What a Black Cab Tour of London Stops At

Not a list of London's greatest hits. Every landmark below appears in the published itinerary of a tour listed here, with the operator's own stop time against it, and the last section covers the places the cab drives past without parking.

Buckingham Palace, and the Guard that times the route

The most-visited stop on these itineraries, and the one that decides when a tour starts. Published stops run from ten minutes to a full hour. The cab sets you down at the gates or on the Victoria Memorial side, and on several routes it uses The Mall to get there, which most traffic cannot.

The King's Guard changes at 11am on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, with soldiers gathering from about 10am, and the Household Division publishes the schedule. It changes at short notice, so check it on the day and tell your driver it matters. One tour here sells a 9am pickup for exactly this reason.

The Houses of Parliament, Big Ben and Parliament Square

Ten to twenty minutes on most routes, and the stop that produces the photograph everybody wants. The cab can pull in on Parliament Square or on the bridge approach; the Elizabeth Tower reads better from the far side of Westminster Bridge, which is where several drivers take you.

Big Ben itself is listed as a pass-by rather than a stop on two of these itineraries, which is not a shortcoming — there is nothing to walk into. The Churchill statue on the square is a three-minute detour and is on almost every route.

Westminster Abbey

Ten to thirty minutes, always from the outside. No tour listed here includes admission to the Abbey, and the queue for it can absorb an hour, so treat it as a photograph now and a separate ticket later. It also appears on the film-location route, where the cloisters are the draw.

The Tower of London and Tower Bridge

The eastern anchor of nearly every route, at ten to thirty minutes. The Tower is a ticketed site with its own timed entry and none of these fares covers it. What the cab gives you is the outside from the river side, and then Tower Bridge, which is usually a drive-across rather than a stop.

If the Crown Jewels are your reason for coming to London, book them separately and ask your driver to end the tour at the gate. That works on any of these tours; several operators say plainly that they will finish somewhere other than where they started.

St Paul's Cathedral and the City

Five to thirty minutes, and the difference is what the driver does with it. On the shortest routes it is a photograph from the churchyard. On the six-hour run the same stop sits alongside half an hour at Guildhall and half an hour at the Bank of England Museum, which is the part of London most sightseeing skips.

The Millennium Bridge view of the dome is the one people photograph, and it is a two-minute walk from where a cab can stand. What travellers made of the City stops is on the reviews page.

Trafalgar Square, Horse Guards and The Mall

Trafalgar Square runs from a drive-past to twenty minutes. Horse Guards Parade is the one that shows what a licensed taxi buys you: it can stand on the gravel, and the photographs in the gallery were taken from there. Why a taxi may use The Mall at all is on the black cab page.

Kensington, the Albert Memorial and the Royal Albert Hall

West London appears on the longer routes only. The six-hour tour gives fifteen minutes to Kensington Palace and ten each to the Royal Albert Hall and the Albert Memorial, then works east along the park. On a two-hour tour none of this fits, which is the clearest single argument for booking longer.

Abbey Road, Carnaby Street and the music addresses

The Beatles routes publish the longest stops of any tour here: an hour on Carnaby Street, an hour at the London Palladium, half an hour at Abbey Road and half an hour outside 3 Savile Row. The studio is a working building and is not open to visitors; the crossing outside it is a live road with a bus route on it, so cross on the driver's signal.

Leadenhall, King's Cross and the film locations

The film-location route trades landmarks for addresses, and its stops are short by design: twenty minutes at King's Cross, fifteen at Leadenhall Market, fifteen at Borough Market, five at Cecil Court and five on the Millennium Bridge. Nine stops in three hours only works because a cab joins them up.

Stops the cab passes rather than parks at

Worth knowing before you book, because it is where expectations go wrong. Across these itineraries the following are marked as pass-bys rather than stops on at least one route: Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, Tower Bridge, Hyde Park Corner, Horse Guards Parade and Lambeth Bridge.

A pass-by is not a failure of the tour. It is a driver deciding that stopping there costs ten minutes and buys a photograph you can take from the window. If one of them matters to you, say so when the driver confirms the plan — on almost every tour here the route is yours to change.

The published stop times, side by side

Taken from the operators' own itineraries. Where a landmark appears on several routes the range is wide, and the range is the useful part: it tells you what a longer booking actually buys.

How those hours divide across a day is worked through in one day in London by black cab, and what each fare covers is on the planning page.

To match a landmark to a tour, the black cab tours in London are set out with their routes and their stop times on Black Cab London Tours.

Pick the route that stops where you want to stand

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