5 Days in London

Almost every English and British coronation since 1066 has taken place in Westminster Abbey, most recently Charles III's in 2023, and it's crowded with tombs: kings and queens, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, and the writers of Poets' Corner. Look for the tomb of Elizabeth I, which she shares with her half-sister and enemy, Mary I, and the grave of the Unknown Warrior, a soldier brought back from France in 1920, the only grave in the Abbey nobody walks on.

Across the road are the Houses of Parliament, rebuilt in Gothic style after a fire in 1834, and the clock tower everyone calls Big Ben. Big Ben is actually the bell inside; the tower was renamed the Elizabeth Tower in 2012. Visitors can watch debates from the public galleries for free when Parliament is sitting, usually Monday to Thursday; Prime Minister's Questions is at noon on Wednesdays, and guided tours run on Saturdays and during recesses.

Walk up Whitehall, the street of government ministries, past the Cenotaph, the national war memorial, and the gates of Downing Street, where the prime minister lives at No. 10. At Horse Guards, two mounted troopers of the Household Cavalry sit on guard every day, and on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 11am the guard changes on Horse Guards Parade behind, with horses, breastplates and plumed helmets. On other days there's a shorter inspection, and every day at 4pm.

Across the road, the Banqueting House is all that's left of the vast Palace of Whitehall, which burned down in 1698. Its ceiling was painted by Rubens, and on 30 January 1649, King Charles I walked out of one of its windows onto a scaffold and was beheaded, the only English king to be executed by his own people.

Under the Treasury building, the Churchill War Rooms are the underground bunker from which Winston Churchill and his government ran World War II, safe from the bombs of the Blitz. When the war ended, in August 1945, the staff turned out the lights in the Map Room and walked away, and it was left almost untouched for decades: the maps with their pins, the colored phones, the sugar someone hoarded in a desk drawer. You see Churchill's bedroom, the transatlantic phone to Roosevelt hidden in a "private toilet", and a big museum of his life.

Cross St James's Park, the oldest of London's royal parks. From the Blue Bridge over the lake there's a view of Buckingham Palace one way and the turrets of Whitehall the other, and the park's pelicans, here since a Russian ambassador gave the first ones to Charles II in 1664, are usually somewhere near the rocks.

At the end of the Mall stands Buckingham Palace, which has only been the monarch's London home since Queen Victoria moved in in 1837. If the Royal Standard is flying, the King is in. The State Rooms open to visitors only in summer, roughly July to September.

Walk up the Mall under Admiralty Arch to Trafalgar Square, with Nelson on his column, 52 meters up, commemorating the admiral who died winning the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and Landseer's four bronze lions. On the empty fourth plinth in the corner, a new piece of contemporary art goes up every couple of years.

Along the top of the square, the National Gallery is free and holds one of the greatest collections of European painting in the world: Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks, Van Gogh's Sunflowers, Turner's Fighting Temeraire. Pick a handful rather than trying to see it all. The National Portrait Gallery round the corner, also free, is the faces of British history.

Before the theater, walk through Covent Garden, the old fruit and vegetable market turned into a piazza of shops and street performers, to the Rock and Sole Plaice on Endell Street, which has been frying fish since 1871 and claims to be the oldest fish and chip shop in London. Battered cod or haddock, thick chips, mushy peas, salt and malt vinegar: it's Britain's national dish, and this is a good, honest one.

London's West End is, with Broadway, the theater capital of the world, with around 40 theaters between Covent Garden and Soho. You can see long-running musicals like Les Misérables and The Lion King, The Mousetrap, an Agatha Christie whodunnit that has run since 1952, the longest-running play in the world, or new plays with famous names. Afterwards, walk through the neon of Piccadilly Circus and the red lanterns of Chinatown on Gerrard Street to Soho, London's late-night quarter of bars, restaurants and the LGBTQ+ scene on Old Compton Street.

William the Conqueror began the White Tower around 1078 to keep the people of London in their place, and for centuries the Tower of London was a royal palace, a fortress, an armory, a mint and, most famously, a prison. Two of Henry VIII's queens, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, and the nine-day queen Lady Jane Grey were beheaded inside its walls; most executions took place on Tower Hill outside.

Go first to the Crown Jewels, still used by the King, with the Imperial State Crown and the Cullinan diamond. Then join one of the free tours led by the Yeoman Warders, the "Beefeaters", who live in the Tower and tell its stories with relish. Look out for the ravens: legend says the kingdom will fall if they leave, so a few are always kept.

Next door, Tower Bridge, opened in 1894, is the bridge everyone pictures when they think of London, and the one many visitors mistake for London Bridge, a plain modern bridge upstream. Its Gothic towers hide a steel frame, and its roads still lift to let tall ships through, several hundred times a year. Walk across it for free; if you have time, the paid exhibition takes you along the high walkways between the towers, partly glass-floored, with the traffic and the river below, and to the Victorian steam engines that once lifted the bridge.

From Tower Pier, take the river bus down the Thames to Greenwich, the best half hour of sightseeing you can buy in London. You pass warehouses turned into flats, old riverside pubs, the towers of Canary Wharf and the bends of the river where the docks of the world's biggest port once were. Pay with a contactless card at the pier; river boats aren't part of the Tube's daily fare cap.

From the pier, climb the hill through Greenwich Park to the Royal Observatory, founded by Charles II in 1675 to solve the problem of finding longitude at sea. In 1884, the world agreed that 0° longitude would run through it, and Greenwich Mean Time became the world's clock. Stand with one foot in each hemisphere on the Prime Meridian line, and look up at the red time ball on the roof, which drops at exactly 1pm every day to let ships on the river set their clocks.

Then walk to the statue of General Wolfe for the best view in London: the Queen's House and the Naval College below you, and Canary Wharf and the City beyond. Come back up at dusk, when the lights come on.

Back down the hill, Maritime Greenwich is a UNESCO World Heritage Site; pick the Painted Hall or the Cutty Sark, as there's rarely time for both. By the pier is the Cutty Sark, a tea clipper built in 1869, one of the fastest ships of her day and the only tea clipper to survive. Along the river, Christopher Wren's twin-domed Old Royal Naval College was built as a hospital for old sailors, and its Painted Hall, decorated by James Thornhill over 19 years, is called Britain's Sistine Chapel.

Behind it, the free National Maritime Museum has Nelson's uniform from Trafalgar, with the bullet hole, and the Queen's House, the first classical building in England.

Pie and mash is the food of working-class London, and the Goddard family has been making it since 1890, first in Deptford and now in this shop near the Cutty Sark. You get a minced beef pie, a scoop of mashed potato and liquor, a green parsley sauce that has nothing to do with alcohol, plus chili vinegar on the table. Jellied eels, the other Cockney classic, are for the brave.

The Great Fire of September 1666 burned down most of the medieval City, including its old cathedral, and Christopher Wren spent 35 years building the new St Paul's, with one of the largest domes in the world. During the Blitz, on the night of 29 December 1940, firewatchers saved it as the City burned around it, and a photo of the dome rising out of the smoke became a symbol of London's survival.

Climb the 257 steps to the Whispering Gallery, where a whisper against the wall carries all the way round, then on up to the Golden Gallery at the top, 528 steps, for a view over the City. In the crypt lie Nelson and Wellington, and Wren himself, under a Latin inscription: if you seek his monument, look around you.

From St Paul's, walk across the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge that opened in 2000, swayed so much under the crowds that it closed after two days, and was nicknamed the Wobbly Bridge forever after. On the other side is Tate Modern, Britain's national gallery of modern art, in a power station designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, the man behind the red phone box. The huge Turbine Hall shows a new giant installation every year, and the permanent collection, free, has Picasso, Rothko, Warhol and Louise Bourgeois.

Take the lift to the viewing level on the 10th floor of the newer Blavatnik Building, free, for a 360° view of the river.

Next door, Shakespeare's Globe is a reconstruction of the open-air theater where Shakespeare's company staged many of his plays, built in 1599 and burned down in 1613 when a cannon fired during Henry VIII set the thatch alight. An American actor, Sam Wanamaker, spent decades raising the money to rebuild it, and it opened in 1997, with the first thatched roof allowed in London since the Great Fire. Take the tour, or, from spring to autumn, see a play as a "groundling", standing in the yard in front of the stage, for a few pounds.

Walk east past Southwark Cathedral, the oldest Gothic church in London, to Borough Market, where food has been sold near the south end of London Bridge for about a thousand years. It's London's best food market, under Victorian iron and glass: British cheeses at Neal's Yard Dairy, oysters, scotch eggs, salt beef, raclette, and custard doughnuts from Bread Ahead. Graze your way round for lunch. It's expensive and crowded, and still worth it.

Cross London Bridge back into the City, past the Monument, Wren's column for the Great Fire of 1666, whose 61 meters equal its distance from the bakery on Pudding Lane where the fire began, and the painted Victorian arcades of Leadenhall Market, among the skyscrapers nicknamed the Gherkin, the Cheesegrater and the Walkie-Talkie, and ride to the top of the Walkie-Talkie to the Sky Garden, a free indoor garden under a glass dome on the 35th to 37th floors, with bars and a view across the river to the Shard, at 310 meters the tallest building in Britain.

End the day back across the river at the George Inn, off Borough High Street, the last galleried coaching inn in London. It was rebuilt in 1677, after a fire, with wooden galleries around a courtyard where coaches once arrived from the south of England, and Charles Dickens drank here and mentioned it in Little Dorrit. It belongs to the National Trust. Have a pint of real ale in one of the dark wooden rooms.

Notting Hill is pastel-painted houses, garden squares and, since the 1999 film, Hugh Grant's travel bookshop. On Saturdays, Portobello Road becomes one of the biggest antiques markets in the world, with hundreds of stalls of silver, old maps, vintage clothes and bric-a-brac, then fruit and vegetables, then street food further down. It's been an immigrant neighborhood too: the Caribbean community that arrived after World War II started the Notting Hill Carnival, Europe's biggest street festival, every August bank holiday.

Walk down through Kensington Gardens to Kensington Palace, a royal home since 1689, where Queen Victoria was born and grew up, and where Princess Diana lived. You can visit the King's State Apartments and Victoria's rooms; the Queen's State Apartments are closed until spring 2027. In the Sunken Garden is the statue of Diana unveiled by her sons in 2021.

The gardens run into Hyde Park without a fence, across the Serpentine lake. Look for the Peter Pan statue by the water, and Speakers' Corner at the far end, where anyone has been free to stand up and talk since the 1870s.

On the south edge of the gardens, the gilded Albert Memorial, opened in 1872, is Queen Victoria's monument to her husband, Prince Albert, who died young in 1861 and whose idea it was to turn this part of London into a quarter of museums and colleges, paid for by the Great Exhibition of 1851. Across the road is the round, red-brick Royal Albert Hall, opened in 1871, home every summer to the Proms, the biggest classical music festival in the world.

The Natural History Museum, in a Romanesque cathedral of terracotta tiles decorated with carved animals, was the most visited attraction in Britain in 2025. The blue whale skeleton, named Hope, dives from the ceiling of the great Hintze Hall, and the dinosaur galleries are the reason every London child knows the word Tyrannosaurus. Next door, the Science Museum, also free, has the Apollo 10 capsule in its new space gallery.

Across Exhibition Road, the Victoria and Albert Museum is the world's greatest museum of art and design, with 2,000 years of everything people have made beautiful: Raphael's huge cartoons for the Sistine Chapel tapestries, the Cast Courts full of plaster copies of Trajan's Column and Michelangelo's David, fashion, jewelry, furniture. It's too big to see in a visit, so follow your nose. The café in the original Victorian refreshment rooms is the most beautiful museum café in the world.

Walk ten minutes to Knightsbridge and the Harrods Food Halls, under tiled Edwardian walls and ceilings: chocolates, cheeses, cakes and every kind of English tea. The store is very expensive and quite touristy, but the food halls are a spectacle, and it's free to look. Buy a tin of tea to take home.

Head back to Kensington Church Street for the Churchill Arms, a pub whose facade disappears under thousands of flowers (and Christmas trees in December), with Churchill memorabilia inside. The surprise is in the back: a conservatory restaurant that's been serving good-value Thai food for decades. It's always busy, and that's the fun of it.

Every Sunday morning, a short Victorian street in Bethnal Green fills with flower sellers, shouting their prices in Cockney ("two for a tenner!") over buckets of tulips, roses and potted palms. Columbia Road is the most charming market in London, and the little shops along it, cafés, bakeries and antiques, open just for Sunday. Come by 9am, before it gets packed, and stay until the stallholders start dropping their prices in the early afternoon.

Walk south to the top of Brick Lane and Beigel Bake, at No. 159, which never closes. Ask for a hot salt beef bagel, thick slices of brined beef carved in front of you, with plenty of English mustard. It's the taste of the Jewish East End, when tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants lived here in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and a salt beef bagel is still well under 10 GBP. The yellow-signed shop next door is the rival; the white sign is the one.

Brick Lane tells the story of London's immigrants in one street. In the late 1600s, French Protestant refugees, the Huguenots, settled here and wove silk; you can still see their tall attic windows on Fournier Street. Then came Irish and Jewish immigrants, and, from the 1970s, people from Bangladesh, which is why the street signs are in Bengali and the area is called Banglatown. One building on the corner of Fournier Street was a Huguenot church in 1743, a synagogue in 1898 and a mosque since 1976.

On Sundays, the old Truman Brewery fills with vintage stalls and street food, and the walls all around are covered in street art. Finish at Spitalfields Market, under its Victorian roof, and Hawksmoor's tall white Christ Church across the road.

The British Museum, founded in 1753, was the first national public museum in the world, and it's free. Its collection of eight million objects tells the story of human civilization: the Rosetta Stone, which unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphs; the Parthenon sculptures from Athens, which Greece wants back; the Assyrian lion hunt reliefs; the Anglo-Saxon treasure from the Sutton Hoo ship burial; the Lewis Chessmen. Enter through the Great Court, roofed in glass in 2000, and pick a few rooms rather than trying to see everything.

Until 11 July 2027, the museum is showing the Bayeux Tapestry, lent by France, back in England for the first time since it was made, nearly 1,000 years ago.

Ten minutes' walk south, on Lincoln's Inn Fields, Sir John Soane's Museum is the house of a Georgian architect crammed with his collection of antiquities and paintings, including Hogarth's A Rake's Progress. It's free, and Londoners' favorite small museum.

Before dinner, walk down to Waterloo Bridge, which has the best view in London in both directions: west to Parliament and the London Eye, east to St Paul's and the towers of the City. It was built during World War II, largely by women, and the Kinks sang about this view in "Waterloo Sunset". Stand in the middle and watch the city light up, then walk back up to Bloomsbury for your roast.

Sunday lunch in a London pub is a roast: roast beef, lamb, pork or chicken, with roast potatoes, vegetables, gravy and a Yorkshire pudding, and many pubs serve it into the evening. Ten minutes from the British Museum, the Lamb on Lamb's Conduit Street is a Victorian pub with its original etched-glass "snob screens", which let the gentry drink without being seen by the barman, and Charles Dickens lived around the corner. It serves food on Sundays until the evening.

If you'd rather have your roast at lunchtime, the Quality Chop House on Farringdon Road, a Victorian eating house with wooden booths, is one of the best in London; book it for Sunday lunch and come to the British Museum afterwards.