As much fun as we had traveling with a younger child and made it work for us, I’ve really enjoy traveling with a tween and teen. This has been particularly true of our recent vacations in London, two over winter break and one in the summer.
The tween still had the wide-eyed wonder of a kid. But she knows more and has interests we’ve been build activities around. And it’s been easier to find activities that engage all of us.
On our most recent trip, in her senior year, she went off to do things on her own, leaving Rich and I to visit a museum we wanted to, and track down a quaint pub we’d visited 25 years ago.
Here is Tween/Teen Traveler’s top-twelve list of fun things to do in London with your parents. I also have three hotel suggestions that worked out well for us.
Read more:
• Plan this easy day trip to Cambridge from London
+ 11 Essential foods & places to eat in London with kids
+ 20 More Things to Do in London With Kids
• This article is featured on GPSmyCity.
To download this article for offline reading or create a self-guided walking tour to visit the attractions highlighted in this article, go to Walking Tours in London.
3 Hotels We Loved
2 on the Southbank
London is big, and it can be hard to know what part of town to choose to stay in. We stayed on the Southbank the first time we visited because we found a good deal and it seemed convenient. We enjoyed it so much we picked the same neighborhood when we returned.
The Southbank has a river promenade that runs for a few miles. The area between the Millennium and Westminster bridges seems busy at every hour of the day with coffee bars, offices, pubs, food trucks, performance spaces and tourist attractions like the London Eye.
Away from the river, we found neighborhood pubs, handy convenience stores and inexpensive ethnic restaurants, including an Irish pub that served delicious Thai food. We had a few Underground lines nearby.
• On one recent trip, we stayed at the Hilton London Bankside, just a block from the Tate Modern. A lot of the area hotels are budget and value brands, but the Hilton is a full-service hotel with a very helpful concierge and desk staff.
There was a large and very good breakfast buffet, which was included in our room rate. We had drinks and dessert at the stylish restaurant one night, and can absolutely recommend the chocolate caramel cake.
There is a pool with a whirlpool that is connected to the pool and not warm. Nevertheless, it worked out the kinks from our long walks around town.
Our double room was a standard size with just about enough room for all of us to keep our bags out of one another’s way. But the beds were smallish full-size, which we didn’t expect. We would have preferred at least one of them to be a queen bed; something to pay attention to when you book.
The bathroom was very modern and had a shower with good water pressure and several different settings.
The room had a quirk where turning off the hallway light turned off all the lights. This made it impossible to have a small reading light on as we were settling in for the night. Despite the quirks, we thought it was a nice hotel with a convenient location and good service.
• On a previous vacation we stayed at the Novotel London Blackfriars straight down from Blackfriars Bridge.
We had a single queen with a daybed in our standard-sized room. It wasn’t super roomy, but we didn’t feel cramped. It has a large bathroom and a very good shower.
There was a pool, steam room and sauna, which we took advantage of most evenings either before or after dinner. Even after dinner there were usually other families in the pool with us, but we had it to ourselves once or twice.
It’s not quite as full-service as the Hilton. There’s no concierge, the front desk is small and breakfast isn’t included. Most mornings we grabbed coffee and pastries at the Caffe Nero along the river.
There’s a colorful restaurant and bar onsite, but we didn’t use it except to take a nightcap back to our room once or twice.
A Good West End Pick
On our latest visit we wanted something convenient to the East End and chose the Doubletree London-West End. It had a very helpful staff, including a concierge.
The best feature was the comfortable lobby where we ordered food and drinks and played a board game one night. There was another family at a nearby cluster of chairs doing the same thing.
The free breakfast had all the elements of a traditional English breakfast, along with vegan and gluten-free options and good whole-grain breads.
They upgraded us from a double-queen to a family suite, which had two rooms with a sofa-bed in one and queen bed in the other. It was nice to have some separation at night. Teen Traveler could stay up late watching Netflix without keeping us awake.
But the sofa-bed took up a lot of space and made us feel like we were always tripping over each other. Had we realized this, we might have stuck with the double-queen.
The hotel is on a busy commercial street that isn’t picturesque, but was very convenient. We were a few blocks from the British Museum, and a 20-minute walk to Covent Garden and close to several West-End theaters. Teen Traveler found bubble tea and some interesting shops along Great Russell Street, perpendicular to the hotel.
There was a tube station two blocks away, from which we seemed to be able to get anywhere in central London in 20 minutes or less. We also had a post office, pharmacies, Asian take-out spots and a Caffee Nero, all within a few steps.
11 Can’t-Miss Things To Do in London With Teens & Tweens
1. Shopping & Eating at Camden Markets
We spent far more time in Camden than we thought we would. A day in Camden is all about eating and shopping. And then shopping and eating.
A few different markets have sprung up around the original market, all with a combination of food and shopping stalls.
From the Camden Town tube stop, walk north on Camden High Street. The stores along this stretch are junky, but many have huge, funky 3D signs that pop out from the buildings.
On the right you’ll see Camden Market Buck Street, which is built with colorful shipping containers. A stall that sells games, cards and magic tricks attracted every tween and teen that walked by. I thought the prices were a little high, but the owner makes sure you know how to do the magic tricks before you leave.
We also found fun food here, and it’s a little less chaotic than the food stalls in the main market. We shared Greek kebabs and pan-Asian bao—small, fluffy Chinese pancakes stuffed like tacos with satay chicken and other items.
The main Camden Market is across the lock to the left. There are vendors at street level, down at canal level and both indoors and out. You’ll find cheap, funky clothes, jewelry and crafts and pricey, stylish clothes, jewelry and accessories.
Tween Traveler went cheap and funky with a retro sun dress, small earrings and a rose-gold ring, which all cost less than £50. Rich bought an expensive but well-cut waistcoat (vest). I fell somewhere in between with an unusual layered shirt, a leather purse and a new wallet.
I also found the Half Hitch micro-distillery, where I sampled Earl Grey and pink-berry gins. They are the perfect gins for someone like me who doesn’t normally like gin. The store doesn’t have a license to mix drinks, but they will sell you a G&T kit with cups, gin and soda water.
Outdoors in Camden Market Yard West, you’ll find the biggest selection of food vendors but also the most people.
On the upper level, look for a bar called Lock 17. They don’t serve food, so you can bring your food-stall food here, sit down at one of several outdoor tables and order or drinks or soft drink to have with your lunch. This is also a good place to chill when you are shopped-out but your teen wants to keep going.
On the same side of the lock but to the right of the bridge is Camden Market Hawley Wharf. There are more food stands here. We found good Thai, Korean and Chinese options. It has more places to sit and bathrooms.
Tip: Try to catch one of the tourist boats going through the lock. Watching them lower or raise the water and manually move the gates is kind of neat.
2. Afternoon Tea
Tween Traveler is a huge fan of the Murder Most Unladylike mysteries, wherein two British schoolgirls solve mysteries while eating copious amounts of tea and cream buns. So she loves sitting down to a real English afternoon tea.
• On our latest visit we had afternoon tea The Swan, the restaurant attached to the Globe Shakespeare Theatre. It’s a airy space with big windows looking out over the river. The tea menus are themed to match whatever play is running.
We just missed the Hansel & Gretel menu they had over the Christmas season, complete with mini gingerbread houses and cheesecake “moonstones.”
We had the Romeo & Juliet menu, which had the usual tea sandwiches and sweets inspired by lines in the play. The plates and tea cups were splashed with hearts and cupid’s arrows.
There was a Verona chocolate mousse in honor of the play’s setting, a vanilla cookie with rose-scented icing for one of the play’s most famous lines, and a passion-fruit fairy cake with gold-painted chocolate lips to represent “true love’s kiss.”
There was also a small flask of “poison,” a green apple-and-elderberry cordial with popping boba. It would have seemed gimmicky if it wasn’t so tasty and clever.
They were quick to offer extra clotted cream and jam for the requisite scones, but it wasn’t needed.
From an extensive tea menu, I chose a good Earl Grey, Rich chose a hibiscus and berries and Teen Traveler had chai.
We liked the room and friendly, unpretentious service. Since the menu will be completely different with the next play, we’d happily go back again.
Tip: You’ll want to make a reservation for afternoon tea, especially on the weekend. But you can probably drop in to the downstairs pub, which is an equally nice space, for casual gastropub food, weekend brunch and Sunday roast.
• On a previous visit we were lucky enough to be *invited for afternoon tea at St. Ermin’s, a lovely Westminster-area hotel with quite a history.
You step off of London’s busy streets to walk through a quiet, green courtyard into a Victorian-style lobby with its original ornate plaster work and a semi-spiral staircase up to the dining rooms.
You can have your tea in a plush indoor dining room with colorful upholstered chairs or on an outside patio that’s lit with fairy lights and closed-in and heated during the winter. We chose the latter.
The traditional tea includes a pot of tea and a tower of savories and sweets that change seasonally. You can upgrade to a champagne tea (or rosé in the spring). They poured good bubbly with a generous hand and it made the meal feel very festive.
Everything we ate was delicious. I liked the way they mixed modern ingredients and traditional English tea foods.
Our savories were curried chicken, humus, roast beef with horseradish and salmon. The sweets paired dark chocolate and pralines, matcha tea and yuzu, and rhubarb and cream.
The hotel’s own rooftop garden and bee colony inspire the children’s tea. It comes in a garden crate with ham and Nutella sandwiches, the same rhubarb parfait we had, a cookie kids can decorate and other small treats.
They have plenty of fruity non-caffeinated tea, but Tween Traveler preferred hot cocoa.
Tip: We didn’t stay at St. Ermin’s, because it’s always hard to get a room during school-break weeks. But I certainly would love to. It offers a quiet street in a convenient central location, very nice family rooms, a good restaurant, and a unique history with England’s spies. It also carries gentler nightly rates than you might expect, especially off-season.
3. Harry Potter Studio Tour
We saved the Warner Brothers Studio Tour for our last day. And this was a wise move. Once you do it, the rest of your holiday will pale in comparison, no matter how good it is.
We loved it partly because it offered all the fun of going to a very immersive theme park without having to wait in all those crazy long lines for thrill rides.
You get to walk through the great hall at Hogwarts and down Diagon Alley. You see the Griffindor common room, Snape’s classroom, Hagrid’s hut and the Weasley’s living room, including Mrs. Weasley’s fantastic clock.
You see costumes from the Yule Ball and other major scenes, all the cast members’ wands, the Hogwarts Express and a hippogriff.
Quite a few secrets are revealed too, like the fact that most of the cast wore wigs for continuity. You also learn how the quidditch and the train scenes were done.
Kids can duel with wands and fly a broom in front of a green screen, and you can get your family portrait in wizard robes.
Tip: You’ll want to see the broom video and photo proofs, and once you do you’ll inevitably buy one or both. If you have multiple adults with you, save time by having one wait in the purchasing line while the other stays with the kids in the broom line.
They add new and seasonal features every so often. At Gringotts Bank Tween Traveler minted a wizard coin and we learned the secret behind the metal chalices, swords and other treasure in Bellatrix LeStrange’s chamber: Most of it was painted rubber.
I think they recommend three hours for a visit but if you want to do everything, like we did, it will take most of a day.
Good Things To Know:
Tickets: It sells out months in advance, so plan accordingly. I bought tickets immediately after I got our plane tickets.
You’ll have the option to buy a regular ticket or a package that includes a souvenir book and audio tour. I bought one package and it was plenty. The souvenir book is nice but not essential and Tween Traveler handed the audio guide over to her dad about an hour in (apparently pairing the guide to what you’re looking at was tricky).
Wizard clothes: Plenty of kids were wearing wizard robes. So if your kids have Harry Potter costumes, pack them.
Shopping: As you would expect, there are multiple gift shops, all selling Honeyduke’s candies. The souvenirs are expensive, of course, but a lot of them are pretty cool, too. We steered Tween Traveler away from a £20 Ravenclaw pen to a more practical £30 sweatshirt. The £1 house pencils near the cash registers are a handy item to bring home for friends.
Dining: You pass by the café at the start of the tour and halfway through. It offers fast food, butterbeer and butterbeer ice cream. The ice cream is pretty good.
There are also a few pubs and other places where you can eat in the town where the train pulls in. We found the Ocean World chipper a block from the shuttle bus stop on Queens Road. It looks like a hole-in-the-wall, but everything was cooked to order. It was quality fish ‘n’ chips and one order easily fed three of us.
The Train: Pay attention to the train schedule leaving London and be sure to wait for an express train. We accidentally hopped on a local on the way there and it took two or three times as long as the express train we took back to the city. Luckily, we left London early, so we still managed to arrive in time for our timed entry.
4. London Theater
We always see at least one show in London, often more than one, because ticket prices are so much lower than in New York.
On other visits we saw My Fair Lady, Matilda and Much Ado About Nothing. On our last visit, Teen Traveler got a student ticket to see Kyoto, a drama about the Kyoto Climate Accord Talks, that she found surprisingly funny.
We’ve also seen The Mousetrap and Witness to the Prosecution, both Agatha Christie plays.
The Mousetrap has been running on the London stage forever. It’s a classic and an easy choice for all-ages. Tween Traveler spent the intermission speculating about who did it. I had read the play and knew, but was still caught up in the suspense.
Witness is being staged in a former county hall in a room that looks like a real courtroom with the judge on a dais and the audience sitting in a U around the stage. If you pick your tickets right, you might wind up sitting next to the crown prosecutor or defense attorney. You might even wind up in the jury box.
Tips: TKTS has great deals on same-day tickets. In addition to its kiosk in Leicester Square, it has a website where you can buy discounted same-day tickets. We picked a show in the morning before we headed out for the day and the tickets were emailed to me on my phone for that evening.
London theaters always sell inexpensive cups of ice cream at intermission, which kids always line up and that Teen Traveler thinks is just fantastic. They sell programs, rather than giving them for free, but they have a lot more information and photos than your average Playbill and are nice souvenirs.
5. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre
If your kids are old enough to have been exposed to some Shakespeare, see what’s going on at the Globe Theatre, a recreation of the Bard’s open-air London stage.
There are tours, exhibits and demonstrations yearround and performances in the afternoon and early evening in the summer.
Take a backstage tour
During school breaks, they give family tours and hold classes where you and your kids can explore a classic Shakespeare play together. They have different sessions for younger kids and for tweens and teens, so there’s no fear your 13YO will be surrounded by first-graders.
Our winter break trip coincided with the U.K’s, and we were able to join a tour aimed at tweens. Our 20-something guide engaged directly with the kids but imparted enough historical information to make it interesting for the parents.
We all gained new insight into Shakespeare’s time and how his plays were meant to be performed. These family events fill up; definitely make reservations ahead of your trip.
Tip: The Globe is on the South Bank esplanade. Take time before or after your tour to take a walk toward the London Eye, You’ll pass the Tate Modern, pubs, cafés and food trucks. There is a lovely playground near the Eye in case your kids are still young enough to appreciate a good romp.
Seeing a Show at the Globe
We enjoyed the tour so much that when we returned in the summer, we made a point of booking tickets to a play. We chose The Tempest because it has iconic characters and none of us had either seen or read it.
The theater presents the plays as traditionally as possible—no lights and no sound system—so they take place while there is daylight. The actors can see and make eye contact with the audience, and they interacted with us in a different way than actors do in a dark theater. I felt like I wasn’t just seeing a play; I was sharing a theater experience with the actors and other audience members.
It was very cool. If you have a theater kid or a future English major, it’s totally worthwhile to do this.
Just because the presentation is traditional doesn’t mean the staging is. Our Tempest was set on a desert island resort and Prospero had a Speedo on under his magic robe.
You can buy very cheap standing room tickets that put you right in front of the stage. It can be a fun experience, but you do have to stand for the length of the play. Seats in the stalls range from about £25 to £65. If you choose the stalls, pay the extra fee for cushions. The benches are hard and the cushions make a difference.
Tip: You can bring food and drinks from the concessions to your seats. Even with a 20-minute intermission, the refreshment lines were crazy long. Look for the QR code that lets you order online. There was almost no wait at the online pick-up spot.
For a longer U.K. trip:
• Read about things to do with kids in Edinburgh,
• with kids and teens in Wales
• and about sidetrips to seaside towns
6. A day trip to Greenwich
Greenwich is a good destination for lots of different ages. There is quite a bit to do and things are spread out, so plan to spend the better part of a day here.
If you get there by boat, the first things you see are the Royal Naval College and the tea clipper, Cutty Sark, which is dry docked next to the college.
At the Naval College visitors center you can buy separate tickets to the Cutty Sark, the Royal Observatory and the planetarium show, as well as admission to the college.
In the same building you’ll find an exhibit that explores the history of the site— it’s been home to a royal palace and maritime hospital as well as the naval college over the past few hundred years. It’s worth a quick breeze through, but we didn’t feel the need to linger. The main attraction is the Painted Hall across the campus.
They call the Painted Hall Britain’s Sistine Chapel and its 40,000-square-feet of murals celebrating English royalty, naval might and empirical ambitions are impressive. Try to catch one of the 30-minute talks they give throughout the day. It helped us to understand and better appreciate what we were looking at.
Below the hall you’ll find a small but pretty naval chapel and a skittles alley, which you can try playing the way the hospital residents did, with discarded cannonballs.
You emerge from the building on a quad that Marvel Movie fans will from Thor: the Dark World. The college has stood in for various palaces and buildings in several other films and tv shows.
We didn’t climb aboard the Cutty Sark, but probably would have if Teen Traveler were still in elementary school. You can tour the ship on your own and on weekends and school holidays you can talk to costumed interpreters. You can also pay extra to climb the rigging, which we all agreed is probably way harder than it looks.
The Royal Naval Observatory is at the far end of Greenwich Park, up a short, steep hill. At the top you have a great view of the park, the naval college and the Thames.
It’s small but has engaging exhibits that explain how astronomy was important to ocean navigation, which was integral to expanding the British Empire. It also explains how and why we developed the idea of a Prime Meridian and how it moved over time as instruments became more precise.
There are also cool telescopes and a camera obscura that you don’t want to miss. Also check out the Royal Astronomer’s house, which has a room shaped like an octagon to facilitate star-gazing before the observatory was built.
There’s an adjacent planetarium, but we didn’t realize you needed separate tickets and wound up skipping it. We mostly saw families with younger kids headed that way.
Tip: The observatory is one of those places where everyone is taking the same photos (in front of the clock, on the Prime Meridian line), but have patience and you’ll get the shot you want.
Greenwich Park is a lovely park with plenty of room for picnicking, flying a kite or kicking a ball around (though the grass was very brown when we were there because of a U.K. heat wave) and it has a nice playground with a huge sand-play area.
Rich wanted to go to the Naval Museum, which is free, but Teen Traveler and I had had our fill of museums for the day. He reported that it was much less stuffy and less focused on war than you might expect and said there was quite a bit to engage kids.
While he did that, we went to the Greenwich Market to buy sausage rolls and Portuguese egg tarts and look at jewelry and t-shirts.
Exploring Greenwich: King William Walk takes you past the Royal Naval College campus and up to Greenwich Park. You’ll find a few pubs and ice-cream stands along here.
The small but really great outdoor Greenwich Market is half a block to the right on College Way. One full block to the right is Greenwich Church Street, where you’ll find bakeries, cafés, a book store, ATM and cheap dining options like Indian and dim sum.
We didn’t figure this out until later and just popped into the Admiral Hardy pub near the college. But we had great food, including a not-traditional but very good raspberry Eton mess for dessert.
Getting to Greenwich: It’s fun and easy to take the Uber water taxi here, which you can access with your Oyster card and takes about a half hour from the Bankside dock, where we caught it. There are stops along the Thames on both banks.
The wait for a return boat in the afternoon was more than an hour. I recommend buying a one-way water taxi fare. This way you have the option of returning via the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) at the Greenwich train station. It connects to several tube lines when you get into Central London.
You can plan all your travel on the Transport for London website.
If you aren’t in a hurry, you can take a scenic boat ride from Westminster to Greenwich. It takes an hour this way but offers narration that the Uber boats don’t.
7. Fortnum & Mason
“I love this store!” Tween Traveler declared after about 15 minutes of window shopping.
Fortnum is a fancy-food store that sits on the border of Piccadilly and St. James’s. If you visit in February, it will already be decked out for Easter with piles of candy eggs, chocolate animals and marzipan flowers.
We stop in on every visit. There’s less candy when it isn’t Easter, but we always walk away with tins of high-quality tea, artisan chocolate and fancy cream puffs and eclairs.
On one vist, most of the store was dedicated to the Queen’s 70th Jubilee. Gold and teal colors festooned both floors. In addition to a new blend of Jubilee tea, they had jubilee cookies, jubilee chocolate, jubilee jam and even jubilee beet relish and HP Sauce.
8. Draughts gaming Café
Tweens and young teens are often night owls, but evening entertainment options are a bit limited for their age group.
On two of our trips we spent an evening at Draughts, a gaming café tucked into the vaulted arches of a train underpass below Waterloo Station.
The location seems better suited to a rave party than wholesome family entertainment, but the café is quite nice. They allow kids under 18 until 9:00 pm.
For a few pounds per person, you get a table for two-to-three hours and access to their library of more than 400 games.
They have a short menu of creative pub food, a bar and soft drinks. We tucked into Korean chicken wings on both visits and Buffalo calamari and fries. We played games we played before and tried several games none of us knew.
Each evening cost about £50, total, and it was a lot of fun.
The café is located in a tunnel that has become known for its graffiti. Take a look at some of this wonderful street art before or after your gaming session.
Tip: The place is busy, even on weeknights. Reserve ahead if you can.
9. The Museum of London: 2 Locations
Docklands at Canary Wharf
The free Docklands Museum is housed in a former sugar warehouse. It has three floors of exhibits that were surprisingly engrossing. We spent about three hours exploring the space, probably twice as long as we expected to.
The museum goes into how the London docks operated, how that evolved over time, how they affected the growth of the city and the role they played in the Empire’s trading. There is an exhibit that deals matter-of-factly with the slave trade, how the growth of the domestic British economy relied on it and why it eventually fell out of favor.
You can (digitally) navigate a trade ship from London to the Far East and back again, turn the man-powered wheel that used to be used to lift crates on and off of ships, and wander through an 18th-century dockside neighborhood.
A large part of one floor goes into what happened to the docks during WWII (hint: they were bombed a lot) and how the British responded to protect them. The bottom floor takes a look at the decline and eventual resurgence of the East End after WWII.
There are a bunch of first-hand oral histories of East End residents toward the tail end of things. You might be eager to get to the gift shop by then, but stop and listen to them; they’re worth it.
If you’re traveling with kids of different ages, it’s good to know that the Docklands has the Mudlarks Gallery, a 5-and-under play space you can use with a free timed ticket that you can book ahead or request when you arrive.
Around the Museum: They are trying to make Canary Wharf a destination even when offices are closed. There are restaurants, coffee shops and beer gardens, boat rentals, a climbing center, a bar with shuffleboard tables, and some shopping.
You come up out of the Canary Wharf tube station into Jubilee Park, which is sort of like coming out of the underground and finding yourself in Wonderland. It’s small, pretty and whimsical; take some time to appreciate it.
The Original museum in the city center closed its former home, built into the original city walls, and will reopen in 2026 in nearby Smithfield. Like Docklands, it’s not a kids’ museum, but it’s interactive, engaging and kid-friendly, and much less crowded than other museums. I expect the new museum will up the interactive elements and to be pretty cool.
The original museum’s exhibits traced London’s history from the time when it was grassland and marshes, through Roman conquest, medieval times, the plague and the great fire, through modern day.
This is another spot that had lots of activities for kids during school breaks and on weekends. It also used to give walking tours of the city and of the Roman ruins beneath it. I hope they will resume all of this when they reopen.
10. The Churchill War Rooms
We each got to pick one thing we absolutely wanted to do on our summer trip and my choice was the Churchill War Rooms. Rich and I had seen this underground warren of offices that Churchill and his cabinet had used during the WWII Blitz in movies and documentaries. So I was curious to see it for real.
I worried that Teen Traveler would be bored, but we all found the experience very engaging. There is a good audio tour, which helped a lot. Teen Traveler used the same one we did, but there’s a separate one for kids.
Churchill, his wife, staff and military and government advisors ate, slept and worked in these windowless spaces for weeks at a time, constantly worried about being bombed or invaded.
The rooms have been left largely intact with desks, beds, typewriters and wall maps from the time left largely how they were when people were using them.
The tour is peppered with first-hand accounts, letters and diaries from both high-level advisors and members of the typing pool. Listening to these while looking at the spaces they’re talking about gave us a real “in the room where it happened” feel that brings history to life and that I think kids appreciate.
Teen Traveler was definitely drawn in by it all. As long as a teen has at least a passing interest in history, they will be, too.
There is an additional large room with an exhibit that focused on Churchill’s life, but we found it cluttered and not well organized. We did a walk-through but preferred to focus on the war-rooms.
Lunch with the Spooks
Afterward, we went to St. Ermin’s Hotel again, this time for lunch. It was something of a themed day, given St. Ermin’s colorful history.
Winston Churchill’s WWII special operations executive made its home here starting in July 1940, as did MI6. When they weren’t training secret agents in sabotage, resistance and guerrilla warfare, they frequented the hotel’s Caxton Bar. James Bond’s creator Ian Fleming drank here when he worked for the SOE. So did foreign agents hoping to befriend and turn their British counterparts (they sometimes succeeded).
Fittingly, the hotel recently acquired a small collection of original SOE field equipment, which was almost certainly the inspiration for the gadgets Q dreams up in Fleming’s books. There’s a compass hidden in a coat button, pilot boots that convert to civilian-style shoes and knives hidden in everything from suitcases to hairbrushes.
You can buy a book that delves into St. Ermin’s cloak-and-dagger history in the hotel gift shop. Kids even get their own secret agent file when their families stay at the hotel.
The Caxton Grill is a bright and airy dining room adjacent to the bar. If you’re in the mood for something a little fancy, it has a lovely, well-priced prix-fixe lunch. Its summer menu leans toward both sides of the Mediterranean.
Rich and I both had appetizers that used summer tomatoes, his in a burrata salad and mine in a light tortilla soup. His roast chicken and Teen Traveler’s cauliflower and couscous both had Moroccan flavors.
My squid risotto and roasted broccoli rabe conjured Southern Italy. Teen Traveler couldn’t resist a side of duck-fat roast potatoes and you can be sure there were no leftovers.
11. Neighborhoods
We like getting away from the heavily-touristed areas of a city and exploring the residential and ethnic neighborhoods if we can. This is always a bit hit-and-miss with kids, but we usually manage to find something everyone likes.
Soho and Leicester Square
This is the most touristy area of London, but there are two places we loved that are not obvious places to go with teens and worth seeking out.
Cecil Court is a one-block street between Charing Cross and St. Martin’s Lane. It’s full of small bookstores —new, used and antique— and shops, selling prints, maps and other fun items. We liked window shopping here and came away with some books and a vintage Winnie the Pooh print we all love.
If you have a teen who is crafty, please take him or her to Liberty London. This Tudor Revival department store is like nothing you’ve ever seen with its exposed beams and tiny animal statues watching over shoppers.
We went for the well-regarded fabric department upstairs. Skip past the bolts of expensive fabric and you’ll find buttons, bundles of fabric remnants and crochet and embroidery kits all within a teen’s budget. On the same floor is a stationary department with pens, notebooks and bookmarks in some of the store’s famous fabric floral patterns.
Tip: Buttons are sold in tubes, but are priced by piece for what’s in the tube, which isn’t obvious and changes the price by quite a bit.
Portobello Road
Notting Hill is buzzing with activities on weekend afternoons and there is a lot to explore here. We spent our time at the long Portobello Road market, which offers a mash-up of antiques, vintage clothes, original maker items, used-book stalls and food vendors.
Tween Traveler and I bought really cute handmade cloth headbands that you can reverse the fabric on for two different looks. She also found a vintage copy of The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe for not a lot of money
There is a cluster of food trucks at one end of the market and there are plenty of pubs and cafés along Portolbello Road and the surrounding streets.
Shoreditch
We had a fun day exploring Shoreditch and Spitalfields, which offer up a lot of fun things to do. They’re full of ethnic food, cheap cafés, lots of street art and an eclectic group of shops and markets.
We started at the Shoreditch BoxPark, a collection of quirky shops and food vendors set up in a pile of shipping containers. Upstairs there is a food court set up around large common tables.
There’s even a play-space for younger kids to do activities while parents linger over a beer. Our Tween was a bit too old for it.
But she enjoyed looking at some of the shops, especially the “gift” items at Gift Box and Play Box (bow-ties for your dog, obscure Pez dispensers, political mugs, etc.) and the tiny notebooks at Papersmiths.
Next we made our way down Brick Lane, which is now a mash-up of Indian and Pakistani restaurants and shops, old Jewish delis and hipster boutiques.
We sampled chocolate in a beautiful African chocolate store and admired the rainbow-colored baked goods in an alternative bakery.
There is an indoor/outdoor Brick Lane Sunday Market and the Sunday Upmarket just down the block in an old brewery building. We’d heard good things about them, but weren’t there on the right day.
We ended our walk at Spitalfields Market, where the food vendors are packed at lunchtime with young workers from nearby offices. The variety of food stalls was amazing, ranging from made-to-order pasta and Chinese dumplings to American-style pulled pork and African jollof.
The high-ceilinged Victorian market has vendors selling antiques, trendy clothes, jewelry and accessories. Over three visits there were stalls we liked on one trip that we couldn’t find on the next. Some vendors only show up on weekends and on weekdays a good number of stalls are empty.
• Use the GPSmyCity app to download this article for offline reading or create a self-guided walking tour to visit the attractions featured here.
A tip for cellular service
Staying in touch overseas: I always buy Airalo eSIMs before we head off anywhere outside the U.S.
The 1GB virtual SIM cards are about $5 each and good for seven days from activation. You need Wi-Fi to activate them. So we download them to our phones at home and activate them when we get to the hotel.
Pin it for later
* All photos are property of FamiliesGo! except the cast of The Mousetrap (Visit London) and the hotels (Hilton, Novotel and Hilton, respectively).
* St. Ermin’s Hotel hosted our afternoon tea, our lunch and a tour of the hotel. We did not agree to any particular coverage in exchange for the meal and our opinions are always our own.
We frequently stay at Hilton Hotels because we have an Honors card that gives us points and discounts. I’ve gotten to know the Hilton Brands well and definitely have my favorites.