This Storied Capital In Europe Is The World's Top Literary Travel Destination

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Whether it's Sherlock Holmes solving crimes from his Baker Street home, Dickensian tales of squalor and strife, or the works of Agatha Christie, J.K. Rowling, Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, or Neil Gaiman, London has long inspired the literary imagination. England's capital city, often playing a role closer to character than setting, has featured more prominently in fiction than any other city over the past century — and it prides itself on its literary stature with tours, museums, escape rooms, and theater shows celebrating the characters who brought the pages to life. With book-inspired vacations being one of the hottest trends in tourism right now, it's no wonder London is considered the world's top literary travel destination.

According to data from Aura Print, shared with Islands in a press release, London is the most written-about European city in published literature. Using the Google Books archive, Aura Print analyzed 25 million works to ascertain which European cities appeared most frequently between 1920 and 2019. London, with 286 million mentions — more than three times that of second-place Paris (95 million) — appeared the most, while the Italian capital, Rome, came third with 48 million mentions. 

Perhaps tellingly, Paris and Rome were at their most popular in the 1920s, based on how regularly each city's name occurred in print. For London, it was the 1960s, when the city was shedding its wartime conservatism, prog rock was changing the airwaves, psychedelia and optimism influenced art and fashion, and James Bond, David Hockey, and The Who were still in their prime. Seismic cultural changes will always attract literary interest, and maybe that's why London has remained at the top. From those dusty gothic tales of misadventure to coming-of-age stories of life, love, loss, and yearning in the 21st century, London has always been rife with narrative potential.

Literary travelers in London are often drawn to the classics. Charles Dickens set "Oliver Twist," "A Christmas Carol," and "Great Expectations" here, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, writer of the 62 Sherlock Holmes stories published around the turn of the 20th century, used London as the setting for his complex detective tales. On guided tours, you can step into the London of Dickensian and Doylian fancy.

With Dickens London Tours, visitors can join Richard Jones, author of "Walking Dickensian London," to explore the locations that inspired the English language's most eminent novelist. The Sherlock Holmes Walking Tour by London Walks takes you to places familiar to fans of the series, including Dr. Mortimer's hospital in "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and Holmes' favorite restaurant from "The Dying Detective." For unashamedly bookish travelers, there are also tours, conducted by London Literary Tours, that bring to life writers like Evelyn Waugh and Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and the exuberant Irish poet and playwright, Oscar Wilde, one of London's adopted sons.

Not every experience requires walking through the (very possibly) drizzly city streets; London is, after all, the best rainy day city in Europe. There's a Sherlock Holmes Museum at his once-fictional address, 221B Baker Street. The four-story Georgian townhouse looks plucked from the pages of a Doylian mystery, as though Holmes were about to burst in and start pacing before the fireplace and positing theories. You can also visit the Charles Dickens Museum in Bloomsbury, inspect the shelves of the British Library (which hold more than 170 million items), or watch a West End theater show inspired by London literature. And make sure you slurp an ale in Fitzroy Tavern, a favorite haunt of Woolf, Orwell, Dylan Thomas, and other boho writers and artists of distinction.

Though J.K. Rowling wrote "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" while working as an English teacher in Portugal, then finished it in the cafes of Edinburgh, London will always be associated with her world of witchcraft and wizardry. Locations like Diagon Alley and Platform 9¾ are, of course, set in Rowling's magical version of London, but the city is littered with many more odes to the author's work. 

TripAdvisor tour company Viator offers the Tour for Muggles, where you can see London through a wizard's eyes, visiting real-life locations that inspired the sets in the film adaptations. And if you want to see those sets, book a ticket for the Warner Bros. Studio Tour, London's most iconic Harry Potter experience. Fans also visit London's Harry Potter merchandise shops and cafes offering wizard-themed afternoon tea. There are magical hotel rooms inspired by Rowling's creations, while "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child," a stage show from the Hogwarts universe, is a regular fixture at the Palace Theatre.

Any booklover in London should check out Cecil Court, also known as "Booksellers Row," for the independent and antiquarian bookshops lining the narrow, 17th-century lane. Leicester Square, surrounded by cinemas and part of the city's "Theaterland," hosts statues depicting icons of the screen, many of which were first dreamt up in books: Paddington Bear, Mary Poppins, Harry Potter on his Nimbus 2000, and the Iron Throne. If you're drawn to the macabre, visit the spirits of your favorite authors at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, where Dickens, Chaucer, Kipling, Hardy, Tennyson, and Browning are buried, and where many more famous scribes are memorialized. According to some studies, London is considered the world's best city of 2026, and in terms of literary offerings, you'd be hard pressed to disagree.