The Best Time to Visit London (After Five Trips and Zero Summers)

We have been to London five times: February 2020, October 2022, March 2023, March 2025, and April 2026. That is five trips in six years, and somehow we have still never gone in summer.

It’s not that we wouldn’t go in summer (trust us, we love London), but it is what works with the constraints of our actual life. We both have full-time jobs and limited PTO, so the trips that make the most sense are the ones we can stack onto a holiday weekend. Good Friday and Presidents’ Day have done a lot of heavy lifting for us over the years.

So if you are trying to figure out when to book a trip to London, here is what we can tell you, built from five real trips rather than a weather chart.

The short answer: October and April

If we could only go back at one time of year we would pick late October, but April is a very close second.

Both give you the same combination that makes London work — mild temperatures, real daylight, thinner crowds than summer, and prices that have not been inflated by school holidays. And in both months we got something we did not expect from London, which was sunshine.

That probably sounds funny, but the rain has been light or nonexistent on every trip, and we never once planned around it. Wind has been the only real nuisance, and even that was never bad enough to change our day. Five trips without getting pummeled is enough of a pattern that we no longer treat London rain as a guarantee. We have destroyed a suitcase or two getting there, mind you, because Nick handles luggage like the Hulk, but that one is on us rather than the weather.

Late October is the sweet spot

Our October trip was late in the month, and it turned out to be the best timing we have ever had.

The weather was so ideal that we barely thought about it. Cool enough that a sweater and a jacket felt right, warm enough that we were outside all day, and sunny more often than not. That combination is rare in a city where you spend most of your time walking between things.

The surprise was the Christmas lights. They were already going up while we were there, which we had no idea would be happening. Watching a city start to switch over for the season is a strange kind of privilege, and it is not something you get if you go in summer or wait until December when it is fully done and fully packed. It felt like a private viewing just for us.

Late October also sits in the gap between the summer rush and the holiday rush, which is exactly where you want to be if you are doing this on a reasonable budget.

April is the other winner, especially around Easter

We went over Easter weekend in 2026 and it was perfect.

Spring in London means longer days than you get in March, gardens and parks that have actually woken up, and temperatures that sit right in that comfortable layering range. Easter weekend brings some additional crowding, but it never felt like a reason to avoid the date. It felt like a normal busy weekend in a very large city.

If your PTO situation makes a long weekend easier than a full week, an Easter-adjacent trip to London is a strong use of it, because the bank holidays do some of the work for you.

March is fine, with one specific warning

We have been in March twice, and it is a perfectly good month. Slightly colder and grayer than April, but nothing that changes what you can actually do. Then again, we live in Pittsburgh, so we may be a little desensitized to the cold. Either way, it has never kept us inside, and honestly the chilly days added their own layer of memories.

The one thing worth knowing is St. Patrick’s Day. Trafalgar Square that weekend is genuinely packed, and it is the most crowded we have ever seen central London. If you want photos there, or you were picturing a relaxed afternoon in that part of the city, plan around it rather than into it.

February is the outlier

February 2020 was our first trip, and it is the only genuinely off-season visit we have made. It is colder, the days are shorter, and you get less usable daylight in a city where so much of the appeal is being outside. We will not lie to you, the days were very gray.

That said, we would not tell anyone not to go. The museums are free and indoors, the pubs are the entire point in winter, and you will pay less for everything. If February is when your calendar and your budget line up, London still works. It just asks more of you.

What the crowds actually look like

Here is the most useful thing we can tell you about London crowds, and it took us a few trips to fully internalize it.

London is crowded exactly where you expect it to be crowded. The palaces at Buckingham and Kensington, along with Trafalgar Square, Soho, Covent Garden, Camden, and Portobello Road, have been busy in every single month we have visited, and no amount of clever timing seems to fix it.

So what does that mean for your trip? It means shoulder season does not empty out the famous spots, but it does make everything between them feel calm, whether that is the walk there, the pub afterward, the neighborhood you are staying in, or the restaurant you walked into without a reservation.

If your goal is an empty photo in front of Big Ben, the answer is early morning rather than a particular month. Central London before 8am is a genuinely different city, and it costs you nothing but an alarm.

Where we put our bags before check-in

Here is something nobody warns you about with an early arrival, and it has caught us out more than once.

Transatlantic flights tend to land in London in the morning, which sounds great until you realize check-in is not until three in the afternoon and you are standing on a street corner with your luggage. We have stayed in both hotels and Airbnbs, and while some of them will hold your bags, plenty of them will not, and the Airbnbs almost never do because there is no front desk to leave anything with.

So we use Bounce. You book a spot through the app, drop your bags at a shop or hotel that is part of their network, and go start your day properly instead of dragging a suitcase through Covent Garden. It costs a few pounds, and it has turned our arrival mornings from a logistical mess into the first real hours of the trip. This is also what makes the early-morning photo advice above actually possible, because you cannot chase empty streets at Big Ben while towing luggage behind you.

How we pack for London, every single time

We travel with two jackets, one heavy that we wear on the plane and one light that goes in the carry-on.

That sounds like overpacking until you have been there, because a London day can start cool enough for a sweater and a light jacket, warm up until you are carrying that jacket around, and then drop again after dark to the point where you want the long heavy one. Two jackets covers all of it, and it means you are never negotiating with the weather.

Our default outfit is some version of pants and a sweater, but truthfully we still never pack enough layers, which brings us to the tradition.

We always end up at Primark, which is the cheap, quirky, slightly chaotic high street store we do not have in the US, and every trip involves picking up a sweater or a sweatshirt or a jacket we did not know we needed. At this point we are fairly convinced Nick underpacks on purpose so he can come home with new London clothes. This is boujee on a budget in its purest form, where you buy the fifteen pound sweatshirt and then wear it for the next three years.

Timing changes where you should stay

We have stayed in Covent Garden, Soho, Shoreditch, and Lambeth North across our trips, and here is what we learned.

You will inevitably end up doing touristy things. Every trip we set out to do the local, off-the-path version of London, and we do find it, but we also keep circling back to Covent Garden for the people watching and the markets because those places are famous for a reason.

So if you have a short trip, stay close to the busy part. It costs a bit more, but the difference has never been dramatic in our experience, and it buys back real time and real tube fare. Paying for convenience is absolutely worth it when your whole trip is only a few days long.

Do not skip the day trips

One of the reasons London holds up across five visits is that it keeps expanding outward, and Stonehenge, Bath, and the Cotswolds are all doable as a day out and back, with each one giving you a completely different version of England.

Bath

Bath is severely underrated, and we will die on this hill. The Roman Baths are genuinely stunning, the kind of place where you stand there doing the math on how old it is and feel a little dizzy. The architecture alone is worth the trip, all that honey-colored Georgian stone curving through the city, and we are still dreaming about the Cornish pasty we ate there months later. If you only have time for one day trip, make it this one.

Stonehenge

Stonehenge is a do-it-once kind of thing, and that is completely fine. The stones are genuinely cool, and there is something about seeing them in person that a photo does not deliver. The only real bummer is that you cannot walk up to them, so you are viewing from a distance along a marked path. Our advice is to pair it with Bath, which most tours already do, so that you get the icon checked off and still come away with a full day.

The Cotswolds

The Cotswolds are where you go for the fairytale moment. You get quiet villages, a proper countryside walk, and shops you actually want to browse rather than endure. This is the low-key day where nothing is scheduled, and that is the entire point. If you have been craving the England you have seen in movies, this is exactly where you will find it.

Shoulder season is meaningfully better for all three, because summer means coach crowds at Stonehenge and traffic clogging the Cotswolds villages, while October and April give you the same landscapes with a fraction of the people.

The tour we actually took

I picked this one, and Nick had no idea what he was walking into. He kept saying “I don’t even know what we’re doing. What is bath?” right up until we got there, and then it ended up being his favorite thing we did all day. I love him, and I’ll keep him.

We did Stonehenge, Bath, and Windsor together as a single day tour out of London, and for a first visit that combination is hard to beat, because you get the ancient icon, the Georgian city, and a working royal castle without renting a car or sorting out three separate train schedules. It’s a long day and we won’t pretend otherwise, but it’s the efficient way to see all three when your PTO is limited and you’ve only got a few days in the city.

If you would rather do Bath on its own and take your time with it, the train from London Paddington gets you there in about ninety minutes, and going independently means you can linger over lunch instead of watching the clock for a coach departure.

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The one thing we do every trip

We eat at Da Mario, at 15 Gloucester Road in South Kensington.

Someone recommended it to us on our very first trip and we ended up eating there twice that same week. Since then it has become the first reservation we make, usually before we have even touched down on UK soil. We have brought family and friends along on later visits, and every one of them is still talking about it.

It is a family-run Italian place that has been open for more than fifty years. Near Kensington Palace, Princess Diana treated it like her neighborhood pizza place, bringing William and Harry there often enough that it became a regular thing. Her name is engraved on the steps outside, and the place really is a classic in exactly the way she was.

For as long as we keep coming back to London, we will keep eating at Da Mario, because the food is fantastic and the service and quality never falter.

So when should you actually book?

Late October is your best bet if you want the best all-around conditions and a chance at early Christmas lights.

April gives you spring, longer days, and a bank holiday weekend doing some of the work.

Choose March if that is what your calendar allows, and check the St. Patrick’s Day date before you book.

February is the move if price is the deciding factor. It is a colder, darker trip, but London in winter has pubs and free museums, and that is not a bad trade.

Whenever you go, pack layers, and leave a little room in your bag for whatever you end up buying at Primark.

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