Things to do in London

Buckingham Palace is the official London residence and primary working palace of the British monarch, one of the most recognisable and visited buildings in the world. Originally built as a town house for the Duke of Buckingham in 1703, the building was purchased by King George III in 1761 and transformed by successive monarchs and architects including John Nash and Aston Webb into the magnificent neoclassical palace that stands today. The State Rooms, with their exceptional collections of Old Master paintings, French furniture, porcelain and decorative arts assembled by monarchs since George IV, are open to visitors during the summer months. The Changing of the Guard ceremony performed daily in the forecourt is one of the most famous military traditions in Britain. The palace fronts onto the Mall and St James's Park, forming the ceremonial heart of the British capital.

The Royal Observatory at Greenwich occupies a hill in southeast London's Greenwich Park and holds a unique place in scientific and navigational history. Founded in 1675 by King Charles II, the observatory was established with a very specific practical purpose: to solve the problem of determining longitude at sea. In the age of sail, the inability to accurately calculate a ship's east-west position was a cause of catastrophic maritime losses, and the astronomers appointed here dedicated generations of work to solving it. The observatory was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, who adapted an existing structure to create the distinctive red-brick Flamsteed House that still stands at the summit of the park. The first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, began the painstaking work of cataloguing star positions that would eventually help navigators establish their longitude. His successors continued and refined this work for centuries, producing star charts and time signals that became essential to maritime navigation worldwide. The observatory's role in timekeeping led to a development of global significance. In 1884, at an international conference in Washington D.C., the meridian passing through Greenwich was adopted as the Prime Meridian of the world, the zero line of longitude from which all geographic positions east and west are measured. Greenwich Mean Time became the foundation of global timekeeping, a convention that persists in the modern digital age through Coordinated Universal Time. Visitors today can stand astride the famous brass meridian line embedded in the courtyard, placing one foot in the eastern hemisphere and one in the western. The site's collection of historic astronomical instruments is genuinely extraordinary, including telescopes used by generations of astronomers and original clockwork mechanisms that helped synchronise time signals across the British Empire. The Great Equatorial Telescope, housed under its green onion dome, was the largest telescope in Britain when it was installed in 1893. The iconic red Time Ball on top of Flamsteed House has dropped at precisely 13:00 every day since 1833, providing ships in the Thames with a visual time signal they could use to set their chronometers before setting sail. It still falls punctually today. The nearby Planetarium shows bring the universe to life for visitors of all ages. Entry to the grounds and the Prime Meridian courtyard is free. Paid admission covers access to the observatory buildings, exhibitions and the Planetarium. The hilltop location also provides one of the best panoramic views across the London skyline, taking in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, the dome of St Paul's Cathedral and the sweep of the Thames.

The IFS Cloud Cable Car crosses the River Thames between Greenwich Peninsula and Royal Docks in east London, operating throughout the year as part of Transport for London's network and accepting Oyster and contactless payment. The gondola crossing takes approximately ten minutes and rises to ninety metres above the Thames, providing exceptional aerial views of the O2 Arena, Canary Wharf, the City of London skyline and the rapidly transforming industrial landscape of east London. Connecting North Greenwich tube station on the south side with Royal Victoria DLR station on the north, the cable car is used both by commuters and tourists seeking a unique perspective on east London.

Leadenhall Market is a buzzy, beautiful and airy market in the heart of the City of London, that boasts a unique selection of boutiques, shops, restaurants and bars. It is a hidden gem – both outdoors and covered – with rich heritage and stunning architecture dating back to the 14th century. Visit this iconic London landmark, an ideal spot for shopping, drinking and dining safely in the heart of the Square Mile.

The London Dungeon is one of London's most popular visitor attractions, an immersive theatrical experience in the Riverside complex on the South Bank near Waterloo that recreates the darker episodes of London's history through live actors, special effects, rides and theatrical sets. The attraction takes visitors through recreations of significant historical events including the Great Plague, the Great Fire of London, the Jack the Ripper murders and the Gunpowder Plot in a format combining entertainment with historical content. First opened in 1974 in the vaults beneath London Bridge station and subsequently moved to its current South Bank location, the London Dungeon has become one of the iconic London tourist experiences particularly popular with older children and adults who enjoy the combination of history and horror. The South Bank location places it within easy reach of other major attractions including the Tate Modern and Shakespeare's Globe.

Madame Tussauds in Marylebone in London is one of the world's most famous and visited tourist attractions, a wax figure museum displaying extraordinarily lifelike wax sculptures of celebrities, royalty, politicians, historical figures and sporting stars in interactive and theatrical settings. The collection was founded by Marie Tussaud, a Swiss-born wax sculptor who learned her craft in Paris and brought her collection to Britain in 1802, eventually establishing a permanent exhibition in London in 1835. The current attraction on Marylebone Road has expanded across several large interconnected exhibition spaces, with themed areas covering film, sport, music, royalty and history and interactive experiences including a Marvel Universe 4D experience and various film-related attractions. Madame Tussauds attracts millions of visitors annually and remains one of the defining experiences of a visit to London, combining entertainment, celebrity culture and the extraordinary technical artistry of wax sculpture.

The National Gallery on Trafalgar Square in London houses one of the greatest collections of Western European painting in the world, approximately 2,300 works spanning from the thirteenth to the early twentieth century displayed in a neoclassical building of 1838 that is the free, public face of one of the world's most important art institutions. The collection was founded in 1824 when the government purchased thirty-eight paintings from the estate of John Julius Angerstein and has been expanded through gifts, bequests and purchases in every subsequent decade to encompass masterpieces from virtually every significant tradition in European painting. The collection is arranged chronologically and by school, allowing visitors to trace the development of Western painting from the altarpieces of the early Italian Renaissance through the golden age of Dutch and Flemish painting, the French classical tradition and the great English school to the Impressionism and Post-Impressionism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The particular strengths of the collection include an unrivalled group of Italian Renaissance paintings, the finest collection of Dutch and Flemish painting in Britain outside the royal collection, and outstanding works of the Spanish and French traditions. Among the individual masterpieces in the collection are the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, Velázquez's The Rokeby Venus, The Fighting Temeraire by Turner, Las Meninas studies, Vermeer's A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal and the Sunflowers by Van Gogh. The combination of encyclopaedic scope and exceptional individual quality makes the National Gallery the single most comprehensive introduction to European painting available in Britain. The collection is free to visit and the gallery is open daily, making it one of the most accessible of all the world's great art museums.

Home to over 500 species in 14 themed zones, there is so much to see at SEA LIFE London Aquarium! Polar Adventure - Travel to the frozen extremities of the Antarctic and meet the stars of Polar Adventure - our Gentoo Penguin Colony Ocean Invaders – Stepping into the UK’s largest jellyfish experience, an interactive experience through three unique zones Coral Kingdom - Dive into a dazzling underwater oasis and wave your fins at the UK’s largest living Coral reef Rockpool - Discover what really lies beneath the surface in our local seas and learn about the creatures closer to home.

The Sky Garden is the most exciting addition to London’s skyline and dining scene. As well as being the capital’s highest public garden, it showcases two destination bars and two beautiful restaurants, alongside a range of private hire options for events. Visiting the Sky Garden is free but spaces are limited. Visits must be booked in advance through this site, and can be made up to three weeks in advance.

St Paul's Cathedral is one of the most recognisable and architecturally significant buildings in the world, a baroque masterpiece designed by Sir Christopher Wren and built between 1675 and 1710 following the destruction of the medieval cathedral in the Great Fire of London in 1666. The cathedral's great dome, rising to 111 metres and visible from many parts of London, became the defining symbol of the rebuilt city and remains one of the most powerful architectural images in Britain. The interior contains exceptional decorative work including mosaics, the carvings of Grinling Gibbons and the Whispering Gallery, Stone Gallery and Golden Gallery providing different perspectives on the city below. St Paul's has been the setting for numerous significant national events including the funerals of Nelson and Churchill and the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. The crypt contains the tombs of Nelson and Wellington.

The Shard is a 310-metre glass skyscraper in London Bridge, Southwark, and the tallest building in the United Kingdom, designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano and completed in 2012. The building's distinctive tapered form with multiple glass facades creates a crystalline profile on the London skyline that has become one of the most recognisable additions to the cityscape in decades. The View from The Shard attraction on the upper floors provides one of the most spectacular panoramas available in London, with views on clear days extending for up to 40 miles in every direction across the capital and its surrounding counties. Below the viewing gallery the building contains offices, the Shangri-La Hotel, residential apartments and restaurants. The London Bridge location places The Shard within easy reach of Borough Market, Tate Modern, Shakespeare's Globe and the South Bank riverside walk, making it part of one of London's most dynamic visitor destinations.

Tower Bridge across the Thames in London is the most recognisable bridge in the world and one of the defining symbols of the city, a Gothic Revival bascule bridge of extraordinary Victorian engineering ambition completed in 1894 whose twin towers, high-level walkways and the road bridge below them have provided the most iconic image of London for over a century. The bridge was designed by the City Architect Sir Horace Jones and the engineer John Wolfe Barry to provide a crossing of the Thames immediately downstream of London Bridge while also allowing the passage of the large vessels that regularly entered the upper Pool of London until the mid-twentieth century. The engineering of Tower Bridge is one of the great Victorian civil engineering achievements. The twin bascule spans, each weighing over a thousand tonnes, are raised by hydraulic machinery to allow tall vessels through the central navigation channel, the original steam-powered hydraulic system having been replaced by electrically powered pumps in 1976. The mechanism still operates on a regular basis for vessels that require the bridge to open, and the opening of the bascules, which takes approximately five minutes from road level, provides one of the most dramatic moments available in the daily life of central London. The towers of the bridge, which house the machinery and visitor exhibitions, are constructed of granite and Portland stone applied over the steel framework of the structure, giving the bridge its neo-Gothic architectural character. The Victorian engineers and their client, the City of London, chose this style to complement the Tower of London immediately to the east and to give the new bridge an appearance appropriate to its prestigious location at the heart of the capital. The Tower Bridge Exhibition allows visitors to cross the high-level walkways between the towers with views up and downstream, and to see the original Victorian hydraulic machinery in the engine rooms at the south bank.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington is the world's greatest museum of art and design, housing a permanent collection of approximately 2.27 million objects spanning 5,000 years of human creativity across every medium, culture and tradition. The museum was established following the Great Exhibition of 1851, which generated both a surplus that funded its creation and an ambition to improve the design quality of British manufactured goods by exposing designers, manufacturers and the public to examples of excellence from across history and the world. The building itself is one of the most elaborate examples of High Victorian institutional architecture in London, its terracotta facades and richly decorated interiors expressing the museum's belief that architecture should itself be a work of art and an educating environment. The great quadrangle, the Raphael Court, the Dome and the successive galleries added through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries create a labyrinthine building of considerable grandeur that is itself part of the visitor experience. The collections defy easy summary by their sheer scale and diversity. The Cast Courts contain plaster casts of some of the most important sculptural monuments in the world, including a full-size cast of Trajan's Column split across two rooms and casts of Michelangelo's David and the portal of Santiago de Compostela cathedral that allow direct comparison impossible to achieve by travelling to the originals. The furniture and decorative arts collections trace the history of interior design from the medieval period to the present day through objects of the highest quality. The textile and fashion collections, the ceramics galleries, the sculpture courts and the great medieval and Renaissance galleries each represent decades of careful acquisition and scholarship. The museum is free to enter and open daily, and its position at the heart of the Museum Quarter in South Kensington alongside the Natural History Museum and Science Museum makes it the natural centrepiece of a full day's museum visiting.

Westminster Abbey is the most historically significant church in England, a Gothic abbey church of great beauty that has been the setting for the coronation of every English and British monarch since William the Conqueror in 1066 and contains the tombs and memorials of kings, queens, statesmen, scientists, poets and composers in a density of historical association unmatched by any other building in Britain. The current Gothic church was begun by Henry III in 1245 and developed over the following centuries into one of the finest Gothic buildings in England, its soaring nave, elaborate chapels and the extraordinary collection of medieval royal tombs in the chapel of Edward the Confessor constituting a national monument of the highest importance. The coronation tradition at Westminster Abbey is unbroken for over nine centuries, every sovereign from William I to the present day having been crowned in the abbey on the Coronation Chair that has housed the Stone of Destiny since Edward I's conquest of Scotland in 1296. The setting of royal coronation, royal marriages and state funerals in the abbey makes it the most theatrically significant building in the country, the physical setting for the ceremonial moments that mark the continuity of the British monarchy and state. The medieval royal tombs in the Henry VII Lady Chapel and the chapel of Edward the Confessor are among the finest collections of medieval funerary sculpture in Europe. The effigies of Henry III, Eleanor of Castile, Edward I and their successors, many in painted and gilded wood or alabaster of exceptional quality, provide a direct and remarkable connection with the medieval monarchs whose reigns defined the development of medieval England. Poets' Corner in the south transept contains memorials to the greatest writers in the English language from Chaucer to the present, providing a literary dimension that complements the royal and political history of the building.

ZSL London Zoo in Regent's Park is the world's oldest scientific zoo, founded by the Zoological Society of London in 1828 and continuously developed since as both a major visitor attraction and a centre for wildlife conservation science and animal welfare research. The zoo covers approximately 36 acres of the northern section of Regent's Park and houses over twenty thousand animals representing approximately seven hundred species, displayed in a combination of modern naturalistic exhibits and the historic buildings of earlier periods that give the zoo its distinctive character as a layered architectural and institutional history as well as a living animal collection. The zoo's architectural heritage is one of its most distinctive features. The Penguin Pool designed by Berthold Lubetkin and completed in 1934, a modernist masterpiece of interlocking concrete ramps above an oval pool, is a listed building of exceptional architectural importance though no longer used for penguins. The Snowdon Aviary of 1965, designed by Lord Snowdon with Cedric Price and Frank Newby, is one of the pioneering examples of high-tension wire structure in architecture. The combination of these modernist landmarks with Victorian and Edwardian buildings and contemporary naturalistic exhibits creates a zoo of remarkable architectural variety. The conservation and research work of the Zoological Society of London, which operates ZSL London Zoo and ZSL Whipsnade Zoo as part of its broader scientific programme, includes field conservation projects in over fifty countries and scientific research programmes in reproductive biology, wildlife health and population genetics that contribute to the conservation of species both in captivity and in the wild. The zoo's location in Regent's Park and its proximity to Camden Town and Central London make it one of the most accessible urban wildlife attractions in Europe.