Self-Guided Tours in London

London's self-guided routes reach past the postcard centre into real neighbourhoods. Around Westminster and St James's, a royal-secrets quest and a WWII spy trail work Buckingham Palace, St James's Palace and Trafalgar Square from different angles, while a troll-themed hunt burrows into the pocket gardens and Roman remains under London Bridge. South of the river, Bermondsey's Victorian warehouses hide a puzzle built around the Tooley Street fire and a poet's old lodging. Further out, Notting Hill gets a florist's love story past Portobello Road, Little Venice a quieter canal walk that opens at Alan Turing's birthplace, and Greenwich a family-secret mystery ending at the Cutty Sark.

Soho holds its own pair: one traces the neighbourhood's queer history past Trafalgar Square and Haymarket, the other its rock and roll past, from a hotel where diners eat in the old cell that once held John Lennon to London's own Tin Pan Alley. A ghost hunt and a wizard-themed chase past real Harry Potter filming spots like Cecil Court both invent fiction on real streets; a couple of plainer city-wide quests fill in the rest. Formats split between the ticket-and-GPS World City Trail app, Questo's clue-and-story games, and a few that play offline once downloaded. Most run ninety minutes to three hours and cost about the price of a cinema ticket.

Practical. A London summer afternoon rarely clears 23C, and a January one sits nearer 8C, so the walks are built to work wet as much as fine; none of the outdoor stops depend on clear skies. Darkness by four in the afternoon in December makes the ghost-hunt and Bermondsey routes properly atmospheric without waiting for a late slot; the same walks in June, with light past nine, read as ordinary history trails instead. None sell out; the risk is a dead phone, so charge up before losing signal on the Underground.