--- title: "Top 10 Things To Do in the United Kingdom (City Guides) Wimup" description: "Browse Wimup's Top 10 guides across the United Kingdom, mapped and filmed. Where to go from Cornwall to the Highlands, when to travel, how to get around, and what to eat." url: https://wimup.com/country/united-kingdom type: Country guide updated: 2026-10-07 publisher: Wimup (https://wimup.com) --- # Top 10s across the United Kingdom **Four nations, one small island group**, and a rail network that puts a different accent an hour from the last one. The United Kingdom packs **an unreasonable amount of variety into a short journey**. ## Quick answer Give **London** three or four nights, then leave, because the country starts where the capital stops. North: **York**, **Manchester** and **Liverpool**, then the Lake District fells. West: **Bath** and **Bristol**, then the Cornwall coast path. Wales: **Cardiff**, then Snowdonia. Scotland: **Edinburgh**, **Glasgow** and the train to **Inverness** for the Highlands. **May, June and September** have the long light without the school holidays. **July and August** are the busiest weeks. ## Quick facts - **Best months:** May–Jun · Sep - **Ideal length:** 10–14 days - **Budget per day:** $120–210 - **Language:** English, with Welsh and Gaelic alongside it - **Getting around:** National Rail & contactless - **2** City guides - **69,281,400** People - **1** Video guide - **4** Nations The United Kingdom rewards travellers who keep moving. London is the obvious opening and the least representative stop: an hour or two by train buys you a cathedral city, a Pennine mill town, the Welsh coast or the Scottish capital, and each one reads as a different country. England holds the crowds and most of the museums, and outside the south east it gets cheaper fast. Scotland is the one with the space, and the sleeper from London reaches the Highlands overnight. Wales is small, mountainous and stubbornly bilingual, with a coast path that runs its entire perimeter. Northern Ireland is a short flight or a ferry away, and its north coast is the drive people remember. Distances are short enough that the plan matters more than the mileage. ## 2 United Kingdom city guides 1. [London](https://wimup.com/city/london.md): Europe · 10 picks 2. [St Andrews](https://wimup.com/city/st-andrews.md): Europe · 10 picks ## Know before you go - **Population:** 69,281,400 - **Area:** 244,376 km² - **Density:** 283.5 / km² - **Capital:** London - **Major cities:** London, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Sheffield - **Tourism board:** Official site - **Currency:** Pound sterling (GBP) No euro anywhere in the UK. Cards and phones work almost everywhere and London buses take no cash. Scottish and Northern Irish banknotes are sterling at par, though English shops may look twice. - **Language:** English Welsh is co-official in Wales and on every road sign there. Scottish Gaelic and Irish are recognised, Scots is widely spoken, and the accents change fast: nobody minds you asking twice. - **Calling code:** +44 - **Power:** 230V · Type G - **Emergency:** 999 999 or 112 for police, ambulance, fire and coastguard, free from any phone. 111 is for urgent medical advice and 101 for non-urgent police matters. - **Visa:** ETA for most visitors Visa-free visitors need an Electronic Travel Authorisation before travel, and since 25 February 2026 carriers check it at boarding. British and Irish citizens are exempt. Check GOV.UK: the rules move. - **Getting around:** National Rail One national timetable, many operators, and advance tickets at a fraction of the walk-up fare. A Railcard pays for itself fast. Cities run their own transport, with contactless capping in London. - **Tipping:** 10 to 12.5 percent Restaurants often add an optional service charge, which you can ask to remove. Nobody tips at a pub bar. Round up for taxis. - **National museums:** Free entry National museum collections are free, from the British Museum and the National Gallery to the V&A and the Tates. Special exhibitions charge, and Scotland and Wales follow the same rule. ## When to visit - **Jan** - **Feb** - **Mar** (good) - **Apr** (good) - **May** (best) - **Jun** (best) - **Jul** (peak) - **Aug** (peak) - **Sep** (best) - **Oct** (good) - **Nov** - **Dec** (good) ## Fun fact British stamps carry no country name. The Universal Postal Union exempted Great Britain in 1874 because it had issued the world’s first adhesive stamp, the Penny Black, in 1840, on condition the reigning monarch’s head serves as the mark of origin. ## Stereotypes, sorted out - **Myth:** It rains all the time **Reality:** It rains often and lightly, and the country is drier than its reputation. London gets less annual rainfall than Rome or New York. The wet part is real in the Lake District and the west of Scotland, where the hills wring out the Atlantic. - **Myth:** The food is terrible **Reality:** That verdict was earned in the post-war decades and has not applied for thirty years. London holds one of the densest restaurant scenes in Europe, the produce (cheese, lamb, shellfish, apples) is excellent, and the curry houses of Birmingham and Bradford are a national cuisine in their own right. - **Myth:** England, Britain and the UK mean the same thing **Reality:** England is one nation of four. Great Britain is the island holding England, Scotland and Wales, and the United Kingdom adds Northern Ireland. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own legal systems, Wales and Scotland their own parliaments. Calling a Scot English sours a conversation. - **Myth:** Everyone is cold and formal **Reality:** Reserve with strangers is real, and it evaporates in a pub, on a train delay or over a dog. The formality is mostly a habit of language: please, sorry and thank you are used constantly and mean almost nothing beyond keeping things smooth. - **Myth:** London is the country **Reality:** London holds under a seventh of the population and almost none of the landscape. Manchester, Glasgow and Birmingham have their own music, papers and opinions of the capital, and the national parks that most travellers come for are hours away from it. - Join the back of the queue. It is the closest thing the country has to a rule, and pushing in is noticed by everyone and mentioned by nobody. - Order at the bar in a pub. Nobody comes to your table, you pay as you go, and there is no tipping when you do. - Stand on the right on escalators, in London especially. Walking up the left is not optional at rush hour. - Sorry is not always an apology. It covers excuse me, pardon, and I am about to squeeze past you. - Say England only when you mean England. Britain, the UK and England are three different things, and the difference matters most to the people you are speaking to. - Round up a taxi fare and leave the bar alone. Restaurant service is often already on the bill, and you can ask for it to come off. - Look right first when you cross. Traffic drives on the left, and the painted reminders in central London exist because the instinct is hard to override. ## Famous British faces - **William Shakespeare**: The Stratford-upon-Avon glover's son whose plays English is still taught through - **The Beatles**: Four Liverpudlians who rewrote what a pop record could be - **Elizabeth II**: Reigned for seventy years, the longest in British history - **Isaac Newton**: Set out the laws of motion and gravitation in the Principia - **Charles Darwin**: Sailed on the Beagle, then published On the Origin of Species - **Winston Churchill**: Wartime prime minister, and a Nobel laureate in literature - **Alan Turing**: Broke wartime ciphers at Bletchley Park and defined what a computer is - **David Bowie**: Brixton-born, and the closest thing pop has to a shapeshifter - **The Rolling Stones**: Six decades on the road, and the blues band that never stopped - **Queen**: Freddie Mercury's band, and the Wembley set everyone still cites - **Pink Floyd**: Cambridge art students who turned the album into an architecture - **Led Zeppelin**: The template most hard rock is still working from - **Kate Bush**: Wuthering Heights, and a catalogue nobody else could have made - **Elton John**: Six decades of songs written at the piano, and the Lion King score - **Amy Winehouse**: Back to Black, and the voice that reset British soul - **Adele**: The Tottenham songwriter whose albums are named for her age - **Oasis**: The Manchester brothers who defined Britpop's loudest decade - **Radiohead**: The Oxford five-piece behind OK Computer - **Charlie Chaplin**: Invented the Tramp out of south London poverty and exported him - **Alfred Hitchcock**: Leytonstone-born director of Vertigo, Psycho and forty more - **Judi Dench**: Six decades on the British stage, and eight films as M - **Anthony Hopkins**: Port Talbot's most famous export, and two Academy Awards for acting - **Sean Connery**: The Edinburgh milkman who became the first James Bond - **Michael Caine**: Six decades of work, and the accent that made a south London voice leading-man material - **Olivia Colman**: Won the Academy Award for best actress for The Favourite - **Idris Elba**: Hackney-raised, and the reason Luther and The Wire share an audience - **David Beckham**: Captained England, and made the free kick a national talking point - **Andy Murray**: Ended a 77-year wait for a British men's Wimbledon champion - **Lewis Hamilton**: Seven Formula One world titles, from a Stevenage karting track - **Steve Redgrave**: Rowed to gold at five consecutive Olympic Games - **Mo Farah**: Double distance gold at two Olympics, and the celebration that followed - **Jessica Ennis-Hill**: Sheffield's heptathlete, and the face of the 2012 home Games - **Michael Faraday**: Discovered electromagnetic induction, and gave the world the electric motor - **Ada Lovelace**: Wrote the notes on Babbage's engine that read as the first program - **Rosalind Franklin**: Her X-ray images made the structure of DNA legible - **Alexander Fleming**: The Ayrshire bacteriologist who noticed penicillin on a stray dish - **Stephen Hawking**: Cambridge cosmologist, and the reason black holes reached the paperback shelf - **Tim Berners-Lee**: Invented the World Wide Web and gave it away without a patent - **Jane Austen**: Six novels that invented the modern comedy of manners - **Charles Dickens**: Serialised Victorian London into the shape everyone still pictures - **Virginia Woolf**: Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and a room of one's own - **George Orwell**: Wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, and half the political vocabulary since - **Agatha Christie**: The best-selling novelist of all time, from a Torquay childhood - **J.R.R. Tolkien**: The Oxford philologist who built Middle-earth from its languages up - **Robert Burns**: Scotland's national poet, toasted every January with a haggis - **Dylan Thomas**: The Swansea poet behind Under Milk Wood - **J.M.W. Turner**: Painted light and weather until the subject nearly disappeared - **John Constable**: Made the Suffolk fields he grew up in the standard English landscape - **Barbara Hepworth**: Carved the pierced forms that made St Ives a modernist address - **Henry Moore**: Yorkshire miner's son whose reclining figures sit outside half the world's museums - **David Hockney**: Bradford-born, and still the most restless painter Britain has - **Banksy**: Bristol's anonymous stencil artist, and the reason street art sells - **Isambard Kingdom Brunel**: Built the Great Western Railway, the Clifton bridge and three record ships - **Thomas Cook**: Ran the first excursion train from Leicester and invented the package tour - **Josiah Wedgwood**: Turned Staffordshire pottery into an industry and a brand - **James Dyson**: Redesigned the vacuum cleaner, then most of the appliance shelf - **Richard Branson**: Built Virgin from a record shop into an airline and a balloon habit - **Emmeline Pankhurst**: Led the militant campaign that won British women the vote - **Florence Nightingale**: Reformed hospital sanitation, and made nursing a profession - **Mary Seacole**: Funded her own passage to the Crimea and nursed at the front - **William Wilberforce**: Fought the parliamentary campaign against the slave trade for two decades - **Margaret Thatcher**: Britain's first woman prime minister, and its most argued-over one - **Diana, Princess of Wales**: Changed what the public expected a royal to be ## Must-try British food - **Full English breakfast**: Bacon, sausage, egg, beans, tomato, mushroom and toast, built to carry you to dinner. - **Sunday roast**: Roast beef, lamb or chicken with roast potatoes, gravy and seasonal veg, eaten slowly. - **Yorkshire pudding**: Batter baked in hot fat until it climbs the tin. Non-negotiable beside roast beef. - **Shepherd's pie**: Minced lamb under a mashed potato lid, browned under the grill. Beef makes it cottage pie. - **Bangers and mash**: Sausages, mashed potato and onion gravy. The cheapest good dinner in the country. - **Toad in the hole**: Sausages baked into Yorkshire pudding batter, served with the same onion gravy. - **Bubble and squeak**: Yesterday's potato and cabbage fried into a crisp cake, usually with a fried egg. - **Cornish pasty**: Beef, potato, swede and onion crimped into pastry, invented as a miner's lunch. - **Steak and kidney pie**: Slow-cooked beef and kidney under suet or shortcrust, the archetypal pub pie. - **Ploughman's lunch**: Cheddar, pickle, bread and an onion on a board. Simple, and only as good as its cheese. - **Scotch egg**: A boiled egg wrapped in sausage meat and breadcrumbs, best when the yolk is still soft. - **Pork pie**: Hot-water crust, chopped pork and a layer of jelly. Melton Mowbray is the protected name. - **Pie and mash**: A minced beef pie, mash and green parsley liquor, from the old East End shops. - **Fish and chips**: Cod or haddock in batter with thick chips, salt and vinegar. Best by the sea, from paper. - **Whitstable oysters**: Farmed off the Kent coast since Roman times, eaten cold with lemon by the water. - **Dressed crab**: Brown and white meat returned to the shell, with brown bread. A Devon and Cornwall order. - **Kippers**: Cold-smoked herring grilled for breakfast. Craster and the Isle of Man dispute the best. - **Potted shrimp**: Morecambe Bay brown shrimp set in spiced butter, spread on hot toast. - **Jellied eels**: Eel set cold in its own stock, with vinegar and pepper. An East End taste to try once. - **Haggis, neeps and tatties**: Scotland's spiced oat and offal pudding, served with mashed swede and potato. - **Cullen skink**: Smoked haddock, potato and onion in milk, from the Moray Firth coast. - **Stornoway black pudding**: Protected Hebridean blood pudding, coarse and peppery, sliced into any Scottish breakfast. - **Welsh rarebit**: A savoury cheese and ale sauce grilled onto toast. Nothing to do with rabbit. - **Cawl**: Welsh lamb or beef slow-cooked with leek, swede and potato, with bread and cheese. - **Bara brith**: Welsh tea loaf, fruit soaked overnight in tea, sliced thick and buttered. - **Ulster fry**: Northern Ireland's breakfast, with soda bread and potato farl beside everything else. - **Cream tea**: Scones, clotted cream and jam. Devon puts cream first, Cornwall jam, and both are certain. - **Victoria sponge**: Two plain sponges, jam and cream, and the benchmark every village show judges by. - **Bakewell tart**: Frangipane over jam in shortcrust, from the Derbyshire town still arguing over the recipe. - **Eccles cake**: Flaky pastry packed with buttery currants, from the Manchester suburb it is named after. - **Sticky toffee pudding**: Date sponge drowned in toffee sauce, claimed by the Lake District and served everywhere. - **Shortbread**: Three ingredients, Scottish, and impossible to improve by adding a fourth. - **Crumpets**: Yeasted holes designed to hold melted butter. Toasted, never fresh. - **Chicken tikka masala**: A British invention Glasgow claims, the dish that made curry houses an institution. - **Balti**: Cooked and served in the same steel bowl, from Birmingham's Balti Triangle. - **Chip butty**: Chips in a buttered white roll. Northern, unapologetic, and better than it sounds. - **Bacon sarnie**: Bacon in bread with brown sauce or ketchup, and the country's default hangover cure. - **Cask ale**: Served cool, never cold, from the barrel, and the reason the pub exists. - **Scotch whisky**: Five regions and a thousand arguments. Speyside for sweetness, Islay for smoke. - **Gin and tonic**: London dry gin is a protected style, and distilleries are back in the city that named it. - **Tea**: Strong, with milk, and offered before any difficult conversation. - **West Country cider**: Pressed from cider apples in Somerset, Devon and Herefordshire. Dry, cloudy and strong. - **Irn-Bru**: Scotland's orange soft drink, sold on a flavour nobody has ever identified. ## By theme - [Michelin cities](https://wimup.com/michelin-cities.md) - [Most visited](https://wimup.com/most-visited.md) ## Films - [Best of London](https://wimup.com/watch/london.md), 14:20 ## FAQs ### How many days do you need in the United Kingdom? Ten days covers a first trip properly. Give London three or four nights, then pick one direction: north through York to Edinburgh, or west through Bath and Bristol to Cornwall. Two weeks buys you Scotland beyond Edinburgh, or Wales and the Lake District on top. ### When is the best time to visit the United Kingdom? May, June and September. The days are long, the gardens and the coast are at their best, and the school holidays have not started or have just ended. July and August bring the festivals and the highest prices. Winter is short-dayed and wet, though the cities are cheaper and the museums are free. ### Do you need a visa or an ETA for the United Kingdom? Most visitors who do not need a visa now need an Electronic Travel Authorisation instead, applied for online and tied to the passport. Since 25 February 2026 it is checked when you board, so it has to be in place before you travel. British and Irish citizens do not need one. Check the official GOV.UK page for your nationality. ### Is the United Kingdom expensive? London is, and the rest of the country is not, by a wide margin. Trains booked on the day are the single worst value in British travel and the same seat booked weeks ahead is a fraction of it. National museum collections are free, the coast paths and the national parks cost nothing, and a pub lunch outside the south east is still cheap. ### Is it always raining in the United Kingdom? It rains often and rarely hard. The west and the Scottish Highlands are wet, the east coast is drier than much of France, and no forecast holds for a whole day anywhere. Pack a layer and a hood, leave the umbrella, and plan on going out regardless. ## Related countries - [Italy](https://wimup.com/country/italy.md) - [France](https://wimup.com/country/france.md) - [All of Europe](https://wimup.com/europe) Part of [Europe](https://wimup.com/europe.md) ## Sources - [Tourism board](https://www.visitbritain.com/en?utm_source=wimup.com&utm_medium=referral) - [Visa](https://www.gov.uk/eta?utm_source=wimup.com&utm_medium=referral) - [Getting around](https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/?utm_source=wimup.com&utm_medium=referral) - Rankings are Wimup editorial picks. Prices, durations and budgets are editorial estimates, not live quotes; check the official site before you go.