On any given summer afternoon, it’s really hard to walk in a straight line on a certain stretch of sidewalk near Westminster Bridge. There are many tour groups spread out on the path. People stop in their tracks to take pictures of Big Ben. A group of teenagers from mainland Europe stand in a loose half-circle and listen to a guide who is a little too far away to hear clearly. There’s nothing wrong being done. Yet, the effect as a whole is almost like traffic jams—on a public sidewalk, during the day, in a city that’s been around for 2,000 years but wasn’t designed for this.
In 2024, 89 million people stayed overnight in London. It’s a strange number by itself, but when you’re trying to get somewhere on a Tuesday in August, it looks different. A tourist tax, which is a fee based on overnight stays, is what Mayor Sadiq Khan wants to do. It could bring in up to £240 million a year. The plan is making its way through Parliament as part of the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill. Similar plans are already in place in Wales and Scotland. The tax is presented as a way to raise money. But it’s also a quiet sign that something is wrong with the way things are now.
You can’t really understand what the word “overtourism” means until you see it used in real life. It’s not just about having a lot of people visit a place. What happens when too many visitors ruin the thing that made a place interesting to visit in the first place? It happens when infrastructure gets strained, when locals feel pushed to the edges of their own neighborhoods, and when the needs of tourists slowly change the character of a city. This has been a problem for Barcelona for years. Even longer, Venice has been having trouble with it. London has been slower to call the problem what it is, maybe because it is so big and used to taking a beating.
One could make the case that the tourist tax won’t solve many problems on its own. London costs a lot of money. People who plan their vacations months in advance and spend hundreds of dollars on theater tickets probably won’t be put off by an extra nightly fee. If the money is carefully spent, it could pay for the improvements to infrastructure and investments in the community that a lot of visitors want but don’t always happen. There is a real difference between what tourism brings in and what it costs a city to host it. London has had this difference for a while now.
The bigger change in thinking that the tax seems to show is more interesting than the tax itself. London & Partners, the city’s official tourism promotion body, has been working on a longer-term plan that includes spreading visitors out more evenly across the city, encouraging travel outside of peak times, and moving away from a model that puts most of the people in a few areas that are already full. It’s possible that this really does mean a change in strategy. On the other hand, it could be the kind of language that sounds good in a planning document but is hard to put into practice. It is possible for two things to be true at the same time.
It is clear that the old advertising logic—more visitors, more money, end of story—is being looked at again. Now the question is what will take its place. With so many layers, London has many neighborhoods that don’t show up on tourist maps and a lot of cultural life that isn’t quite like the picture on the postcard. It is still very unclear whether those areas can be made more appealing to tourists and whether that will actually make things better for the people who live there. The idea of “smart dispersal” sounds beautiful. In this case, it’s a lot harder because most people came to see Westminster.
Some people think that London is going through something that all big cities will have to go through at some point: the tension between wanting to be a tourist destination and wanting to stay a place where normal people can still live. One tool is the tourist tax. One more thing is better planning. Neither one is enough by itself. Even though the answers aren’t here yet, the fact that the conversation is happening at all, in public and at the policy level, shows that the city is at least thinking about the right things.
