The Time Out London blog team

When it comes to choosing where to jet off to on holiday, Londoners are not exactly short on options. Between Heathrow (one of the planet’s busiest air hubs), Gatwick (which counts among the biggest airports in Europe), Stansted, Luton and City, there are very few places you can’t get to from the UK capital. And this summer London is getting even more flight routes. Gatwick has revealed that new services will fly from the Sussex hub to 12 airports around the world, with those destinations spread from Europe and North Africa to the Middle East, Asia and North America. A whopping eight new carriers are coming to the airport in time for summer. So, where will you soon be able to fly to from LGW, and who with? One of those routes is from Jet2, which is expanding its London route options. Jet2 will operate a total of 29 Gatwick routes in the summer season, including a thrice-weekly service to Tenerife in the Canary Islands. In terms of further-flung destinations, Beijing Capital is launching a weekly service to Qingdao in China – all the better for making the most of the recent relaxation of visa rules for Brits. Photograph: ShutterstockQingdao in China Air Asia X is kicking off a service between Gatwick and the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur, which will run seven times a week, while Air Transat is kicking off a three-times-per-week route to Ottawa in Canada. Royal Air Maroc will run twice a week to Tetouan, as Air Arabia flies 14 times weekly to Sharjah. And that’s without...

PSA! In less than a week, using London’s tube is going to get more expensive. Despite a freeze on rail fares across other parts of the country, tube and TfL rail fares are being hiked by an average of 5.8 percent, though some cheaper ticket types will be going up as much as 10 percent. Travel within Zone 1 will rise from £2.90 to £3.10 while Zone 1-2 will go up from £3.50 to £3.60. No single pay-as-you-go fare on the tube will go up by more than 20p. That increase is down to an official order from the government that told TfL it should increase prices by the RPI rate of inflation plus one percent every year until 2030 in order to receive £2bn of funding.  In a bit of better news, the price of London Travelcards will be frozen until March 2027 and their weekly and daily caps won’t change. All that will be different is that holders will hit the cap sooner. Discounts like Zip photocards and 18+ Student photocards will also stay the same. And if you prefer the bus over the Underground, you’ll be glad to know that fares are staying exactly the same. There are even a some bus routes that’ll be free to ride for the next few months.   Read on for the exact date of London’s tube fare increase and the new prices that you can expect to pay.  When will tube fares go up in 2026?  The new fares across the London Underground, Overground, Elizabeth line and DLR will be implemented from Sunday March 1, 2026.  'Photograph: I Wei Huang / Shutterstock.com' Full list of new tube ticket...

More than a decade after plans were first put forward, the Silvertown Tunnel (London’s first sub-Thames road tunnel in 30 years) finally opened last April. In order to pay for the upkeep of the structure, drivers have to pay a toll every time they go through the tunnel, but for anyone taking the bus, it’s completely free.  To entice more people to use the Superloop route between Grove Park and Canary Wharf (SL4) and encourage drivers to swap their cars for public transport, TfL made three local bus routes completely free to use along any part of their routes.  The free rides were only meant to last for 12 months, but now TfL has announced that it’ll be extending them by another seven weeks.  Photograph: TfL That means that everyone will continue to be able to take the SL4 and 129, which both go through Silvertown, and the 108, which uses the Blackwell Tunnel, without paying a thing until Tuesday, May 26. The bike shuttle that safely takes cyclists from one side of the tunnel to the other will also remain free for the foreseeable future.  According to TfL, 10,400 bus journeys are now made on Silvertown and Blackwall tunnels every day, compared to 2,700 prior to the opening of Silvertown Tunnel. Opponents to the tunnel argued that it would create more congestion and pollution in the area, but a few months after it tunnel opened, City Hall said that Silvertown had reduced journey times on approach roads by as much as 70 percent during morning rush hour and had seen a...