Sight & museum tours

Guided visits to Britain's sights—museums, cathedrals, castles, palaces, ruins—can help make them come alive, deepen your understanding, and enrich your experience

Whether led by learned volunteers, hired guides, a dusty professor, or a rotund old monk, a 30- to 120-minute tour of an individual sight can do the same thing for a cathedral or art gallery that walking tours do for a city.

Guides can spin stories and give insightful commentaries on the meanings of every tiny detail of a sight or painting, conjuring up the past and enriching the experience of your visit tenfold.

I'm not just trying to sell you a line here. I love sight tours. I've discovered what it took to become a knight on a Beefeater guard tour of the Tower of London, delved into the stories behind the Old Masters masterpieces at the National Gallery, and learned more than I ever needed to know about Scotch in Edinburgh (though I recommend not doing that one on the eve of the opening of the first Scottish Parliament in 292 years, because boy! did they want to celebrate; I think I still have a hangover, and that was in 1999).

Do I need to book guided tours ahead of time?

You can often hop on the next guided tour at any museum, and some major sights, just by showing up, but there are two caveats here.

1. Tours may be offered only at certain times and/or on certain days, so it pays to poke around the museum's or other sight's website (or call a few days ahead) to find this out. 
    
2. Reservations are essential for a few top-notch tours, which can book up way in advance (as can entry to some sights that don't even come with a tour, just an admission ticket).

You can choose to book tours of some of the more popular sights ahead of time via one of our partners:

Activities, 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