The problem with most London lists is that they were written for someone who has never been. If you have already done the London Eye and stood outside Buckingham Palace, none of that is useful. This is the other list: what London is actually good at right now, and where people who live here spend a Saturday.
Museums, but at night
Several of the big museums run late openings, and they are a completely different experience from the daytime version. Fewer pushchairs, a bar in the room, and often music or talks. The V&A and Tate both run evening programmes, and the National Gallery opens late on Fridays. Check the dates before you plan an evening around one, because the schedules move, but if one lands on the night you are free it is the best value entertainment in the city.
The smaller institutions are better still. Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields is the house of an architect who never threw anything away, left exactly as he arranged it: sarcophagi in the basement, paintings on hinged walls that swing open to reveal more paintings. It is free, it is small, and it is unlike anywhere else in Europe.
Where to actually eat
Maltby Street Market on a Saturday is the better version of Borough: smaller, less photographed, and the traders are cooking rather than packaging. Go hungry and early.
Soho after eight is still the densest concentration of good small restaurants in the country, and most of the best ones do not take bookings for two. The trick is to treat the wait as part of it and have a drink somewhere while you queue, which Soho is extremely well set up for.
For a proper evening rather than a meal, our list of the best bars in London covers where to go before and after.
Green space that is not Hyde Park
Hampstead Heath is the one Londoners actually use. It is not landscaped, it is genuinely wild in places, and the view from Parliament Hill is the best free thing in London. The swimming ponds are open year round if you are serious about it, and the pub at the top of the hill has been there since before any of this was London.
The Barbican Conservatory is a tropical glasshouse hidden inside a brutalist housing estate, open limited hours, free, and almost always empty. It is one of the strangest and most pleasant rooms in the city.
Markets, on the right day
Half of London’s markets are tourist traps and half are genuinely good, and the difference is entirely which day you go. Columbia Road is flowers and only on a Sunday morning, and it is worth the early start. Broadway Market in Hackney is Saturdays. Brick Lane is Sunday and is more crowded than it is good, but the streets either side of it are worth an hour.
Live music in a room that matters
Wilton’s Music Hall in Whitechapel is the oldest surviving grand music hall in the world, saved from demolition and deliberately left looking its age. Whatever is on, the building is the reason to go. It also has a bar in what used to be the mahogany-panelled saloon, which is reason enough on its own.
For jazz, the small rooms beat the famous ones. Soho has several and most take walk-ins on a weeknight.
The view, done properly
Skip the paid observation decks. The Garden at 120 in the City is a rooftop garden, free, open to anyone, and looks straight at the Gherkin and the Walkie Talkie. Greenwich Park gives you the whole skyline from the south with the Observatory behind you. Both cost nothing and neither has a queue.
If you would rather have the view with a drink in your hand, London’s rooftop bars is the list for that.
Odd corners
God’s Own Junkyard in Walthamstow is a warehouse full of salvaged neon signs, open at weekends, with a cafe in the middle of it. It is completely mad and takes about forty minutes including the journey out there.
The Postal Museum’s Mail Rail puts you on a miniature train in the tunnels under Mount Pleasant that carried London’s post for most of the twentieth century. It is a genuinely strange fifteen minutes.
How to plan it
Pick a neighbourhood, not a list. London punishes zig-zagging. An afternoon in one area beats three landmarks spread across the city, every time.
Sundays are not dead. Columbia Road, the markets and most museums run on Sundays. Shops shut early, and the Tube runs a thinner service, but the good stuff is open.
Check opening days before you travel. Several of the best small museums close on Mondays, and the free rooftop gardens keep office hours. Nothing on this list is worth an unplanned journey.
If you have only a day and it needs to be efficient, things to do in central London keeps everything inside Zone 1. If you want the genuinely strange rather than the currently good, unique things to do in London goes further in that direction. And the whole thing sits inside our wider guide to what to do in London.