 70% the same inventory, but then 30% will be completely different (some Viator has City-Discovery does not, other vice-versa) so it pays to check through the offerings from both.Partner
Tips
On any tour, stick next to the guide like a good, head-of-the-class nerd.
Walking from stop to stop on the tour, you’ll be able to chat with her, ask questions, and hear her answers and explanations not only to your queries but to everyone else’s questions as well.
You'll get a whole lot more out of your tour (and bang for your buck) if you just stick close to the guide.
Some thematic walks
Microtours in the U.K.—Guided walks, bus tours, museum tours, private guides, escorted sidetrips, and more
From the London of the Beatles to that of Harry Potter—with Bond and Holmes, Doctor Who and Downton Abbey all in between
Famous Harry Potter sights, filming locations, and moments from the Harry Potter books and movies
From the Sherlock Holmes Museum (a mock-up of Holmes's and Watson's rooms at 221b Baker Street in an actual Victorian-era boarding house on Baker Street) to Holmesian tours of the London streets
Tour London in search of the TARDIS (and filming locations) with fellow Whovians and an expert guide
Bond, James Bond, does occasionally report back to MI6 in London, and while there sometimes even engages in a high speed chase or two though the city streets or on the River Thames
Guided walks are a fabulous way to bring a city to life and learn its secrets and its history
Guided visits to Britain's sights—museums, cathedrals, castles, palaces, ruins—can help make them come alive, deepen your understanding, and enrich your experience
Free greeter programs around the world encourage locals to welcome you to their hometown
Hiking, biking, kayaking, ballooning, horseback and other active tours of the United Kingdom
