Kings, Ducks, and Uninvited Campers: Victoria to Covent Garden Walk

London sits at the intersection of royal pageantry and everyday life, where a pub named after ancient Roman drinking parties stands next to a palace with surprisingly porous security. On this walking tour, you'll trace a route from Victoria to Covent Garden through some of London's most storied streets. You'll also hear how kings, admirals, and opportunistic German campers left their mark on the city's landscape.

The tour starts at Victoria Station, where a restored 1899 tiled map inside the station shows the Victorian railway network – including golf courses and yacht harbours – that was later dismantled by the controversial Beeching cuts of the 1960s. From there, you'll pass Little Ben, a clock tower with an automated gas-lighting mechanism, before skirting the garden walls of Buckingham Palace and crossing through St James's Park, a former leper hospital turned royal hunting ground where Charles II famously fed the ducks.

Emerging from the park, you'll reach Trafalgar Square and Nelson's Column, where the sculptor Edwin Landseer ran out of lion corpse and finished the feet using his cat as a model. The tour then winds past the National Gallery's Sainsbury Wing – an architectural joke at Prince Charles's expense – before finishing in Covent Garden, home to Rules, London's oldest restaurant, and the Royal Opera House, where Handel first wrote operas for the stage in 1735.

On this 75-minute tour, you'll have a chance to:

• Spot the shell-encrusted garden huts in Lower Grosvenor Gardens, decorated with thousands of shells in 1952
• Learn how a pair of German students accidentally camped in Buckingham Palace's garden overnight
• Watch for pelicans near Duck Island. Birds which were first gifted to Charles II by a Russian ambassador in 1664
• Visit Admiralty Arch, sold in 2012 and being converted into a luxury hotel
• Find London's smallest police box hidden in Trafalgar Square – now a broom cupboard
• Explore the pub-lined streets of Chandos Place, including the Harp, trading since at least 1785

This tour rewards the curious – the more you look, the more London reveals.