City walking tours

Guided walks are a fabulous way to bring a city to life and learn its secrets and its history

There’s no better way to bring a city’s culture and history to life than through a professional guide’s anecdotes, character sketches, jokes, and tons of background details. And the easiest (and cheapest) way to get one is to sign up for a guided walking tour.

Guided specialty walking tours can run the gamut, including:

• Royal London Walking Tour Including Early Access to the Tower of London and Changing of The Guard 
• Historical Pub Walking Tour of London
• London Harry Potter Walking Tour 
• The Blitz - London During the War
• Mackintosh in Context tour of Glasgow
• Westminster Abbey, Britain Through the Ages Royal Mile Guided Walking Tour in Edinburgh
• Jack the Ripper Tour of London with 'Ripper-Vision' 

For some walks, you must reserve in advance. For others, like the famous London Walks, you just show up at the specified place and time and pay the guide the fee (might be anywhere from $10 to $60).

ReidsEngland.com has partnered with both Context Travel and Viator.com, which both provide a variety of walking tours you can sign up for ahead of time (Viator also offers advance booking for skip-the-line tickets to major sights). 

You can pick up brochures on all sorts of walking tours at local tourism offices in Britain (pamphlets for the fabulous London Walks are available all over town), or book ahead via one of our partner sights:

Activities, walks, & excursions

• Viator.com - Best one-stop shopping site for all sorts of activities, walking tours, bus tours, escorted day trips, and other excursions. It is actually a clearinghouse for many local tour companies and outfitters, and since it gets a bulk-rate deal on pricing (and takes only a token fee for itself), you can actually sometimes book an activity through Viator for less than it would cost to buy the same exact tour from the tour company itself. (I once booked a Dublin pub crawl via Viator and later discovered that I saved about $1.50; also, the tour turned out to be sold-out, and they were turning away the folks in front of me in line, but since I had a pre-booked voucher I got in.)Partner
• Londonwalks.com - Since the 1970s, the gold standard in city walking tours and museum tours—and cheap, to boot. Just meet your guide at the appointed time and place (usually a Tube stop), pay your £10 (students or over 65s are £8; under 15 free), and prepare for a good two hours of amazing cultural insight and historic anecdotes. If you plan on taking three or more walks, buy a "Frequent London Walker" card for £2 from your first guide, then each subsequent walk costs £8. They also run popular excursions outside London for £18. Note that the fee just covers the guided tour; you pay for any admissions (or, for excursions, travel expenses) yourself.
• Contexttravel.com - This bespoke walking tour company doesn't even call its 200 tour leaders "guides." It calls them "docents"—perhaps because most guides are academics and specialists in their fields: history professors, archeologists, PhDs, art historians, artists, etc. Groups are miniscule (often six people maximum), and most docents can be booked for private guiding sessions as well. They aren't always the cheapest tours, but they are invariably the best. People rave about Context.Partner
• City-discovery.com - Chief rival to Viator (though with a less spiffy interface and often sub-par text descriptions), representing many of the same tours (at the same prices). However, it also seems to cover more destinations, especially secondary ones. When it comes down to it, City-Discovery and Viator have maybe 70% the same inventory, but then 30% will be completely different (some Viator has City-Discovery does not, other vice-versa) so it pays to check through the offerings from both.Partner