You can admire London from a double decker bus, a boat down the Thames, or one of its many vantage points (Battersea, The Shard, London Eye, SkyGarden, and more), but you’ll never truly understand it until you walk it.

Walking brings you face to face with the rhythms, secrets, and personality of a place. And when it comes to a city like London, every alley, pub, church, and park whispers a story. Walking puts you where the stories happened. In London, that might mean standing in the courtyard where Shakespeare debuted a play, or pausing at a hidden plaque that marks where a fire once changed the city forever. It’s one thing to read about these events in a guidebook. It’s another to stand where they unfolded.

A great tourist guide in London connects past and present, showing how centuries of history shape the way Londoners live today.

On the best London walking tours, you notice the details: the Roman walls tucked behind a hotel or beneath a church, the World War II damage still visible on a monument, or the blue plaques revealing who once lived in that flat you almost walked past.

A great tourist guide in London shares stories that aren’t in any book, like family legends, neighborhood gossip, cultural insight. They’ll set the stage for what life was like in the Victorian Era, or during Henry VIII’s rule.

It’s in these conversations that the city opens up. You get not just facts, but feeling. Not just direction, but connection.

There’s something about experiencing a city on foot that makes it stick, as you imagine yourself transported to the London of yesteryear, the biggest and most industrialized city the world had even known, the Thames so choked with ships you could cross it by hopping across their decks… can you imagine it now? You can imagine it better while standing on London Bridge, looking down at the river, with a guide like Londunnit that can set the stage.