Shopping

London is one of the great shopping cities of the world, there’s an enormous choice of things to spend your money on, the only draw back for visitors would be the exchange rate that makes London not as competitive price wise as other places.

Many visitors will end up doing their shopping in the West End and surrounding parts of central London. Oxford Street is one of the main retail streets in London with over 300 shops. It runs east from Tottenham Court Road to Marble Arch and the eastern end is the tackier part with lots of cheap tourist gift stores and burger restaurants.

Up around Oxford Circus there are large versions of the chain stores you find all over the UK and from Oxford Circus to Marble Arch more of the up market department stores like Selfridges.

Running south from Oxford Circus is Regent Street, an imposing street with some quality shops, that runs into Piccadilly Circus. Just off upper end of Regent Street is the famous Liberty department store selling unique clothing, homeware and furniture.

Running off Oxford Street, between Marble Arch and Oxford Circus, are Bond Street and South Moulton Street where you’ll find all the designer stores by the likes of Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, Jimmy Choo etc along with jeweller’s such as Cartier, Asprey’s, Bulgari and a lot more. Most shops in the West End open from 10am-7pm Mon-Sat and 12-6pm Sun.

Head south down Park Lane from Marble Arch and you’ll be on the way to probably the most famous store in London, Harrods. Known as the top people’s store it has over a million sq ft of selling space in its Brompton Road location. The Harrods sale after Christmas each year is always the most publicized and sort after to get into. There are two main sales that stores in London hold every year, one in Jan-Feb the other in June-July and the queue’s for the opening day of these tend to be huge.

If you get tired of walking the streets of London looking for the right store there are a couple of huge shopping malls on the eastern side of London, Bluewater and Lakeside. Both are open seven days a week and Bluewater can be reached by taking a train from either Charing Cross, Waterloo East, London Bridge or Cannon Street and going to Greenhithe for Bluewater. The trains run every 15 minutes. You can get to Lakeside from Fenchurch Street station.

If you’re looking for something a little more original there are around 30 regular markets held in London, selling clothes, antique’s, crafts, if fact just about anything.

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