London in September

Quick Tips:

Best Way To Get Around:

The museum’s collection would probably need at least a week to do it justice, but the night viewings allow one to see the selected galleries in a much shorter time, due to the lack of crowds. They change which galleries are open on a regular basis, so it’s best to check the museum website for the schedule openings for the month you are planning to travel.

Entry was free. I can’t remember whether it was with our Great Britain Heritage card – I seem to remember that a lot of the public museums are free for viewing standard collections in England, except for special exhibitions. The website will tell you

The buses take a number of routes and have conductors/guides who give a running commentary in various languages and point out the major attractions and a little history as they hurtle around the city. Your ticket lets you on and off at various sites along the way as many times as you like in one day. We found it a very good orientation tool and would use them again. In fact, my 77-year-old mother (active), who travelled with us, was quite taken with one of the guides, who had us laughing the whole time, and she would happily have just driven around the city all day, listening to his amusing anecdotes of London history. Do the river cruise towards the end of the day; it is pleasant to grab a cold drink and collapse in a seat on the boat and view the city from a different and much quieter aspect of the river. There are also excellent photo opportunities of Big Ben and some of the other riverside attractions that you can’t get from the roadways and footpaths.

Beware and check the maps you receive if you pre-book your tickets, as the routes change depending on the season. We waited at the first bus stop for quite a while before we decided we should walk further up, as we could see plenty of buses on the next corner. When we showed the ticket collectors our map, they said we had a summer map with more pick-up points. They quickly swapped our map for a current one, and we set off on our journey of discovery. The buses arrive every 15 minutes at most sites and are easily identified. The maps provided are in a naïve style but are very clear to read, as they are based on landmarks and major roads. There are two major companies that run these buses, but we used the "original" company and found them excellent. If we had been staying longer, we would have purchased a second day (offered for a cheaper rate once you have had a one-day ticket) and done another route or two.

They also have an excellent website, which we discovered just before we left home, that shows some of the routes they offer and a little information about them. Much better than the five-line blurb in a travel brochure.

I would never use Evans Evans tours again. We pre-booked this tour prior to leaving home, with the understanding that you had to pre-book Buckingham Palace; otherwise, you would not get in. It cost $98 per person for what was advertised as a three-hour tour, finishing at lunch time at the palace. When I received our Great Britain Heritage Cards, booked after the Evans Evans Tour, I found we could have gotten in for free with these but may have had to wait up to two hours for entry, depending on the queues. Not having to wait in the queue was the only good thing I have to say about how the tour was operated. We made our way to the pick-up point at about 8am, and the tour was scheduled to start at 9am. The bus took us a whole 10 minutes away to Victoria Bus Station, where we were transferred to a larger coach and sat in the depot til nearly 10am. We then were taken on a tour of the city with a guide who had the most annoying voice and mannerisms and did not do as good a job as the much cheaper hop-on-hop-off buses of the day before. We were taken to the Albert Memorial and the Victoria and Albert (but not allowed in), and we were taken to Kensington Palace and walked through the park and stood at the fence for ages (but again, were not allowed in) and then dumped at Westminster Abbey to purchase a cup of tea (again, with strict instructions to not go in, as the guide didn’t want to have any trouble rounding anyone up). All these sites were open to the public and had virtually no queues at the time we visited.

We were then dumped at Buckingham Palace at noon (nearly lunchtime), the time the tour had been advertised to finish, as the guide said to "do the palace and the gardens on your own." In truth, we would have been better off just going and waiting at the palace queue early in the morning or with the tour taking us to one of the places mentioned and letting us go in and do it properly; it just felt as if they were wasting time till they could throw us at the Buckingham Palace staff. Consequently, we had to fly through the palace, as we had booked a hire car at 1pm to drive to the South of England that afternoon. I still don’t know what we actually paid the bus tour for, as they did virtually nothing and even had the hide to made sounds like they should receive a tip!

Read the brochures carefully before booking trips, and try to confirm the information that appears to be there and that you are getting what you think. Our brochure said that the tour ends at the palace at noon, where you are free to continue exploring the gardens; that really meant that, once you were passed to the BP staff, the whole tour, not just the gardens, was on your own. We actually missed the gardens, as the car company would only extend our pick-up time by an hour, and we had to be in Lymington to book into our timeshare by 5pm. There were a number of groups on the bus from Australia who felt they had been mislead and, like us, were scrambling to try and change the arrangements they had made for the afternoon when we made stops.

Having had my whine –- the hand-over to palace staff was extremely smooth, and the organisation of that staff saw us very promptly guided through their various entry protocols without having to sit and wait for admission. We were travelling in September and were near the end of the palace’s opening season. If you were travelling in the peak season, the ability to just walk straight in on delivery would be an advantage, so one may use a tour company to gain access. Just read the fine print carefully so that you know what to expect.

Hold changing of the guards at Windsor, as well as Buckingham Palace. We arrived at 11am in time for this and then explored the castle itself. Although, we did this as a day trip from our timeshare, Walton Hall, it was approximately an hour-and-a-half trip and would have taken nearly as long from the centre of London, given that it was mostly freeway -- three-lane roads -- all the way from Wellesbourne to Windsor. We timed it to leave just on the tail-end of the morning traffic on advice from the staff at Walton Hall. We arrived just before the 11am changing of the guards, which left us plenty of time to explore and still allowed us to be home in time for tea. Free on Great Britain Heritage Pass, about 11 pounds per person normally.