Overview to London: Travel Guide and Tourist Information
- London Information
- Eating & drinking in London
- Night life in London
- Getting around in London
- Things to do in London
- Where to stay in London
- London street map
“By seeing London,” Dr Johnson said, “I have seen as much of life as the world can show.” And that, as many backpackers will testify, is as true today as it was then; London is a city of unparalleled activity which fizzes and courses with life.
Swanky neighborhoods full of pricey boutiques and elegant restaurants - including Knightsbridge, Kensington and Chelsea - make up the west of the center. The east, on the other hand, is full of more down-to-earth and increasingly trendy areas like Shoreditch, Hackney and Whitechapel.
London’s greatest strength is its incredible number of galleries and museums. Its sprawling pavilions of culture include the National History Museum, the Science Museum and the V&A (in South Kensington), as well as the incomparable British Museum in the heart of Bloomsbury.
Impressive art galleries like the Tate Modern (on the Southbank), the Tate Britain (on Millbank) and the National Gallery (on Trafalgar Square) mix with scores of smaller, more intimate venues. Handily for the budget traveler, most of these galleries can be entered for free and are easily accessible from the many conveniently located London hostels.
But many of the other big-name sights are not so cheap. For the Tower of London (on Tower Hill), the London Eye (on the Southbank) and Buckingham Palace (off the Mall), backpackers must be prepared to dig deep into their pockets.
A fantastic way of counteracting some of these costs, though, is to head for one of the number of enormous parks, commons and heaths that are dotted around the city. The most central, Hyde Park, may be the best known, but it’s also perhaps the least interesting.
Out to the southwest of the city, the trio of parks at Richmond, Putney and Wimbledon are a fantastic mixture of woods, heathland and wildlife. But the best park is undoubtedly the vast Hampstead Heath, an oasis of rugged countryside in the north of the city.
It would take a lifetime to get to know every area of the city. London, like the River Thames that forms its backbone, ebbs and flows and seems to be in a constant state of flux and reinvention. And it's just so big, diverse and intriguing, that when you’d finished exploring it, everything would have changed all over again!
