If the first time that you visit London is as a new resident one of the things that you’re likely to miss out on, and which many people never seek to remedy, is participating in typical ‘tourist’ activities – I don’t say this with any particular sense of pride, but to date I have never been to the London Dungeon or visited the Tower of London, for example. That’s why I was quite excited when an email dropped into my inbox from The Original Tour company last week, inviting me to take one of their open-top bus tours around central London.
The company’s itinerary offers four different routes, with each of the buses about ten minutes apart – I opted for the ‘Original Tour’ or yellow route, which winds its way along a circular path that takes in Marble Arch in the west to the Tower of London in the east over a period of around two and a quarter hours, picking it up opposite their Visitor Centre on the corner of Trafalgar Square.
If you take the ‘Original Tour’ route, you’ll find that there’s a guide who sits at the top of the stairs under the covered section at the front of the bus and imparts knowledge about the sites that pass by on either side – on my trip this was Tom, who I think it would be fair to say has an encyclopaedic knowledge of central London. Now I can’t say that he regaled us with any tales that I wasn’t already familiar with, but then I do have a groaning shelf of London books at home and have hours and hours of research and many experiences of walking tours and museum visits under my belt – I’m hardly a typical passenger!
What did dawn on me as we travelled along is that Tom has a speciality – I would guess that this is cultivated amongst The Original Tour guides to differentiate them from one another, but I was pleased to discover that his particular focus is on the unusual origins of familiar phrases, or at least the modern interpretations of their meaning. What research I’ve done makes me slightly doubtful that the executioner’s route between the ‘Tyburn Tree’ (which stood near Marble Arch) and Newgate Prison actually gave rise to both ‘one for the road’ and ‘on the wagon’, but even if it is a fiction it’s a colourful and gruesome tale which I’m sure gave the tourists something to talk about…
If you board one of The Original Tour buses you don’t have to do the entire route all at once – you can hop on and off at various key points along the way (Hyde Park Corner, outside the Palace Of Westminster, next to County Hall and so on) for twenty four hours after the original issue time of your ticket. Plan your visit intelligently and you could get many, many hours of sightseeing from just the one ticket, using The Original Tour bus to get you around town.
A trip on one of the City Cruises boats between Embankment Pier and Tower Millenium Pier is also included in the price, as are three walking tours – a leisurely morning stroll down the Mall for Changing the Guard, a Rock ‘n Roll tour around Soho and the West End, and a walk through the eastern edge of the City of London that takes in the notorious ‘Jack the Ripper’ spots.
I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by my bus journey around central London with The Original Tour – our guide had a genuinely in-depth knowledge of London (not many people know that the plaques which decorate the base of Nelson’s column were cast from melted-down French cannons captured at the Battle Of Trafalgar, for example), and being out in the open air at the back of a double-decker bus gave me a new perspective. I would suggest wrapping up warm if you’re going to sit towards the back in the current weather however – I was very glad of my four layers of clothing after about thirty minutes of the wind whipping around!
There’s more information on The Original Tour bus routes and their other services over on their website, and I’m also excited to be able to tell you that if you’re reading this piece then you’re entitled to a discount on your ticket. If you quote ‘LONDONEER’ when booking you’ll get 20% off the ticket price!
About Pete Stean
