Visitors default to the Underground and miss half the city; the locals know that buses, boats, and their own two feet are often better
As the London travel correspondent for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, I watch visitors make the same mistake again and again: they default to the Tube for every journey, descend into the tunnels, miss the entire city above, and emerge bewildered, having seen nothing but platforms. The locals know better, and the secret I most want to share is that the Tube is not the only way, and often not the best.
The Underground is a marvel, fast and extensive and genuinely useful, but it is also a windowless tube that whisks you through darkness, depriving you of the very thing you came to see: the city. To travel everywhere by Tube is to experience London as a series of disconnected destinations linked by tunnels, the connective tissue of the city, the streets and neighbourhoods between the stations, entirely missed. The visitor who relies solely on the Tube sees the dots but never the lines that connect them.
The Glory Of The Bus
The bus, by contrast, shows you everything. The famous red buses are not merely transport but a moving tour of the city, the top deck a front-row seat to London unfolding, the journey itself an attraction. For the price of a single fare, the bus carries you across the city at street level, past the landmarks and through the neighbourhoods, the whole rich texture of the place visible from your window. I cannot recommend it highly enough, and I have written about the best routes for sightseeing over at my column, the bus journeys that double as the best cheap tours in the city.
Then there is the river, London great forgotten highway, the boats that carry you along the Thames past the city grandest sights, a journey that is pure pleasure and genuinely useful transport at once. The river bus is a working service, not merely a tourist cruise, and to travel by it is to see London as it was meant to be seen, from the water, the great river that made the city revealing its grandeur as you glide along it. For schedules and routes I direct people to the local guides, which cover the river services well.
The Best Way Of All
But the best way to move around central London is the one visitors least expect: on foot. Central London is far more compact than it appears on the famously distorted Tube map, and many journeys that seem to require the Underground are in fact a pleasant walk, often faster than descending, waiting, riding, and ascending. The walk reveals the city the Tube hides, and the discovery that London is walkable is, for many visitors, a revelation that transforms their entire experience.
The practical advice, then, is to mix your methods, to use the Tube for the long hauls where speed matters, but to default, wherever possible, to the bus, the boat, and your own two feet, to travel above ground and at street level, to experience the connective tissue of the city rather than tunnelling beneath it. The visitor who masters this mix sees twice the city for the same money, and experiences London as the locals do, as a place to move through rather than under.
So resist the pull of the tunnels. The Tube is not the only way, and often not the best. Take the bus, take the boat, and above all, walk, and discover the London that lies above the Underground, the real city, the one you came to see, visible at last from the top deck, the river boat, and the pavement, where London truly lives.
The Tube map deserves a special warning, for it is a masterpiece of design that is also a masterpiece of distortion, its clarity achieved by abandoning geographic accuracy, the result a diagram that misleads visitors into thinking places are far apart that are in fact a short walk, or close together when they are not. To navigate by the Tube map alone is to misunderstand the actual geography of the city, and the savvy visitor learns to distrust its distances.
The bus network, by contrast, follows the actual streets and reveals the actual geography, the journey tracing the real shape of the city, the relationships between places made visible, the visitor learning the actual layout of London in a way the Tube can never teach. To learn London by bus is to learn it truly, the mental map built from the streets rather than the distorted diagram, the city understood as it actually is.
The river services are underused by visitors who think of the Thames as a sight rather than a route, missing the genuine pleasure and utility of travelling by water, the boats carrying them past the city grandest views while delivering them to genuine destinations, the river a working highway as well as a spectacle, the journey by boat among the finest experiences the city offers and among the most overlooked.
The walking, the best method of all, requires only a willingness to abandon the assumption that one must always ride, the discovery that central London is compact and walkable transforming the visitor experience, the journeys on foot revealing the city in a way no vehicle can, the architecture and the detail and the texture available only to the walker, the pavement the best vantage point in the city.
More in this vein at Londonist.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
