Buckingham Palace → Big Ben

The classic Westminster walk, and one every visitor to London does in some order: the Palace, the Park, and the clock tower that isn't actually called Big Ben (that's the bell — the tower is the Elizabeth Tower, a fact roughly nobody uses in conversation).

The direct route cuts through St James's Park — flat gravel paths, a lake with actual pelicans, and views back toward the Palace that make this one of the more pleasant short walks in central London. From the Park you exit onto Horse Guards Road and into Parliament Square, with the tower in view for the last stretch.

Door to door, this runs about 1 mile of actual path through the park rather than a straight line through buildings and gates that don't exist. That's roughly 2,200 steps for an average-height adult, per the standard conversion this site uses.

Buckingham Palace has served as the monarch's official London residence since 1837, though the building itself started life a century earlier as a private townhouse before a series of royal expansions turned it into the 775-room palace it is today. The Changing of the Guard, one of the most photographed events in London, doesn't happen daily year-round — it typically runs on alternate days, so it's worth checking the schedule before timing a visit around it.

The Elizabeth Tower — what most people call Big Ben, though that name technically belongs only to the massive bell inside — recently underwent a lengthy restoration that included silencing its famous chimes for extended stretches, the longest pause in the bell's regular operation since it was installed in 1859. St James's Park itself, the connecting link on this walk, is the oldest of London's Royal Parks and was first enclosed for deer hunting under Henry VIII, long before it became the pelican-populated public green space it is now.

This route is also short enough to comfortably extend: continuing past the Palace into Green Park, or detouring through Horse Guards Parade before reaching Parliament Square, turns a twenty-minute walk into a genuinely thorough tour of royal and political London without adding much real distance.

Walking somewhere else? Calculate your own route →