Every experienced traveller eventually arrives at the same London realisation. The famous things are famous for good reason. The Tower of London, the Eye, Buckingham Palace – they are all genuinely worth seeing, and you should see them. But London is also a city of extraordinary depth, and if you spend your entire visit at the attractions that attract 3.5 million people a year, you will come home with the feeling that you have seen the postcard rather than the place.
The Japanese Emperor Naruhito understood this instinctively. On a recent state visit to London that included Buckingham Palace and a Royal College of Music recital, the attraction he reportedly expressed most excitement about was the Thames Barrier. A flood barrier. In east London. Which tells you something rather important about the difference between what tourists do and what genuinely curious people do.
Here are the London discoveries worth building time into your itinerary for – the ones that the crowds haven’t found yet.
The Emperor was right. Each of the 10 main gates of London’s flood barrier weighs 3,300 tonnes, a team of 80 monitors them around the clock and they protect 48 square miles of central London from tidal surges. Monthly tests see the gates rise from the depths as high as a five-storey building, and visitors are welcome to watch. There is a visitor centre on the south bank near Woolwich and, on the north side, the Thames Barrier Park – one of London’s least-visited green spaces and all the better for it.
Tucked behind a wall on the Royal Hospital Road, this extraordinary garden has been growing medicinal and edible plants since 1673, when the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London established it as a teaching garden for their students. Today it nurtures more than 5,000 species – from rare echiums to cocoa plants – and volunteers lead tours through what amounts to one of London’s most tranquil secrets. The workshops alone, covering everything from living medicine to the Japanese art of kokedama, are worth planning around. Entry is £11.
The world’s oldest hat shop has been on St James’s Street since 1676. Lock & Co, still family-run, commissioned the fedora worn by Oscar Wilde on his 1882 American lecture tour and invented the bowler hat. Inside, a forest-green door leads to a museum of extraordinary hats and paper measurements of famous head shapes – Winston Churchill, Tracey Emin, Horatio Nelson. Entry is free, which makes it one of London’s great overlooked pleasures.
In the former Lambeth workhouse where Charlie Chaplin lived intermittently between the ages of seven and fourteen, this volunteer-run museum is a love letter to the golden age of cinema. Founded in 1984 by two film enthusiasts who salvaged everything from velvet seats to usher’s uniforms from 19th-century cinemas facing demolition, it now runs everything from silent film screenings to film-related book launches. Guided tours at £10 are snapped up quickly. Worth booking ahead.
Few visitors ever find their way into the Inns of Court near Holborn, and those who do tend to wonder why it took them so long. This is the historic nerve centre of Britain’s legal system — a maze of beautiful gardens, silent squares, 300-year-old wig shops and time-twisted alleyways that feels completely separate from the London outside its gates. Hidden within are the office where a 15-year-old Charles Dickens laboured over law books, and the 15th-century dining hall where Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors received its first documented performance on December 28, 1594. Free to wander, entirely unforgettable.
Very few people realise that a 105-acre wildlife haven sits minutes from the Thames towpath between Hammersmith and Putney. The London Wetland Centre offers encounters with otters, more than 200 bird species and 70 breeding pairs of sand martins across a network of hanging pathways, wooden bridges and six birdwatching hides. Entry is around £18 and it is one of the most genuinely peaceful hours you will spend in the city.
If you’re looking for the right base from which to explore both London and Paris, Trafalgar’s nine-day London and Paris Explorer tour does the heavy lifting beautifully. Four nights in London – with a Trafalgar Local Host on hand for recommendations – followed by four nights in Paris, with Versailles, Bath, Stonehenge and Windsor built into the itinerary. Departures run through to April 2028, with prices from $4,815 per person twin share.
The guided structure gives you the famous landmarks in good hands, which leaves your free days — and every itinerary has them — free for the Thames Barrier, the hat shop and a 350-year-old garden that most of London has never visited.
Which is, if you ask me, exactly the right way to do it.
For full details and to book, visit travelat60.com