Walking around London

LONDON — Saturday, Feb. 18 — Londoners are fond of saying that you can see everything just by walking around, but can you really? What if you were here during a a transport strike, or simply didn't feel like dealing with crowded Underground trains and buses stalled in traffic?

I pretended that was the case the other day by weaning myself from public transportation and taxis for a day, and experimenting with how much I could see and do on foot. (OK, I cheated a little. Since I'm staying in Holland Park, I took the Tube to Bloomsbury near the British Museum, to start my walk.)

Here's what I found out: If you can walk five miles throughout the course of a day on level ground, you can see most of what's famous in London, from the historical and the hip, to the cultural and royal, with plenty of opportunities for rest breaks along the way.

Even though it's February, it feels like springtime in London this week, with lots of sun breaks and warmer-than-average temperatures. But it is winter, and a few minutes after I started my walk, it began to rain. I took it as a good excuse to duck into the British Museum (free) to see the new ceiling in the Great Court main entrance, made from more than 3,000 panes of glass.

When I came out, the sun was shining again, and I walked a few blocks to busy and congested Oxford Street, then veered left into Soho, a slice of Bohemian London with narrow streets named after windmills and Greeks, lined with storefronts housing strip clubs, boutiques, Italian cafes and sushi bars. It started hailing just about the time I was to meet a friend for lunch, so we ducked into the Bar Saaqi for Indian tapas, a new lunchtime trend some of the hipper Indian restaurants have started to set themselves apart from hundreds of competitors.

Soho leads into the bright lights of the theater district. I walked along Shaftsbury Avenue, past Chinatown and onto Charing Cross Road where, sadly, many of the old, used-book stores that used to be here are no longer, and finally into Leicester Square where the Half-Price ticket booth was selling tickets for evening performances of Chicago, Stomp, Saturday Night Fever and The Producers.

From here, it's a five-minute walk to a good arts and crafts market at Covent Garden, but I detoured instead to Trafalgar Square and looked around in the National Portrait Gallery (also free), then took in the views of the Parliament buildings, London Eye and Big Ben over tea at a cafe and restaurant on the top floor.

Trafalgar leads into Whitehall, headquarters for official London, where guards and an iron fence secure Downing Street and where tourists who miss the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace can pose for pictures with members of the Queen's Horseguard Parade stationed near St. James Park.

Whitehall deadends into all the sites for which London is famous - the Parliament buildings, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben and, across the Thames River, the London Eye. Stand here and soak up the London you always imagined. Listen to the clock chimes and church bells, and savor your choices: Will it be a walk across the bridge to South Bank for a ride on the Eye or a look inside the Tate Modern built inside an old power station, a tour of Westminster or simply more walking?

With a little more time and energy, I could have extended my walk a bit further along Birdcage Walk to Buckingham Palace, and had it been earlier in the day, I would have. But by this time, it was 4:30 p.m., almost dark this time of year, and my pedometer registered five miles.

I wouldn't want to spend an entire vacation week trying to explore all there is to see and do in London without relying on public transportation, but when it comes to the highlights, a pair of feet and a good pair of walking shoes should do just fine.