London Top Sights Tours offer a comprehensive day tour of the main sights in London. Visitors can book tickets online (good value for money if you are travelling with children)
Take a walk through London’s Royal Parks. A good walk would start at Paddington station, and head through Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, Green Park (passing Buckingham Palace) and St James Park before crossing Trafalgar Square and the River Thames to the South Bank and Waterloo Station. At a strolling pace this walk would take half a day, with plenty of places to stop, sit, drink, eat en-route. A good pictorial description of this walk can be found online at Trips By Trains Royal Parks Walk.
London is one of the best cities in the world for concerts, spanning from new musical trends to well known bands. Popular classical concerts at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square.
Between huge concert facilities and small pubs, there are hundreds of venues that organise and promote live music every week. Many concerts, especially in smaller or less known places are free, so there is plenty of choice even for tourists on a budget. London has long been a launchpad for alternative movements, from the mods of the 60s, punks of the 70s, new romantics of the 80s, the britpop scene of the 90s and in recent years the indie rock movement spearheaded by The Libertines and their ilk. It has one of the world’s most lively live music scenes: any band heading a British, European or World tour will play London, not to mention the local talent.
London’s Music Scene is incredibly diverse, covering all genres of music from electro-jazz to death-metal, and all sizes of bands, from the U2s and Rolling Stones of the world to one man bands who disband after their first gig. A number of apps exist to help Londoners choose between the huge number of gigs on offer. One of the most popular is DICE, an event discovery app that doesn’t charge any booking fees.
The West End, especially the areas concentrated around Leicester Square, Covent Garden, Shaftesbury Avenue and Haymarket, is one of the world’s premier destinations for theatre, including musical theatre.
The South Bank is another area well-known for world class theatre, and is home to both the National Theatre and the Globe Theatre, the latter of which is London’s only thatched building and an attraction in itself. Each Globe performance has over 700 tickets priced at £5. London’s theatre scene outside of these two main districts is known as “the Fringe”. There are tour companies worldwide that take travellers to see London theatre. These companies sell themselves on being able to deliver unique and behind-the-scenes access to some of the world’s greatest theatres.
If you don’t feel like splashing out on one of the commercial bus tours, you can make your own bus tour by buying an Oyster card and spending some time riding around London on the top deck of standard London buses. Of course you don’t get the open air or the commentary, but the views are very similar. You will likely get lost but that is half the fun; if it worries you go for a commercial tour.
