What To Do In A City When It Rains: A Practical Answer

Steady light rain is a clothing problem, not a plan problem. Wind and cold are what make a wet day miserable, and a downpour that lasts twenty minutes is not worth reorganising around.

Look at the forecast by the hour rather than by the day. Northern European rain in particular tends to come in bands with dry gaps, and a two-hour route can usually be fitted into one of them. Rain that is set in for the whole day is a different situation, and the rest of this article is about that.

A wet city is not a worse city. It is quieter, the light is softer, reflections make everything look better in photographs, and the places everyone queues for on a dry day are half empty.

What to change:

• Shorten it. Two kilometres in the rain feels like four in the sun. Cut the route rather than the day.
• Use the covered parts of the city. Arcades, covered markets, station halls, colonnades, underpasses and narrow streets with overhanging upper floors. Most old centres have more shelter than people realise.
• Plan a warm stop halfway. Not at the end, halfway is where a group decides whether to continue.
• Skip the parks and the viewpoints. Those are the parts that genuinely do not work wet.

Bring a hooded jacket rather than an umbrella if there is any wind, and accept that shoes will get wet. Wet feet ruin more days out than rain does.

Walking with a task works better in the rain than walking without one, because the task gives people something to think about other than the weather. Groups that would turn back after ten minutes of aimless walking will keep going for an hour if there is something to solve at the next corner.

You can build this yourself: pick four or five stops in a compact area, give each one a small task, and keep them close enough together that nobody is walking for more than five minutes between them. Or use a ready-made version, a city game is exactly this, played on your phone at your own pace, and it can be paused when you duck into a café. Here is how a game works. The one honest caveat: it is played on a phone, and phones and heavy rain are not friends, so a waterproof pocket or a plastic bag matters more than it sounds.

If it is cold as well as wet, or if there are small children, indoors is the right call. Some options are better than the obvious ones.

• The second museum, not the first. The famous one will be full of everyone else with the same idea. The smaller specialist museum two streets away will be nearly empty.
• Libraries and reading rooms. Free, warm, often architecturally spectacular, and nobody thinks of them.
• Covered markets. Food, shelter and something to look at, all at once.
• An indoor escape room or bowling alley. Fine for a group that wants an activity rather than a place, though these need booking and a wet day is when everyone else books too.
• A long lunch. Underrated. Sometimes the correct answer to bad weather is to sit down for two hours.

Rain changes what a day out should look like; it does not remove the day. Shorten the route, plan the warm stop before you need it, protect the phone, and give people something to do rather than something to endure. If you are organising for a group and want the practical side handled, we arrange days for companies and larger groups, and the contact page is the place for questions about timing and numbers. For the dry-weather version of the same idea, see our guide to a self-guided walking tour.