A Layover in London, England | Notes from the Archive
the unintentional first stop on my 2012 inter-railing trip
*SHARED TO THE BLOG IN OCTOBER 2025.
ARCHIVE / aar•kive / (noun): a collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, institution, or group of people.
Welcome to a new Notes from the Archive post, a series in which I am sharing some of my old & well documented travel notes to the blog. I’ve been keeping detailed notes and journals from my travels abroad long before I ever started sharing that content to this little corner of the internet. For some reason, it only dawned on me recently that, although not as thorough as my note-taking and journaling of today, this information could a. be useful to someone out there planning a trip, b. offer a glimpse into my travel days of yore, or c. just be fun for me to relive briefly under the pretense of being useful — so I figured why not share them here!
If you have stumbled across this post on a deep-dive through the blog archives, hello! I have done my darndest to make sure every piece of information shared here is just as relevant today as it was the day it was scrawled in my journal. I would also like to take a moment here to apologise in advance for any poor-quality photographs. You have been warned.
Today’s Notes from the Archive post — A Layover in London, England — covers everything myself and my then-boyfriend got up to on the very first day of our inter-railing trip. If you’re thinking London is a random place to start your inter-railing journey from — considering it isn’t even on the continent! — you would be correct: we never planned to include London in our itinerary. However! The airline we’d initially booked to fly with from Dublin to Split, MALÉV Hungarian Airlines, went bankrupt just before our trip was scheduled to begin, and flying through London was the only option we could find at such short notice; so here we are.
Listed below is everything we got up to during our very brief layover in town.
Enjoy, friends!
getting there
Here’s how we made the journey that kickstarted our inter-railing trip:
we flew from Dublin airport into London Gatwick airport with Ryanair. The flight took slightly less than 1-hour and 30-minutes.
from London Gatwick, we took the Gatwick Express into London Victoria Station, which took around 30-minutes. At the time of our visit, a return ticket with a student discount cost us £33.90 each. More info on the Gatwick Express here.
from London Victoria, we strolled an easy 15-minutes towards Buckingham Palace to begin our day of exploration.
a few hours later, at the end of our brief layover, we returned to the airport for our next flight: London Gatwick to Split Saint Jerome airport. We flew with easyJet, and the flight time was 2-hours and 30-minutes. *Sidenote: this flight wasn’t actually until the following morning, but to save money on accommodation we spent the night in Gatwick, where we slept very badly on very uncomfortable chairs.
where we touristed
Seeing as we never really intended to include London as a stop on our inter-railing trip, we were reluctant to spend any money on our one day in town. And so, we resolved to spend our entire day walking around the city, seeing as many things as possible — but without actually spending anything. It was long and tiring, but we saw so much! If you’d like to follow our footsteps, allow me to introduce you to what we later dubbed the “Walk of the Century, London Edition”, which begins and ends at London Victoria station:
Buckingham Palace // we coincidentally made it here just in time to watch the changing of the guard, which is never not fascinating.
Trafalgar Square // we only stopped here because we’d bought wraps in a nearby Pret A Manger and were desperate to sit down.
The National Gallery // the art history student in me was very excited to wander around in here for a good while. We saw many wonderful pieces of art, but stumbling across Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus stopped me dead in my tracks.
No. 10 Downing Street // sadly, no sightings of the prime minister were had.
Palace of Westminster + Big Ben // for that quintessentially British view.
London Eye // we didn’t feel up to shelling out the 20-quid to actually ride the Eye, so instead just sat at the bottom and watched it go around for a while.
Leicester Square // where we wandered around, looking longingly into restaurants we couldn’t afford, and testing our self-restraint in M&M World.
Piccadilly Circus // always a cool area to wander through.
St James's Park // we really only stumbled through here because it was convenient to do so on our way back to London Victoria — but it was still pretty.
Ta-da, and thus concluded our epic walk around London! According to Google Maps, this route is about 9.17-kilometres long — no wonder I was so bloody exhausted afterwards!
And there we have it: A Layover in London, England! An exceptionally speedy recap of everything we got up to during our one day in town. I hope you enjoyed it, friends!
Chat soon,
Vicki xo
*Date of trip: 13th -14th May, 2012*
related posts
My 2012 Inter-Railing Itinerary | Notes from the Archive
Four Days in Split, Croatia | Notes from the Archive (coming soon!)
An Afternoon on Hvar, Croatia | Notes from the Archive (coming soon!)
