Everything to do in London and How to Get Around

London was fantastic!

After 6 days in London, we headed to Disneyland Paris and then finally Paris before my aunt and I departed ways this morning, her for home, myself for Lyon and then to Italy. My week in London was wonderful and exhausting, we pretty much did everything on both of our wish lists. 

A comprehensive list as follows:

Westminster Abbey

2 free walking tours

St. Paul’s Cathedral

Hyde Park/princess Diana memorial
Trafalgar Square

Piccadilly Circus 

Saint Katherine Docks
Harrods Department Store
Oxford Street/ Disney store/first Primark experience 

Platform 9 3/4

Harry Potter Warner Brothers Studio Tour

Windsor Castle

Tate Modern Museum 

Millennial foot bridge 

Sky garden 

Wimbledon 

Notting hill/fancy neighborhoods 

Little Venice 

Big Ben

London Eye 

Changing of the guards/ Buckingham Palace

Kensington Palace 

Tower of London

Tower bridge 

Honestly I have no idea how I’m even a functioning human being right now but we survived 10 days of this. Highlights of the London trip are probably for Cheryl, Wimbledon and for me, the obvious Harry Potter Tour. So much that I’m dedicating an entire blog post to it later on.

A few of the other highlights on our London stop were the major castles and palaces we visited.

In London, especially in the summer time it’s wise to book ahead of time for almost anything you do. It typically saves money and almost guarantees you’ll get in to see it. I say almost guarantees since the obvious unforetold circumstances can occur just like anywhere. Some of the places are still working buildings, ie: Buckingham Palace is still occupied by the Queen.

If you’re planning to visit Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace, Tower of London or Kensington Palace I would recommend buying your tickets and printing them before you visit to save time. In Windsor the ticket printer was down, causing an hour long line to back up into the streets of the small surrounding town. Since our tickets were printed ahead of time we were able to skip that entire line. 

Every one of them had audio tours that you could purchase with the exception of Buckingham Palace being free. Each site cost about 20-30 pounds to gain access to and London is hands down the most expensive part of my trip. I will not being paying that much money to get in to every building when sometimes just appreciating the outside beauty is enough.. or maybe that’s just the cheap, backpacker person in me! Haha Just don’t feel obligated to go into something simply because it’s famous. There are often things you can do completely for free that are just as exciting (ie. the Tate Modern) and can provide great experiences. 

Below are some of the trips we took with pricing and information on how to get there.

Windsor- took the tube to Waterloo and then an above ground train to Windsor

Buckingham Palace - took the tube to Westminster to check out Big Ben and then walked to Buckingham. Saint James Park or Victoria might get you a tad closer but there’s probably still a 5-10 minute walk for both.

Kensington Palace - we walked to Kensington from Buckingham since we wanted to walk through Hyde park and Check out the Princess Diana Memorial. I recommend this because it’s beautiful in the park! There’s a tube stop that takes you to the beginning of Hyde Park (called Hyde Park Corner Underground) that is opposite of Kensington Palace or High Street Kensington stop takes you the closest.

Tower of London/Tower Bridge - took the tube to Tower Hill tube stop and walked. It’s right next to the stop. 

The Tube

The tube is extremely easy to take and we decided to use our contact less credit cards instead of grabbing an Oyster card. The Oyster card is sort of a prepaid ticket that you can purchase for a few dollars and then load money on to it to use in the tube. I’m not sure if the Oyster would have saved us money but it was EXTREMELY convenient to just pull out our personal credit cards and tap. No worrying about reloading our Oyster cards every time we ran out of money or trying to figure how much money we had left. I also feel like we used it a great deal and I only spent a few dollars a day on transportation.

There are a few apps that I recommend using to get around London. The first is "Tube Map" and exactly like it says, it is a map of the tube lines. You can use it offline to plot where you need to go or look up a certain tube stop. This way you're not standing in the underground staring at a map while hundreds of people rush past you. 

The second app is Google Maps. Most of you might have this in your phone already and it can be used for all international or domestic travel. THIS APP IS A LIFE SAVER. There is a feature that if, you have enough storage on your phone, you can download offline maps of a certain city and use it while offline. So I downloaded the London map and whenever I didn't have service it could 1. find my exact location and 2. look up locations of places I searched so I knew how to get there. The only negative aspect of Google maps is that, offline, they only give car driving directions. The walking and train ones are unfortunately unavailable. However, I simply just typed in my address or location I needed to go, hit the car directions and followed that as accurately as I could, deviating where possible to make the trip shorter. 

I’ve taken so many pictures and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to do my travels justice by representing them in a few snaps but I can try. My hopes with my blog are to inspire people to travel more and answer questions anyone has! Your travels don’t even have to be as far as Europe but can start with that weekend trip you’ve always wanted to take a few hours away. Enjoy life or it will pass you by too quickly. As the cliche says, life starts at the edge of your comfort zone! 💙