Easter Weekend in London Without the Tourist Traps
Easter weekend gives you a rare long stretch of time in London, and it’s a shame to spend it queuing behind coach parties. With a bit of thought, you can have a proper break without the crowds.
Go local for the long weekend
The big attractions will be rammed. Your own neighbourhood, or a quieter one nearby, will be calm and pleasant. Sometimes the best day out is barely a day out at all.
Markets and long lunches
Easter is made for slow food. The city’s markets and neighbourhood restaurants come into their own when you’ve got nowhere to be. Worth bookmarking alongside dressing for unpredictable spring weather for your next trip.
Plan around the crowds
A little planning saves the weekend. Checking London Guide UK for what’s quiet and what’s worth the trip means you spend the long weekend relaxing, not queuing.
Alternatives to the big-name attractions
Every Easter weekend, the same handful of major sights end up with queues stretching well beyond what the actual experience is worth, coach parties and school holiday crowds combining into the worst possible timing. The good news is that London has excellent substitutes for almost every big attraction that get a fraction of the visitors. Skip the main tourist trail entirely and try one of the smaller, specialist museums instead, the Sir John Soane’s Museum or the Wallace Collection both offer genuinely impressive collections without anything like the queues of the major galleries. Free entry, too, in both cases.
Parks work the same way. Rather than the most famous Royal Parks, which fill up fast over a long weekend, somewhere like Hampstead Heath or Wimbledon Common offers just as much space to walk and relax with a fraction of the crowd, plus a genuinely good pub nearby to end the afternoon at. It requires a slightly longer journey out from the centre, but the trade-off in peace and quiet is usually well worth it over a bank holiday weekend specifically.
Easter-specific events worth knowing about
A handful of events only happen around Easter and are worth building a day around if the timing lines up. Egg hunts run in several of the Royal Parks and at attractions like Kew Gardens, aimed mostly at families but genuinely enjoyable regardless. Battersea Park and a few other green spaces also host seasonal fairs over the long weekend. These get busy too, so arriving early in the day rather than mid-afternoon tends to make for a considerably calmer visit.
Transport over the bank holiday
It’s worth checking engineering works before making any firm plans, since Transport for London routinely schedules major maintenance over bank holiday weekends, closing entire Tube lines or sections of them without much fanfare beyond the TfL website and app. This has caught out more than a few Easter weekends in London, turning a simple cross-city trip into an unexpectedly long one. A quick check the night before saves a lot of frustration on the day itself.
If you enjoyed this, our guide to Things to Do in Oxford is well worth a read too.
