How do I get around London?

Oyster card or contactless bank card — pick one and forget the rest. A contactless Visa or Mastercard already in your wallet taps on every Tube gate, bus reader, and Overground turnstile at the same price as an Oyster, and it auto-caps your daily spend at £8.10 for Zones 1-2. If your bank charges foreign transaction fees, buy an Oyster at any station machine for a £7 refundable deposit and load £20, which covers roughly three days of moderate Tube use. Paper single tickets cost £6.70 per journey versus £2.80 on contactless — that gap alone justifies sorting your card situation before you leave Heathrow. The Tube runs from roughly 5am to midnight, with Night Tube service on Fridays and Saturdays on the Victoria, Central, Jubilee, Northern, and Piccadilly lines. Trains come every 2-4 minutes at rush hour on the central lines; you rarely need to check a timetable.

Buses are the unglamorous workhorse. They run 24 hours a day, they cost a flat £1.75 per ride regardless of distance, and they take you through neighborhoods the Tube skips entirely — try the 11 from Liverpool Street through the City, along the Strand, past Westminster and Chelsea to Fulham, all from the top deck for the price of a bad coffee. You'll hear the hiss of brakes and the recorded "bus stopping" chime so often it becomes background noise by day two. Cash is not accepted on any London bus. Mind you, buses are slow during rush hour — a journey from Shoreditch to Kensington that takes 25 minutes on the Tube might be 70 on a bus crawling through Holborn. Use them for short hops, scenic routes, and after-midnight travel when the Tube is shut.

Black cabs and Uber split the after-hours work. Black cabs are metered, reliable, and expensive — a 3-mile ride from Soho to King's Cross runs about £12-15 depending on traffic, and the meter ticks upward at every red light with a kind of quiet menace. Hailing one on the street still works in central London; the orange "For Hire" sign on the roof is the signal. Uber tends to be 20-40% cheaper for the same route, and surge pricing at 2am outside a Shoreditch club can flip that math entirely. Download Uber and Bolt before you arrive. Worth noting: neither ridehail app picks up from Heathrow arrivals as smoothly as the Heathrow Express or Piccadilly line — more on that in the airport-to-city guide.

Walking is where London stops being a transit problem and starts being the point. The distance from Covent Garden to the British Museum is 8 minutes on foot. Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace is 12. The South Bank from Westminster Bridge to Tower Bridge is a flat 45-minute walk along the Thames, with the smell of roasted chestnuts from the vendors near the National Theatre in colder months and the clatter of skateboarders under the Southbank Centre year-round. Most first-time visitors overestimate how far apart central London landmarks actually are and burn 40 minutes on a Tube journey that involves two changes when the walk would have taken 15. A rough rule: if the journey is under a mile and you don't have a time constraint, walk it. You'll see more, and the rain is rarely as bad as its reputation — currently it is overcast and about 17°C, which is standard late-May London.

The Elizabeth line is the newest and best-connected route for first-timers. It runs from Heathrow through Paddington, Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road, Liverpool Street, and out to Canary Wharf — essentially threading through every zone a visitor cares about on one line with wide, air-conditioned carriages that feel nothing like the cramped, warm Central line. Google Maps handles London transit well; Citymapper is better. Set it up before you land, let it route you, and trust it over the paper Tube map — the geographic distortion on that map has been fooling visitors into unnecessary changes since 1933.