London travel guide

For a cosmopolitan city of 7.7 million people, London is quite parochial. Each neighbourhood, each street corner, is proud of its own identity. Central London is the shared London of all these groups and of nearly 20 million visitors a year as well. Symbols of London – the Beefeaters, the bobbies, the cabbies, the red buses, the pageantry, the Royal Family, the Houses of Parliament – all are here, along with the stock market, motorcycle messengers, dirty air and crawling traffic.

After an initial tour by boat or on an open-top bus to orientate yourself, the best way to see Central London is on foot. Although Greater London sprawls for 610 sq miles (1,580 sq km), the central area is surprisingly compact. Walkers have time to appreciate the infinite variety of architectural detail that traces the city’s long development. What’s more, they will be treading in the footsteps of some of history’s most celebrated citizens – to aid the imagination, blue plaques show where the great, the good and the notorious once lived.

As a visitor, you may be one of the 72 percent who visit the Tower of London, or the 92 percent who make their way to Piccadilly Circus. But you will probably also be one of the millions who find some small, distinctive corner of this remarkable city to be enthusiastic about.

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Places to visit in London

Soho and Covent Garden, with their abundance of shops, restaurants and theatres, are the twin hubs of tourist London, but if you step back from their overcrowded centres – Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square, Oxford Street and Covent Garden Piazza – you are in the chic and lively heart of the West End.

To many, Westminster and St James’s are central London. Between them they have the highest concentration of iconic buildings – the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, 10 Downing Street, Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square – not to mention the National Galleries and St James’s Park.

Bloomsbury is best known for its literary connections. Once the home of Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and Britain’s publishing houses, it is still a thriving cultural area thanks to the presence of University College London and the British Museum. Made up of Georgian terraces with beautiful green squares, Bloomsbury and Holborn are pleasingly quiet areas to wander around.

The City, or the Square Mile as it is also known, stands on the original settled area of London, and is now the financial district. Thus thrusting glass and steel bank headquarters nestle against centuries-old churches and pubs. The warehouses and print shops of old Clerkenwell are now the loft spaces, bars and clubs of its stylish new inhabitants. Dedicated fashion followers and bargain hunters flock east to the markets and boutiques of Spitalfields and Brick Lane.

The South Bank is the south side of the river between Tower and Westminster bridges. If you only had time for one slice of London sightseeing, make it this. Here in microcosm you have the best of London: fantastic food (Borough Market), art (Tate Modern), theatre (Shakespeare’s Globe and the National), music (Royal Festival Hall) and architecture (Tower Bridge and the London Eye).

Kensington, Chelsea and Knightsbridge are the most traditional, least changing parts of the city. Largely residential, the quiet squares and immaculate terraced housing are civilised, genteel pockets broken up by the posh shopping streets of Knightsbridge and the Kings Road, and the museum mile of Brompton and Exhibition Roads.

London is not a homogeneous city. It is rather a chaotic patchwork of overlapping villages all of which have distinctly different characters – boho Notting Hill, edgy Camden, easy Islington, gritty East End, intellectual Hampstead, scientific Greenwich and green Richmond – all merit a visit.

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