Book a hotel online. Visit London’s online booking service offers a best price guarantee on over 100 two- to five-star hotels and feature other campaigns like Radisson Edwardian’s Let Loose in London program, where rates start at $149 per night.
Go to a museum. There are 238 of them, from the British Museum to the Hackney City Farm, most of them are free.
Take in a show. Buy half-price tickets at the tkts booth in Leicester Square day of performance (open 10:00 am-7:00 pm Monday-Friday and 12pm - 3pm Sunday).
Go around town for free. Buy an Oyster Card for easyaccess to trains, buses, and trams. Kids travel free or almost free with adults.
Grab a bite to eat. Brick Lane and Edgeware Road are full of authentic ethnic cuisine at great prices, or stay in the West End and try Chez Gerard, Livebait, or Bertorelli, all of which offer two courses under £10.
Seek a pew. Catch a free classical concert at one of the many churches in London.
Shop at designer discount stores. Go traditional and find a piece at the Burberry sale shop at 29 Chatham Place for 1/3 of the regular price or try Nicole Farhi’s outlet shop at 75-83 Fairfield Road for 50% discounts. Or rummage around at one of London’s eclectic markets, like Bermondsey Antiques Market.
Take a rest. Escape the non-stop activity in central London and relax in the peaceful parks in Greenwich, Richmond, Kew Gardens, or Hampstead Heath.
Get the details at
www.visitlondon.com
More Family Vacation Planning Resources. Visit London Website for Kids, by Kids. Visit London has launched a new website to provide a fun, educational guide for planning time in the capital for the young and young at heart. The site boasts interactive quizzes, up-to-date information on what’s hot, and children’s reviews of London attractions to make exploring the city fun and exciting. KidsLoveLondon.com was created for kids, by kids. Local school children between the ages of seven and 11 visited London’s attractions and used state-of-the-art technology to create an online multi-media report for kids. Children logging onto the site can get the lowdown on London by taking virtual tours with video clips, music, poems, and descriptions about special exhibitions. At home, kids can also have their own say by voting for favorite things from museums to music, or they might enjoy testing their knowledge with the London Landmarks Quiz.
‘Stuff to do’ is brimming with time-filling ideas, including where to walk with dinosaurs and tips for star-spotting in the capital. Additional sections include cool places to eat, in-store events, such as book signings and celebrity appearances, and shop shop shop, which gives hints and tips for finding designer labels, such as Diesel for kids or Jasper Conran’s jeans for teens. For the whole story go to
www.kidslovelondon.com
Don't miss London’ Museum in Docklands. One of London’s oldest warehouses has a new life as the Museum in Docklands.
Charting an unexplored area of London’s history, the Museum in Docklands tells the story of the river, port and its people, from the arrival of the Romans to the rise of Canary Wharf. Housed in the first warehouses of the enclosed docks - built 200 years ago for storing sugar, coffee and rum - the Museum stands on the edge of West India Quay in the heart of the Docklands. The quayside, nicknamed Blood Alley after the damaged hands, necks and backs of dockers who once heaved sacks of raw sugar from nearby sailing ships, is today overlooked by American-style skyscrapers, built in the last 20 years to challenge the Square Mile as the capital’s financial powerhouse.
The Museum’s thousands of objects and pictures capture the people and places behind the area’s dramatic transformation. Many are unique, having been rescued during the 1970s and 80s after containerization and competition forced London’s port to move downstream. Interactives, videos, models and recreations explore the lives of those that built and shaped the port’s long riverfront, from yesterday’s gentleman pirates to today’s city workers.
Led by Time Team’s Tony Robinson, visitors can explore the early ports of London, from the Saxon settlement in Covent Garden to the Medieval port at Billingsgate. Enormous whale-bones mark one of the uses of the early wet docks at Rotherhithe in the 18th century, when London was at the centre of the world whaling trade, while a gibbet cage set at the end of a recreation of a legal quay reveals the fate of those engaged in organized crime.
In Sailor Town, visitors can wander through a series of mid-19th century alleyways, when ships jostled to unload their wares, the air was suffused with the smells of exotic goods, and the sound of a dozen different languages echoed along the wharves. Throughout the Museum are the stories of people from every corner of the globe, from the Lascars of India, to the Irish, Scandinavians and Chinese, all of who came to settle on the Thames waterside.
In Mudlarks’, the Museum’s interactive gallery for children, under 11’s can learn to winch and weigh cargos, get a diver’s eye view of work under water, discover archaeological finds on the foreshore, or even reconstruct a simple model of Canary Wharf.
Historic photographs and printed materials from the Port of London Authority Archive show the vast scale of the docks at the turn of the 20th century, providing tantalizing glimpses into a time when everything, from snakeskins to cinnamon, cars to live elephants, were brought into the Warehouse of the World. Original plans, pamphlets and engineering drawings uncover the debate surrounding the founding of the new docks from 1802. Workshop reconstructions stand as testimony to the many traditional port trades now mostly lost.
Rarely seen film from the Metropolitan Fire Brigade and captured Nazi footage in Docklands at War documents the impact of the Blitz on the area during 1940. For the first time, oral testimonies are combined with footage from the Imperial War Museum to explore the port’s role in secret projects such as the Pipe Line Under the Ocean. A series of original canvases by official war artist William Ware dramatically capture the full extent of the destruction.
Children less than 16 years of age admitted free of charge. Museum in Docklands, No. 1 Warehouse, West India Quay Hertsmere Road, London E14 4AL or 020 7001 9800 or
www.museumindocklands.org.uk
Copyright 2009. Information provided by VisitBritain and image from Docklands Museum.
