The Original Tour

With a history dating back to the early 1900s, The Original Tour is the first sightseeing tour of its kind. It was formally introduced by London Transport as ‘Service J’ for the Festival of Britain in 1951. The thousands of visitors descending on the capital were invited to take the tour “around the town for half a crown!”. At the time it was described as a non-stop circular tour of London operating with double-decker buses from Buckingham Palace Road in Victoria. As part of the tour, visitors were given a free London Transport Guide Book from which they had to identify the major sights of London. It was the first incarnation of the open-top sightseeing tours that are now a familiar sight in cities across the world.