Top 10 Things to Do in London | Ninety Minutes at a Time
Every Australian arrives already knowing London, which is exactly the problem. This is the list for the other ninety-six percent of the city, plus the one habit that changes how you use it.
You already know London, and that is the problem
No Australian arrives here cold. We have absorbed this city through decades of television, novels, news and family stories, and we land with a mental map made of Big Ben, black cabs and red buses.
All of it is real. It is also, roughly, the West End and Westminster: a small fraction of an enormous city, and the fraction every other visitor is standing in.
So this list assumes you will do the famous things, because you should, and spends its effort on the other ninety-six percent. Ask us about London fares.
The ten
1. The free museums, ninety minutes at a time
The single best value in world travel and Australians consistently misuse it.
The British Museum, the National Gallery, Tate Britain and Tate Modern, the Natural History Museum, the V&A, the Science Museum: free general admission, permanently. A donation is invited and thoroughly deserved.
Here is the habit that changes everything. Do not attempt the British Museum in a day. It cannot be done and the attempt is miserable. Go for ninety minutes, see four things properly, and come back on another morning.
They are free. That is the gift: you can treat a world-class museum like a coffee shop. If you only do one, make it the V&A, because it is the strangest and least exhausting of them and most people have never heard of it.
2. Hampstead Heath
The best view in London and the best swim, and both are free.
Parliament Hill gives you the whole city, from a hill, after a walk. The swimming ponds are a genuine Londoner thing that almost no visitor knows exists, and they are open year-round for people who are made of stronger stuff than most.
This is the answer to the London Eye and it costs nothing.
3. Borough Market on a weekday morning
Before the tourists and the queues, when it is still a working market rather than a photograph of one.
Weekends are a crush. A Tuesday at nine is a different place. Compare London food tours on Viator.
4. Greenwich, by river
The boat is the point. Not the train.
You get the Thames, the whole city from the water, and then a maritime museum, a meridian and a park at the end of it. Half a day and one of the best uses of London's geography.
5. The East End on foot
Spitalfields, Brick Lane, and the streets around them, which is where the city's immigrant history is written on the buildings.
The detail people remember: one structure that has been a Huguenot chapel, a synagogue and a mosque in turn, which is the entire story of the neighbourhood in one roofline.
6. The Tower of London, at opening
The one big paid attraction we would defend without qualification.
Go at opening. Take the Yeoman Warder tour, which is included and is the best guided anything in the city, delivered by someone who has earned the right to be that funny. Be out before the coaches. Find London tickets on Klook.
7. The canals, Little Venice to Camden
A walk almost nobody takes, along the Regent's Canal, through the back of the zoo, past narrowboats and out at Camden.
An hour and a half, entirely flat, and a version of London that most visitors do not know exists.
8. A proper pub, on a weekday, in a residential street
Not a famous one in a tourist quarter. A pub with no history to sell you, on a street where people live, at six on a Wednesday.
That is the actual thing. The ones in the guidebooks are museums with beer.
9. Kew Gardens
Genuinely one of the great gardens of the world, and Londoners treat it as a nice park.
The Palm House alone justifies the trip, and the whole thing absorbs an unhurried day.
10. The theatre, late in the trip
The thing London does better than anywhere. Book it for late in your trip, when you are on local time, not for the night you land.
Our London travel guide is blunt about this: Australians routinely book a West End show for the day they arrive, which is twenty-two hours of travel followed by two hours of sitting in the dark trying not to fall asleep.
The Barbican, for a wet day
Worth its own mention because it is the underrated answer.
A piece of brutalist architecture that people either love or find genuinely offensive, containing a concert hall, a cinema, an art gallery and a conservatory almost nobody knows about: a tropical glasshouse in the middle of a concrete estate, open on limited days, and almost empty.
If it rains, and it will, this beats another museum.
What we tell Australians to skip
The London Eye. Slow, expensive, and a view of a fairly flat skyline. Parliament Hill is free and better.
Madame Tussauds. You have flown to the other side of the earth to look at wax.
The hop-on-hop-off bus. London's actual buses are red, cost almost nothing, and go to the same places. Sit upstairs at the front on a normal route and you have had the tour.
Oxford Street. A shopping street with more people on it than any shopping street should have.
Three days. Which is the real one, and the mistake almost every Australian makes because Paris is waiting.
Getting the most out of it
Just tap your card. Contactless works on every bus, tube and train, with the same fares and daily caps as a travel card. You do not need to buy anything, and everyone needs their own card.
Walk more than you plan to. London's connective tissue is the walking, and the tube hides the fact that things you think are far apart are twenty minutes on foot through a park.
Do not schedule anything for the first 48 hours. Going to Europe is the hard jet lag direction, as our best time to visit Europe guide explains, and you will not enjoy what you paid for.
Leave something undone. You will come back, and a city this size punishes completism.
Booking notes
Prices shown by our partners are live and in your choice of currency, most activities confirm instantly, and free cancellation windows are stated on each listing. London needs very little advance booking: the museums, parks, markets and walking are free and simply there. Theatre and special exhibitions are the exceptions and both are worth booking before you fly.
Our Melbourne to London page covers why the stopover on the way over usually costs nothing and buys back three days. Get a free London quote.