The capital has a reputation for emptying wallets, but a little local knowledge turns an expensive city into a surprisingly affordable one
I write London travel guidance for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, and the question I am asked most often, by anxious visitors and weary residents alike, is the same: how on earth does anyone afford this city? The honest answer is that with a little local knowledge, London is far more affordable than its fearsome reputation suggests, and I am here to share the knowledge.
London has a reputation as a wallet-emptying machine, a city where a coffee costs a fortune and a museum costs your firstborn, and the reputation is not entirely undeserved, for it is perfectly possible to spend extraordinary sums here if you confine yourself to the tourist trail. But the tourist trail is a trap, and the city that lies just off it is a different and far cheaper place, and learning to find it is the single most valuable skill a visitor can acquire.
The Great Free Treasure
Start with the museums, because here London is genuinely generous. The great national museums, the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Tate galleries, the Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert, are free to enter, a treasure of world-class culture available at no cost, a generosity that puts many cities to shame. A visitor could spend a week exploring these collections without paying a penny for admission, and many do, and they are right to. For the latest exhibitions and opening times I always point people to the listings, which keep track of what is on.
Beyond the museums lies a whole city of free pleasures, the great parks, the markets, the walks along the river, the architecture, the simple pleasure of wandering through neighbourhoods that are themselves the attraction. London best experiences are often its cheapest, the free wandering through a city of endless interest, and I have catalogued many of them over at my column for exactly the budget-conscious visitor who has discovered that the city need not bankrupt them.
Eating Well For Less
The food, too, need not break the bank, for alongside the expensive restaurants lies a vast and wonderful world of cheap eating, the markets with their street food, the ethnic neighbourhoods with their authentic and affordable kitchens, the pubs with their reasonable meals, the whole alternative food economy that the visitor confined to the tourist restaurants never discovers. To eat well and cheaply in London, one need only venture where the locals eat, which is, almost by definition, not where the tourists eat.
The transport, the accommodation, the entertainment, all have their budget versions, their local secrets, their ways of being enjoyed without the tourist premium, and I will explore them in future guides. The essential lesson, the one that transforms the expensive city into the affordable one, is simply this: get off the tourist trail. The London of the guidebooks is expensive; the London of the locals is not, and the second London is far more interesting than the first.
So do not be frightened by London reputation. With a little local knowledge, the wallet-emptying machine becomes a surprisingly affordable city, its greatest treasures free, its best food cheap, its finest pleasures available to anyone willing to step off the beaten path. The expensive London is real, but it is optional, and the affordable London, the real London, is there for anyone who knows where to look.
The free museums deserve a fuller word, for they are among the genuine glories of the city and the single best value any visitor can find. The breadth of the collections is staggering, millennia of human history and art available without charge, the kind of cultural wealth that elsewhere commands steep admission, here simply open to all, a public generosity that reflects a genuine commitment to access that the visitor should appreciate and exploit.
The strategy for the museums is not to attempt everything, for the great collections are overwhelming and a day spent trying to see all of the British Museum is a day spent seeing none of it properly. Better to choose, to focus, to spend an unhurried hour with a few galleries than a frantic afternoon with all of them, the free admission making it possible to return, to treat the museum not as a one-time conquest but as a place to visit and revisit.
The parks are the city other great free treasure, the vast green spaces that punctuate the urban density, the royal parks and the commons and the gardens, each with its own character, all free, all offering the simple pleasures of green space in a great city, the walking, the sitting, the watching of the city at leisure, the antidote to the expense and the bustle, available to anyone at no cost.
The walking is perhaps the best free pleasure of all, for London is a city that rewards the walker, its interest concentrated at street level, its neighbourhoods revealing themselves only to those who explore them on foot, the architecture and the history and the texture of the place available free to anyone willing to walk, the city itself the attraction, the wandering its own reward.
More in this vein at Time Out London.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
