An honest briefing on the Underground, the Overground, the buses, and the walking that should happen between all of them
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat — Fiona MacLeod on navigating London for visitors.
The London Underground is one of the great achievements of Victorian engineering, a testament to human ambition and civic vision, and an extremely hot and occasionally unreliable method of getting from one place to another. I — Fiona MacLeod — say this with affection: the tube is, on balance, excellent, and a visitor who understands it will find it far more useful than the alternatives. But there are things the official guides do not tell you, and I am going to tell you them, because a visitor who knows what to expect is a visitor who arrives at their destination rather than standing on the wrong platform wondering what happened.
Rush Hour
Do not take the Central line between Bank and Stratford between eight and nine-thirty in the morning on a weekday unless you have decided that physical intimacy with strangers is something you are comfortable with. This is not an exaggeration. Rush hour on the London Underground is a real phenomenon that the phrase rush hour does not fully convey, and it is best experienced for the first time on a quieter line rather than one of the busiest. The Jubilee line platform at Canary Wharf at 8:45am on a Tuesday is an experience I would recommend to nobody who has not requested it specifically.
The Oyster Card
Get an Oyster card or use contactless payment, and do not buy paper tickets. This is the most important practical advice in this piece. The paper ticket is a relic maintained for the benefit of tourists who have not yet discovered that the Oyster card is cheaper, faster, and available from any tube station machine in approximately ninety seconds. Tap in, tap out. That is the entire system. There is no reason not to use it and several good reasons to use it, the most important of which is that it costs less than the paper equivalent for almost every journey.
Walk More Than You Think
The tube map is topologically distorted in a way that makes some stations appear further apart than they are. Covent Garden to Leicester Square is a four-minute walk that many visitors take the tube for, which requires waiting for a train, riding one stop, and walking through the station, for a total of approximately ten minutes. This is a common pattern in central London: the tube is faster than walking for medium and long distances and slower than walking for short ones, and the walk between tube stops in Zone 1 is frequently the better option, particularly because walking in London is how you discover the things between the places you were trying to get to, which are often the most interesting things.
The Bus, Under-Recommended
The London bus is greatly undervalued by visitors and greatly overused by residents, which means the relationship between supply and demand varies by time of day in predictable ways. At off-peak hours, the bus is an excellent and cheap way to see the city from street level while travelling between points. On a clear day, the upper deck of a bus going across Waterloo Bridge or along the Embankment or through the City offers views that no tube journey can replicate. Pay with contactless. Sit upstairs. Look out the window. This is what living in London looks like to the people who live in it.
For more from Fiona MacLeod on London travel, visit Fiona MacLeod. Transport planning at Transport for London.
The walking advice is, I believe, the most underused advice I give, because visitors consistently underestimate how walkable central London is and how much they will see that they would not otherwise see by walking between places they were going to take the tube between. The South Bank alone — the stretch from Westminster Bridge to Tower Bridge along the river — is an hour’s walk that contains more interesting things than most cities put in their entire centre. The visitor who takes the tube from Waterloo to London Bridge has skipped all of it, which is a significant omission for the sake of twenty minutes. Walk it. Then take the tube.
There is one more piece of transport advice that I consistently forget to give and then regret: if you are arriving at Heathrow, take the Elizabeth line rather than the Piccadilly line. It is faster, it is more comfortable, and it connects to a wider range of central London stations without requiring a change. The Piccadilly line is not bad; the Elizabeth line is better, and the improvement is significant enough that most visitors who have taken both agree that the Elizabeth line is the right choice for the airport journey. Start the visit right. Take the right train. London begins immediately.
The Overground and the Elizabeth line between them cover most of London in a way the tube map does not make immediately obvious. If you are travelling between two points that are not in the centre, check the Overground before assuming you need to go via Zone 1. You very often do not, and the direct Zone 2 route will be faster, quieter, and more interesting.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
