Why We Spend Our Summers in London

After several summers with our girls, London has become less of a destination and more of a second home.

Every summer, we leave New York.

We pack up and escape the sweltering heat of the city and the several-thousand-dollar-a-week summer camps. Although, to be fair, this year London decided to greet us with its own heat wave, so apparently you cannot completely outrun the sun, no matter how far you fly.

Still, we leave.

Not for two weeks, and not for the kind of trip where you are frantically checking off sights before heading back to the airport. We stay long enough to unpack, stock the fridge, get attached to a favorite neighborhood playground and eventually lose track of what day it is.

There are plenty of practical reasons we go. We have family and friends in London, and we love the city. But after doing this for a few summers, I think the real reason is simpler: I really like what our family life feels like there.

London gives us a different version of summer.

We still work. The girls still go to camp. There are still grocery runs, laundry, deadlines and plenty of moments when someone is crying because someone else looked at them.

But we get more of the summer with them.

We get slow mornings and afternoons at the park. We can walk around the neighborhood without worrying that everyone is going to melt. We can sit outside for lunch, wander home after dinner, stop for ice cream and spend an entire afternoon doing something that was not planned three weeks in advance.

It is not that London is easier in every way. There are plenty of things I miss about New York, and plenty of everyday conveniences that we have at home that we do not have in the UK.

We’ve collected many of the places that have become part of our routine in our Ultimate London Family Travel Guide, but this is less about what we do in London than why we keep coming back.

Sometimes we sleep in

The time difference from New York works surprisingly well with young kids.

Bedtime naturally shifts later. We can have a slow dinner, wander around the neighborhood afterward, stop for ice cream and not feel like we are completely blowing up everyone’s sleep schedule because it is 9:30 p.m.

And then somehow our kids sleep later.

Mornings move a little slower. There is no immediate panic to get three kids dressed, fed and out the door.

Every year, I worry that getting them back on New York time is going to be awful. It never is. Within a few days, the girls are back to their normal 7:30–8 p.m. bedtime and waking up around 7, just in time for our usual school-morning routine.

Kids are remarkably adaptable. Or maybe they just really like late-night ice cream.

The grocery store feels easier

I notice this almost immediately when we arrive.

I spend less time standing in the grocery aisle turning packages around and wondering what exactly is in them. Everyday food just feels simpler: yogurt, fruit, bread, cheese, eggs, vegetables, pasta. There are plenty of biscuits and treats, obviously. My girls make sure of that.

And our grocery bill is noticeably lower, too. I am not buying anything particularly exotic or shopping at fancy stores. The basics just seem to cost less than they do in New York.

I also find myself worrying less about whether I am feeding them the “right” things. There is something nice about buying a loaf of bread, some cheese, fruit and yogurt and calling it lunch.

Waitrose and M&S Food are two of our favorites.

We actually spend a lot of time outside

This is probably one of the biggest differences.

Summer in New York is supposed to be the season when you are outside all day with your kids. Except that when it is 95 or 100 degrees in the middle of the day, the park starts to feel less like an idyllic summer activity and more like an endurance challenge.

In London, even when it is warm, we can usually just be outside.

We walk to the park. We sit outside at lunch. We wander around the neighborhood. We find a playground and stay until everyone is ready to leave.

There is less strategy involved. We do not have to think quite so hard about when it is bearable to be outside.

Some of our favorite summer days have come from exactly that looseness—a walk that turns into lunch, an afternoon that disappears at a playground, or deciding to take the girls to Wimbledon and discovering that you absolutely do not need Centre Court tickets to make it special.

And with three little kids, that changes the entire rhythm of the day.

Kids are just part of dinner

I have also noticed that eating out with kids feels different.

In New York, kids’ menus can often feel like an entirely separate meal: chicken nuggets, buttered noodles, grilled cheese. There is certainly a time and place for all of those things, especially with three little kids.

But in London, kids’ menus tend to feel more like a smaller version of the actual restaurant. At one of our favorite places, Comptoir Libanais, the girls can get things like chicken taouk, falafel, halloumi and mezze.

And in some cases, kids’ meals are free when you order adult mains. It is not unusual to see restaurants offer some version of this, which makes taking the whole family out for dinner feel a lot more doable.

More than anything, I like that the girls are simply included. They are not being given a completely separate version of dinner. They are being introduced to the same food, the same restaurants and the same experience as the rest of us.

Sometimes they eat it. Sometimes they don’t.

But they are at the table.

Summer camp without the stress

One of our favorite discoveries has been the local camp situation.

London has a huge variety of holiday camps, and many are significantly less expensive than what we are used to paying in New York.

But honestly, the cost is not even my favorite part.

I love that camp can just be part of the day.

It does not have to mean eight hours of childcare, five days a week, for the entire summer. There are half-day options, which means the kids can go to camp in the morning and we can still have the afternoon together, or vice versa.

It makes summer feel like summer, rather than one very long childcare spreadsheet.

I usually take about three to four weeks of actual vacation while we are in London, but I also work remotely for part of the summer.

And, without fail, those working weeks seem to coincide with a major project or some kind of deadline. Though the time difference does make it surprisingly manageable. Most of my team is on the West Coast, so I get a pretty big head start on the workday.

A typical day might look something like this:

Morning: I get a quiet block of focused work done before anyone else is awake. Then we have breakfast and head out to the park.

Afternoon: The girls go to camp while I get another uninterrupted block of work done as the U.S. starts waking up.

Evening: We have dinner together, do bedtime and then I log back on for a couple hours while the West Coast is still working.

Is it a vacation?

Definitely not.

Am I putting in real hours?

Absolutely.

But I am also not spending the entire summer sitting behind a desk while my kids are somewhere else.

For me, that has been one of the biggest benefits of doing this. And I am endlessly grateful that my company and my role allow me to do this.

They are learning that there is more than one way to do things

I do think spending time somewhere else has changed the girls’ view of the world, although probably not in the grand, “travel broadens the mind” way I imagined before having kids.

It is much more ordinary than that.

They know the 11 and 22 buses. They have opinions about which one is coming and get very excited when we get the top seats on the top deck. We look for the stroller space on every bus, which feels like a small luxury when you are used to NYC buses. And with a three-year-old, I have developed a deep appreciation for the fact that you can usually find a potty within about five minutes in almost any neighborhood.

They are learning how a different city works by actually living in it.

They also see that things can be done differently and still be completely normal. Different food, different shops, different schools and camps, different ways of getting around, different kinds of houses, different accents.

Research on family travel increasingly points to this kind of informal learning. Kids absorb a lot simply by navigating new environments and interacting with people and cultures outside their everyday lives.

I think that is one of the things I value most about these summers. The girls are growing up knowing that New York is home, but it is not the template for how everyone else lives.

There is an 11 bus. There is a 22 bus. Sometimes you sit upstairs. Sometimes you walk. Sometimes dinner comes with hummus and halloumi. And sometimes the bus has a stroller space exactly where you need it.

All of it is just normal to them.

London is a good home base

For the longer summer stretch, having an apartment is a big part of what allows London to feel like somewhere we live rather than somewhere we are visiting. We can unpack, cook dinner, do laundry and settle into a neighborhood. For shorter stays, we’ve also loved experiencing the city from a hotel—The Goring remains one of our favorite examples of a very grown-up London hotel that genuinely welcomes families.

Another bonus is that London makes it relatively easy to add a little more Europe to the summer.

The Eurostar makes Paris an easy trip, and there are plenty of quick flights to other parts of Europe.

The last two summers, we have spent a couple of weeks in Aix-en-Provence after London, trading the Tube for sunny markets, long lunches and a completely different pace of life in the South of France.

And, yes, this is also when I inevitably stock up on the French baby liniment I bring home every summer, which has somehow become its own slightly ridiculous family tradition.

We have our people and places

Maybe this is what brings us back year after year.

I know we should probably diversify. There are so many places we could take the girls, and we do try. We have spent time in the South of France and taken day trips to Bath and Brighton. But after a few summers in London, we have gotten to the point where we have opinions.

We know which park has the best ice cream truck. We know which playground has the cool zipline or trampoline. We have a favorite coffee shop and a favorite flat white. We know where to go when we need to fill 45 minutes and where to go when we need to fill an entire afternoon.

And we have our people.

There are friends and family who make us feel at home. There is a sweet woman at Daylesford who knows the girls and inevitably sneaks them a cookie. There are places where the girls are regulars, even if only for a few weeks a year. Babyccinos are almost always complimentary, which I appreciate every time I remember that I have absolutely paid $4 for one in New York.

None of this is why you fly three little kids across the Atlantic.

But maybe it is why you do it again.

At some point, the girls stop experiencing London as somewhere we go and start experiencing it as somewhere they know and love. And this feels really special to me.

We usually head back to New York in late August, which gives us a couple of weeks to unpack, get everyone back on East Coast time and ease into September before school starts.

And every year, I come home reminded of how much I love New York.

But I also notice that something has shifted.

The girls have seen a little more of the world. They have spent weeks somewhere that feels familiar but is still different. And my husband and I have had a chance to step outside our usual New York routine and remember that there are a lot of different ways to have a normal day.

I think that might be the biggest reason we keep doing this.

We are not spending our summers in London because we want to escape our life in New York.

We love our life here.

We go because we like the version of our family that exists there, too.

The slower mornings. The long walks. The family and friends. The parks. The pub lunches. The ability to work and still have a morning with the kids.

And somehow, by the end of every summer, London feels a little less like somewhere we took the girls and a little more like somewhere that is becoming part of their childhood.