London by Night Sightseeing Open Top Bus Tour with Live Guide
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From $39 per person
One London Night After Dark: An Evening Itinerary
Short answer. A whole evening, built around one tour rather than instead of one. Where to be at half past five, what to do with the awkward hour, which departure to take, where to go afterwards and how to get home — with the free version alongside the booked one at every step.
What a London evening actually looks like
Almost every night tour in this city leaves between half past five and half past ten, and the bulk of them go at half past seven. That leaves two hours before and two hours after, and those four hours are where an evening is either very good or spent standing outside a closed building.
This is one evening, in order, with the timings that work between October and March. Between May and July, push everything two hours later and take the last departure of the night instead.
| Time | Where | What | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 17:30 | Embankment or the South Bank | Walk the river as the light goes | Free |
| 18:30 | Near your departure point | Eat — this is the quiet hour | Your choice |
| 19:30 | Your meeting point | The tour itself | From $27 |
| 21:15 | Wherever it finished | A drink, or Waterloo Bridge | Free upwards |
| 22:30 | Night bus or Night Tube | Home | One fare |
Half past five: walk the river while the light goes
Start on Westminster Bridge and walk east along the South Bank. In December the light is going at four and gone by five, so you get the change from dusk to floodlight over about twenty minutes, and it is the best free hour of a London day.
The London Eye is lit first, then the Palace of Westminster behind you, then the Illuminated River bridges downstream. If you do nothing else all evening, do this.
Half past six: eat, because nothing else is happening
This is the awkward hour. Museums are closing, tours have not started, and restaurants are quiet, which is exactly why it is the best hour to eat in central London. Book something near your departure point rather than near your hotel.
If you are booked on a cab tour with hotel pickup, this hour is yours entirely. If you are meeting a walking tour at Tower Hill, the floodlit Roman wall behind the station is five minutes and almost always empty.
Useful tip. Eat between six and seven. It is the quiet hour in central London restaurants and it is the hour most tours have not started. More on the rest of the evening.
Half past seven: the tour
Whatever you booked. The buses leave at 7.30pm and 9.20pm between October and March and six times a night between April and September; the Ripper walk leaves at 7.30pm year round; the cab tours start when you tell them to, with 5pm the earliest offered.
Arrive ten minutes early for anything with a fixed meeting point. The map page has every one of them, including the bus stop beside the Ritz that is not the station exit and catches people out.
How long should you allow?
- Open-top bus: 90 minutes, back where you started.
- Ripper walk: 1 hour 45, finishing at Spitalfields.
- Royal-parks ghost walk: 2 hours 30, finishing at Tower Hill.
- Two-hour cab: 2 hours, back to your door.
- Four-hour cab: 4 hours, and it is the whole evening.
Only the four-hour cab fills the night on its own. Everything else leaves you with two hours afterwards, which is the part most itineraries forget to plan.
Quarter past nine: where to go afterwards
It depends where you finished. Spitalfields, where both Ripper walks end, holds up later than most of the East End and Liverpool Street is four minutes away. Green Park puts you in Mayfair and a short walk from Soho, which is the safe answer for anything after ten.
If your tour was on the river, Borough Market's bars and restaurants run past the market's own hours and sit directly on the two-hour cab route. The after-dark page has more.
What if you want a second walk?
Waterloo Bridge is the best single vantage point in London and it is ten minutes from almost anywhere central. The City one way, Westminster the other, and nobody on it after ten. It is the correct end to an evening that started on the river and it costs nothing.
The alternative is the Millennium Bridge for St Paul's, which is quieter still and frames the dome dead centre.
Did you know? Night buses run every night across the whole network; the Night Tube runs on Friday and Saturday only. The planning page covers getting home.
Half past ten: how do you get home?
Night buses run every night, all night, across the whole network, and they are the answer from Sunday to Thursday. The Night Tube adds the Central, Jubilee, Northern, Piccadilly and Victoria lines on Friday and Saturday nights only.
Check Transport for London for the night you are travelling, because weekend engineering work moves things. Every walking tour here finishes at or beside a station for exactly this reason, and the cab tours drop you wherever you like.
Can you fit two departures into one evening?
Yes, if one is short and they are neighbours. A 90-minute bus circuit at 7.30pm and a late walk on the South Bank afterwards is comfortable. Booking two guided departures in one night does not: the second starts while you are still getting to it.
The exception is December, when the Christmas routes run early enough that a 5pm cab tour and a 7.30pm bus are genuinely possible. Everything else is better spread over two evenings.
What if you only have two hours?
Then skip the pre-tour walk and book something that ends where you want to be. A two-hour black cab route collects you and returns you, which removes all the transit time from the equation. A 90-minute bus circuit does the same if you can get to the stop.
The walking tours are the wrong choice on a tight evening, not because they are long but because they finish somewhere other than where they started, and you then have to get back. Two hours in this city goes quickly once travel is in it.
If two hours is genuinely all you have, the highest-value version is the river between Westminster and Blackfriars on foot. It needs no booking, no meeting point and no return journey, and it is the best-lit stretch of the city.
Where should you stay for an evening like this?
Anywhere within the pickup radius, which on the cab tours is five kilometres from Embankment or five miles from Trafalgar Square depending on the operator. That covers most of zone one and a good deal of zone two.
If you are booking a bus or a walk, the practical question is different: how far is your hotel from a station on a Night Tube line? Central, Jubilee, Northern, Piccadilly and Victoria run all night on Fridays and Saturdays, and staying on one of them removes the only genuinely awkward part of a late evening.
Outside those two nights the night buses cover everywhere, but they are slower and they need a little more confidence. The map page lists which station each departure sits beside.
Does the day of the week matter?
For the tours themselves, barely. For getting home, a great deal: the Night Tube runs on Friday and Saturday only, so a late Tuesday finish means a night bus. Plan the end of the evening around that rather than the start.
A December version of the same evening
Move everything two hours earlier. Sunset in mid-December is 15:52 and civil dusk follows before half past four, so the river walk works at four in the afternoon and the lights are fully on by five.
That opens a version of this evening that is impossible for most of the year: an early tour, a proper dinner afterwards, and still an hour for a bridge before the last train. December is also when the Christmas displays are up on the shopping streets, so the walk between Covent Garden and Regent Street becomes a second attraction rather than a transfer.
The cost is crowds and booking pressure, both of which peak in the middle two weeks. The Christmas guide covers that season in detail.
The free version of the same night
Westminster Bridge at dusk, east along the South Bank to Tower Bridge, cross, back along the north side, finish on Waterloo Bridge. About two and a half hours, no cost, and it passes most of what a bus circuit shows you. The full route is written out here.
What it does not give you is somebody explaining what you are looking at, which on a first visit is most of the value. That is the honest trade and it is worth making deliberately rather than by default.
What should you skip?
The observation decks, unless a view from above is specifically what you came for. They are the one category of London attraction genuinely open at night, they cost more than most of the tours on this market, and they show you the city as a map rather than as a place. On a single evening the river gives you more.
Skip the queue for anything ticketed, too. Nothing on this evening needs a queue, and December is the month when every queue in the West End is at its worst.
The evening, in one line
River at dusk, dinner at half six, tour at half seven, bridge at half nine, night bus home. Everything else here is a variation on that, and every departure that fits into it is listed with its meeting point.
What next
Build the evening around a departure that suits it. London Night Tours has all of them, and the map page shows where each one starts and finishes.
Departures that fit into the evening above
Private 2-Hour Night Tour of London in an Iconic Black Cab
Private groupHotel pickupLive guide
From $356 per group (up to 6)
