London by Night Sightseeing Open Top Bus Tour with Live Guide
Live guide12 audio languagesMax 72
From $39 per person
London Night Tours: How to See the City After Dark
Short answer. Come between October and March and book anything; the city is dark by five and every departure runs in full night. Between May and July take the last departure of the evening or accept a daylight tour. Seats start at $27, private vehicles at $247, and everything refunds in full 24 hours ahead.
The one number that decides everything
Most guides to London at night open with a list of landmarks. This one opens with a clock, because the single most useful thing to know before you book an evening here is what time the light actually goes — and in London that moves by five and a half hours across the year.
Sunset is 15:52 in mid-December and 21:19 in mid-June. Civil dusk, the point at which the floodlighting starts to win and the sky stops competing with it, follows about thirty-five to forty-five minutes later. So the identical 7.30pm departure is three hours into the night in December and in broad daylight in June, and both open-top bus operators say as much in their own small print rather than hiding it.
| Month | Sunset | Civil dusk | Is a 7.30pm departure dark? |
|---|---|---|---|
| December | 15:52 | 16:32 | Yes, three hours in |
| February | 17:15 | 17:50 | Yes |
| April | 19:57 | 20:32 | It starts light and ends dark |
| June | 21:19 | 22:07 | No — take the 10.15pm |
| August | 20:24 | 21:01 | Only the later departures |
| October | 18:08 | 18:42 | Yes |
If you take one thing from this article, take that table. The month-by-month page goes further, with what each month is like to stand outside in.
What is actually on offer
Five formats, and they are genuinely different purchases rather than tiers of one thing. A bus seat and a private cab do not answer the same question, which is why the price gap between them looks absurd until you work out which question is yours.
- The open-top bus. Ninety minutes, roughly $39 to $42 a seat, no stops. The widest sweep of the city for the least money.
- The private black cab. Two to four hours, priced for the vehicle rather than the seat, with hotel pickup and a route you can change halfway through.
- The ghost or Ripper walk. Under $31 a head, on foot, in one part of the city, with the story rather than the skyline as the product.
- The photography walk. Three hours on the South Bank with a professional, and the only format where you go home with something.
- Nothing at all. A real option for repeat visitors, and one worth reading about before you spend anything.
The format comparison sets all five against each other properly; this is the summary.
What it costs, and where the money goes
Seats start at $27 and stop at about $42. Private vehicles start around $247 and run to $633, and the number does not move with how many of you climb in. That is the whole arithmetic of this market: four people in a black cab pay roughly what four bus seats cost twice over, and six people pay less per head than a walking tour.
What you never pay for is admission, and that is not an omission. London's big indoor attractions close in the late afternoon, hours before any of these departures leave, so an evening here is an outdoors, look-up experience by design. The planning page has the price bands set out in full.
Useful tip. Book a departure that leaves AFTER civil dusk in your month, not one that leaves at a time that sounds late. In June, 7.30pm is the middle of the afternoon as far as the lighting is concerned. The darkness table has every month.
When to book
Two to five days ahead for the buses and the walks between April and September, and the same again across the whole of December. The private cabs want more notice, because one vehicle serves one booking a night and the festive weeks fill first.
Everything listed refunds in full up to 24 hours before departure, which is unusually consistent across this set and matters more here than on a sunny-country day trip. British weather in the evening is the thing most likely to change your mind, and the policy is built for exactly that.
Where the evenings start
There is no single departure point. The open-top buses leave from stops beside hotels rather than station exits; the Ripper walk meets outside a gallery at Aldgate East, which is a different station from Aldgate and the mistake the listing specifically warns about; the cab tours come to you. The meeting-point map has every one of them with its nearest station.
What the evening is like
Colder than you think on an open top deck, because the bus is moving and you are not. Standing for two hours on the walking tours, with nowhere to sit at any point. Warm and door to door in a cab. The commonest criticism across both bus routes is not the tour but the temperature, and it is solved entirely by a hat.
The full what-to-expect page covers arriving, tipping, photographs and what happens when the weather turns.
Getting home afterwards
Night buses run every night, all night, across the whole network, and they are the answer from Sunday to Thursday. The Night Tube adds five lines — Central, Jubilee, Northern, Piccadilly and Victoria — on Friday and Saturday nights only. Check Transport for London for the night you are travelling, because weekend engineering work moves things around.
Every walking tour here finishes at or beside a station for exactly this reason. The cab tours drop you wherever you like, which on a wet Tuesday in January is worth something on its own.
Did you know? Every departure listed here refunds in full up to 24 hours before it starts. That consistency is unusual, and it is why booking early costs you nothing but a decision. The FAQs cover the rest of the booking questions.
Two mistakes worth avoiding
Booking by the clock rather than by the calendar. Half past seven sounds like a night-time departure and for five months of the year it is not. The same booking page, the same product, the same price, and a completely different evening depending on which month you press the button in. Nothing else on this list costs people more disappointment.
Assuming you will get inside something. Visitors regularly book an evening expecting to walk into one of the buildings they are looking at, and none of these tours includes admission anywhere because there is nothing open to be admitted to. Once you plan around that, the evening improves immediately: you stop trying to fit an interior into it and start standing in the right places outside instead.
A third, smaller one: turning up at the station rather than the meeting point. Two of the departure points on this market are a short walk from the station that shares their name, and one of the walking tours meets outside a gallery at a station whose near-namesake is five minutes away. Ten minutes of margin solves all of it, and the meeting-point map removes the guesswork entirely.
The short version
Pick your month first, then your format, then your departure time. If you are here between October and March, anything works and the 7.30pm departures are the best of the evening. If you are here between May and July, take the last bus of the night or book a cab you can start at nine. Everything else is detail, and the FAQs have it.
What next
Ready to pick an evening? Every departure with live prices and availability is on London Night Tours, and the darkness table decides which month.
Departures that suit a first evening in London
