Introduction
This is Five Cents: travel guide to London. Plan four or five full days around connected central districts, rather than trying to collect the whole city. We’ll use the Thames as your spine. We’ll pair royal London with Parliament, choose depth in museums and history, then finish in Greenwich.
How to plan the route
The best place to start is with one central base and a simple rule: walk each cluster, and use public transport only between them. Stay around Covent Garden for the whole trip. From Heathrow, the Elizabeth line is the direct choice when your hotel is near its central stations. The journey takes about forty to forty-five minutes, depending on where you get off.
Use contactless or Oyster pay-as-you-go on the Tube and Elizabeth line. Keep the same card or device throughout the day. Begin southwest of your base, in St James’s Park, London’s oldest Royal Park. Its paths link Buckingham Palace, The Mall, Westminster and Trafalgar Square. Royal ceremony and public space make sense as one walk.
Continue past Buckingham Palace and down towards Westminster Abbey, Parliament and Big Ben. Choose Westminster Abbey as your one interior here. It gives the ceremonial district the historical weight that photographs cannot. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is a useful companion for this area because it captures central London as overlapping streets, parks, public rituals and private lives.
The following day, cross Westminster Bridge and turn east along the South Bank, the pedestrian riverfront opposite Parliament. This is where the Thames stops being a backdrop and becomes the route itself. Walk past the London Eye area towards Tate Modern, the former power station turned modern art museum. Choose Tate Modern over another paid skyline attraction. It gives you art, river views and a sense of the city’s industrial reinvention in the same stretch.
Borough Market works well as a food stop nearby
Borough Market works well as a food stop nearby, not as a separate mission. Keep moving east for London’s oldest political and commercial layers. From the South Bank, follow the river where it makes sense. Use a short Tube connection if needed, then continue to the Tower of London. Give it a substantial half-day. This former royal palace, fortress and prison concentrates nearly a millennium of power, including the Crown Jewels.
Afterwards, walk to Tower Bridge for the visual finish. Medieval royal authority, the financial City and the river all meet in one view. On day four, take the Tube west to Bloomsbury for the British Museum, a free global collection that is the best single introduction to London’s major museums. Don’t attempt several museums in one day. One thoughtful visit explains more about London as a world city than rushing through multiple galleries.
In the evening, head into the West End. Its compact streets around theatres, Soho, Chinatown and Covent Garden make a performance the right anchor for the night. Theatre is one of London’s defining cultural experiences, not just an extra after sightseeing. If you have a fifth day, make Greenwich your southeast extension. Treat it as a dedicated half-day by Tube or rail from central London.
Greenwich Park rises above the river with a broad view back towards the city, while the Royal Observatory adds the scientific story of time, astronomy and the Prime Meridian. It also completes the Thames narrative: from royal Westminster and the historic City to the maritime London that faced outward to the world.
For a shorter stay
For a shorter stay, stop after the West End rather than squeezing Greenwich into an already crowded itinerary. Camden, Notting Hill and Shoreditch are better saved for a more focused return. Windsor, Bath and the Harry Potter Studio Tour belong outside this city route. Remember three things: stay central and travel in walkable clusters; use the Thames to connect the city’s major identities; and choose depth with one historical interior, one museum and one theatre evening.
To continue, you can generate London Museums: British Museum, V and A and Natural History Museum.
To explore beyond central London, you can generate London Day Trips: Greenwich, Windsor and Harry Potter Studio Tour.