The at-a-glance list of all of our out-of-town trips (to Stonehenge, Oxford, Winchester, Cambridge,

Royal London's budget car rental coupon code the theme for the new edition of The London Walks Podcast. Brought to you by Karen, author of Royal London; Andy, who played George VI; Shaughan, who can impersonate every royal under the sun; and Adam, the only person I know who talks like a really well written magazine article! budget car rental coupon code More
on the London Walks Blog. "...want to thank you for all the daily tidbits about London which i absolutely adore, I also thank you for this cool game which I'm starting to enjoy a lot! :-) Cheers!" Two clicks and a scroll down takes you there. More
London Walks has better guides – including the distinguished crime historian who is "internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper"! Here are the dates Britain's foremost crime historian will be guiding the Ripper walk between now and the end of February. More
Want the real thing? Rather than a cup of hot water and a teabag. And most definitely rather than something that costs a king's ransom. Well, let London Walks beam you in. Get in touch and we'll tell you where. Local knowledge – you can't beat it!
Yes, the International Homicide Investigators Association wanted to hear from the world's leading expert on Jack the Ripper. And that's what we mean when we say "There's no comparison" between London Walks guides and the knock-offs. More
books in the pipeline. Aunties' Charley, Charles' autobiography, is published next month. To be followed by a London Stories companion budget car rental coupon code volume – it takes as its subject our Day Trip, out-of-town destinations. And Rachel's book on Jewish London. And "The World's Greatest Guide" – Karen's – on Royal London.
In the starting lineup of "The World's Greatest Guides". budget car rental coupon code Yes, it's London Walks guide Karen. The august American travel budget car rental coupon code publication Travel & Leisure has just crowned her in their "The World's Greatest Tour Guides" article. She's one of just 15 – and, yes, the only one from England. More
"Helen Marks discovers a dramatic transformation budget car rental coupon code to the waters budget car rental coupon code of the River Thames" is how the BBC is trailing the Radio 4 programme on Thames budget car rental coupon code Beachcombing. It's aired bright and early – 6.07-6.30 am – on New Year's Day. And then available on BBC Iplayer. And there'll be a rebroadcast.
and guiding! Back from China, Donald Rumbelow, "internationally recogised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper", will be guiding the nightly – 7.30 pm from Tower Hill Tube – Jack the Ripper Walk on... More
The at-a-glance list of all of our out-of-town trips (to Stonehenge, Oxford, Winchester, Cambridge, Hampton Court, Bath, Rye, Constable Country, Lavenham, budget car rental coupon code Avebury & Lacock, Glastonbury & Wells, budget car rental coupon code Leeds Castle, St. Albans, The Cotswolds, etc.) this summer. budget car rental coupon code All 128 of them! More
Vive le difference! That's the first thing. And the second thing is this: give yourself a pat on the back. Precisely because you've found your way here. In short, you're already part way over the wall about to break the surly bonds of the package , the motorway, London traffic jams, the coach!
If you want it short and sweet, what's just been said will more than suffice. Especially budget car rental coupon code if you close it out by watching this little film of our Cambridge Tour . Along with its shorter sidekick The Cambridge Walk (Here's How It Works) . Together they'll give you a very good idea of what a London Walks Day Trip from London is like, what happens, what you get, how you go on one, etc. On the other hand, if you want to drill down deeper, well, by all means watch the films and then read on. Because further down this page I'm going to close with some of the differences that make the way we do it... better .
Okay, now, as promised, let's close with some of those differences . And make no mistake, budget car rental coupon code these are really important, fundamental matters structural differences as opposed to window dressing 'differences'. As such they go right to the heart of the thing. It's all just common sense, really but it never gets said. So let's get it said.
Hotel pick-ups. We don't do them. We meet you at the ticket office of the designated railway station. You just take the tube there eeezy peezy (as my sprogs used to say). What are the parameters and implications of that modus operandi ? Well, for starters coaches aren't our thing. We don't go by coach. We don't own coaches. We're not locked into them don't have a huge capital investment dictating where and how we go. End of story? Hardly. budget car rental coupon code Chew on this: London traffic moves at an average budget car rental coupon code speed of about 6 mph these days . (Horse drawn hackney cabriolets a century ago got you there faster than the internal combustion engine does today. ) That's average speed . You can imagine what central London is like in the crush hours hotel pick-up budget car rental coupon code time, in other words. Making the rounds of those hotels can take up to two hours. (Talk about having your time fly straight into nothingness.) And that's just to get everybody rounded up. It's the practice run, if run's the mot juste . Perfect to get you in the mood for the crawl out of town to the motorway. Crawl through town. Crawl out of town. Don't know about you, but that would work wonders for my irritability quotient. Well, each to his own. But if I were a visitor I'd rather have a bit of a lie-in and a leisurely breakfast; then stroll to the tube and do as they do in London: go by tube. Not only is it a lot quicker and a lot less stressful it's a taste of ordinary, work-a-day budget car rental coupon code London. It's how Londoners budget car rental coupon code do it, how they get around and it's something I'd want to experience budget car rental coupon code if I were a visitor budget car rental coupon code to London.
Do yourself a huge favour do a few distance calculations . It's eezy peezy on the Internet. Add up those miles put a figure on it and then use your common sense. Work out for yourself how far it is from London budget car rental coupon code to Wherever. And then from Wherever to Wherever (and perhaps to Wherever) to back to London. How many miles is that? If it's, say, 230 miles how long's that going to take, how much of your day out's going to be a day in in a coach, on the road ? Particularly when you factor in the London budget car rental coupon code crawl and the 20 or 30 mph limit not that you'll ever hit those speeds in built-up areas .
Time for an analogy. Think of a day tour of New York City that takes in Yankee Stadium, Central Park, the Rockefeller Center, Times Square, the Empire State Building, Greenwich Village, Wall Street, the Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridge. How much of Greenwich Village do you think you're going to see on that tour? And that's just one city on a tiny (13.5 mile-long and 2.5 mile-wide) island. As opposed to two or three or four destinations separated from each other and London by a motorway journey that in total comes to a couple of hundred miles or more. Again, maybe it's just me, but that's my idea of doing hard time.
That's one way of doing it. It's certainly not our way. It for us is a very different cup of tea. It for us is only one or two destinations. We get to them a lot quicker. And we spend a lot more time in them. We see them properly. You want tourist hell holes don't go with us. You want quaint little back streets, you want to go where coaches can't go, you want to reach the parts other tours cannot reach (because of time constraints - let alone road width!)...well, then we're going to be right for you. And that's all by way of saying, we do a walking tour or two of each of the places we go to. Proper walking tours not just sad little get-out, stretch-your-legs, take-the-obligatory-photo affairs. To go back to the New York analogy, our way of doing it would be to do a walking tour of Greenwich Village and one of Wall Street. We'd save Times Square and the Rockefeller Center for another day. And do them justice on their day.
Niche is the mot juste here. Richard , who masterminds the Day Trips strand of our programme, has found (though created is probably a better budget car rental coupon code word) a very special little niche here. And niches are almost always delightful. Not least because by definition they've got their own highly individualised character they're not one-size-fits-all.
Goes without saying that coach tours are the way most people get to see these places for the first time. (Yes, you can do it on your own of course, but that's got its own downside.) At the other end of the cost spectrum budget car rental coupon code is hiring your own driver-guide and being chauffeured. Or hiring a car and doing your own driving. Which is also frightfully expensive let alone stressful.
I said the other end of the cost spectrum implying that coach tours and driver-guide tours (I suppose you could have yourself helicoptered if you really wanted to play silly buggers with your bank balance) were the two ends of that spectrum. They're not. No question about it, going the chauffeured, driver-guide way is what's out at the expensive end. But it's London Walks that's there to greet you at the pocketbook friendly end! ( Spectrum will do, but rainbow isn't bad either. At the far end you fork out a pot of gold, at our end you find one an experiential p. of g! ) But tracking back to the main point: just get Googling and you'll see what I mean. Coach tours cost more .
And consider the particulars of the bill of fare. 1) You pay more for less comfort. It's incontrovertible, that. There's just more room on trains, you can get up and move around, there's the food trolley, there's a table for your book or laptop, there's any number of decent-sized loos, etc. Case closed. 2) You pay more for worse visuals : the train goes through the countryside, the motorway's the motorway great for spotting lots of lorries. 3) It takes a lot longer to get there. For that you pay more? 'Fraid so. Basically, you're paying more for more hard time and a lot less quality time i.e., time in the places you're paying to visit. 4) The counter budget car rental coupon code argument of course is multiple destinations . But boy is that ever debateable. You get right down to it it's a category confusion quantity and quality. Lots of motorway and very little time in each of several destinations doesn't float our boat. Our position budget car rental coupon code is that time is of the essence. If