If sports are your interest, I can recommend the tours at Lords for Cricket (and I'd never heard of "Real Tennis" until I did the tour there) and Wimbledon for Tennis. Didn't get to make it to Wembley stadium.
I found getting an Oyster card easiest way to use the Tube and buses. I used a combination of apps to help navigate the tube/bus: Tube tamer, London Tube and the Zuti Tube and Bus apps, and mxdata apps. Different ones had different features to find stops/routes, which carriage to get on/off at for quickest transfer/exit path etc. So I found the combination useful.
Can also recommend catching up with fellow AFFers for drinks/dinner (shout out to Mal there.)
I caught the Tube out to Heathrow and it was a slow bumpy ride (the tube is over 100 years old after all!). I paid the extra for the Heathrow Express the next time and that was much more pleasant and faster.. worth the extra money in my book. The Connect service may be a good balance between price and time.
I used the London Pass as it helped me to work out what to do without having to think about it too much, and occasionally it did mean I got in quicker. I didn't do everything on the pass, but afterwards did a quick calculation and it worked out value for money for me. (In my experience, the number of days you purchase the pass for is a furphy: you are meant to write on the back of the card the day you start using it. Vendors kept accepting mine after my 5 days were up as long as I hadn't been to that attraction before. If the machine said 'yes', none of them asked why the date was blank on the card, or asked how many days I'd been using it, so I guess it may be a case of as long as they got their money. YMMV)
While I'm not much of a shopper, I don't think I appreciated what Harrods was all about. I think it is certainly worth exploring a bit more as it becomes quite an experience just wandering around. And it seems their food area would be a great place to grab lunch or a bite to eat, even if it's a bit more expensive (I'd imagine it is, though I didn't notice prices). The lady in the Scotch area was very happy to provide tastings of a few of their scotches, even when it would've been quite apparent to her that I wasn't buying.
I'm not much into Museums either, and went through the entire British Museum in 2 or 3 hours. I couldn't help but have the main thought while walking around the halls that all this stuff was stolen from other countries. :shock: (Though I guess that's subjective.)
Doing tours of the Royal palaces (Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle) may have actually made me a bit of a republican
, as I realised a
lot of what they do is just for show. However, they were interesting places to visit and to consider the history and context within society over there.
I noticed that certain street shopping areas and the shopping centres (e.g. Westfields at Shepherd's Bush) were open much later hours into the night. Very handy and unexpected when compared to Australian shopping hours.
