Buckingham Palace → Big Ben

This is a walk designed on purpose, which makes it unusual among city routes. The road between Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Westminster was laid out to be processed along, and everything about it — the width, the tree line, the sightlines — was decided by people who expected crowds to watch. Walking it is one of the few times in London where the city cooperates with you rather than the reverse.

The route

From the Victoria Memorial in front of the palace, take The Mall east. After about 400 metres, drop right into St James's Park and follow the lake path along its southern shore. Cross Horse Guards Road at the eastern end of the park, continue through to Parliament Street, and Big Ben — properly the Elizabeth Tower, since Big Ben is the bell — is directly ahead of you.

The park route and the straight road route are almost identical in length, around 1.3 kilometres or 0.8 miles. The park is better in every respect: it is quieter, it is shaded, the surface is softer, and the view back across the lake to Horse Guards is the most photographed non-royal sightline in central London. There is no meaningful distance penalty for choosing it, which is rare.

What the number is made of

Zero point eight miles converts to roughly 1,720 steps at an average adult stride. The route is flat, with under ten metres of total elevation change, and mixes asphalt on The Mall with compacted gravel through the park. Expect the gravel to shorten your stride marginally.

Why the road looks like that

The Mall was originally a seventeenth-century alley used for playing paille-maille, a lawn game imported from France that gave both this street and nearby Pall Mall their names. Its current form dates from 1911, when it was rebuilt as a ceremonial route as part of the memorial to Queen Victoria. The red surface is often described as being coloured to resemble a carpet; the more prosaic explanation is that iron oxide was added to the asphalt for the same effect at lower cost, and the description came afterwards.

St James's Park is the oldest of the eight royal parks. It was drained marshland used as a deer nursery under Henry VIII, redesigned as a formal French-style garden with a straight canal under Charles II, and then redesigned again in the 1820s by John Nash, who broke the canal into the irregular lake you now walk beside. The pelicans on Duck Island are the continuation of a diplomatic gift: a Russian ambassador presented pelicans to Charles II in 1664, and the park has kept them ever since.

The Elizabeth Tower at the far end was completed in 1859 as part of Charles Barry's replacement Palace of Westminster, built after the fire of 1834 destroyed almost all of the medieval original. The clock was required by specification to be accurate to within one second per day — an extraordinary demand for a public clock of that size at the time — and it is still trimmed by adding or removing pre-decimal pennies from the pendulum.

Walking it well

Avoid 10:45 to 11:30 on Changing of the Guard days. The Mall is closed to pedestrians in sections and the crowd around the Victoria Memorial makes the first 300 metres effectively impassable. Early morning is excellent; the park gates open at five and the lake path before eight is close to empty.

If you want a longer version, continue past Big Ben across Westminster Bridge and turn back along the South Bank to Hungerford Bridge. That loop adds about 1.1 miles and 2,360 steps, and gives you the best available view of the tower from across the water.

Your step count, by height

Step length varies with height by more than 25 per cent across the adult range, so the single figure at the top of this page will not be right for everyone. Here is the same distance for a range of heights, using the standard estimate of 0.414 × height.

Your height	Est. step length	Steps for this route
1.55 m	0.64 m	2,005
1.65 m	0.68 m	1,885
1.75 m	0.72 m	1,776
1.85 m	0.77 m	1,681
1.95 m	0.81 m	1,595

These are estimates. If you want a figure that matches your own gait, our guide to measuring your stride length takes about five minutes.

Common questions

How long does the walk take?

About 15 minutes at a comfortable pace, or 20 to 25 if you take the lake path and stop at the bridge over the water.

Is Big Ben the tower or the bell?

The bell. The tower was called the Clock Tower until 2012, when it was renamed the Elizabeth Tower for the Diamond Jubilee. Almost nobody uses either name in conversation.

Is the route step-free?

Yes. Both The Mall and the St James's Park lake path are level and step-free, with dropped kerbs at the Horse Guards Road crossing.

Try your own route

Enter any two places into the step calculator to get a figure for a walk of your own, or browse all twenty routes and eight articles.