Two mounted troopers of the Household Cavalry guard the Whitehall arch of Horse Guards from 10:00 to 16:00 every day, and it costs nothing to stand a metre away from them. The mounted guard changes at 11:00 on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and a dismounted inspection takes place at 16:00 every day of the year.
Horse Guards is the low Palladian building halfway up Whitehall with a clock arch through the middle. Walk through the arch and you come out onto Horse Guards Parade, the gravel square where Trooping the Colour happens. It is the quietest of London's ceremonial sights: no railings, no ticket, and usually a couple of dozen people rather than a couple of thousand. Our guide to the Changing of the Guard covers the Buckingham Palace ceremony and the full monthly schedule; this page is about the building, the mounted guard and the walk up Whitehall.
One correction worth making before you set your alarm. The ceremony at 11:00 is a guard change on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and a duty officer's inspection at weekends; the inspection people mean when they talk about "the inspection at Horse Guards" is the dismounted one at 16:00. If you only have one slot in the day, take four o'clock.
Horse Guards at a glance
- Cost
- Free to watch, inside and out
- Mounted sentries
- Two, on the Whitehall side, 10:00-16:00, changed every hour
- Guard change
- 11:00, Monday, Wednesday and Friday
- Dismounted inspection
- 16:00, daily
- Household Cavalry Museum
- £11.00 adult (March 2026); entrance off Horse Guards Parade
- Nearest stations
- Westminster, Embankment, Charing Cross
What happens when, and which one to turn up for
The Household Division publishes the whole week, and the pattern rewards a reader who plans. The King's Life Guard is found by the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment, which rides down from Hyde Park Barracks in Knightsbridge.
| Day | Time | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| Monday, Wednesday, Friday | 10:28-11:00 | The new guard leaves Hyde Park Barracks at 10:28 and rides via Hyde Park Corner, Constitution Hill and The Mall; the change itself is on Horse Guards Parade at 11:00 |
| Tuesday, Thursday | 10:30-11:15 | A patrol rather than a change |
| Saturday, Sunday | 11:00 | The guard stays put and the duty officer inspects it |
| Every day | 10:00-16:00 | Two mounted sentries at the Whitehall arch, changed on the hour |
| Every day | 16:00 | Dismounted inspection, after which the guard comes off duty |
The 11:00 change is the bigger event and it is over in about half an hour. The 16:00 inspection is shorter, smaller and far less advertised, which is exactly why it is worth knowing about: you can stand at the front of it with almost no one in the way. It happens in all weather and on every day of the year.
If you want to see the horses on the move rather than standing still, the ride down from Knightsbridge is the best of it. Stand on The Mall at about 10:45 on a Monday, Wednesday or Friday, and the guard passes you at close range with no crowd control at all.
Four o'clock beats eleven o'clock if you dislike crowds. The dismounted inspection runs every day, needs no schedule check and draws a fraction of the audience, because almost no guidebook mentions it.
Photo: Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons · resized
The two sentries, and how close you can get
On the Whitehall pavement, two troopers sit their horses in stone alcoves either side of the arch. They are changed on the hour, which is a small piece of drill in itself and happens eight times a day. Behind the arch, on the parade ground side, two more troopers stand dismounted.
The horses are working animals and can move suddenly. Stand beside the alcove rather than in front of it, do not touch the horse, and keep children where you can hold them. Police are present at ceremonial times and the Household Division's own advice for anyone watching is blunt about pickpockets in the crowd; the same warning appears on its Buckingham Palace pages, and our guide to how pickpockets work in London explains where they operate.
You may walk through the arch at any time the building is open to foot traffic, which is most of the day. It is one of very few places in Whitehall where you can cross from the street into a Crown space without a ticket or a security queue.
The Household Cavalry Museum
This is the one thing at Horse Guards you pay for, and it is small, cheap and much better than its size suggests. The entrance is off Horse Guards Parade, not off Whitehall, which is why many visitors walk past it. The address is Horse Guards, Whitehall, SW1A 2AX.
The museum occupies part of the working stable block, and a glass partition lets you watch troopers preparing horses and kit on the other side. The rest is uniforms, musical instruments, campaign material and the working detail of a regiment that does ceremonial duty in the morning and operational soldiering the rest of the time. Allow 45 minutes to an hour.
| Ticket | Price (March 2026) |
|---|---|
| Adult | £11.00 |
| Child, 6-16 | £8.00 |
| Over 60 | £9.50 |
| Family: 1 adult and up to 3 children | £25.00 |
| Family: 2 adults and up to 3 children | £29.00 |
| Carer or access companion | Free, no ticket needed |
Opening hours are 10:00 to 18:00 from April to October and 10:00 to 17:00 from November to March, with last admission an hour before closing. Booking is recommended but not required. The museum closes for the whole day on London Marathon day, Good Friday, Remembrance Sunday, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day, and it sometimes shuts for part of a day at short notice when the building is needed. Check the current price and the day's hours before you travel: the figures above were read on the museum's own site in a dated copy from March 2026, because the live site refuses automated requests.
For a family of two adults and two children, the £29 family ticket is the cheapest way in, and it is the least expensive indoor museum in this part of Westminster by a wide margin. Set against the Churchill War Rooms five minutes away, it is a different order of price and a different order of scale.
Horse Guards Parade: an empty square with a job
On most days the parade ground is a large expanse of gravel with a view of the back of Downing Street's garden wall, the Old Admiralty buildings and the trees of St James's Park. It is used for four things: the guard change, Trooping the Colour in June, Beating Retreat in the early summer, and the formation of the veterans' column before the march past on Remembrance Sunday. The rest of the year it is simply a short cut between Whitehall and the park.
The two low buildings on the south side of the parade ground include the Cabinet Office. On the north side is the Old Admiralty complex. The cannon at the north-west corner is the Turkish gun captured in Egypt in 1801, mounted on a cast-iron carriage with a sphinx on each side, and it is the most photographed object on the square after the horses.
Walk west and you are in St James's Park within a minute, which makes Horse Guards the natural hinge between the government quarter and the parks.
Walking up Whitehall: what is on which side
Whitehall runs about 700 metres from Parliament Square to Trafalgar Square, and a slow walk with stops takes 30 minutes. The overview is in our Westminster neighbourhood guide; what follows is the detail you can only use standing in the street.
- West side, from the south. The Treasury and Foreign Office block designed by George Gilbert Scott with Matthew Digby Wyatt, then King Charles Street, then Downing Street behind its gates, then Dover House with its domed rotunda, then Horse Guards, then the Old War Office building.
- East side, from the south. The Ministry of Defence, then the Banqueting House, then the long Edwardian frontage that ends at the Old Admiralty.
- In the middle of the road. The Cenotaph, and 100 metres north the Memorial to the Women of World War II, a bronze block hung with the uniforms and working clothes women wore in the war. It was unveiled in 2005 after a long charity campaign, part-funded by a £934,115 grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund.
The Banqueting House is the one interior on Whitehall besides the museum, and it opens on very few days, so check before you count on it. The gates and the memorial have a page of their own: see Downing Street and the Cenotaph.
Free, and what it costs you instead
Nothing at Horse Guards except the museum asks for money, which puts it near the top of our list of free things to do in London. What it costs is timing. The guard change is a fixed 11:00 on three days of the week, and ceremonial activity can be altered or cancelled at very short notice in wet weather, sometimes as late as quarter to eleven. Build the rest of the morning so that a cancellation does not wreck it.
If you are combining sights, the sensible order is Horse Guards at 11:00, Whitehall and the Cenotaph on foot, then Trafalgar Square and the free national galleries; or reverse it and finish at the four o'clock inspection. Our five-day itinerary puts the whole stretch into a single morning.
Getting there, and the practical gaps
Westminster, Embankment and Charing Cross are all about five to eight minutes away and all three are on more than one line. Whitehall is a red route with buses along its whole length, and it is one of the few central streets where the bus is genuinely quicker than walking in traffic-free conditions.
There is no public toilet at Horse Guards and no cafe on the parade ground. The nearest facilities are in St James's Park to the west and around Trafalgar Square to the north; see where to find a public toilet in London. Gun salutes fired in Green Park and at the Tower on royal anniversaries involve the same regiments and are covered in our guide to gun salutes in London.
Frequently asked questions
Is the guard change at Horse Guards every day?
No. The mounted guard changes at 11:00 on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays only. On Tuesdays and Thursdays there is a patrol between 10:30 and 11:15, and at weekends the duty officer inspects the guard at 11:00 instead. The dismounted inspection at 16:00 is the only element that happens every single day.
Do I need a ticket for Horse Guards?
Not for the building, the arch, the sentries, the parade ground or any of the ceremonies, which are all free and unticketed. The only paid element is the Household Cavalry Museum, at £11.00 for an adult in March 2026, entered from Horse Guards Parade rather than from Whitehall.
Can you walk down Whitehall past Downing Street?
Yes. Whitehall itself is a public street and you can walk its full length. Downing Street is the side street off it, and that is closed behind security gates, so you can look down it from the Whitehall pavement but not enter.
How long does Horse Guards take?
Fifteen minutes if you only want to see the sentries and walk through the arch, about 40 minutes for the 11:00 guard change including finding a spot, and an extra 45 minutes to an hour if you add the museum. The full Whitehall walk with the Cenotaph takes half a morning.
Is Horse Guards better than the Buckingham Palace ceremony?
For most visitors, yes, if the aim is to see soldiers rather than a crowd. Horse Guards has no railings, the horses are close, and the audience is a fraction of the size. Buckingham Palace has the band, the bearskins and the palace front, and if that is the picture you came for, you need to go there instead.
Sources
- Household Division - King's Life Guard (checked September 2026)
- Household Division - Changing the Guard (checked September 2026)
- Household Cavalry Museum - Plan a visit (Internet Archive copy, 15 March 2026) (checked September 2026)
- GOV.UK - King Charles Street: a history of the Foreign Office building (checked September 2026)
- UK Parliament, Hansard - written answer on memorials and statues, 16 February 2006 (checked September 2026)