Travel Tips: When London Returns to Normal

This page was written in August 2011, in the week English cities burned. Riots had started in Tottenham and spread across London and then to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Bristol. Shops were looted, buildings went up, five people died. We wrote that travellers with trips booked might want to watch the news and consider postponing, and we wondered aloud whether London could clean itself up before the Olympics the following summer.

We can answer our own question now. London hosted the 2012 Games eleven months later and they went off without any of it mattering. Visitors that summer saw nothing of the damage. The city had moved on and so had the coverage.

That is worth keeping, because it is the pattern, and the pattern is more useful to you than anything we could have told you at the time.

News coverage compresses a city into its worst street

Television needs a frame with something burning in it. What it cannot show is the other 1,500 square kilometres of London where nothing at all was happening, which in 2011 was almost all of it.

If you are watching footage and trying to decide about a trip, the question to ask is not "how bad does this look" but "where exactly is this, and is it anywhere I was going". Usually it is not. Unrest tends to be concentrated in particular neighbourhoods, and the parts of a city that visitors use are rarely the parts involved.

What to actually check

Your own government's travel advice, which is specific and updated, rather than a rolling news channel. For British destinations, the local police force and the transport operator will tell you what is closed, and that is the information that affects your day.

For a city in the middle of a disruption, the transport authority's live status page is worth more than any news site. Closed stations and diverted buses are what you will actually run into.

Timing, and when to postpone

There is a genuine case for postponing if you would be arriving into an event in progress. Not because a city is dangerous to visitors in any general sense, but because unpredictable disorder is worth staying away from, and because a city dealing with it has other priorities than your holiday.

Once it is over, it is over faster than you expect. Broken windows are boarded within a day and reglazed within a fortnight. The insurance and the rebuilding take longer, but none of that is visible to someone on a walking tour.

The one thing that does linger is price. A city that has just had bad coverage often has cheap flights and available hotel rooms for a few weeks afterwards, because other people cancelled. If your dates are flexible and the trouble has genuinely ended, that is the window.

If you are already there

Keep away from crowds and from whatever is being filmed. Take the advice of the local authorities rather than deciding for yourself that it looks fine. Tell someone at home where you are. Keep your phone charged, because in a serious disruption that is your map, your ticket and your way of finding out which lines are running.

And do not go to look. It is somebody's neighbourhood.

The longer view

Cities absorb this sort of thing. London has had the Blitz, the IRA campaign, the 7 July bombings in 2005 and the 2011 riots, and it has gone on being one of the most visited cities on earth throughout.

That is not a reason to be careless about timing. It is a reason not to write a place off because of a week.