Everyone does South Bank. The trick is to do it at dusk and to do it east. You start at the Festival Hall, not on the Embankment; you walk downriver, not up; and you finish on the far side of Tower Bridge with the river lit behind you.
Come up through the Festival Hall foyer first — nobody does this and it's the best room in London that you can sit in for free. Then out along the river: the brutalist back of the National, the tiny pubs of Gabriel's Wharf, the unloved stretch of embankment past the ITV building where nobody walks.
Tate Modern is the halfway pivot. Go in. Stand in the turbine hall for three minutes and come out the other side. Then past the Globe, through Clink Street behind the replica Golden Hinde, and you emerge at the back of Borough Market — which at six o'clock on a Friday is a pub and not much else.
Finish on the north side of Tower Bridge. The tourist's route, corrected.
