When we were planning our London visit over the winter, I made a list of “must sees” and “maybe sees” in London. The finished lists had thirty three things on them collectively. Had we been staying in London for a month, this would have been fine, but since we had five days we had to do quite a bit of editing. So this is not a definitive list of things to do in London. It’s a list of what WE did in London, with some details about each place and (I hope) some information that will help with planning your own visit.
Our main challenge when we’re visiting cities is how big of an age spread there is between our four kids. On this trip the youngest was 6 and the oldest had just turned 18. It’s not as much of an issue in more rural areas, particularly now that our youngest can keep up pretty well on hikes; everyone likes scrambling on rocks, and looking at pretty nature-y things, and petting adorable farm animals. But my older kids love a good art museum or historic house a lot more than my youngest, and vice versa with something like a children’s museum or playground. I think we did a good job in London balancing everyone’s likes/wants/needs and keeping people (mostly) happy. There are a lot of museums on the list, and I’ll share as I go along how we kept these fun for Abe (we found London sites in general to be GREAT about having things focused on families with young kids).
I have no idea how best to organize this, so….there will be no organization! Well, I’ll go chronologically. Which means there will be some loose geographical grouping as well.
National Maritime Museum
I wrote a post about the National Martime Museum back before I decided to do one big London post. So I won’t talk about it again, except to say that this is a great free museum with tons to do for all ages.
British Museum
We were all super excited before the trip about seeing the British Museum. The kids had learned about a ton of stuff there in their assorted art and world history classes. The British stole so many things for their museum!
I have to say, though, that we were a little unprepared for and overwhelmed by the crowds at the museum. We were also nervous that it was going to be like that everywhere we went in London, but that turned out not to be the case. We were there in early June, on a weekday (Friday), so not really prime tourist season yet…and still: SO CROWDED.
But you can learn from our experiences! What we SHOULD have done:
*Get there early. I don’t remember what time we got to the museum, but it was the first full day of the trip, so I’m sure we didn’t get a super early start. By the time we got there, there was already a long line just to get into the building (although it moved fast). And it only got more crowded as our visit went on into the early afternoon. Crowds build fast, but getting there and in right at opening might give you a little time to see the biggest crowd drawers before they get out of control. The museum doesn’t open until 10, which means there’s probably less of an advantage to getting there right at opening than if they opened earlier.
*Or maybe stay late! I suspect (and a google search backs me up) that late afternoon or evening touring would be less crowded. And on Fridays they’re open until 8:30, so plenty of time to tour after the morning/early afternoon crowds have cleared out.
*Plan what you want to see and focus on finding hidden gems. We didn’t do this, so we went immediately to the very popular Egypt area and then went to the Rosetta Stone. Just like everyone else:
But we still had a good time and saw very cool stuff; we just wore out from the crowds a little more quickly than we would have had we followed those handy tips. As it was, we split into two groups as soon as we got there. The older kids went off to see things on their own, while Dave and I stuck with Abe.
We found the British Museum to be extremely six year old friendly. We had printed out several activity trails in advance–guides that take you through an area of the museum and give you objects to look for along the way and questions to answer about what you’re seeing. We only managed to do the Egypt one while we were there, but it was really well done and Abe enjoyed it.
They have a ton of other things to do with kids. There are lots of different activity trails (some of which they have there and some you have to print out yourself beforehand), an app with online games to play as you go through some exhibits, and activity backpacks you can check out. Here’s a page that lays out all the different options nicely. (I just had a little wave of sadness thinking about how we likely won’t make it back before Abe has outgrown the backpacks. And also about how hard it is to find similar programs in the US for kids visiting “adult” museums).
After battling the Egypt and Rosetta Stone crowds, we spent the rest of the time before meeting up with the big kids just sort of wandering around. (The big kids spent most of their time with someone aimless wandering, with a focus on some things from A History of the World in 100 Objects (affiliate link) and from Ari’s art history class).
We saw this giant room that was….some king or someone’s library:
Still a lot of people in here, as you can see, but not NEARLY as crowded as Egypt.
And then we came across one of the kiosks where they have things from their collection that you’re allowed to actually touch. Surprisingly, this wasn’t crowded at all, and Abe got his own personal lesson about this really, really old hand axe:
Then we met back up with his brothers in the front of the museum, and he insisted that we bring them back there so they could hold it, too.
And that was it for our visit because it was lunchtime and we were too burned out by the crowds to come back after lunch (plus we had another museum to get to). But, of course, there’s so much more to see! I wish we’d devoted a whole day to it and had a better plan to cope with the crowds. Admission is free (donations suggested), so even if you only have a couple of hours to spend here, it’s certainly worth your time.
A nice thing about London is that you can wander around all over the place and it mostly looks like…London everywhere. So after the British Museum we needed to stop by the Bank of England to change out some money, and they would only let one person in, so I took pictures of the kids being in London for awhile while we waited.
Then we wandered by St. Paul’s Cathedral….
…on our way to the…
Museum of London
The Museum of London is another free museum (they’re all over the place in London!) and it tells you all about the history of London, from prehistoric to modern times. It was one million times less crowded than the British Museum and well worth a couple of hours of your time.
I really liked the re-creations of Roman shops and houses:
You can see a fragment from the original Roman wall through a display window:
We learned a lot about fires and plagues. And then! You can walk through model Victorian streets! And look in all the shops and stuff. Fun!
Vauxhall City Farm
There are a number of city farms around London, but Vauxhall happened to be close to our rental house, so that’s the one we went to. Admission is by donation (£3 suggested), and the farm is a short walk from either Vauxhall or Oval station. We started a day here that included walking to Westminster Abbey and it made for a lovely, very doable walk.
This was a fairly quick visit (we spent maybe an hour and a half here), but a fun one that furthered my impression of London as a super kid-friendly place. Big kids and little kids all love farm animals!
Vauxhall Farm has a big variety of animals, many of whom you can pet and/or feed (with food from dispensers).
They had a simple scavenger hunt available for younger kids; in that picture with the orange kitty, Abe is holding the stickers he got as a prize for finishing it.
They have an onsite cafe where you can get snacks and tea or coffee:
Also–look! A hidden Mickey!
Right across from the farm, there’s a nice park where we stopped for a picnic:
After Vauxhall Farm, we crossed the Thames and spent some more time being in London and taking pictures of it.
Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey is yet another example of somewhere that seems like a very grown-up kind of site but that does an excellent job keeping kids engaged.
Important things to note when planning a visit to Westminster Abbey: you should buy tickets online to bypass the VERY LONG lines and to save a few dollars, and (the part we didn’t know) you can’t buy online tickets the day of your visit. We tried to buy them before we left that morning and realized it wasn’t possible. So we waited for a very long time in line (over an hour) to get inside.
I entertained myself by taking a zillion pictures of the outside of the Abbey…until my camera died. That was very sad. And left me sharing a camera with Ari until I got a new one in Bath a few days later. But, anyway, here are a few pictures I took with my poor, dying camera:
You can’t take pictures inside Westminster Abbey, so you’ll have to google or watch some royal weddings or something. But it is, of course, truly magnificent inside. Once you’ve paid the admission cost (sadly, this is not one of the many free attractions in London, although they do offer family tickets that make the prices more reasonable), you’ll pick up your multimedia guides that take you on a self-paced tour around the abbey and give you information (audio and visual) about some of the most noteworthy parts of it. There’s a kid friendly family option for this, and Dave and I did that one with Abe and found it really well done (and plenty informative for grown-ups, too). They also have a kid activity book available, and it’s ADORABLE…but we found trying to do both that and the multimedia guide didn’t work very well: too much information to take in and too much overlap in the materials. We liked the multimedia guide better for our (6 year old) kid, but the activity book might work better with one who needs something more hands-on.
There’s a ton to see inside and so many fascinating stories. And despite those lines outside, we found the crowd level very manageable. Nearly everyone is doing the multimedia tour, so everyone’s kind of moving at the same pace, keeping bottlenecks from building.
You can take pictures once you get to the outside areas again:
We actually ended up going to Westminster Abbey twice! We came back for the Sunday evening organ recital after our first visit. The Abbey is an active church with regular services open to the public throughout the week and any of these offer a chance to see the inside free of charge. We opted for the organ recital because we like organs and because it was only half an hour long, which seemed most appropriate for Abe’s attention span.
We weren’t sure what to expect with the organ recital, so a few things we learned:
*The line for this wasn’t as long as the regular line, but it was still pretty impressive. I think we got there around 20-30 minutes before it started, and that worked well. People who were behind us in line had to sit on the seats along the side instead of in the middle, but you can’t see the organist anyway, so it doesn’t make much difference where you sit.
*I spent a ridiculous amount of time googling trying to figure out what kind of clothing was appropriate, and ultimately packed a collared shirt for everyone to wear that day with jeans. It turned out I really didn’t need to worry…I’m not sure we saw anyone there that was actually dressed up, and there were plenty of people in shorts and t-shirts. I suspect things are probably a little dressier for the Sunday morning services.
*The recital we saw, at least, wasn’t particularly traditional organ music. The organist played more contemporary music, with some unusual meters. Dave wasn’t a huge fan, mostly, I think, because it wasn’t what he was expecting.
*You can’t wander around and see everything during the organ recital. You go in and sit and then you leave right after. If you have the time and money, it’s definitely worth paying for admission another time so you can see everything. But you’re still inside Westminster Abbey, and you still get a great sense of how amazing it is….so if this is the only way you can see it, you should certainly do it.
Treasure Trails
I mentioned these before and will again, because we’re really big fans and because we did three of them while we were in England. Treasure Trails are scavenger hunts for all over the UK; you can choose from 48 different ones in London alone. We picked one in the Westminster area to do after touring Westminster Abbey. You need to remember to buy these before you leave for your trip; you can either order a printed copy or download and print it yourself. As of this writing, they’re £6.99 each, which I think is completely reasonable. The shipping price is £1.49 if you don’t print at home; there wasn’t a separate international shipping charge listed, and they sent them to me in the US and they got here fairly quickly, but it’s probably best to choose print at home if you’re not in the UK, particularly if your trip is coming up fairly soon (I ordered ours months in advance because I didn’t want to forget about them).
We all loved the Treasure Trails more than I expected. When I came across them online before the trip, I ordered a few mostly with the idea that they’d keep Abe occupied enough so that all of us could explore without him complaining too much. But we found they were actually great for all of us. I always want to spend time just wandering around in new cities, but I’m never sure exactly how to do it–especially with a group of six of all different ages. Following the Treasure Trails lent just enough direction and purpose to the wanderings AND helped us find cool little areas we never would have discovered on our own. On our London trail, we saw lovely parks and gardens and a couple of streets that bore a remarkable resemblance to the England section of Epcot at Disney World–only REAL!
It’s hard for me to convey this experience to you in photographs, because (have I mentioned?) my camera died and I had only my phone. Anyway, in real life it was SO CHARMING.
Treasure Trails work so well in the UK because practically every building has a plaque on it telling about some important thing that happened there (slight exaggeration), so there are plenty of options for clues. There’s a very loose theme to the scavenger hunt–some kind of “mission” you’re suppose to be on. I have no memory whatsoever of what ours was about, though, because to me the point was just to get you out seeing cool stuff.
We found Abraham Lincoln:
Word is, according our Treasure Trail, this statue of Queen Anne comes to life once a year and wanders the streets:
There’s a good bit of walking involve in finishing Treasure Trails (generally in the two-three mile range), although there’s lots of starting and stopping (and, of course, you can take a break whenever you want) and walking through relaxing parks:
We found the clues challenging enough to keep everyone interested, but easy enough not to be frustrating. Once you solve the clue, you write it down in the back of the book and then go on to the next one.
…and it takes a good bit of time. Most of them say they’ll take around two hours, but we always took longer. I guess we’re slow. Our London Treasure Trail is the only one we didn’t manage to finish. It was getting fairly late, but we were hoping to push through….when we encountered some people protesting outside an embassy exactly where we needed to look for a clue! We figured whatever cause the demonstration was about was probably more important than our need to finish our Treasure Trail, so we gave up at that point.
Victoria and Albert Museum
Another free museum! We almost went to the Natural History Museum on this day, but Gus the vegetarian is not a fan of taxidermy, so we shifted plans at the last minute. And I’m sure the natural history museum is great, too, but we all LOVED the V&A!
The V&A is devoted to all things design, which, again, doesn’t sound like something that would be great for young kids. But, again, they do an amazing job making it accessible to kids. We sent the big kids off on their own to explore and went to check out a kids’ backpack with an Abe who was perhaps feeling the effects of travel and was not, at first, in the best of moods:
But eventually he perked up enough to pick a backpack. There are a bunch of different backpacks to choose from, for various age ranges. We ended up with one that took us through the China section and gave us a number of activities to do there to interact with the exhibits. We met some pandas:
….tried out this comfy pillow….
….wrote some Chinese characters…
…and had a tea party…
I was so impressed with the backpacks that I wanted to go right back and get another one, but Abe was ready for a snack. So we headed out to the courtyard, where there’s a big pool/fountain in the middle where a bunch of kids were cooling off (it was not hot. We had no desire to cool off):
I know that I’ve mostly been focusing on what we did with Abe for these museum stops. Honestly, my big kids are happy to wander around for hours at pretty much any museum, so as long as we turn them loose and don’t let Abe slow them down, we don’t have to think about them too much. But don’t worry, they were having plenty of fun, as this picture Ari shared with me proves. Golden Arches!
We went out for lunch at the nearby Honest Burgers (a local chain; everyone really liked it) and then came back for more design:
This time Abe wanted to try out a scavenger hunt through the Europe 1600-1815 gallery; we looked for parrots that signaled kid friendly information and activities.
Then we got lost in the maze like museum trying to find the older kids, who’d gone off to another exhibit, where there were a number of hands-on activities, like designing a coat of arms (we think we were in room 57). This was the last thing we checked out, but there are even MORE kid-friendly ways to explore, including some online scavenger hunts you can play with your phone.
Kensington Gardens and the Diana Memorial Playground
After the V&A, we walked through Kensington Gardens to check out the Diana Memorial Playground, which everyone raves about as a place you must see when visiting London with kids. Unfortunately, the weather was looking quite ominous as we headed through the park. We were also pretty tired, so the our original plans to wander all over and see the Peter Pan statue and all that kind of went out the window. But there is a ton more to do in Kensington Gardens, including touring Kensington Palace.
We settled for stopping by the Albert Memorial. Note dramatic skies:
And then on to the playground, which lived up to the hype. It’s an awesome playground, with not just the big pirate ship that always shows up in photos, but tons of smaller little areas to discover as well. It’s times like this I almost wish Abe were a twin; the playground would have been a lot more fun for him if he had a brother closer to his age to hang out on it with.
But there really wasn’t a lot of time to explore anyway before the rain finally caught up with us. We got a bit wet walking back to an Underground station once the skies opened up.
The Tower of London
The Tower of London was probably the single thing I was most looking forward to in London, so I’m sorry to have to say that our visit there was a bit of a letdown. But it wasn’t the Tower’s fault! It was the coldest, rainiest day of our visit by far, for one thing.
And the crowds caught up with us again. I knew to expect crowds. In fact, I’d been told explicitly by a friend who was just in London a year ago to get there when it opened. We got there….close to when it opened. Except we went on a Monday, when it opens an hour later than usual, and, the woman selling tickets told us, that means people tend to get there at the same time, and you can’t really beat out the crowds.
We DID buy our tickets in advance this time, but the line to pick up pre-purchased tickets was longer than the line to buy tickets. And then everyone had to go wait in ANOTHER very long line after that to get inside.
By the time we were finally in, we knew we weren’t interested in waiting in yet another long line in the rain to see the Crown Jewels. So we took advantage of yet another awesome program for kids: in the form of an app based scavenger hunt called Time Explorers (missions are available at several different sites operated by Historic Royal Palaces, but this is the only one we made it to). The mission we picked took us through the Medieval Palace in 1290, getting ready for King Edward to show up. (These next couple of pictures are Ari’s; it was his turn to use the camera that day):
After we finished our mission, we peeked at the ravens who live at the Tower and then got back inside to check out the White Tower, where they keep all the armor:
…the weird dragon thing…
….the creepy faces and hands (a woman behind me was VERY excited about these, so I figured I should take a picture)….
….some long passageways….
…and an interactive area where you can try your hand at dressing a knight and shooting an arrow and all that kind of thing…
And with that, we were more than ready to head back to our cozy AirBnB. We actually had tickets for the Sky Garden that afternoon and ended up not using them, figuring we wouldn’t be able to see much on such a grey day anyway.
And that was it for London! Revisiting it through this incredibly long post is making me want to go back!
Maybe you would like to pin this?
Leave a Reply