By Shawna Cordonnier, Travel Advisor, Roseville Travel
The honest answer is four full days minimum, five if you want a day trip. Three days is a stopover, not a visit, and it is the single most common way people come home from London feeling they rushed it.
The reason is not that there is too much to see. It is that London is enormous. Central London alone covers more ground than the whole of central Paris, and the Tower of London and the British Museum are a genuine forty-five minutes apart. Four or five moves a day, at half an hour each, is two and a half hours of your day spent underground.
The fix is to plan by neighborhood rather than by attraction.
The four-day structure
Day 1 — Westminster. Westminster Abbey, the Churchill War Rooms, and the view across to Parliament. All walkable from each other. If Parliament matters to you, tours run on Saturdays and during recess; Buckingham Palace's State Rooms open only in late summer, roughly July to September, which surprises a lot of visitors who planned around them.
Day 2 — The City and the river. The Tower of London at opening — go straight to the Crown Jewels before the queue forms, then double back for the rest. St Paul's, then across the Millennium Bridge to Tate Modern and along the South Bank to Borough Market.
Day 3 — Museums. The British Museum, the V&A and the National Gallery are all free for their permanent collections, which Americans consistently do not believe until they walk in. Pick one for the morning and one for the afternoon; do not attempt three.
Day 4 — West End and parks. Covent Garden, Soho, a walk through Hyde Park or Regent's Park, and a play in the evening.
Day 5, if you have it — a day trip. Windsor is about thirty minutes from Paddington. Oxford is an hour, Bath about an hour and twenty-five. Stonehenge realistically needs a tour or a car.
Theatre, booked properly
The West End is one of the genuine reasons to add a day. Two rules:
Book direct with the theatre's own website. Resale sites add fees that can double a ticket, and they appear above the real box office in search results.
For same-day seats, use the official TKTS booth in Leicester Square — the one operated by the Society of London Theatre. There are lookalike shops nearby that are not it.
The travel card you should not buy
Do not buy an Oyster card, a Travelcard, or a tourist transit pass. Tap in and out with your contactless credit card or phone. The system applies the same fares, and it automatically caps your daily and weekly spend at the best available rate — you cannot overpay.
The London Pass and similar sightseeing bundles are a different question, and usually a no. Three of the four big museums are free, which is most of what such passes are priced against.
From Heathrow, the Elizabeth line is fast and reasonable, the Heathrow Express is fastest and most expensive, and the Piccadilly line is cheapest and slowest.
Where to stay
Stay central. South Kensington, Bloomsbury, Marylebone, Covent Garden and Soho all put you within walking distance of something worth walking to.
The saving on a hotel near Heathrow or out in zone 4 is real, and it costs you ninety minutes a day and the ability to go back to the room in the afternoon. On a four-day trip that trade is a bad one.
Book before you go
- Tower of London and Westminster Abbey — timed entry, sells out in summer
- Churchill War Rooms — small, and it sells out earliest of the three
- Theatre, direct with the venue
- Buckingham Palace State Rooms, if your dates fall in the opening window
The free museums need no booking, which is another argument for building days around them.
Adding Scotland
If you have ten days rather than five, the natural extension is the train north. London King's Cross to Edinburgh takes about four hours and twenty minutes — city center to city center, no airport, and the east coast run past Durham and the Northumberland coast is one of the best train journeys in Britain.
Advance fares on that route are dramatically cheaper than walk-up ones, so book it the week you fix your dates.
From Placer County
There are nonstop flights to London from San Francisco, so this is one of the easier long-haul trips to arrange from here — a short hop to SFO and then straight through. You land in the morning, jet-lagged; make day one the Westminster day and keep the evening light.
Still deciding whether London is even the right trip this year? Five questions will narrow it faster than another list of destinations.
If you are extending the trip, Edinburgh is four hours north by train and Bruges is two hours east by Eurostar. Both work as three-night additions.
Call Roseville Travel at (916) 782-6363 and we will build the days around what you actually want to see, and get the timed entries locked before they sell.