Originally Posted by
flatlander
London has enough things to do that it is useful to have some idea of what you want to do. For example "See the best known sights" is some idea, and a reasonable thing to do for a first-time visitor.
With only a few days in London, you won't have time to see even all of a subset, let alone all of London's tourist attractions. So it's better to choose things, and if you have no better idea just pick things at random from central London and if you don't like something, move along to the next idea.
Some sorts of choices might be "churches and good food", or "monuments and museums", or "art galleries and street markets", or so on. A couple of major topics, or things you definitely don't want to do, really helps with the quality of the advice.
It also helps to know when you are going, since the weather is worse in winter than in summer.
You're right, I wasn't being very helpful in my request. Here is a better effort.
As a first-timer, we want to see the most popular sights. What's important to us is seeing Big Ben, Parliament, changing of the guard, London Eye, a few museums, westminster, do some shopping.
If I had to pick three main points of high interest for us, they would be monuments, museums/galleries, and food.
What we don't care about are guided walking tours because we want to be flexible. A plan for allotted time at specific locations is nice, but we're the type of couple to bail on something very quickly if it doesn't excite us and spend a few more hours exploring something that does.
We do not plan on renting a car or taking a day trip out of the city if that's helpful.
I will be there the first week in Oct. 2016.