Five Days in London: The Itinerary With Room to Breathe

In this guide

Five days splits what three days forces together. The Tower gets an afternoon and the City an evening, the South Bank gets its own day, Greenwich gets a whole day reached by boat, and the fifth day is one district and nothing else.

Walking times are TfL’s, which run slower than most people walk.

💡 The Short Version: Day 1 Westminster and the West End — the Abbey (£32, shut to sightseers on Sundays) and the Churchill War Rooms (£34, timed entry only). Day 2 the Tower (£38) on an afternoon slot, Tower Bridge, then the City and a free view from Sky Garden or Horizon 22. Day 3 the South Bank end to end, Borough Market to the London Eye. Day 4 Greenwich by river — £11.40 by contactless, 56 to 60 minutes from Westminster. Day 5 one district and nothing else — a free museum morning and the neighbourhood around it, or a market day in the east.

Book these before you leave

⚠️ Two closures decide the order of these five days. Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s do no sightseeing on Sundays. Borough Market is closed on Mondays. Check which day of the week you land on before you fix anything else.

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Day 1: Westminster and the West End

Just over two miles of point-to-point walking on TfL’s routes, flat throughout, plus whatever you do inside.

The eleven-stop Westminster walk has the route, a map and a Google Maps link; this is the timing and the money.

Westminster Abbey

Open 9.30am to 3.30pm Monday to Friday and 9.30am to 3.00pm on Saturday; Sunday is worship only. £32 an adult, £29 for over-65s and students, £14 for a child aged 6 to 17, free under 6. Every ticket includes a multimedia guide.

Allow two hours. Poets’ Corner, the royal tombs, the Lady Chapel and the Cosmati Pavement are the four things people miss at speed.

Two add-ons:

• The verger tour is your entry price plus £10, runs about 90 minutes, is capped at 20 people and goes Monday to Saturday. It is the only public access to the Shrine of Edward the Confessor, and it cannot be booked in advance — you sign up on arrival, so book your entry slot about 30 minutes before you want the tour.
• The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries add £5 for adults and are free for under-18s, on a timed ticket bought with your entry. They run along the 13th-century triforium and shut at 3pm — half an hour before the Abbey does.

Choral Evensong is free and needs no ticket, sung at 5.00pm on weekdays in the Quire. Come back for it on a different evening.

Churchill War Rooms

Seven minutes’ walk, 480 metres, to the Clive Steps entrance on King Charles Street.

Open 9.30am to 6pm, last entry 5pm, every day except 24 to 26 December. £34 adult, £17 child 5–15, £30.60 concession, under-5s and carers free. IWM adds no donation on top.

The Cabinet War Rooms are left as they were in 1945 — the Map Room clocks, the pins still in the Atlantic convoy charts — with the Churchill Museum built alongside. Admission is a timed slot booked online and walk-ups are not guaranteed. The handheld audio guide in thirteen languages is already in the ticket price; a paid “exclusive audio tour” from a reseller is the same handset. Our guide has the detail.

Lunch, then the park

Walk into St James’s or two stops to Covent Garden, not eating on the bridge approaches. The cheap eats guide covers both.

Fifteen minutes and one kilometre from the Clive Steps to Buckingham Palace across St James’s Park. The bridge over the lake has the palace one way and the London Eye the other.

Changing the Guard at Buckingham Palace is 11am on Monday, Wednesday and Friday on the Household Division’s own calendar. There is also a Sunday Parade at 10am, and on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday a Captain’s Inspection at 3pm — shorter, less crowded, band on most days, and the one that fits a day with an Abbey ticket in it. The view worth standing for is from the Victoria Memorial steps. Where else to stand, and what the palace charges to go inside, is in our Buckingham Palace and Changing of the Guard guide.

The Mall, Trafalgar Square and the evening

Twenty-one minutes and 1.3km down The Mall and through Admiralty Arch.

The National Gallery is free, open daily 10am to 6pm and until 9pm on Fridays, closed 24 to 26 December and 1 January. The free entrance is the Sainsbury Wing. A free general-admission ticket gets fast-track entry; walk-ups are fine. The cloakroom is £3 an item and takes no wheeled luggage at all, whatever the size.

Covent Garden is nine minutes from the square and Chinatown ten. Dinner in Soho, Covent Garden or Chinatown — the dim sum guide for the last of those — and a show if you booked one. Two hours between sitting down and curtain-up, and tell the restaurant the time.

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Day 2: The Tower, Tower Bridge and the City

Under two miles, and the shortest walking day of the five.

Tower of London, after midday

£38 an adult, £19 for a child aged 5 to 15 and for a young person aged 16 to 17, £30.30 for seniors, students and disabled visitors, free under 5. Historic Royal Palaces prices by age band with one optional 10% donation, and there is no family ticket. £1 a head for anyone on Universal Credit, Pension Credit, ESA, Income Support, Jobseeker’s Allowance or Working Tax Credit, up to four people, booked online in advance; Tower Hamlets residents pay £1 year-round. The full list is in our Tower guide.

Allow two and a half to three hours. The Crown Jewels, the White Tower and the ramparts are three separate visits inside one wall.

💡 Take the late-morning slot, not the first one. Historic Royal Palaces says the Tower is quieter after midday. The free Yeoman Warder tour runs roughly every half hour, and the last one included in the ticket leaves mid-afternoon. An 11:00 or 12:00 entry clears the morning crush and still catches a Beefeater.

Tower Bridge

Six minutes, 470 metres, from the Tower gate. Walking across is free. The Exhibition — the high walkways with the glass floor, and the Victorian engine rooms below the south approach — is ticketed and open daily 09:30 to 18:00, last entry 17:00. Its ticket office is on the north-west side. On the second Saturday of the month it runs a low-capacity Relaxed Opening, 09:30 to 11:30, last entry 11:10, designed for neurodivergent visitors.

The City, on foot

Thirteen minutes and 870 metres from the Tower to 20 Fenchurch Street. Wren churches, Roman remains and glass towers are stacked inside one square mile. Our City of London walk has it as numbered stops, and the area guide has where to eat in it.

Sky Garden is free, on the 35th floor of 20 Fenchurch Street. Monday to Friday 10am–6pm; Saturday, Sunday and bank holidays 11am–9pm. Free tickets are released weekly and bookable up to three weeks ahead. Weekends are longer, so only a Saturday or Sunday visit can be at dusk.

Horizon 22 is free and higher, on Level 58 of 22 Bishopsgate — its own description is London’s highest free viewing gallery, 41 seconds up by lift. Eleven minutes and 690 metres from Sky Garden. Weekdays 10.00–18.00, Saturday 10.00–17.00, Sunday 10.00–16.00. The views guide puts both against the paid ones.

⚠️ The Square Mile empties at the weekend, and so do its kitchens. Sky Garden and Horizon 22 open on Saturday and Sunday, but much of the City’s eating and drinking is built for a weekday office crowd and does not trade. For a Saturday or Sunday evening, walk fifteen minutes north into Shoreditch or east into Spitalfields instead.

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Day 3: The South Bank, end to end

About 3 miles, all of it flat and signposted. The Thames Path needs no navigation.

The numbered South Bank walk covers the same ground the other way.

Borough Market.

Borough Market, early

⚠️ Borough Market is closed on Mondays. Tuesday to Friday 10am–5pm, Saturday 9am–5pm, Sunday 10am–4pm. Entry is free. Saturday is the only day it opens at nine; go at opening rather than at one, when the office lunch trade lands.

The markets guide has what to eat there and best street food has the stalls worth a queue. If your Day 3 falls on a Monday, run Day 5 here instead and move this to the Tuesday.

Shakespeare’s Globe

Nine minutes, 680 metres, west along the river. The reconstructed open-air theatre at 21 New Globe Walk. The guided tour is £31 for adults and £14 for under-16s and runs about 1 hour 30 minutes — 50 minutes guided, the rest self-guided in the exhibition. Pre-booking is essential. The theatre is roofless and tours run in all weather, the cloakroom charges £2.50 an item, and there is no luggage storage on site.

Tate Modern

Five minutes, 400 metres. Free, and open Sunday to Thursday 10.00–18.00 and Friday to Saturday 10.00–21.00 — which puts Friday and Saturday evenings on the table when the rest of this walk has shut. The Turbine Hall, in the old Bankside power station, is free. Bags are checked on the way in, and the only bag storage is a paid locker.

St Paul’s, over the Millennium Bridge

Thirteen minutes and 980 metres from the Tate doors to the cathedral steps, over the footbridge.

Sightseeing is £27 an adult and £10.50 a child, Monday to Saturday only. The cathedral opens for sightseeing from 8.30am with last entry usually 4pm, and sightseeing ends half an hour after that. The Dome Galleries open at 9.30am with last entry at 4.15pm, so a late-afternoon arrival gets you the floor and the crypt and not the view. The climb is 528 steps with no lift at any point: 257 to the Whispering Gallery, 376 to the Stone, 528 to the Golden. There is no sightseeing on a Sunday; services are free to attend.

West to the London Eye

Twenty-four minutes and 1.8km from Tate Modern, past Gabriel’s Wharf, the Oxo Tower, the National Theatre and the Southbank Centre. The second-hand book market under Waterloo Bridge costs nothing to browse.

Walk-up tickets for the London Eye are £39 an adult and £35 a child aged 2 to 15; booked online in advance they start at £29 and £26. One rotation is 30 minutes. Book a slot about half an hour before sunset to board in daylight and come off with the bridges lit. The London Eye guide covers Fast Track and where to leave a suitcase.

If one of the five days is wet, swap this one out. Tate Modern, the Globe’s exhibition and Borough’s covered sections hold up in rain; two miles of open riverside does not. London in the rain has the swaps.

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Day 4: Greenwich, and go by river

About 2 miles on foot, one of them uphill. Half a day at a sprint, a full day comfortably.

Take the boat. The DLR is faster, but the river approach past Wapping and the Isle of Dogs is what the £11.40 pays for. Uber Boat by Thames Clippers runs from Westminster, Embankment and Tower piers.

Journey times are from the weekend eastbound timetable; fares are the Central and East zone rate, valid until 31 October 2026.

⚠️ Saturdays, Sundays and bank holidays are charged at the peak river fare all day, and river fares are not capped. A TfL Travelcard gets a third off the boat. Touch in and out at the pier readers, with the same card or device both ends. Full detail in our river boats guide.

A Hop-on Hop-off river day ticket is £29.30 online or £32.60 at the pier, £14.65 and £16.30 for a child or concession, and £58.70 online for a family of two adults and up to three children. It only pays if you are making three or more hops.

What Greenwich costs once you arrive

Greenwich Pier lands you a minute from the Cutty Sark, and everything below is within a ten-minute walk of the next thing.

Cutty Sark is, in the museum’s own words, the world’s only surviving tea clipper. The ship is raised clear of its dock, so you can walk underneath the copper hull as well as on the decks. £3 tickets go to visitors on Universal Credit, Pension Credit, ESA, Income Support, Jobseeker’s Allowance and Tax Credits, and a carer accompanying a disabled visitor goes free.

The Painted Hall is three minutes and 290 metres from the Cutty Sark. Sir James Thornhill and his team painted it between 1707 and 1726, and 2026 is its 300th anniversary. The £19 ticket converts to an annual pass for nothing — ask when you buy it. The grounds are open daily 8am to 11pm and are free.

The National Maritime Museum is five minutes and 320 metres further, free, and booking is only recommended rather than required.

The Royal Observatory is ten minutes and 790 metres uphill through Greenwich Park from the Maritime Museum, and the climb is short and steep. The view from the top of the hill is free. The Observatory itself, with the Prime Meridian line and Harrison’s chronometers, is closed from 2 November 2026 for refurbishment; Royal Museums Greenwich says the Meridian Courtyard reopens in summer 2027, with tickets on sale in January. The Peter Harrison Planetarium is closed for renovation, so do not plan a show into the day.

The view from Greenwich Park.

Getting back

Walk under the river. The Greenwich Foot Tunnel starts beside the Cutty Sark and comes up at Island Gardens, directly opposite the Naval College — eleven minutes and 670 metres on TfL’s route, and free. From Island Gardens the DLR runs north through the docks on a viaduct with no driver, so sit at the front.

That drops you in Canary Wharf. If you would rather walk the whole thing, we have it as a numbered route from Canary Wharf to Greenwich and as a Wapping to Canary Wharf walk along the north bank.

The Greenwich guide has the pubs and the rest of the park.

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Day 5: One district

Pick one district and stay in it: eat there, walk it, sit in its park. Two of the four options pair a free museum district with the neighbourhood around it; two are neighbourhood days with no museum.

Option A — South Kensington, then Chelsea or Notting Hill

Three national museums, all free, within a few minutes of each other.

Do two, not three. The V&A to the Science Museum is five minutes and 370 metres. Use the Exhibition Road entrances, which are quieter than the grand ones on Cromwell Road, and note the Science Museum’s own warning that galleries start closing 30 minutes before the museum does.

Then south into Chelsea for the King’s Road and the Physic Garden, or north through Kensington Gardens to Notting Hill. Portobello Road Market trades Monday to Sunday, 8am to 7pm; the painted terraces are a short walk off it and we have them mapped in Notting Hill’s colourful houses.

Option B — Bloomsbury, then King’s Cross and the canal

• British Museum — free, daily 10.00–17.00 and Fridays to 20.30, last entry 16.45 (20.15 on Fridays). A free ticket buys priority entry when it is busy; walk-ups are admitted daily. Pick three things — Sutton Hoo, the Egyptian mummies, the Islamic world galleries.
• Lunch on Lamb’s Conduit Street — sixteen minutes and 1.1km north-east, a pedestrianised Georgian street of independents.
• British Library — twenty-six minutes and 1.5km from the museum. The Treasures Gallery is free and needs no booking: Magna Carta and Beowulf sit in the same room as Shakespeare and Monty Python. Monday to Thursday 09.30–20.00, Friday 09.30–18.00, Saturday 09.30–17.00 and Sunday 11.00–17.00. It is kept cool and dark to protect the manuscripts, so take a layer.
• Coal Drops Yard and the Regent’s Canal — fifteen minutes and 1.1km on, then the towpath. See King’s Cross and the King’s Cross to Camden canal walk.

Option C — East London, on a Sunday

No museum, and the only option that is day-specific.

Columbia Road Flower Market runs on Sundays only, from 8am until about 3pm. Spitalfields’ traders market is 10am to 6pm on a Sunday against 11am to 5pm on a Saturday, so Sunday is both longer and fuller. Brick Lane sits between the two.

Street art, a beigel at the top of Brick Lane, curry houses below it — the street art guide, the Shoreditch guide and the Shoreditch and Spitalfields walk between them cover it.

Option D — Camden, Regent’s Park and Hampstead

Camden Market opens Monday to Sunday, 10am to 7pm, including bank holidays, so it is the option that does not care which day you have left. Combine it with the canal towpath west to Little Venice, or Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill for the skyline. See Camden.

Further out, Kenwood House is free, open daily 10am to 5pm with last entry at 4.30pm, and holds Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Two Circles at the top of Hampstead Heath. The Hampstead guide and the Heath and Primrose Hill walk have the rest.

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Spread the evenings out

Plan your meals rather than eating wherever is nearest the hotel, and do not stack the special evenings at the end of the trip. Spend one night in a neighbourhood you are not staying in, such as Peckham, Hackney or Brixton, and leave the rest loose.

• A West End show — booked before you fly. See the theatre guide.
• One proper dinner — special occasion restaurants. Lunch at the same restaurant is dramatically cheaper for the same kitchen.
• A free view at dusk — Sky Garden runs to 9pm at weekends and The Lookout at 8 Bishopsgate to 9pm on Mondays and Fridays. Horizon 22 shuts at 6pm on a weekday and 4pm on a Sunday.
• Live music — from the 100 Club to a jazz late set.
• An old pub — historic pubs and dining rooms.

Do not put the big dinner after Day 3, the longest walking day of the five.

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Should you take a day trip instead?

Windsor, Oxford, Cambridge, Bath and Brighton are all reachable, but on five days each one costs you a London day. Greenwich gives you a change of scene and an hour on the water for £11.40 without leaving the fare zone. Save the day trips for a longer visit: Bath is 1h15 from Paddington and the rest are compared in day trips from London.

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Common mistakes

1. Taking the DLR to Greenwich because it is faster. The river is the experience; the DLR is the way back.
2. Forgetting river fares are not capped. Weekends are peak all day.
3. Planning Greenwich around a planetarium show. The Peter Harrison Planetarium is closed for renovation.
4. Buying the Painted Hall ticket and walking out. It converts to an annual pass if you ask.
5. Landing at Borough Market on a Monday. Closed. Move Day 3.
6. Taking the Tower’s first slot out of habit. It is quieter after midday.
7. Doing both museum districts. Day 5 is one of them.
8. Planning a Saturday night in the Square Mile. Most of the City is shut.
9. Stacking every special evening at the end of the trip.

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Continue planning your London trip

• 🗓️ Three Days in London — the same ground, compressed, if five days is not what you have
• 🧭 How to Plan a London Itinerary — how many days you actually need
• 🎯 One-Day Plans by Interest
• ⛵ How to Use London’s River Boats — the zones, the fares and which pier
• 🏘️ Best London Areas to Visit
• 🏛️ The Best Museums in London
• 👀 The Best Views in London
• 🎪 Free Things to Do in London
• 🧳 Luggage Storage in London — where to leave a bag between checking out and flying home

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Walking times are TfL’s. River fares hold until 31 October 2026. Attractions close for ceremonies and services at short notice, and hours move around public holidays.

Common questions

Is five days enough to see London?

Yes. Five days lets you split the Tower and the South Bank across two days instead of forcing them into one, give Greenwich a whole day by river, and spend a fifth day on a museum district and the neighbourhood next to it. It still will not cover everything.

What is different about a five-day London plan versus three days?

Three days puts the Tower and the entire South Bank in one march. Five days splits them: the Tower and the City on day two, the South Bank end to end on day three. It also buys a full day in Greenwich and a fifth day that is not a sightseeing day at all.

How do I get to Greenwich from central London, and what does it cost?

By Uber Boat by Thames Clippers from Westminster, Embankment or Tower piers. Westminster to Greenwich is scheduled at 56 to 60 minutes on the weekend timetable and Tower to Greenwich at about 25 minutes. Pay with contactless: Central and East zones cost £11.40 off-peak and £13.70 peak, and Saturdays, Sundays and bank holidays are charged at the peak fare all day. River fares do not count towards the Tube and bus daily cap.

What does Greenwich cost once you are there?

Cutty Sark is £22 for an adult and £11 for a child. The Royal Observatory is £24 and £12 until it closes on 2 November 2026. The Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College is £19 and children go free. The National Maritime Museum, the Queen's House, Greenwich Park, Greenwich Market and the view from the Observatory hill are all free.

Should I take a day trip out of London on a five-day visit?

Probably not. Windsor, Oxford and Bath each swallow a day and cost you a London neighbourhood you have not seen. Greenwich gives you a change of scene and an hour on the water without leaving the fare zone.

How much walking is a five-day London itinerary?

Three to four miles on the three central days on TfL's walking routes, about two in Greenwich with one short steep hill, and whatever you choose on day five. Every long stretch here has a bus, a boat or a Tube alternative.