Pop culture sights & tours in London ★☆☆
London is awash in pop culture icons, from Doctor Who to The Beatles' Abbey Road crosswalk—and, sometimes, both at once
From the London of the Beatles to that of Harry Potter—with Bond and Holmes, Doctor Who and Downton Abbey all in between
- Harry Potter - From landmarks features into the Harry Potter books to the places where they filmed scenes in the movies, here is everything you need to know about the London of Harry Potter... » more
- Downton Abbey - Yes, Downton Abbey is set in Yorkshire, but much of the hit TV show is actually filmed much closer to London in Oxfordshire and Berkshire—including "The Abbey" itself, played on TV by Highclere Castle... » more
- Sherlock Holmes - From the Sherlock Holmes Museum (a mock-up of Holmes's and Watson's rooms at 221b Baker Street in an actual Victorian-era boarding house on Baker Street) to Holmesian tours of the London streets... » more
- Doctor Who - Argue with fellow Whovians about who was the best Doctor (Tennant) while following a trivia-filled expert guide and keeping a lookout for the TARDIS while you pose at various filming sights from the venerable, indestructible BBC series... » more
- The Beatles - Notably the only famous Brits on this list who are not, in fact, fictional... » more
- James Bond - Everybody's favorite spy in Her Majesty's Secret Service does spend much of his time in exotic locales, but he does spend some time hanging around MI6 headquarters and the rest of London, especially the re-booted Daniel Craig version... » more
Pop Culture Tours Tours
These might include Pop culture tours
More toursActivities, walks, & excursions
- Viator.com - Best one-stop shopping site for all sorts of activities, walking tours, bus tours, escorted day trips, and other excursions. It is actually a clearinghouse for many local tour companies and outfitters, and since it gets a bulk-rate deal on pricing (and takes only a token fee for itself), you can actually sometimes book an activity through Viator for less than it would cost to buy the same exact tour from the tour company itself. (I once booked a Dublin pub crawl via Viator and later discovered that I saved about $1.50; also, the tour turned out to be sold-out, and they were turning away the folks in front of me in line, but since I had a pre-booked voucher I got in.)Partner
- Londonwalks.com - Since the 1970s, the gold standard in city walking tours and museum tours—and cheap, to boot. Just meet your guide at the appointed time and place (usually a Tube stop), pay your £10 (students or over 65s are £8; under 15 free), and prepare for a good two hours of amazing cultural insight and historic anecdotes. If you plan on taking three or more walks, buy a "Frequent London Walker" card for £2 from your first guide, then each subsequent walk costs £8. They also run popular excursions outside London for £18. Note that the fee just covers the guided tour; you pay for any admissions (or, for excursions, travel expenses) yourself.
- Contexttravel.com - This bespoke walking tour company doesn't even call its 200 tour leaders "guides." It calls them "docents"—perhaps because most guides are academics and specialists in their fields: history professors, archeologists, PhDs, art historians, artists, etc. Groups are miniscule (often six people maximum), and most docents can be booked for private guiding sessions as well. They aren't always the cheapest tours, but they are invariably the best. People rave about Context.Partner
- City-discovery.com - Chief rival to Viator (though with a less spiffy interface and often sub-par text descriptions), representing many of the same tours (at the same prices). However, it also seems to cover more destinations, especially secondary ones. When it comes down to it, City-Discovery and Viator have maybe 70% the same inventory, but then 30% will be completely different (some Viator has City-Discovery does not, other vice-versa) so it pays to check through the offerings from both.Partner
