London is a city that wears its wartime history lightly. There is no single museum gate to walk through, no ticket to buy. Instead the story is scattered across the pavement in bronze, Portland stone and shrapnel-pitted brick, waiting for anyone willing to put in a decent pair of shoes and a full day. This route runs roughly six miles from Westminster to Lambeth, west to east and back again, and takes in the statues, plaques and scarred buildings that mark the capital's Second World War.

Before You Set Off

Give yourself a full day rather than a rushed half. The walking itself is manageable, but you will want to stop, read and linger, and the route passes enough pubs and cafes to break it in two if the weather turns.

• Start at Westminster station, ideally by 9am, before the crowds build around Parliament Square.
• Wear something waterproof. Much of this walk is open, exposed ground beside the river.
• Bring a contactless card or phone for the Tube. You will almost certainly want to shorten the eastern stretch.
• The middle section through the City is quietest at weekends, when the office crowds vanish and the plaques are easier to read.

Westminster and Whitehall: Where the War Was Directed

Begin in Parliament Square, where the bronze of Winston Churchill by Ivor Roberts-Jones glowers towards the Houses of Parliament. Churchill is shown in his heavy overcoat, head bowed, and the plinth is worn smooth by the hands of visitors. Look also for the statue of Jan Smuts, the South African statesman and field marshal who sat in the Imperial War Cabinet.

Walk down Whitehall, past the Cenotaph designed by Edwin Lutyens and unveiled in 1920. It became the focal point of national mourning again after 1945, and on Remembrance Sunday it is still the centre of the nation's attention. A short way along the east side stands the Monument to the Women of the Second World War, a slab of bronze hung with the uniforms and tools of the women who served in factories, hospitals and on the land.

Further south on Whitehall you will find the statues of Field Marshal Montgomery and Viscount Alanbrooke, the two men most responsible for the conduct of the land war. Turn up Horse Guards Road and look for the Admiralty Citadel — a great concrete blockhouse built in 1940 and 1941 to house naval command, now smothered in ivy. It is one of the most obvious military structures in central London and one of the least noticed.

From there, drop into King Charles Street and the Churchill War Rooms, the underground complex where the War Cabinet met through the worst of the bombing. Even if you do not go in, the entrance below Clive Steps is worth the detour; the map room and the telephone room are preserved almost exactly as they were left.

The Embankment and the Battle of Britain

Head down to Victoria Embankment and turn east. On the river wall near Westminster Bridge stands the Battle of Britain Monument, unveiled in 2005, its bronze reliefs crowded with scrambling pilots, ground crew and the ordinary Londoners who watched the dogfights from the rooftops. The panels reward slow reading.

Continue past the RAF memorial with its golden eagle, then follow the river towards the City. This stretch is the best part of the walk on a clear day: the water opens out, and you can see exactly how narrow the Thames is here and how exposed the docks would have been to bombers following the river inland.

Into the City: St Paul's and the Blitz

Pause at the National Firefighters Memorial near St Paul's, which commemorates the fire service dead of both world wars. The cathedral itself is the great survivor of the Blitz. On the night of 29 December 1940, incendiary bombs fell all around it and the famous photograph of the dome rising through smoke became a symbol of defiance. A volunteer group, the St Paul's Watch, patrolled the roof with sandbags and stirrup pumps and put out dozens of fires.

Inland, walk up to Newgate Street to see Christ Church Greyfriars. Its nave was destroyed in 1940 and the tower and spire were left stranded; the footprint is now a public garden, the planting laid out where the pews once stood. Further east, St Dunstan-in-the-East on St Dunstan's Hill is another roofless shell, bombed in 1941 and now a walled garden of ivy and trees.

Look up as you walk. Many City buildings carry small plaques noting damage sustained during the Blitz, and the scars are still visible in the patched brickwork and the surviving Victorian facades surrounded by glass towers.

The East End: Where the Bombs Landed

The docks were the target, and the East End took the punishment. Take the Tube to Aldgate East or Tower Hill and walk east through Wapping and St Katharine Docks. The warehouses were gutted, and the residential streets behind them suffered terribly in the autumn of 1940.

On Cannon Street Road, St George-in-the-East was gutted by fire in 1941. The outer walls were kept and the interior is now a garden of rest, with a small memorial to those killed in the raids. In Bethnal Green Gardens, a modest memorial marks the Bethnal Green tube disaster of March 1943, when 173 people died in a crush on the shelter stairs — a reminder that not every wartime death in London came from a bomb.

Finishing at Lambeth

Catch the Tube back west and end at the Imperial War Museum on Lambeth Road, housed in the former Bethlem Hospital. Its Second World War galleries put the whole day into order, and outside in the grounds you can see the great naval guns from the battleships that took part in the war at sea.

By this point you will have walked the full length of the story: from the rooms where decisions were made, past the monuments to those who carried them out, and through the streets that took the consequences. It is a long day, but London rewards the walker, and the city's wartime history is best read at pavement level.