Free things to do in London

138 places that charge nothing to get in, plus 254 plaques, murals and filming locations you can find on foot. Some need a free ticket booked in advance; where that applies, the entry says so.

Museums and galleries

London's national museums are free by law, and most people only ever visit two of them.

  • Museum of the Home

    Hoxton

    A row of eighteenth-century almshouses laid out as domestic rooms from 1600 to now, with period gardens behind - free, and almost never busy.

  • National Maritime Museum

    Greenwich

    Free, enormous, and holds Nelson's Trafalgar coat with the bullet hole still in the shoulder.

  • Southbank Centre

    South Bank

    Europe's largest arts centre, and the foyers, outdoor artworks and a good share of the exhibitions cost nothing at all to walk into.

  • The British Library Treasures Gallery

    King's Cross

    Magna Carta, Leonardo's notebook, Handel's Messiah in his own hand and Beatles lyrics on scrap paper, in one free room most people walk past on the way to a train.

  • St Paul's, the Actors' Church

    Covent Garden

    Inigo Jones's 1633 church, walled with memorials to actors from Ellen Terry to Charlie Chaplin, and with a quiet garden behind that most of the Piazza crowd never finds.

  • Bank of England Museum

    City of London

    Free, inside the Bank itself, and it lets you lift a real gold bar out of a perspex case - which is the bit everyone remembers.

  • London's Roman Amphitheatre

    City of London

    The remains of Londinium's amphitheatre in the basement of the Guildhall Art Gallery, with the missing seating drawn back in as green light on the walls.

  • The Supreme Court

    Westminster

    You can walk in off Parliament Square and sit at the back of the highest court in the land while it hears a real case, for nothing and without booking.

  • Tate Britain

    Westminster

    The national collection of British art from 1500 on, free, and holding the Turner bequest - which is the largest collection of one artist's work anywhere in Britain.

  • The Faraday Museum

    Mayfair

    Faraday's actual magnetic laboratory, preserved in the basement of the Royal Institution, where the electric motor and the transformer were worked out. Ten elements were first isolated in this building.

  • Cork Street Galleries

    Mayfair

    A single street of dealers - Waddington Custot, Hamiltons, Sims Reed - with museum-standard work on the walls, and every one of them free to walk into.

  • Natural History Museum

    South Kensington

    Eighty million specimens behind a terracotta Romanesque front, with a blue whale skeleton diving through Hintze Hall and the best dinosaur collection in the country.

  • Science Museum

    South Kensington

    Stephenson's Rocket, the Apollo 10 command module and a working section of Babbage's difference engine, plus Wonderlab upstairs where children are meant to touch everything.

  • Victoria and Albert Museum

    South Kensington

    Raphael cartoons, the Cast Courts with a full-size Trajan's Column in two halves, and the oldest museum restaurant in the world - all free.

  • The Design Museum

    Kensington

    The former Commonwealth Institute, gutted and rebuilt under its listed swooping concrete roof, with a permanent design collection that costs nothing.

  • Serpentine Galleries

    Kensington

    Two free contemporary art galleries five minutes apart across the Serpentine bridge, plus the summer Pavilion - a new one commissioned from a different architect every year.

  • The British Museum

    Bloomsbury

    The Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon sculptures and the Sutton Hoo helmet under Foster's glass-roofed Great Court - and none of it costs anything.

  • Wellcome Collection

    Bloomsbury

    Free, genuinely strange, and built around Henry Wellcome's collection of medical objects - which runs from Napoleon's toothbrush to a Peruvian mummy.

  • Grant Museum of Zoology

    Bloomsbury

    One cramped room of UCL's zoological teaching collection - 68,000 specimens including a jar packed with preserved moles and the bones of a quagga, an animal that no longer exists.

  • Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology

    Bloomsbury

    Where the British Museum has the monuments, the Petrie has the ordinary things - the world's oldest dress, the earliest metal from Egypt, and a lot of it in the original wooden cases.

  • The Wallace Collection

    Marylebone

    Frans Hals's Laughing Cavalier, Fragonard's The Swing, and one of the best armour collections in Europe, in the townhouse they were assembled in - and free.

  • The Fitzrovia Chapel

    Fitzrovia

    The last surviving fragment of the Middlesex Hospital, demolished around it. A plain brick exterior hides a ceiling of gold mosaic finished in 1929 by the architect's son.

  • All Saints, Margaret Street

    Fitzrovia

    William Butterfield's 1859 church, where every surface is patterned tile, marble or paint - the loudest interior in London, thirty seconds off Oxford Street.

  • Saatchi Gallery

    Chelsea

    Seventy thousand square feet of white gallery in a former military headquarters, showing artists nobody has heard of yet - and most of it is free.

  • Royal Hospital Chelsea

    Chelsea

    Christopher Wren's 1692 hospital, still home to the Chelsea Pensioners in their scarlet coats, with Figure Court and the grounds open to walk into.

  • White Cube Bermondsey

    Bermondsey

    Fifty-four thousand square feet of gallery behind a plain Bermondsey Street frontage, showing major international artists - and free to walk into.

  • Kenwood House

    Hampstead

    Robert Adam's library, and the Iveagh Bequest hanging in it - a Rembrandt self-portrait, a Vermeer and a Gainsborough - all of it free.

  • The Prospect of Whitby

    Wapping

    Standing since about 1520, with a flagstone floor, a pewter-topped bar on old barrels and a replica gallows on the river terrace where Judge Jeffreys drank.

  • Tobacco Dock

    Wapping

    A Grade I listed 1811 tobacco warehouse with brick vaults and iron columns, now an events space holding up to ten thousand, with a roof garden over the top.

  • Bold Tendencies

    Peckham

    A non-profit that has been commissioning sculpture, opera and orchestral performance on the top floors of a Peckham car park since 2007 - and the art is free to see.

  • South London Gallery

    Peckham

    Free contemporary art across two sites - the original Victorian gallery and a converted fire station opposite - with a good garden behind the main building.

  • Hay's Galleria

    South Bank

    Hay's Wharf, where Britain's tea came ashore, roofed over in 1987 with a glass and steel barrel vault modelled on Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II - and holding David Kemp's sixty-foot kinetic sculpture The Navigators.

  • Outernet London

    Soho

    Four-storey 16K screens wrapping the walls and ceiling of a public hall by Tottenham Court Road - you walk in off the street, for nothing, and stand inside the picture.

  • Sir John Soane's Museum

    Bloomsbury

    Soane's own house, preserved by Act of Parliament exactly as he left it in 1837 - mirrors, top-lit wells, Hogarth's Rake's Progress on hinged panels, and a sarcophagus in the basement.

  • Horniman Museum and Gardens

    Forest Hill

    A Victorian tea trader's collection, most famous for a walrus stuffed by taxidermists who had never seen one and so filled in every wrinkle. The gardens have a bandstand, a butterfly house and a view back over London.

  • RAF Museum London

    Colindale

    More than a hundred aircraft in hangars on the site of the old Hendon aerodrome - a Spitfire, a Lancaster, a Vulcan and a Harrier, all free to walk around.

  • Queer Britain

    King's Cross

    The first national museum of British LGBTQ+ history anywhere in the country, opened in 2022 on the ground floor of a Granary Square warehouse, with rotating exhibitions rather than a fixed collection.

  • The London Silver Vaults

    Holborn

    A vault complex under Chancery Lane holding around fifty independent dealers - the largest collection of fine silver for sale anywhere in the world, and free to walk through even if you are only looking.

  • Imperial War Museum

    South Bank

    One of London's half-dozen biggest national museums and free, covering conflict from WWI to today - a Holocaust galleries floor that needs real time, and a full-size Spitfire hanging in the atrium.

  • National Army Museum

    Chelsea

    The Army's own museum next to the Royal Hospital Chelsea - free, and a genuinely different, quieter kind of military history to the Imperial War Museum's.

  • London Museum Docklands

    Canary Wharf

    A real Georgian sugar warehouse holding the story of the Thames, the port and the slave trade that built this stretch of river - the obvious pairing with a Canary Wharf visit that almost nobody makes.

  • Guildhall Art Gallery

    City of London

    Victorian and pre-Raphaelite paintings in the City's own gallery - the same building that sits directly above the Roman amphitheatre already on this site, so the two are one visit rather than two.

  • Orleans House Gallery

    Twickenham

    Free changing exhibitions inside the one surviving room - a spectacular Baroque octagon - of a Georgian riverside mansion otherwise demolished in the 1920s.

  • BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir (Neasden Temple)

    Wembley

    Hand-carved from Italian and Indian marble and Bulgarian limestone, shipped out and carved in India before assembly here - one of the largest Hindu temples outside India, and free to enter.

  • Young V&A

    Bethnal Green

    The V&A's museum built entirely around children, reopened in 2023 after a redesign that put play first - three galleries, a stage, and things to climb rather than only look at. Free.

  • National Portrait Gallery

    Westminster

    The national collection of portraits, from Tudor monarchs to living musicians, reopened in 2023 after a three-year redevelopment. Free, and quieter than the National Gallery next door.

  • Somerset House

    Strand

    A Georgian quadrangle off the Strand with fifty-five fountains in the courtyard, an ice rink in winter, and a rolling programme of exhibitions. The courtyard costs nothing.

  • Tate Modern

    Bankside

    The national collection of international modern art inside Giles Gilbert Scott's Bankside power station, with the Turbine Hall running the full length of it. Free.

  • National Gallery

    Westminster

    Two thousand paintings from the 1200s to 1900 - Van Gogh's Sunflowers, Turner's Fighting Temeraire, the Wilton Diptych - free, on Trafalgar Square, and open until 21:00 on Fridays.

Parks and gardens

Including the roof gardens and glasshouses that are free but need booking.

  • Crossrail Place Roof Garden

    Canary Wharf

    A planted garden under a timber lattice roof on top of the Elizabeth line station, split along the line of the Greenwich meridian with Asian planting on one side and American on the other.

  • Jubilee Park

    Canary Wharf

    The largest green space in Canary Wharf - dawn redwoods, 22 fountains and a serpentine water channel by Jacques Wirtz, where the whole estate eats lunch the moment it is warm enough.

  • Primrose Hill

    Primrose Hill

    A ten-minute walk from Camden Market to one of London's legally protected views - the whole central skyline laid out from a grass slope, for nothing.

  • Greenwich Park

    Greenwich

    183 acres holding a deer enclosure, a boating pond, a rose garden and London's longest herbaceous border, with the best free view in south London at the top.

  • Greenwich Peninsula Ecology Park

    Greenwich Peninsula

    Four acres of wetland, marsh and woodland hidden behind the Peninsula's towers, with hides, a lake and a genuinely surprising amount of birdlife.

  • Granary Square Fountains

    King's Cross

    More than a thousand individually controlled jets in the open square by the canal, lit at night and free to run straight through in summer.

  • Camley Street Natural Park

    King's Cross

    Wetland, meadow and woodland on a two-acre strip of former coal yard beside the canal, run by the London Wildlife Trust three minutes from a mainline terminus.

  • Lewis Cubitt Park

    King's Cross

    A landscaped lawn and a proper playground with a sand pit at the top of Coal Drops Yard - the place families end up when the fountains get too much.

  • Soho Square

    Soho

    The one patch of grass in Soho, with a half-timbered garden hut in the middle that hides the entrance to an electricity substation.

  • Sky Garden

    City of London

    Three storeys of planted terraces under a glass shell on top of the Walkie-Talkie, with a 360-degree view over the City - and it costs nothing.

  • The Garden at 120

    City of London

    Fifteen storeys up with a 360-degree view, a water rill and wisteria walkways - and unlike Sky Garden across the road, you can simply walk in.

  • Barbican Conservatory

    City of London

    Over 1,500 species of tropical plants and a pond of koi and terrapins, grown inside the concrete fly tower of a Brutalist theatre - the second largest conservatory in London and by far the strangest.

  • St Dunstan in the East

    City of London

    A Wren church gutted in the Blitz and left as a shell, now filled with climbing plants and trees growing up through the empty windows.

  • Postman's Park

    City of London

    A wall of hand-painted ceramic tablets, each recording an ordinary person who died saving someone else - the quietest and most affecting thing in the Square Mile.

  • St James's Park

    St James's

    A resident pelican colony first given to Charles II by a Russian ambassador, and the view from the Blue Bridge back to Buckingham Palace and forward to Whitehall.

  • Brown Hart Gardens

    Mayfair

    A raised stone terrace built on the roof of a working Edwardian electricity substation, two minutes off Oxford Street and almost always empty.

  • Mount Street Gardens

    Mayfair

    A walled garden so sheltered that Australian mimosa and Canary Island palms survive in it, hidden behind Mount Street and lined with benches donated by American visitors.

  • Kyoto Garden, Holland Park

    Kensington

    A tiered Japanese garden given by Kyoto in 1991, with a waterfall, a koi pond and peacocks that wander in from the rest of Holland Park.

  • Regent's Park and Queen Mary's Gardens

    Marylebone

    Nearly 400 acres, with Queen Mary's Gardens holding over 12,000 roses in 85 beds - the largest rose collection in London and free to walk into.

  • Fitzroy Square

    Fitzrovia

    Robert Adam frontages on two sides, fully pedestrianised, and almost always empty - Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw both lived on it, at the same address.

  • Victoria Park

    Hackney

    Eighty-six hectares with a boating lake, a deer enclosure and a Chinese pagoda on the eastern side that most Londoners do not know is there.

  • Hackney City Farm

    Hackney

    Pigs, goats, donkeys and chickens on a scrap of land off Hackney Road, free to walk into, with a good cafe and a pottery in the yard.

  • Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

    Stratford

    560 acres of the 2012 park with the waterways replanted, the Tumbling Bay playground, and free walking routes between every venue - the rare Olympic site that got a second life.

  • Battersea Park

    Battersea

    Two hundred acres on the river with a boating lake, a Japanese Peace Pagoda on the Thames path and a bandstand - and the Power Station chimneys over the trees.

  • Richmond Park

    Richmond

    London's largest royal park, with about 600 free-roaming red and fallow deer, and a protected sightline from King Henry's Mound to St Paul's ten miles away.

  • Isabella Plantation

    Richmond

    Forty acres of woodland garden walled inside Richmond Park, famous for evergreen azaleas and rhododendrons that peak in late April and early May.

  • Petersham Nurseries

    Richmond

    A working plant nursery down a lane off Petersham Meadows, with a teahouse and restaurant under the glasshouses and the plants left growing through the dining room.

  • Hampstead Heath

    Hampstead

    Seven hundred and ninety acres left deliberately wild, with Parliament Hill giving one of London's protected views - and unlike the royal parks, it feels like countryside.

  • The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

    Crystal Palace

    Built in 1854, these are the first dinosaur sculptures ever made anywhere - and they are gloriously, confidently wrong, because nobody had worked out what the animals looked like yet. Grade I listed.

  • Spitalfields City Farm

    Spitalfields

    A working farm on reclaimed railway land minutes from Brick Lane - sheep, goats and a farm shop, entirely free, and about as far from the area's markets and bars as it is possible to feel in five minutes' walk.

  • Vauxhall City Farm

    Vauxhall

    Sheep, pigs and a riding school a few minutes from Vauxhall's rail and Tube interchange - one of the few green, quiet things in an area otherwise defined by traffic.

  • Kentish Town City Farm

    Kentish Town

    The farm that started the city farm movement in Britain in 1972 - cows, pigs, a duck pond and a cafe, tucked behind the railway a few minutes from Kentish Town station.

  • Deen City Farm

    Wimbledon

    A working farm and riding school beside the River Wandle, near Merton Abbey Mills - south-west London's equivalent of Hackney or Kentish Town's farms, and much less known.

  • Freightliners Farm

    Islington

    A 2.5-acre farm squeezed into Islington - goats, chickens and a market garden, saved from closure by local campaigning more than once.

  • Mudchute Park and Farm

    Isle of Dogs

    32 acres of open farmland with Canary Wharf's towers visible over the fence - genuinely disorienting, and by far the largest of London's city farms. Llamas, a rare-breed herd and a proper cafe.

  • The Ecology Pavilion, Mile End Park

    Mile End

    The pavilion building itself is an events venue, but the reedbeds and lakes around it are the best-kept surprise on the whole Regent's Canal towpath - a boardwalk through actual wetland a few steps off the path, usually empty.

  • Stepney City Farm

    Stepney

    Pigs, bees and a working pottery studio, plus a weekend food and produce market that draws people who would never otherwise visit a farm.

  • Surrey Docks Farm

    Rotherhithe

    Right on the Thames Path in Rotherhithe - pigs, goats and beehives with river views, and an easy add-on to a Rotherhithe or Greenland Dock walk.

  • Walthamstow Wetlands

    Walthamstow

    Ten reservoirs still supplying London's drinking water, opened to the public in 2017 and now Europe's largest urban wetland nature reserve - free, and genuinely wild given how close it sits to the North Circular.

  • Woodberry Wetlands

    Stoke Newington

    A Victorian reservoir turned London Wildlife Trust reserve in 2016 - much smaller than Walthamstow's, and closer in for anyone in Stoke Newington or Manor House.

  • Sydenham Hill Wood

    Sydenham

    The largest surviving piece of the ancient Great North Wood that once covered this whole stretch of south London - a ruined Victorian folly and a disused railway tunnel sit inside it.

  • Gunnersbury Triangle

    Chiswick

    A patch of accidental woodland that grew up in the triangle of land between three railway lines - saved from development by a 1980s campaign, now a proper nature reserve two minutes from Chiswick Park station.

Markets and shopping

Free to walk into. What you spend once you are inside is your own business.

  • Billingsgate Fish Market

    Canary Wharf

    The UK's largest inland fish market, trading before dawn a few minutes from the towers - the public can walk in and buy, and almost nobody does.

  • Columbia Road Flower Market

    Bethnal Green

    A Victorian street packed shoulder to shoulder with flower sellers shouting prices down, plus the independent shops behind them that only open when the market does.

  • Rough Trade East

    Shoreditch

    A large record shop in the Truman Brewery with a stage at the back - in-store gigs are free with an album purchase and are often bands that will not play a room this size again.

  • Camden Market

    Camden Town

    Camden Lock, the Stables and Hawley Wharf run together into the best-known collection of street vendors in Britain - vintage, records, band merch and several hundred food stalls.

  • Greenwich Market

    Greenwich

    Trading since 1737 and the only London market inside a World Heritage site - designer-makers, antiques and a strong street food run under one roof.

  • South Bank Book Market

    South Bank

    Eight stalls of second-hand books, maps and prints running under Waterloo Bridge for forty years, with traders who have been there since the 1980s.

  • Coal Drops Yard

    King's Cross

    Two Victorian coal drops joined by a kissing roof by Thomas Heatherwick, holding fifty-odd shops, a cinema and some of the better bars in this part of London.

  • Word on the Water

    King's Cross

    A floating second-hand bookshop on an old Dutch barge moored on the towpath, with a wood burner inside and live jazz on the roof in decent weather.

  • Seven Dials Market

    Covent Garden

    Two floors of independent food traders in a 1920s banana-ripening warehouse, with a stage for live music and a bookshop tucked in among the counters.

  • Carnaby Street

    Soho

    The street the Sixties happened on, now thirteen pedestrianised lanes of independents and the best Christmas lights in central London.

  • Leadenhall Market

    City of London

    An 1881 covered market in cream, maroon and green wrought iron, standing where the Roman forum was, and standing in for Diagon Alley on film.

  • Shepherd Market

    Mayfair

    A pocket of narrow pedestrian lanes, small shops and old pubs left over from the eighteenth-century May Fair itself - the least Mayfair-looking corner of Mayfair.

  • Portobello Road Market

    Notting Hill

    Two miles of stalls running from antiques at the Notting Hill end through fruit and veg to vintage under the Westway - the largest antiques market in Britain.

  • Golborne Road

    Notting Hill

    The far end past the Westway, where the antiques give way to midcentury furniture, Moroccan groceries and Portuguese cafes - and the prices drop with the tourist numbers.

  • Daunt Books Marylebone

    Marylebone

    A purpose-built Edwardian bookshop with oak galleries, a long skylight and a conservatory at the back, where the travel section is shelved by country rather than by genre.

  • Broadway Market

    Hackney

    A hundred and twenty stalls of food, vintage and produce running from the canal to London Fields, with seventy independent shops behind them that trade all week.

  • The King's Road

    Chelsea

    Mary Quant opened Bazaar here in 1955 and Vivienne Westwood and McLaren ran SEX at 430 in the seventies - two separate fashion revolutions on one road.

  • Camden Passage

    Islington

    A flagstoned alley off Upper Street lined with antique dealers, vintage shops and cafes - and nothing at all to do with Camden Town, which catches people out.

  • Upper Street

    Islington

    A mile from Angel to Highbury Corner, said to hold more restaurants and bars per yard than anywhere else in Britain, with independents and two theatres among them.

  • Maltby Street Market

    Bermondsey

    A narrow ropewalk of food traders wedged under the railway arches since 2010 - oysters, waffles, gin and a scotch egg stall with a permanent queue.

  • Battersea Power Station

    Battersea

    Gilbert Scott's brick cathedral of a power station, derelict for forty years, now holding 150 shops and restaurants with both original Turbine Halls opened up.

  • Peckham Levels

    Peckham

    Seven floors of the same Rye Lane car park turned into studios, food traders and bars - and unlike Frank's above it, it stays open all year.

  • Lower Stable Street Market

    King's Cross

    A different set of independent stallholders every weekend - homewares, clothing, art, books and food - alongside the permanent record shop, gallery and coffee roaster on the same street.

  • Peninsula Al Fresco

    Greenwich Peninsula

    Churros, fried chicken, pizza and a spritz bar under pergolas outside the O2 - free giant Jenga and Connect Four keep it family-friendly rather than purely a food market.

  • Canopy Market

    King's Cross

    Street food, makers and craft drinks under a restored Victorian iron canopy - covered, which makes it one of the few King's Cross options that works in bad weather.

  • Southbank Centre Food Market

    South Bank

    Thirty-odd stalls behind the Royal Festival Hall, steps from the National Theatre - Caribbean, Venezuelan, Ethiopian and Punjabi among them, and one of the few South Bank options that is not a chain.

Views

Every one of these is free. The ones people queue and pay for are not on this list.

  • Royal Opera House Terrace

    Covent Garden

    The opera house's terrace bar is open to anyone during opening hours, with the best elevated view over the Piazza and Market Building in Covent Garden - and no ticket needed.

  • Neal's Yard

    Covent Garden

    A tiny courtyard off Seven Dials painted in every colour and hung with plants - the most photographed twenty square metres in Covent Garden.

  • The Lookout at 8 Bishopsgate

    City of London

    The 50th floor, a 240-degree sweep across the City, and the newest of London's free high viewpoints - which means it is still the least crowded of them.

  • Paddington Basin Moving Bridges

    Paddington

    Thomas Heatherwick's Rolling Bridge curls itself into an octagon, and the Fan Bridge next to it opens like a hand of cards. Both are working footbridges and both are free to watch.

  • The View from Richmond Hill

    Richmond

    The bend of the Thames below Petersham Meadows, painted by Turner and Reynolds, and protected by its own Act of Parliament in 1902 - the only view in England that is.

  • Royal Victoria Dock Bridge

    Royal Docks

    A high-level footbridge across the dock with a clear line of sight to Canary Wharf and the City - the best free thing to do in the twenty minutes before an event at ExCeL starts.

Walks and street art

Self-guided, no ticket, no booking.

  • Shoreditch Street Art

    Shoreditch

    The walls around Brick Lane, Redchurch Street and Hanbury Street change constantly - what you photograph this month will be painted over next.

  • Greenwich Foot Tunnel

    Greenwich

    Walk under the Thames through a tiled Victorian tunnel and come up on the Isle of Dogs with the whole Greenwich waterfront laid out behind you.

  • Undercroft Skate Space

    South Bank

    Skated continuously since 1973 and defended from redevelopment by a campaign that won - the oldest surviving skate spot on earth, still in daily use.

  • Covent Garden Street Performers

    Covent Garden

    Jugglers, opera singers, escapologists and contortionists working the Piazza and the Market Building - and unusually for street performance, every act has passed an audition to be there.

  • Changing the Guard

    St James's

    Guards in bearskins and a full regimental band handing over the palace, free to watch, and one of the few genuinely free set-piece spectacles in London.

  • The Bloomsbury Squares

    Bloomsbury

    Russell, Bedford, Gordon, Tavistock and Bloomsbury squares in one walk, with the blue plaques of the Bloomsbury Group - Woolf, Keynes, Strachey - clustered round Gordon Square.

  • Paddington Bear Statue and Pawprint Trail

    Paddington

    The bronze Paddington on Platform 1, then a free trail of brass pawprints set into the pavements around the station and the basin.

  • Regent's Canal at Islington

    Islington

    The towpath from City Road Basin west towards King's Cross, past narrowboats and the mouth of the 878-metre Islington Tunnel, which has no towpath through it at all.

  • Wapping Thames Path and the Old Stairs

    Wapping

    Wapping Old Stairs and Pelican Stairs are medieval river accesses still there between the warehouses, and at low tide they put you on the actual Thames foreshore.

More free things

Everything else we have found that costs nothing.

  • BFI Southbank

    South Bank

    Four screens of archive prints, restorations and seasons that no multiplex would touch, plus the free Mediatheque where you can watch the national archive on your own.

  • Everyman Screen on the Canal

    King's Cross

    Films projected beside the canal in summer, watched from the towpath steps, for nothing - the rare outdoor screen that has not been turned into a ticketed event.

  • Diana Memorial Playground

    Kensington

    A wooden pirate ship in a sand pit, a teepee camp and a musical garden, built where Barrie set Peter Pan - and free.

  • The Bermondsey Beer Mile

    Bermondsey

    A string of brewery taprooms in the railway arches running south-east from Maltby Street - unofficial, unbranded, and entirely walkable in an afternoon.

  • Alexandra Palace

    Muswell Hill

    The world's first regular television broadcasts went out from this building in 1936, and the restored Victorian theatre inside had been sealed up for most of a century. The hill it sits on has one of the best free views in London.

  • BBC Show Recordings (free audience tickets)

    White City

    Tickets to be in the audience for TV and radio recordings are free - panel shows, quizzes and comedy at Television Centre and Broadcasting House. It is the cheapest evening out in London that is also genuinely a London thing.

Hidden London

254 blue plaques, Banksy pieces, filming locations and oddities. All free, all on public streets, none of them ticketed — they live on the area guides rather than a list of their own.