How To Use The Tube To Get Around London

1. How To Use The Tube… Your Questions Answered

In Short: At Experience England Tours, we think the best way to get around London when exploring as a tourist is to use a mixture of London’s many transport options. We call this ‘Seeing London Like A Londoner’. This will give a wonderfully local flavour to your touring; but the London underground train system, or the tube, is by far the most popular mode of transport in London.

Why Is The Tube So Popular? Because it’s fast, clean and very safe, with the massive network now supporting around 5 million journeys a day at busy times. 

See belowfor more information and tips on how to use London Underground. 

Although this series of ‘Getting Around London’ blogs are designed to help you choose how you’d like to travel when with one of our entertaining private tour guides in London, if you’re confident, everything below applies even when exploring by yourselves.

Why Do I Even Need to Think Ahead About This?

Most cities are best toured at least partly on foot. It means being able to stop with your private guide outside the amazing Westminster Abbey or The Houses of Parliament, or with a stunning view of the River and all the important buildings along it, and for your guide to describe what you’re looking at, while you ask questions, take photos etc. Your guide will go at your pace, if you’re on foot, you can take all the time you’d like because we customise tours to you, your pace and your interests.

But London is huge, and at some point, you will probably simply cover a lot of ground quickly; perhaps to get between The City of Westminster to The City of London or to or from your hotel. So this is where we look at options with wheels and rudders… more blogs to follow, but do take a look at our Taxi Tours… SUCH a great way to get around, especially if going a little off the beaten path.

The London Underground

Most Londoners call this huge network of underground train lines  the tube. You’ll see why almost as soon as you walk down the steps into your first tube station… tubes (circles) are the strongest shape in engineering, so the first builders of this, the world’s largest underground system dug U-Shaped ditches, put in the tubes with track inside, and covered it all up again. Later technology allowed tube lines to go deeper: some even extend under the river.

 The first trains ran underground in London in 1863 and were steam driven. In spite of the sooty, sulphurous fumes being forced into the carriages, which were designed for above ground use, the first tube line, The Metropolitan, carried over 9m passengers in its first year. Nowadays, it’s faster, quieter and in many cases, air conditioned and with WiFi.

Tube Need to Knows:

-              Pay by ‘tappable’ debit or credit card. You can buy tickets but we encourage paperless travel. Each person will need a different card. (the same goes for buses and some riverboats; always use the same card each day)

-              Tap in and tap out so TfL know what journey you have done. If you don’t tap out, it will assume you’ve done the longest, most expensive journey.

-              Once you reach the daily limit, subsequent travel on tubes and buses will be free.

-              Finding your way is like joining the dots; find where you are on the tube map, find where you want to go, then work out the quickest route - and where, if anywhere, to change onto a different line. If you are travelling without one of our London tour guides, staff at the turnstiles can help with planning your journey.

-              For the purposes of this guide, because it links with, and has interchanges with  the tube system, we are including the brand new Elizabeth Line as part of the same network, even though many consider it a primarily ‘overground’ service.

-              Pro’s: The Tube is very safe,  very clean and probably the fastest way to get around London. You’re never far from a station, especially in central London.

-              Cons: you don’t get the views as you travel, as you would on foot, by bus, in a 

-              vehicle, or on a Thames riverboat.

Last But Not Least:

We think a combination of using The Tube and a bus or a boat will give you a great experience of London and its two cities… the central area where most attractions are.

If you’d like to explore some of London’s neighbourhoods, or visit Hampton Court Palace, Windsor Castle, we’d suggest using one of London’s highly trained black taxi drivers for a taxi tour as they are both just on the edge of London. Or for Royal Greenwich, we think getting there by boat is best.
** Look out for more blogs about all the above! 

Just contact us now to start planning your tour.

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The Tube – A Blue Badge Guide’s Story

Some years ago, I was employed by Transport for London (TfL) to give a talk about, then to show off, London’s amazing public transport system to a number of transport ministers from other countries. 

My 60 minute talk about how London came to have the type of transport system other countries want to come and study went well; then, to show off London’s amazing public transport system, I lead fourteen high powered men and women to the nearest tube station and led them onto the platform, exclaiming, ‘the great thing is that you never have to wait more than a few minutes for the next train.’ Then I looked at the dot matrix next train indicator. It said, ‘1st Train: 59 minutes.’

After some steadying breaths, I found a member of staff who explained that an unexploded WWII bomb had been found in a building site in East London and the entire line was shut down. 

Of all days. Much hasty improvisation with my gaggle of ministers followed.

Two things: 

-              First, to reassure you, finding unexploded WWII bombs happens once in the proverbial blue moon, don’t worry! 

-              Second, as I knew they would be, the buses, black taxis and riverboats were all still running. Phew.