The Funniest Ways to Tour London

There is an argument — not entirely unreasonable — that the correct way to tour London is to arrive at Camden Town tube station, walk to Camden Market, spend the entire day there, eat something from every food stall, visit the 98types studio in Market Hall, and then go home without having seen any other part of the city. This is not the lazy option. This is the option of someone who understands that Camden contains more of what makes London genuinely interesting per square metre than anywhere else in Zone 2.

Camden is the neighbourhood that gave the world the Britpop scene, Amy Winehouse, the Clash, Madness, the Roundhouse, and the best collection of street food stalls outside of a major international food festival. It is also the neighbourhood where 98types has been selling museum-grade posters from Market Hall for 14+ years — which means that if you want to take a piece of London home without dragging a souvenir snow globe through the Tube gates, Camden is where you go.

The Camden tour has three rules: (1) arrive before 11am to see the market before the crowds arrive, (2) spend at least twenty minutes in Market Hall looking at the 98types collection before buying anything else, and (3) follow the Regent's Canal towpath east toward King's Cross when you have recovered enough to move. Everything else in London is secondary to getting Camden right.

The London Underground map is one of the most beautiful pieces of graphic design in human history and also one of the most spatially misleading. Harry Beck's 1933 design prioritised clarity of navigation over geographical accuracy, which means that anyone who uses the Tube to understand London's actual geography will arrive at a mental model of the city that is spectacularly wrong in ways they will not discover until they attempt to walk between stations and realise that Covent Garden and Leicester Square are 260 metres apart — a distance that the Tube map implies takes approximately fifteen minutes.

The Tube tour of London has its own comedy: you descend at Knightsbridge thinking you are in the middle of somewhere significant, emerge into the cold, walk six minutes, and are standing in front of Harrods wondering what you expected. You change at Bank and discover that "Bank" is in fact six different stations connected by tunnels that lead through a subterranean labyrinth with the navigational logic of a nervous breakdown. You take the Jubilee line to Canary Wharf and find yourself in a financial district built from glass on an island nobody has visited voluntarily since 1987.

The correct approach to the Tube tour: use it for the long distances, ignore it for anything under a mile, and buy the Mind the Gap print from 98types so that at least one piece of the experience ends up on a wall rather than in the memory of a very hot carriage between Stockwell and Brixton.

The Royal tour of London has a specific energy that is entirely unavailable in any other city. You walk down The Mall — a road that exists specifically to look impressive from the palace end — and arrive at Victoria Memorial, where you stand with approximately four thousand other people and wait for something to happen. Sometimes the Changing of the Guard happens. Sometimes it does not. The guards are professionally, aggressively uninterested in your presence, which is the correct response.

The Royal tour extends from Buckingham Palace east through St James's Park — the most beautiful park in London, whose pelicans have been there since 1664 and have developed the specific insouciance of creatures that have outlasted every government since the Restoration — through Horse Guards Parade, down Whitehall past the Cenotaph, and eventually to Westminster, where the entire apparatus of British democracy is contained in a building that looks like it was designed to intimidate foreign dignitaries by being very large and very Gothic simultaneously.

The comedy of the Royal tour is the specific British relationship with royalty: a combination of genuine affection, mild embarrassment about the whole thing, and the nagging sense that this is enormously expensive and also completely irreplaceable. Big Ben — currently visible again after its restoration — is the centrepiece. The view from the South Bank looking back toward the Westminster skyline is the best in London, and the Big Ben and London Eye print from 98types is the version of that view you can take home.

The literary pub tour of London is based on a simple and endlessly verifiable fact: Charles Dickens drank in an extraordinary number of London pubs, all of which have been claiming the honour ever since. The Lamb and Flag in Covent Garden. The Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street. The George Inn in Borough. The Princess Louise in Holborn. The Cittie of Yorke. The rules of the literary pub tour require that you visit at least four of these establishments, read the framed notice claiming Dickens drank at each one, and accept that all of them are probably telling the truth.

The Soho circuit is the contemporary literary pub tour: the French House on Dean Street (where Brendan Behan drank, where the French government in exile operated in World War Two, where the measures are deliberately half the standard pour as a matter of policy and philosophy). The Wheatsheaf on Rathbone Place. The Fitzroy Tavern. Dylan Thomas drank himself into oblivion in most of them, which is either a recommendation or a warning depending on your perspective.

The literary pub tour ends in Soho because Soho is the neighbourhood where London's literary, artistic and generally disreputable traditions converge in the most concentrated form. The Soho map from 98types is the correct souvenir of this tour: the streets of a neighbourhood that has been simultaneously scandalous and magnificent for three hundred years, rendered as clean cartographic art.

The Instagram tour of London has its own entirely self-consistent logic. You do not visit places because they are historically significant or architecturally important or because they contain anything worth understanding. You visit them because they photograph well between 8am and 10am, when the light is correct and the tourists have not yet arrived.

The Instagram tour begins on the South Bank at dawn. The view toward Tower Bridge from below City Hall is the most photographed view in London after the Westminster Bridge shot, and at 7am in summer you will have it almost to yourself, which is the only time this is available as an experience. Then Borough Market, then the Tate Modern turbine hall, then the Millennium Bridge looking back toward St Paul's, then — if you are willing to do the journey — the Queen's Walk looking west toward the Eye.

The comedy of the Instagram tour is that the people doing it are generally right. The places that photograph well in London photograph well because they are genuinely visually remarkable. Tower Bridge really is as beautiful as the photographs suggest. The Eye really does glow as the night comes on. The city really does have a quality of light in the late afternoon that makes the Thames look like a painting rather than a river. The 98types Tower Bridge and London collection exists because these images are genuinely worth putting on a wall — which is the Instagram tour's final, vindicated argument.

Covent Garden is the only place in London where you are morally guaranteed to stop walking at least three times without intending to. This is because the Piazza contains a continuous rotation of street performers at a density calculated to make it impossible to cross without encountering at least one human being doing something physically remarkable enough to make you break stride.

There is always someone on a unicycle. The unicycle performer always involves audience participation. The audience participation always involves a nervous person from Germany doing something undignified on the unicycle while fifty people watch. The street performer always concludes this sequence with a request for donations framed in the specific way that makes it feel rude not to contribute. Covent Garden's economy runs almost entirely on this transaction.

The Covent Garden tour also includes: the Royal Opera House, whose exterior is significantly more impressive than most people who pass it ever register; the London Transport Museum, which is genuinely excellent and is full of vintage tube posters that are the conceptual grandparents of the 98types London poster collection; Neal's Yard, the colourful courtyard in Seven Dials that is the most photographed non-landmark location in central London; and the entire area around Endell Street, which contains more independent shops per metre than anywhere in Zone 1.

Amy Winehouse grew up in Southgate, North London, and became one of the greatest vocalists of the 20th and 21st centuries. She recorded her first album in Camden, made her reputation at the Dublin Castle on Parkway, and her statue now stands on the corner of the Stables Market — a bronze figure in her signature beehive and ballet flats, looking out over the market that she was photographed walking through a thousand times.

The Amy Winehouse Camden tour starts at Camden Town tube station, walks up Camden High Street past the Market Entrance, continues to the Stables Market where the statue is, then doubles back along Jamestown Road to the Dublin Castle — one of the finest small live music venues in London, which looks like it has not changed its carpet since 1978 and is all the better for it. The tour concludes in any of the approximately forty bars and restaurants on Chalk Farm Road where something musically significant has happened in the last fifty years.

The 98types Amy Winehouse poster is the Camden music pilgrimage souvenir — the poster of an artist whose Camden story is the Camden story in miniature: the neighbourhood that produces extraordinary people, contains their memory long after they are gone, and continues to be the most musically alive square mile in London regardless of what is happening in the rest of the city.

Canary Wharf is what happens when you give a group of architects unlimited budgets, a former docklands site, and instructions to create Europe's financial capital while nobody from Zone 1 is paying attention. The result is a city district that feels like London has been replaced by a very clean, very corporate, slightly eerie version of itself where everything is made of glass and everyone is wearing a lanyard.

The Canary Wharf tour is best done on a weekday lunchtime, when the financial district produces its most characteristic ecosystem: approximately eight thousand people in suits buying sushi from Waitrose and eating it outside in a state of focused efficiency. The escalators are very long. The shopping centre is underground. The towers are genuinely impressive and the view from the top of One Canada Square — the tallest building in the UK for twenty years until The Shard appeared and made it the second tallest — is extraordinary in any direction.

The Canary Wharf experience concludes with the DLR back to Bank, which is itself a more entertaining experience than it sounds: the DLR is a driverless train that proceeds through what feels like a small city's worth of glassy office development before reconnecting you to the part of London you actually wanted to be in. The Canary Wharf map print from 98types is the souvenir for the person who visited, was impressed despite themselves, and needs to prove to someone that they went.

London at night is a different city from London during the day — which is the obvious thing to say and also entirely true. The South Bank at 10pm, when the theatre audiences from the National are spilling out and the last of the day's tourists are making their way back to Zone 1, has a specific quality of ambient contentment that the daytime version never quite achieves. The lights are on in the Tate. The Eye is turning slowly. The view back toward the City is made of a thousand lit windows.

The after-dark tour has specific recommended locations: Brick Lane at midnight (the curry houses that have been open continuously since 1975, the beigel shops that operate on a 24-hour basis and have done so longer than anyone can remember, the street that goes from market activity to night economy in the space of an hour). Soho at 11pm (the specific energy of the West End winding down and the nightlife starting up simultaneously on the same streets). The Victoria Embankment looking east toward Tower Bridge at any hour after sunset, when the Thames is dark and the bridges are lit and the city looks exactly like the postcard version of itself that it rarely achieves in daylight.

The London after dark tour always ends at Camden Market or on the South Bank, because these are the two places where the city's nighttime energy is most concentrated and most itself. Both have 98types prints in the collection. Both deserve a place on the wall.