London in a Long Weekend

The mistake people make in London is treating it as a list. The Tower, the Eye, Buckingham Palace, a musical, Oxford Street. It is possible to do all of that in three days and come away having experienced almost nothing of the city.

London is a collection of villages that happens to contain some world-class institutions. The better plan is to pick one big thing a day and spend the rest of the time walking somewhere specific.

One Museum a Day, and Which One

They are free, they are extraordinary, and they will defeat you if you attempt more than one. The British Museum for the sheer sweep of it, though go at opening or in the last two hours. The National Gallery if you want great paintings in a manageable building. The V and A if you care about design, and it has the best museum cafe in London.

Sir John Soane's Museum, a small architect's house near Holborn stuffed floor to ceiling with antiquities, is the one Londoners send friends to. Free, strange, and only takes an hour.

Walk These, Not Oxford Street

Marylebone, for a high street that still works, good bookshops and the sense of a village that got surrounded. Borough Market and then east along the river toward Tower Bridge, ideally on a weekday morning.

Hampstead and the Heath for a proper half day, with the swimming ponds if the weather allows and a pub at the end of it. Columbia Road on a Sunday morning for the flower market, then Brick Lane and Spitalfields afterwards.

Avoid Oxford Street entirely. It has nothing you cannot buy at home and it is the least pleasant half mile in central London.

Eating

Book before you fly. The good rooms in London go weeks out, and the restaurants with tables free on the day are almost always the ones aimed at people who did not plan.

The city's real strength is its range rather than its grandest restaurants. A proper curry in Whitechapel, dim sum in Chinatown at eleven in the morning, a Sunday roast in a pub with a fire. Do at least one of each.

Afternoon tea is a genuine pleasure and a genuine tourist trap depending entirely on where. The hotel dining rooms do it properly. Anywhere advertising it on a chalkboard does not.

Practicalities

Get an Oyster card or just tap a contactless card, which now works on everything and caps automatically. Walk more than you plan to. Central London is much smaller than the tube map suggests, and the map is famously not to scale.

Theatre is worth doing and worth booking directly with the theatre rather than through a reseller. Same-day returns often appear at the box office in the morning for shows that look sold out.

When to Come

May, June and September are the best of it: long days, gardens working, and the city not yet in high summer crowds. July and August are busy and the transport is hot in a way the system was never designed for.

Winter is underrated if you accept the dark. The museums are empty, the pubs are at their best, and hotel rates in January are the lowest of the year by a wide margin.