Got your bag packed, your tickets printed, and your hotel booked for London? Good. Here are all of the places that you should avoid when you get here.
Harrods
Why? Londoners don't go to Harrods. They don't. They went once, had a look around, laughed at the price of food in the food kitchen, found the displays rather lovely but a bit too posh for them, and then made their purchases in John Lewis. It's a shop many tourists go to because they think that they are having a typically British experience, but they aren't. Londoners shop by going to Sports Direct, then heading to Waitrose for a free coffee and to wait for the price of a ham sandwich to be reduced as it reaches its Use By date. This is the truth.
Go here instead: Liberty in Regent Street. It's very British but a lot less rammed. If you fancy a bit of posh window-shopping go to the posh shops near Bond Street.
Peter Macdiarmid / Getty Images
Piccadilly Circus
Why? Every tourist seems to head here first, and every Londoner wonders why they do so. It is essentially a busy junction permanently jammed with traffic, with several huge illuminated signs that look cool at first but are nothing compared to Times Square, a small pavement area so full of tourists that you feel that you have to breath in otherwise you won't be able to squeeze past Boots, and hundreds of French exchange students who all decide to have lunch at the Eros statue at exactly the same time. It's perplexing.
Go here instead: Get lost in the streets of Soho, then walk slowly over to the fancy pedestrian streets of Covent Garden.
Scott Bryan / BuzzFeed
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