London Walks

One of the best things I have done when visiting London is the London Walks. They have dozens of different walks given by an array of different guides. I have been on 6 or 7 so far and have found many to be great. The most famous of course is the Jack the Ripper tour which is just as good as advertised. My personal favorite is Helena’s “Westminster & the West End” walk which does give you a grand overview, both historically and geographically. The distance and time are just about right for a good walk: two hours on average and I’d say most cover about two miles. Not too strenuous at all. For the evening tours (besides the Ripper walk) I would definitely recommend the pub tours. Well worth it to hear some history and find some hidden gems.

My husband and I just came back from a weekend in London and did two walks. The first was "Royal London & Westminster Abbey". Our guide Brian was fantastic and gave us a lot of history. I absolutely recommend this walk!

Our second was the "Along the Thames" pub walk. If I were to do a pub walk again, or recommend one to a friend, it would not be this one. The reason being our guide David, while theatrical and witty, was too long-winded. We visited two bars and were only allowed 15 MINUTES in each! On a friday night, that is absoulutely ridiculous. It took us 5-8 minutes to get up to the bar and order a drink. Then we had to down it in 5-8 minutes! These bars were great and loads of fun, but for a 3 HOUR tour, 30 minutes of drinking is not what we expected. Our guide actually took us to three bars, but the third one was only pointed out to us, and was where the tour ended.

My main complaint is this: The description of the tour said that food was available on the walk. The walk is from 7pm-10pm approx. Well the first bar had food, but we only had 15 minutes to hang out....not enough time to order food, especially on a Friday night when it's hard just to get a beer, let alone a table. The second bar did not serve food, and by the time we arrived at the last bar where the tour ended, they had stopped serving food because it was after 10pm! Needless to say, there were many people on the tour who were complaining about how hungry they were. Lucky for us, we grabbed a bite to eat before the walk started.

Overall, I am glad we did both walks. The pub walk was in a part of London that we would probably have skipped if we had not done it....so I'm glad we did it. The bars we went to were fantastic and we visited them again later on during the weekend.

So do the walk if you haven't visited that part of London before, but eat before you go and plan on returning to the bars at another point to actually enjoy them and try the variety of beers.