London

Markets and Neighbourhoods

At Borough Market, Brindisa's chorizo roll comes in a white bun with a sweet piquillo pepper and a handful of rocket, and the stall shuts when the chorizo runs out. This is a useful thing to understand about London: the best of it does not wait for you. A few arches over, Kappacasein scrapes molten raclette onto sourdough baked in the Poilâne style, and Bread Ahead sells salted caramel doughnuts a few feet from the bakery school that will teach you to make them. Neal's Yard Dairy stacks British and Irish farmhouse cheese in towering wheels and lets you taste most of it. You can eat a whole day here without repeating yourself — moong dal dosa from Horn OK Please, kubba dumplings and charcoal kebabs from the British-Iraqi Juma Kitchen, paella from Bomba — and never leave the shadow of London Bridge.

Which is the first thing to settle about a stay in London: which part of it you sleep in. The city is really a collection of towns that grew into each other, and each one is for something different.

Soho is the West End at its densest — theatres wall to wall, some of the best cooking in the city sitting a few doors from a tourist trap, and more than a century as the heart of London's LGBTQ+ life and the engine room of its music, film and advertising trades. If you have come for the theatre, sleep here. If you want central but calmer, walk ten minutes north to Marylebone, where the high street has boutiques and bookshops and a genuine slowness to it; Daunt Books trades from its oak-galleried Edwardian shop. Bloomsbury, east of there, is Georgian garden squares and the British Museum and quiet evenings — Dickens lived here, and the Bloomsbury Group after him.

For markets and late nights, go east to Shoreditch and Hoxton, which have been Shakespeare's stage-land, then Victorian textile warehouses, then the loudest address in 2000s London, and are now tech offices and rooftop bars and street art with a "Pho Mile" of Vietnamese restaurants running up Kingsland Road. Columbia Road, Brick Lane and Spitalfields are all within a walk. Notting Hill is pastel stucco terraces, Portobello Road antiques, and the home of the Carnival. South Bank is the car-free choice for a first visit, with the galleries and theatres and the river all reachable on foot. And Greenwich, downriver, feels like a separate town, which it more or less is.

Tables, Pubs and Market Days

London's oldest restaurant has been serving since 1798. Rules, on Maiden Lane in Covent Garden, does classic British game — grouse, partridge, venison from its own estate at Lartington — under red velvet in an interior that has not changed in a long time. At the other end of the temperament is St. John, near Smithfield meat market, Fergus Henderson's whitewashed former smokehouse, where the signature dish is roast bone marrow and parsley salad: roasted femur bones, toast, a scrape of coarse sea salt. Anthony Bourdain named it the meal he would choose for his last.

Some places you queue for, and the queue is part of the arrangement. Dishoom serves a bacon naan roll — the naan baked to order for about twenty seconds in a tandoor at roughly 500°C — for under eight pounds; you can join the waitlist on the app and drink at the bar while you wait. Padella, by Borough Market, is a counter-seating pasta bar with a line down the stairs, and the line is for pici cacio e pepe: thick hand-rolled noodles, pecorino, cracked black pepper, a few pounds a plate. Poppies does fish and chips in a 1950s set-dressing across Spitalfields, Camden and Soho.

The pubs are older than the restaurants. Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, up an alley off Fleet Street, was rebuilt in 1667 — the year after the Great Fire — on a site that had held a pub since 1538, and it is a warren of small panelled rooms and cellars you can lose yourself in. Dr Johnson drank here, having lived round the corner; "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life," he told Boswell in 1777. So, later, did Dickens, Mark Twain, Conan Doyle and G. K. Chesterton. Darnay recovers here after his acquittal in A Tale of Two Cities. In the early 1890s the back rooms held the Rhymers' Club, founded by W. B. Yeats. The Lamb, on Lamb's Conduit Street in Bloomsbury, was Dickens's local when he lived nearby on Doughty Street, and later Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath's; it still has its etched-glass "snob screens."

Borough is the famous market, but London runs a different one almost every day. Columbia Road sells cut flowers and plants on Sunday mornings only, roughly eight until three, rain or shine, the traders shouting prices in Cockney over the crowd. Portobello Road is really five markets stacked together — antiques, vintage clothes, household goods, fruit and veg, food — with the antiques at their fullest on Saturdays. Brick Lane on a Sunday is vintage fashion and records and street food, the 24-hour Beigel Bake nearby and the curry houses along the old curry mile. Maltby Street, under the Bermondsey railway arches, is the quieter and more serious version of Borough — cheese, natural wine, small bars. Spitalfields, opposite Liverpool Street, is covered and open daily.

Parks, Museums and Theatreland

There is more green in the city than a first visit expects. Eight Royal Parks — around 5,000 acres of former royal hunting ground — are free to walk into. Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens hold the Serpentine, a rose garden, Speakers' Corner and 4,000-odd trees. Regent's Park has a boating lake, formal gardens and London Zoo, and Primrose Hill above it gives one of the best free views of the skyline in the city. St James's Park, between Buckingham Palace and Whitehall, keeps pelicans on its lake. Richmond Park is the largest at 2,500 acres, laid out by Charles I in the 1630s as a deer park and still full of free-roaming red and fallow deer among ancient oaks. And Hampstead Heath, which is not a Royal Park but 800 acres managed by the City of London, has open-air bathing ponds — separate men's, ladies' and mixed — and the view from Parliament Hill.

The great museums are free, every day, which is easy to forget until you have wandered into two million years of history without paying for it. The British Museum in Bloomsbury holds the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon Marbles, the Lewis Chessmen and the Egyptian mummies across some eighty galleries; book a timed slot in summer. The Natural History Museum in South Kensington hangs a 25-metre blue whale skeleton, named Hope, in its entrance hall, with the dinosaurs down the corridor. The V&A next door runs to 145 galleries of design, fashion and ceramics, including the Cast Courts, where full-size plaster copies of Michelangelo's David and Trajan's Column stand indoors. Tate Modern, across the river in the old Bankside Power Station, gives its collection away and fills the vast Turbine Hall with a single installation at a time. Only the temporary exhibitions cost anything, roughly twelve to twenty-five pounds.

The West End keeps its theatres the way other places keep churches. Drury Lane has had a theatre on it since 1663, the oldest such site in London still in use. The Mousetrap, Agatha Christie's whodunit, has been running at St Martin's since 1952 and past 28,000 performances, which makes it the longest-running play in the world; Les Misérables has managed over 14,000 since 1985. If you have not booked, the TKTS booth in Leicester Square sells day-of tickets at a discount.

Along the Thames and Across the City

Along the South Bank you can walk from the London Eye to Shakespeare's Globe without meeting a car. The path passes the Southbank Centre, the BFI — which opened in 1951 as the National Film Theatre for the Festival of Britain — the National Theatre, which runs 75-minute backstage tours, and Tate Modern, joined to St Paul's by the Millennium Bridge. Underneath it, beneath Queen Elizabeth Hall, is the Undercroft: the oldest skate spot in continuous use anywhere, going on five decades, saved from redevelopment in 2013 by a campaign called Long Live Southbank. Leake Street, close by, is a road tunnel where the graffiti is legal.

Greenwich is worth a day on its own, and the nicest way to reach it is by river boat. The Cutty Sark, the last surviving tea clipper in the world, sits in dry dock by the water. Up the hill, the Royal Observatory — which Charles II commissioned in 1675 — lets you stand with one foot on either side of the Prime Meridian, longitude zero, the line that handed the world Greenwich Mean Time. And in the Old Royal Naval College is the Painted Hall, which Sir James Thornhill spent nineteen years painting, to 1726, and which people call Britain's Sistine Chapel; Nelson lay in state beneath it in 1806. An £8.5m restoration reopened it in 2019.

Getting around is mostly solved. The Underground opened in 1863 as the world's first, steam-hauled and gas-lit, carrying 38,000 people on its opening day between Paddington and Farringdon; it now runs eleven lines and 272 stations. The Elizabeth line, opened in 2022, crosses the whole city east to west at speed. You do not need a paper ticket for any of it — a contactless card or phone works on the Tube, the buses, the DLR and the river boats, and the fares cap themselves daily and weekly. London was the first public-transport system in the world to take contactless cards, in 2014; an Oyster card does the same job. Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and City airports all connect in.

Fire, Frost and Carnival

The city has burned, stunk and choked its way to its present shape. The Great Fire of 1666 cleared the medieval City and gave Christopher Wren the room to raise St Paul's. In 1858 the Thames smelled so badly that Parliament, whose windows overlooked it, hired Joseph Bazalgette to build a network of brick sewers; they were largely done by 1875 and still carry the city's waste. In December 1952 four days of coal smoke and fog killed several thousand people and produced the Clean Air Act.

And some of London is simply gone. Tyburn, near Marble Arch, was the city's main gallows for over 650 years, at the end of the cart-ride from Newgate; Speakers' Corner now stands near where the scaffold did. The Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens drew crowds to masquerades and Handel performances for two centuries before closing in 1859. And in the Little Ice Age, when old London Bridge's nineteen piers dammed the river into something wide and slow, the Thames sometimes froze hard enough to hold a fair. The last was in February 1814: four days of stalls and printing presses on the ice between Blackfriars and London Bridge, and an elephant led across below Blackfriars to prove it would hold. They took the old bridge down in 1831, the river ran faster after that, and it has never frozen since.

Every August the biggest street festival in Europe takes over Notting Hill — over a million people, second in the world only to Rio. It began indoors: Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian activist, held a Caribbean carnival at St Pancras Town Hall in 1959. The first outdoor version came in 1966, organised by Rhaune Laslett and the London Free School, and what people remember of that day is Russ Henderson's steel band setting off through Portobello Road with the neighbourhood falling in behind it, dancing.