It will rain. It may rain now, while you are reading this. Here is how to have an excellent time anyway
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat — Fiona MacLeod on the reality of London weather for visitors.
I want to begin with honesty: it will rain during your visit to London. Not necessarily all the time, not necessarily hard, but it will rain with a probability that is, depending on the month, between very likely and essentially certain. I — Fiona MacLeod — am telling you this not to discourage you but because the visitors who have the best time in London in all weathers are the ones who have accepted this fact before they arrive and planned accordingly. The visitor who expected sun and got drizzle is the visitor who sits in a hotel lobby being disappointed. The visitor who expected drizzle and got sun is the visitor who is delighted by an unexpected gift. Lower your expectations for the sky. Raise them for everything else.
The Indoor London That Rain Reveals
London has, by accident of climate, developed one of the finest indoor cultures in the world. The museums are extraordinary: the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert, the Natural History Museum, the National Gallery, the Tate Modern, all of them free to enter, all of them extensive enough that a rainy afternoon in any one of them is a complete experience rather than a stopgap. The covered markets — Leadenhall, the Arcades, Covent Garden — are themselves worth visiting and provide shelter and entertainment simultaneously. The bookshops, particularly Daunt on Marylebone High Street and Foyles on Charing Cross Road, are the kind of places you can spend two hours without noticing.
What to Wear
Wear layers. London weather is variable enough that the coat you put on for the morning may be too heavy by the afternoon, and the jacket that was adequate at noon is insufficient by evening. The layering system is not a fashion statement; it is a practical response to a climate that changes its mind several times a day and has been doing so for as long as anyone can remember. A waterproof outer layer is not optional; it is the single most useful thing a visitor can bring. An umbrella is useful but is destroyed by London wind with a frequency that suggests the umbrella shops near major tourist sites are doing excellent business for reasons that are not coincidental.
The Rainy Day Cafe
The best thing to do in London rain is to find a cafe, order something hot, and stay there longer than you planned. London has an enormous number of excellent cafes, and the rainy day gives you permission to use one as it was intended: as a refuge, a place to sit and watch the rain and the street and the people passing, and to do nothing productive for as long as the coffee justifies it. This is a legitimate use of a travel day. The city will be there when the rain stops. The cafe is good now. The two things are not in competition.
The Upside
The genuine upside of London in the rain is that the queues are shorter. The major attractions — the Tower, the Eye, the Tate Modern turbine hall — have smaller queues in bad weather, because a percentage of visitors has retreated to hotels or indoor alternatives. If you are the visitor who goes anyway, equipped with the right coat and the right attitude, you will often find the city more accessible and more pleasant than it is on the sunny days when everyone is trying to enjoy it at once. Rain is a filter. The visitors who persist through it are, in my experience, the visitors who get the most out of London, because they are the ones who came to see the city rather than to see it when it is at its most photogenic.
For more from Fiona MacLeod on London travel tips, visit Fiona MacLeod. Weather and planning at Visit London.
The relationship between a visitor and rain is, I have observed over many years of talking to people who visit London, primarily a relationship between the visitor and their own expectations. The visitor who expected sunshine and got grey skies feels cheated. The visitor who expected grey skies and got sunshine feels lucky. The weather has not changed; the expectation has. This is the argument for the honest pre-visit briefing: not to lower enthusiasm but to calibrate it accurately, so that the experience of being in London matches the reality of London rather than the photographic version of London that appears in the images from the three sunny days per year when everything photographs beautifully.
The practical note I left out earlier: if it is raining hard and you are at a loss, go to any of the major museums and take the lift rather than the stairs, and go to the top floor first, and work your way down. This sounds trivial but it changes the experience significantly: you arrive at the beginning of each section fresh, descending through the collection rather than climbing toward the distant things you were going to see next. The Natural History Museum works particularly well this way: start with the blue whale on the top, and let the building take you down through geology and minerals and human biology to the entrance, which you will reach having seen the whole thing in an order that makes unexpected sense.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
