worst tourist behaviours in the uk

The first time I visited the UK, I was seventeen, walking around Parliament and taking photographs of red telephone boxes. I never imagined I’d eventually live here. By the time I’d spent eight years in the country, I could look back at my own tourist behaviour and see why some of it might have annoyed people.

I asked followers on Instagram and in the Adventures and Naps chat room what tourists did that they wished would stop. I wasn’t approaching the answers as somebody who’d always known better. I’d done plenty of these things myself, and I understood some of them rather more sympathetically than others.

A sightseeing stop is somebody else’s route to work

Abruptly stopping on a pavement was the first thing that came to mind for me, and lots of people mentioned it. I understood the distraction. There was so much to look at, particularly in London, and I’d been that visitor staring around. But people were also trying to get to work, meetings, appointments or trains home.

I didn’t live in London, but I went there often, including for appointments after my laser eye surgery. Trying to reach an appointment at a specific time while somebody stopped in the middle of the pavement was frustrating. I didn’t want to be rude, but I really wanted them to move to the side so the rest of us could get through.

Escalators produced a similar complaint. I could understand stepping off one and needing to work out where to go, perhaps by checking a map on your phone. Standing right at the end still blocked everyone coming up behind you. What I wanted was simple: step away from the flow of people, then stop and figure it out.

People also mentioned standing on the wrong side, particularly in London. The arrangement I knew was standing on the right so people could walk on the left. I’d been trying to catch a train that only came once an hour and found people standing on the left, or a pair standing side by side. That was especially irritating when I was about to miss it.

Yellow words reading stand on the right across the steps of a London escalator
An archival photograph of the escalator signs at Oxford Circus in July 2019. Photo by Romainbehar, via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0. EXIF orientation applied and JPEG re-encoded.

I understood the telephone-box photos

Somebody described tourists in Birmingham taking lots of pictures of pigeons beside a historic cathedral. I could see why that looked odd to them, but what interested somebody depended on what was normal at home. If the bird was something they’d never seen and the architecture felt familiar, maybe the pigeon was the exciting part.

I certainly understood wanting a red telephone-box photograph. I’d done it myself. To me as a visitor, it had been a recognisable picture of Britain, something I’d seen in films and television that we didn’t have back home. I wasn’t surprised that foreigners wanted to queue for a photograph, even though by then I thought the boxes themselves were often disgusting and wouldn’t want to get inside one.

Another complaint was describing places as quaint, and I disagreed with that one. I didn’t use quaint just to mean small. To me it suggested something interesting, unusual in a good way and perhaps historical. I thought it was a lovely word, had used it before and would use it again. Not every complaint in the responses convinced me.

London isn’t the whole visit list

I loved the amount of food, history and things to see packed into London, but I didn’t think visiting it meant you’d experienced the whole UK. I understood choosing a familiar big city when travelling, because I did that too. In Spain I’d gone to Barcelona; in France, Paris. You didn’t necessarily arrive knowing which small town or village you’d like best.

What annoyed me was treating the country as finished because London had been ticked off a list. There was so much more someone could miss that way. I could understand the choice of destination without agreeing that one city represented everything else.

Some complaints were easier to agree with

Buying drinks in rounds was another point people raised. I liked the efficiency of one person ordering and paying for a group, with everyone taking a turn. A group of ten people all placing and paying for individual orders could make the bar feel much more chaotic. It was a social habit I could see the point of.

Trying to tease or provoke the King’s Guard was something I had much less sympathy for. Somebody doing that wanted a reaction precisely because the guard wasn’t supposed to react. I found it disrespectful, and if a person I was visiting London with behaved that way, it would have been a huge red flag for me. It didn’t look funny.

Then there was queue jumping, which I called probably the biggest sin of the lot. My own history as an annoying visitor gave me plenty of understanding for stopping to stare or wanting a photograph. It didn’t stop me getting frustrated when those choices got in everybody else’s way.

Watch the tourist complaints and the ones I disagreed with.