Horse Guards Parade on the first of June 2024. We did not plan this. We walked up St James’s Park and there it was · photo: ours
United Kingdom Family Travel Guide
“The whole idea of London, not just the James Bond part, was pretty exciting, but we will just have to save it for another time.”
The UK is the country I know best outside my own, and it is the one I am hardest on. We have people in Gloucestershire and people in Milton Keynes, so we do not visit Britain, we go back to it. April 2023. September 2023. May 2024. February 2025. And right now, August 2026, from a house in Milton Keynes with the laundry going.
Adam and I nearly went in 2010 and did not. We had the RV on the mainland and the math killed it. Train tickets for the two of us into London for two days were 313 euros. Taking the RV across on the ferry was 281. We drove on to Spain instead and he wrote that we would save London for another time. It took thirteen years.
Here is what I tell clients and nobody wants to hear. London is not a cheap city and pretending otherwise ruins the trip. It is the most expensive place we go in Europe with five people. Budget for it honestly and it is one of the best cities on earth for kids. Budget for it dishonestly and you will spend a week angry about sandwiches.
And Scotland is not a day out of London. It is four and a half hours on a train each way, and it deserves its own week. We drove up in 2023, from Nottingham through Glasgow and Edinburgh and Dumfries, and the difference in the light alone is worth the drive. Do not try to squeeze it in. Give it a separate trip.
The United Kingdom City by City
Four countries in one, connected by the densest train network in Europe and a lot of very narrow roads. These are the eight I would build a first trip around. City guides are coming as we write them.
London
Edinburgh
Bath
Cotswolds
York
Cardiff
Lake District
Oxford
Why the United Kingdom
If you have never taken your children out of the country, this is the least frightening place to do it, and I say that knowing exactly how expensive it is.
No language to learn, no currency conversion to explain at every till, no cultural gap to negotiate before breakfast. What you get instead is a country where a nine year old walks into a two thousand year old Roman bath house and a working royal palace on the same day and thinks it is normal.
The big museums cost nothing
The British Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the National Gallery, the Tate. All free to walk into. On a rainy afternoon with three tired kids that fact is worth more than any pass you can buy.
Everything is a train ride
London to Bath is ninety minutes. London to York is under two hours. London to Edinburgh is four and a half. You do not need a car until you want the countryside, and then you really do.
The history is the entertainment
Castles, Roman walls, code breaking huts, ships in dry dock. My kids have never once complained about a castle. They have complained about almost everything else.
Who knew it was only for trains. So, we also didn’t know the ticket prices to head over.
Adam, on missing Britain, September 2010Culture and Etiquette
British politeness is not friendliness. It is a system, and once you understand it you will stop misreading everybody.
Look right. It is painted on the road at every crossing in central London for a reason. Americans step off curbs looking the wrong way and get clipped. We drilled it with the kids on day one and then drilled it again on day three, because they forgot.
The line is real and it is sacred. Nobody will shout at you for cutting. They will do something far worse, which is stand behind you in total silence while you feel it.
Sorry does not mean sorry. It means excuse me, pardon me, I am about to walk past you, or I did not hear you.
Tipping is not the same. Ten to twelve percent in a restaurant if service is not already added, and check the bill because it usually is. Nobody tips at a pub bar.
Pubs are family places until they are not. Most serve food and welcome children until early evening, and then the kitchen closes and it becomes an adult room. Eat early. Nobody will tell you the rule, they will just look at you.
London, April 2023. They paint this at every crossing in the middle of town because visitors keep stepping into traffic. Teach it to the kids before you land.
What to Eat
British food is not what it was in 1985 and the people still making that joke have not been recently. It is also the easiest place in Europe to feed a fussy child.
One more thing. Indian food in Britain is not a novelty, it is the national cuisine at this point, and a curry house dinner will feed five of you for less than a mediocre pizza in central London.
Getting Around
Train for the cities. Car for the countryside. Never a car in London.
In London, tap in and out with a contactless card or a phone on every tube, bus, tram and most trains. One card per person. Under elevens ride free with a paying adult. Eleven to fifteen year olds need a Zip photocard or you pay adult fares.
Between cities, book train tickets the day they release, which is usually twelve weeks out. An advance ticket London to Edinburgh can be thirty pounds. The same seat bought on the morning of travel can be a hundred and eighty. This is the single biggest money mistake Americans make here and it is completely avoidable.
Renting a car is where it gets real. You drive on the left, you sit on the right, and the gear stick is in your other hand. Get an automatic. Then there are the country lanes, which are single track with stone walls and hedges on both sides and no shoulder, and you will meet a tractor. There are passing places. Learn to use them and learn to reverse into one, because the other driver often cannot.
We drove Nottingham to Scotland and back down through Liverpool and North Wales in 2023, and the first two days were the hardest driving I have done anywhere. By day three it was fine. Give yourself those two days somewhere quiet first.
The SS Great Britain in Bristol, May 2024. The ticket lasts a year, the dry dock is under glass, and it beat two of the London museums for our lot.
Money and Practical Basics
Pounds, not euros. Nothing takes euros. Scotland prints its own notes and they are legal everywhere in the UK, but a shop in Cornwall may hand it back to you anyway. Spend Scottish notes in Scotland.
Cards work everywhere and cash almost nowhere. We went days in 2024 without touching a note. Bring one card with no foreign transaction fee and always choose to be charged in pounds when the machine asks.
Type G plugs, three fat pins, 230 volts. Different from the rest of Europe, so your continental adapters will not fit. Buy a multi pack before you go, one per person.
Americans need an ETA now. It is an electronic travel authorisation, applied for online, cheap, and valid for two years. Do it weeks ahead, not the night before, and do one for every child including the baby.
Family rooms barely exist. Most British hotel rooms hold two adults and one child at a push. With three kids you are booking two rooms or an apartment.
When to Go
The weather is exactly as bad as you have heard and not in the way you expect. It is rarely very cold and rarely very hot. It is gray, it is damp, and the sky changes its mind four times a day. Pack layers and a real waterproof, not a fashion one, in every single month.
Spring
April and May are the best value in the year. Gardens open, lambs in the fields, daylight until nine by late May, and prices still low. We have gone twice in April and once in late May and it never once ruined a day, though it rained on most of them.
Summer
July and August are warm, busy and expensive, and British schools break up in late July. Book everything in advance. The upside is light until nearly ten at night and every castle, farm and country house running full programming for children.
Autumn
September and early October are quietly the smartest window. The crowds go home the first week of September, the weather holds, and hotel rates drop by a third. Our October 2023 trip was the easiest of the four.
Winter
Dark by four, wet, and cheap. Christmas markets and empty museums. February is the bleakest month and also when we flew into Dublin and crossed over, because the fares were half price.
How Many Days and How to Route It
The mistake is trying to do England, Scotland and Wales in ten days. You will spend four of them on trains.
Five days. London only. Three days in the middle, one day out to Windsor or Greenwich, one day for whatever the kids loved enough to repeat. Do not add a second city.
Seven to nine days. London plus Bath. Ninety minutes on the train, then use Bath as a base for the Cotswolds and Bristol. This is the trip I book most often and it is very hard to get wrong.
Ten to fourteen days. Now add a car for the middle stretch. London, train to Bath, pick up a car for the Cotswolds and Wales, drop it, train north to York and Edinburgh, fly home from Edinburgh. Open jaw tickets cost about the same as a round trip.
Scotland on its own. A week, minimum, flying into Edinburgh and out of Inverness or Glasgow. Trying to bolt it onto a London trip is how people end up seeing a train window for a day and a castle for two hours.
Regions at a Glance
London and the South East
London, Windsor, Canterbury, Brighton and the Kent coast. Everything is within an hour of a London terminus. Expensive, crowded and worth it. Almost every first trip lives here.
The West Country
Bath, Bristol, the Cotswolds, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. Honey colored stone, Roman baths, dry docks and cliff paths. This is the part of England we know best and keep going back to.
The North and the Midlands
Nottingham, Liverpool, York, Manchester and the Lake District. Cheaper, friendlier, and where the country stops performing for tourists. York is the best small city in England for children.
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
Three separate countries with their own laws, their own accents and, in Wales, their own language on every road sign. Each one needs its own trip rather than a day out of somewhere else.
Where to Go in the United Kingdom
Marked Ours where we have actually stood there.
London. Ours. Three days minimum. The Tower of London and the British Museum are the two I will not let a family skip, and both need a morning slot booked ahead. We walked up St James’s Park on the first of June 2024 and straight into Trooping the Color without a ticket.
Bath. Ours. Twice, and I would go again. The Roman Baths audio guide has a children’s track that is good. Walk up to The Circus and the Royal Crescent afterwards and let them run on the lawn.
Bristol. Ours. Underrated and forty minutes from Bath. The SS Great Britain sits in her original dry dock under a glass sea. You walk the decks, then walk underneath the hull.
Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes. Ours. The huts where the Enigma codes were broken, an hour out of Euston. The sleeper hit for a curious ten to fourteen year old.
Stonehenge. Ours. Honest answer. It is a ring of stones in a field with a rope around it and a shuttle bus, and half an hour after you arrive you are done. Go if it is on the way between London and Bath. Do not build a day around it.
Edinburgh and Glasgow. Ours. The Royal Mile is a tourist funnel, so climb Arthur’s Seat or Calton Hill and see Edinburgh properly. Glasgow is the one nobody plans and everybody likes.
Conwy Castle, North Wales. Ours. A complete thirteenth century castle you can walk the walls of, in the middle of a walled town on an estuary. A morning there in April 2023 beat anything else that week for the kids.
The Cotswolds. Ours. We stay in this part of the world every year. Beautiful, and also a string of very small villages full of very expensive tea rooms. Pick two or three and drive between them slowly. Wotton under Edge, Stroud and Cheltenham are the real ones.
York. Walled Roman and Viking city, the Minster, the Shambles, and a free railway museum. Two hours from London and the best small city on this list for families. It is on our own next trip.
The Lake District. Windermere, Keswick, boat trips and low fells that children can actually climb. You need a car and you need to accept rain. Two nights minimum or the drive is not worth it.
Cornwall. Beaches, surf, the Eden Project and St Ives. Five hours from London and completely full in August. I book it for families who want a week in one place, and I book it for June or September.
Glencoe. Scotland is four and a half hours north of London on a train and it is the part people cut when the trip gets tight. Cut something else · photo: stock
Family Travel Considerations
Poppy marks the family parts. Wherever you see her, that section is written for travelling with children.Getting a dog in is the hard part. No airline flies a pet into the UK in the cabin. Full stop. Poppy came in on a P and O ferry from Calais to Dover in August 2026, which is the route that actually works, and the ship has a pet lounge with a door out to the deck. She needs a microchip, a rabies shot at least twenty one days old, and a tapeworm treatment given by a vet one to five days before you arrive. Get the paperwork wrong and you do not board.
The Ireland route is the other option. Fly into Dublin, where pets are more accessible by air, then take the ferry across to Wales. We planned exactly that before we drove instead. It is longer and it works.
Plan the rainy day before it rains. Have two free museums and one soft play or swimming pool in your back pocket for every city. You will need them, and deciding at nine in the morning in the rain with three children is how days fall apart.
Read into it first. Our history hunts and explorer journals are built for exactly this kind of trip, where the whole country is a story and the kids need a reason to care about a wall.
Splurge-Worthy Experiences
A West End matinee
Not the evening show. A weekday matinee, booked through the theater’s own site, is often half the price and it ends in time for dinner. The Lion King and Matilda both hold a nine year old for the full two hours.
A proper afternoon tea, once
Thirty five to seventy pounds a head in London and worth doing exactly one time. Or do what we do and have a cream tea in a village tea room in the West Country for eight pounds, which is the same thing without the chandelier.
A private black cab tour
Two hours with a licensed London cabbie who has passed the Knowledge, roughly 200 to 300 pounds for up to five people. They know the city better than any walking guide.
A night in a castle
Britain is full of small country house hotels and converted castles that cost less than a mid range London chain. One night on the way north turns a driving day into the thing they remember.
What Surprises First-Timers
The plumbing is its own country. Separate hot and cold taps, a pull cord for the bathroom light, and a shower that may be electric and weak. None of it is broken.
Air conditioning is rare and so is ice. Older buildings do not have it, and a drink comes with two cubes or none.
The supermarkets are an attraction. I am not joking. Crisp flavors you have never seen, a whole aisle of biscuits, and meal deals that feed a child for four pounds.
Roundabouts, everywhere, including doubles. Milton Keynes is built out of them. Your satnav will say take the third exit and you will take the second. It is fine.
Combine It With
If you have the time to add a second country, these are the ones I would actually pair this one with. Not a list of neighbors. A list of trips that work.
Dublin to Holyhead by ferry, or a fifty minute flight. Just do not treat them as the same country, because they are not.
Three hours from London and the stopover is built into half the flights. Two or three days is enough.
The Eurostar puts you in Paris two and a quarter hours after St Pancras. Our kids would rate the tunnel above the Eiffel Tower.
More Europe Guides
Every other country in Europe we have a full guide for. Tap one and go.
Keep exploring from United Kingdom
Cities, neighbors, and the wider region.
Click any card to open that page
City guides in United Kingdom
LondonMore of Europe
Germany
Norway
Poland
Sweden
All of Europe
The Travel LibraryWays to travel
The United Kingdom is not one kind of trip
How you move through it changes the trip more than which places you pick. Only the ways that actually work here are on this list.
01Rail JourneysLondon to Edinburgh in four and a half hours. Book twelve weeks out and it costs a third of what it does on the day.
02Road TripsScotland, the Cotswolds, Wales and Cornwall. Everything outside the cities is easier with a car.
03Walking and HikingThe Lake District, the coast paths, and London itself, which is far more walkable than the tube map suggests.
04Guided and Small GroupCastles, cathedrals and battlefields. Britain is a country where the story is the whole point.
05Ocean CruisingSouthampton is the biggest cruise port in the country, and the Scottish isles are reached by small ship.
06Independent TravelNo language barrier and endless information. The only difficulty is that everything costs more in London.