Things to do in London
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Brick Lane Beigel Bake
You won’t find fresher (or cheaper) bagels anywhere in London than at this bakery and delicatessen; just ask any taxi driver (it’s their favourite nosherie). It’s always busy: with market shoppers on Sunday and Shoreditch clubbers by night.
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Boxwood Cafe
An accessible entry point into Gordon Ramsay's eating empire, Boxwood offers set-price lunch and pre-7pm menus (two/three courses £21/25). It's intended as an informal option – although you wouldn't guess it from the attentive staff, faultless food and staid decor.
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Kennington Tandoori
This local curry house is a favourite of MPs from across the river.
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London Eye
It's hard to remember what London looked like before the landmark London Eye (officially the EDF Energy Lon-don Eye) began twirling at the southwestern end of Jubilee Gardens in 2000. Not only has it fundamentally altered the South Bank skyline but, standing 135m tall in a fairly flat city, it is visible from many surprising parts of the city (eg Kennington, Mayfair or Honor Oak Park). A ride – or 'flight', as it is called here – in one of the wheel's 32 glass-enclosed eye pods holding up to 28 people draws 3.5 million visitors annually. At peak times (July, August and school holidays) it may seem like they are all in the queue with you; save money and shorten queues by…
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Fifteen
It would be easy to dismiss Jamie Oliver’s nonprofit training restaurant as a gimmick, but on our latest visit the kitchen was in fine fettle. Here young chefs from disadvantaged backgrounds train with experienced professionals, creating an ambitious and interesting Italian menu. The ground-floor trattoria is a relaxed venue, while the underground dining room is more formal. Reservations are usually essential.
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Primark
Despite some recent bad press about its manufacturing methods, the flagship store of Primark is still crammed to the rafters with women hunting for bargain fashions that look like haute couture. They don’t call it ‘Primani’ for nothing.
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British Library
For visitors, the real highlight is a visit to the Sir John Ritblat Gallery where the most precious manuscripts, spanning almost three millennia, are held. Here you'll find the Codex Sinaiticus (the first complete text of the New Testament), a Gutenberg Bible (1455), the stunningly illustrated Jain sacred texts, Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, a copy of the Magna Carta (1215), explorer Captain Scott's final diary, Shakespeare's First Folio (1623) and the lyrics to 'A Hard Day's Night' (scribbled on the back of Julian Lennon's birthday card) plus original scores by Handel, Mozart and Beethoven.
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Churchill Museum & Cabinet War Rooms
Down in the bunker where Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his cabinet and generals met during WWII, £6 million has been spent on a huge exhibition devoted to ‘the greatest Briton’. This whizz-bang multimedia Churchill Museum joins the highly evocative Cabinet War Rooms, where chiefs of staff slept, ate and plotted Hitler’s downfall, blissfully believing they were protected from Luftwaffe bombs by the 3m slab of concrete overhead. (Turns out it would have crumpled like paper had the area taken a hit.) Together, these two sections make you forget the Churchill who was a maverick and lousy peacetime politician, and drive home how much the cigar-chewing, wartime PM was a…
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Old Royal Naval College
Designed by Wren, the Old Royal Naval College is a magnificent example of monumental classical architecture. Parts are now used by the University of Greenwich and Trinity College of Music, but you can visit the chapel and the extraordinary Painted Hall, which took artist Sir James Thornhill 19 years to complete.
The complex was built on the site of the 15th-century Palace of Placentia, the birthplace of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. This Tudor connection, along with Greenwich's industrial and maritime history, is explored in the Discover Greenwich centre. The tourist office is based here, along with a cafe/restaurant and microbrewery. Yeomen-led tours of the complex leave…
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Stonehenge, Windsor Castle and Bath Day Trip from London
11 hours (Departs London, United Kingdom)
by Viator
Don't leave London without taking this best-selling tour to Windsor Castle, Stonehenge and Bath, England's most beautiful Georgian city. Your day trip includes…Not LP reviewed
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Wellcome Collection
Focussing on the interface of art, science and medicine, this clever museum is surprisingly fascinating. There are interactive displays where you can scan your face and watch it stretched into the statistical average; wacky modern sculptures inspired by various medical conditions; and downright creepy things, like an actual cross-section of a body and enlargements of parasites (fleas, body lice, scabies) at terrifying proportions.
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Old Operating Theatre Museum & Herb Garret
This unique museum, 32 steps up the spiral stairway through the poorly marked door on the left leading into the tower of St Thomas Church (1703), focuses on the nastiness of 19th-century hospital treatment. Rediscovered in 1956 the garret was used by the apothecary of St Thomas’s Hospital to store medicinal herbs and now houses a medical museum. Browse the natural remedies, including snail water for venereal disease and bladderwrack for goitre and tuberculosis. A fiendish array of amputation knives and blades is a presage to the 19th-century operating theatres and their rough-and-ready (pre-ether, pre-chloroform, pre-antiseptic) conditions. Surgeons had to be snappy; one…
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St Giles-in-the-Fields
Built in what used to be countryside between the City and Westminster, St Giles church isn’t much to look at but has an interesting history, while the area around St Giles High St had perhaps the worst reputation of any London quarter. The current structure is the third to stand on the site of an original chapel built in the 12th century to serve the leprosy hospital. Until 1547, when the hospital closed, prisoners on their way to be executed at Tyburn stopped at the church gate and sipped a large cup of soporific ale – their last refreshment – from St Giles’s Bowl. From 1650 the prisoners were buried in the church grounds. It was also within the boundaries of St Giles…
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Geffrye Museum
This series of beautiful 18th-century ivy-clad almshouses, with an extensive and well-presented herb garden, was first opened as a museum in 1914, in a spot that was then in the centre of the furniture industry. The museum inside is devoted to domestic interiors, with each room of the main building furnished to show how the homes of the relatively affluent middle class would have looked from Elizabethan times right through to the end of the 19th century. A postmodernist extension completed in 1998 contains several 20th-century rooms (a flat from the 1930s, a room in the contemporary style of the 1950s and a 1990s converted warehouse complete with IKEA furniture) as well…
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Abney Park Cemetery
Unfairly dubbed ‘the poor man’s Highgate’ by some, this magical place was bought and developed by a private firm from 1840 to provide burial grounds for central London’s overflow. It was a dissenters (ie non-Church of England) cemetery and many of the most influential Presbyterians, Quakers and Baptists are buried here, including the Salvation Army founder, William Booth, whose grand tombstone greets you as you enter from Church St.
Since the 1950s the cemetery has been left to fend for itself and, these days, is as much a bird and plant sanctuary, a gay cruising ground and a hang-out for some of Hackney’s least salubrious drug users, as a delightfully overgrown…
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Covent Garden Market
London’s first planned square is now the exclusive reserve of tourists who flock here to shop in the quaint old arcades, be entertained by buskers, pay through the nose for refreshments at outdoor cafes and bars, and watch men and women pretend to be statues.
On its western flank is St Paul’s Church. The Earl of Bedford, the man who had commissioned Inigo Jones to design the piazza, asked for the simplest possible church, basically no more than a barn. The architect responded by producing ‘the handsomest barn in England’. It has long been regarded as the actors’ church for its associations with the theatre, and contains memorials to the likes of Charlie Chaplin and…
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Hunterian Museum
The collection of anatomical specimens of pioneering surgeon John Hunter (1728–93) inspired this fascinating, slightly morbid, little-known, yet fantastic London museum. Among the more bizarre items on display are the skeleton of a 2.3m giant, half of mathematician Charles Babbage’s brain and, hilariously, Winston Churchill’s dentures.
Thanks to a massive refurbishment some years back, the atmosphere is less gory and allows decent viewing of such things as animal digestive systems (forensically documented in formaldehyde) and the ‘hearing organ’ of a blue whale. Upstairs there’s a display on surgery techniques, which will impress and disgust in equal measure.…
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Momo
This wonderfully atmospheric Moroccan restaurant is stuffed with cushions and lamps, and staffed by all-dancing, tambourine-playing waiters. It’s a funny old place that manages to be all things to all diners, who range from romantic couples to raucous office-party ravers. Service is very friendly and the dishes are as exciting as you dare to be, so after the meze eschew the traditional and ordinary tajine (stew cooked in a traditional clay pot) and tuck into the splendid Moroccan speciality pastilla, a scrumptious nutmeg and pigeon pie. There’s outside seating in this quiet backstreet in the warmer months.
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Ottolenghi
This is the pick of Upper Street’s many eating options – a brilliantly bright, white space that’s worth a trip to see the eye-poppingly beautiful cakes and bread in the front deli alone. But get a table at this temple to good food and you’ll really appreciate it. At lunch you choose between the dishes spread out on the counter, while in the evening there’s á la carte dining, too, though so fanatical about ingredient quality are the chefs that the menu is not confirmed until 5pm. Weekend brunch here is fabulous, though you’ll usually have to wait for a table. Reservations are essential in the evenings.
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Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club
As it says on the tin, this is a true working men’s club, which has opened its doors and let in all kinds of off-the-wall club nights, including trashy burlesque, vintage nights of all eras, beach parties and bake offs. Expect sticky carpets, a shimmery stage set and a space akin to a school-hall disco.
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Greenwich Park
Handsome venue of the 2012 Games equestrian events, this park is one of London's loveliest expanses of green, with a rose garden, picturesque walks and astonishing views from the crown of the hill near the statue of General Wolfe, opposite the Royal Observatory. Covering a full 73 hectares, this is the oldest enclosed royal park and is partly the work of André Le Nôtre, the landscape architect who designed the palace gardens of Versailles for Louis XIV, the Sun King. The park is rich in historic sights, including a teahouse near the Royal Observatory, a cafe behind the National Maritime Museum, a deer park, tennis courts in the southwest and a boating lake at the Queen's…
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Stonehenge, Windsor Castle and Oxford Custom Day Trip
9 hours 30 minutes (Departs London, United Kingdom)
by Viator
Travel to Windsor, Stonehenge and Oxford. Our custom day trip guarantees unbeatable low prices, deluxe coaches, experienced guides and the flexibility to add…Not LP reviewed
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Harrods
Both garish and stylish at the same time, perennially crowded Harrods is an obligatory stop for London’s tourists, from the cash strapped to the big, big spenders. High on kitsch, the ‘Egyptian Elevator’ with its ex-owner Mohammed Al Fayed sphinxes, resembles something hauled in from an Indiana Jones epic, while the memorial fountain to Dodi and Di merely adds surrealism. Piped opera will be thrown at you as you recoil from the price tags: after an hour of browsing, you may just want to lie down on one of the doubles in the 2nd-floor bedroom department. But the stock is astonishing and you’ll swoon over the spectacular food hall.
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Garrison Public House
The Garrison’s traditional green-tiled exterior and rather distressed, beach-shack interior are both appealing. It boasts an actual cinema (free films every Sunday 7pm, intermissions for drinks provided) in its basement, but it’s the food – razor clams, black face lamb gigot with roast squash, and pumpkin, chickpea and courgette cake – that lures punters to this evergreen Bermondsey gastropub. If you don’t fancy nearly bashing your neighbour’s elbow every time you lift your fork, though, come for breakfast (8am to 11.30am weekdays, 9am to 11.30am weekends).
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1 Lombard St
Cassoulet goes head-to-head with bangers-and-mash in the brasserie, under the domes of a heritage-listed bank building, and both the French and the Brits come out winners.
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