Even the most die-hard of tourists would struggle to visit most of London's attractions in a short holiday. But the temptation to pack it all in is difficult to suppress. If you're travelling on a budget or just want to save a little on the high prices of the capital, visitors now have the option of buying a London pass, allowing entry into dozens of attractions. Armed with a £19 daily pass and a travelcard, I set out to see everything and get my money's worth. At all costs.
10am: What better place for the visitor to start than the British Museum, home of artefacts pillaged from around the world? I'm at the door before it opens. Most of the museum, including the fabulous new Great Court, is free to visitors anyway, but the special exhibitions are extra.
One such is the Unknown Amazon, a fascinating array of costumes and artefacts from indigenous peoples: an ant-filled sateré-mawé glove, worn as a rite of passage by teenage boys, sits alongside a body ornament featuring eight brightly-coloured dead birds threaded through the beak. It's also a chance to come face to face with a collection of trophy heads. One of these shrunken bonces has been stuck on the end of a hollowed out piece of wood to make a trumpet - "the ultimate humiliation", the display notes.
I can't quite bring myself to leave the museum without a token visit to the mummies and a dash past the Rosetta stone. But time is money. Exhibition entrance: £7
10.50am: I stride out and down Charing Cross Road for a quick coffee stop at a fast food chain, where my London pass means buying a bagel and drink (£4.44) gets me a free brownie. Not sure if this is such a great deal.
11.30am: Next, London's Transport Museum in Covent Garden - far more enjoyable than I expected. Its array of old horse-drawn coaches, early trams and Underground carriages bring the past vividly to life. Public transport, I learn, was reliant on horses until the beginning of the 20th century, and it's 50,000-strong workforce produced 1,000 tonnes of dung daily on the capital's streets. A piece of antique rolling stock taken out of service in 1975 is carefully preserved with the advertisements in place - including one with Jimmy Savile promoting the job of London Telephone Girl. Entrance: £5.95
12.45pm: I get on the tube with new eyes, and opt to go flash via the Jubilee Line to London Bridge. Just round the back on St Thomas Street is the Old Operating Theatre, Museum and Herb Garret. Up a small wooden spiral staircase, the aroma of medicines hits you as you enter. The operating theatre is billed as Europe's oldest surviving theatre, although quite what surviving means is unclear. Built in 1822, the theatre hails the days when anaesthetic and antiseptic were unheard of, meaning that the patients were probably not as stoically calm as surgeons sawed through their limbs than the collected illustrations would have it. Entrance: £3.50 1.40pm Virtually next door is Southwark Cathedral, big enough to command a visit in its own right but bound to come second to St Paul's across the river. It's free to wander in but the interactive history exhibition, "The Long View of London", is ticketed. Best, there is a film taken by 360-degrees camera and projected into a metre-wide dish, depicting a day on London Bridge condensed into a few minutes. Commuters, buses and lovers all whizz by as night falls and then the sun rises; it's strangely moving. Exhibition entrance £3. (Total recouped: £19.45. Ker-CHING!)
2.15pm: As a child, I pleaded to be taken to the London Dungeon. It would be nice to say it was worth waiting for; but it isn't. Possibly tapping into the same rich human vein that saw the Taliban holding public executions in Kabul's football stadium, the Dungeon offers a fairly random selection of quasi-historical gore, from the agonies of plague victims to prisoners being tortured. Fake blood spurts out of waxworks. Just as I think it can't get any more depressing, we're obliged to pass through a courtroom where a mock judge humiliates hapless tourists with jokes about pubic lice in their hair. Next, we're invited to help track down the killer of eviscerated prostitutes. I have to ask a Victorian man to show me the way out. Exhibition entrance £10.95.
3.00pm: I take the tube to Waterloo and pop in to the Dali Universe (entrance: £8.50), a gallery filled with hundreds of artworks, mainly sketches and watercolours, by the Spanish surrealist. It's more one for the connoisseur; reaching the section of Dali nudes, I realise the last thing I need right now is more slashed-up bodies. I hurry quickly through. The adjacent Namco games hall gives £3 worth of tokens to passholders. A family is betting on a mechanised camel race but otherwise the arcade is empty. I opt to destroy the Empire in a Star Wars simulator. Three minutes later my credit is used up.
3.35pm: A few metres down the Thames path is the London Aquarium. Somehow, all the fish inside look a little grey at first, but by the time I'm in the beach zone stroking the back of a friendly ray I'm feeling distinctly better. I go on to see the morays, possibly the world's ugliest fish. By the time I reach the mangrove section and see a poison dart frog hop around, I'm feeling quite chirpy again.
4.15pm: I jump on a 159 bus from Westminster bridge and am treated to one of those moments that moulds London's reputation among foreign tourists. About to board, a middle-aged American woman asks the conductor if the bus goes to Marble Gate. No, he replies. Startled, she asks again; again, a blunt no. At which point her partner steps back, looks up and points out that it says on the side of the bus that it goes to Marble Arch. "Marble Arch, yes," concedes the conductor and walks away.
4.30pm: Arrive at the National Gallery with the intention of seeing the temporary Pisanello collection. But I am flagging, and divert to the cafe to have a sandwich instead.
5.05pm Run around the corner to make the last entry to the National Portrait Gallery's Painted Ladies exhibition. The woman at the door expresses concern that I've bought a ticket with only 30 minutes or so until closing time, but today half an hour is an eternity. The collection, portraits of the most desirable ladies of the court of Charles II, is compelling. Frankly, tastes have changed. I come face to face with my namesake Nell Gwyn, famed for her vivacity and general licentiousness, and possibly one of the best looking of the bunch.
6.00pm With all the galleries and museums closed, the West End musical is the natural refuge of the tourist. The pass offers a tenner off a ticket to Cats, but it will take a good deal more than that to tempt me.
In the final reckoning, a £19 pass has got me the equivalent of £52.65 in entrance fees, plus a chocolate brownie and three brief plays on a video game. It doesn't seem a bad investment, though I'm totally knackered, toured out and would remember very little of much of the day without the benefit of notes.
There are several A-list attractions missing from the pass's coverage (the London Eye, the South Bank galleries and the major Kensington museums, to name a few), and you can only make the pass really pay for itself with a dedicated and meticulously planned assault on the capital. And while the total entrance fees far outweighed the pass price, you might not normally bother to shell out the cost of a meal for a few minutes in a paying attraction.
That said, it's a good opportunity to test everything out, especially if you have a short attention span. Overall, it's worth it if you work it. You might just need a holiday afterwards.
· The London Pass costs £19 per adult, £14 per child for a day. Two, three and six-day passes are also available including free travel at £44, £55 and £89 for adults, £27, £34 and £45 for children. Passes are available at all London travel information centres, but you need to buy online in advance to have free travel included.
