Things to Do in Shoreditch: Plan It by the Day

Shoreditch is the part of London where the day you visit matters more than anything else you decide. The best thing here happens on Sundays only, the second best on Thursdays, and one of the most interesting is shut on Mondays. Arrive on the wrong day and you will conclude, as a lot of people do, that Shoreditch is a street of bars and some graffiti.

Two things to settle before anything else.

Most of what is sold to you as Shoreditch is not in Shoreditch. Dennis Severs’ House and Old Spitalfields Market are Spitalfields. Columbia Road is Bethnal Green. The Museum of the Home is Hoxton. They are all within a twenty minute walk of each other and all worth the trip, so this guide covers them, but if a stranger tells you they live in Shoreditch it is worth knowing how elastic the word has become.

The markets are the reason to come, and they are not open when you think. That is the whole planning problem, and the rest of this page solves it.

Dennis Severs' House

Address

18 Folgate Street, Spitalfields

Nearest

Liverpool Street or Shoreditch High Street

Price

Day visit 16 pounds, Silent Night visit 25 pounds, both plus a 1.50 booking fee

Standing

Managed by The Spitalfields Trust, which also holds 19 Princelet Street

How to get in

Book online. Their own note is that walk up tickets are subject to availability, which on a house this small means most evenings they are not. Take the Silent Night visit over the day one: the rooms are lit by candle and the whole conceit only works in the dark.

A Georgian house arranged as though its eighteenth century occupants walked out of the room a moment before you walked into it: fires lit, food on the table, a chamber pot not yet emptied. The house describes itself as “an amazing survival and a total fantasy”, which is exactly right and is also the only honest way to describe it.

There are three ways in. The Relaxed Day Visit permits discreet conversation. The Silent Day Visit does not, and is “enlivened by the sound of ticking clocks and the scent of perfume and cloves.” The Silent Night Visit is the one to book.

Beyond those, the Dennis Severs’ Tour at £75 is a performance rather than a visit, devised and directed by The Gentle Author, for an audience of no more than seven. There are also Armchair Concerts at £38, which this autumn are Baroque recitals by the violist Dominic Stokes.

Old Spitalfields Market

Address

16 Horner Square, E1 6EW

Nearest

Liverpool Street or Shoreditch High Street

Hours

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday 10am to 6pm by its visitor page, 8pm by the footer of the same page. Thursday 8am to 6pm. Saturday 10am to 6pm. Sunday 10am to 5pm

Standing

45 food and drink traders, 60 shops and stalls, seven days a week

How to get in

Thursday is the day, and the hours tell you so: it opens at 8am instead of 10am because Thursday is the Antiques Market, and the dealers do not keep shop hours. Every other day it opens at ten.

A covered Victorian market hall with a permanent trade in food and shops, and a different specialist market laid over the top of it depending on the day. Thursday is antiques and the reason to plan around it. There is a separate Vinyl Market for records.

Check individual shops and restaurants for their own times: the hall’s hours are the hall’s, and the traders inside it set their own.

Columbia Road Flower Market

Address

Columbia Road, Bethnal Green

Nearest

Hoxton or Bethnal Green

Hours

Sundays only, from 8am until around 3pm

Price

Free to walk

Standing

One of the few streets in the country made up of sixty independent businesses

How to get in

Sundays, and go at eight. The street is narrow and by eleven it is a slow moving crowd rather than a market. Some of the sixty shops also open during the week, when you can actually see them, but the stalls are Sunday only.

The market’s own description of its hours is “Sundays from 8am til 3(ish!)”, and that parenthesis is doing real work: the end of the day is when the sellers decide it is. Go early to see it at its best rather than in the crush of late morning. On Saturday 31 October 2026 the street also holds London’s Day of the Dead, with music, dance, flowers, costume and a procession.

Behind the stalls is the better half of the street: small galleries next to delis next to antique shops, plus the pubs and cafés. A walk along Columbia Road is a lovely way to start a Sunday morning, in the market’s own words, which if anything undersells it.

Museum of the Home

Address

136 Kingsland Road, E2 8EA, Hoxton

Nearest

Hoxton

Hours

10am to 5pm, Tuesday to Sunday and Bank Holiday Mondays

Price

Free

How to get in

No booking required, which at a free London museum is worth saying out loud. Closed Mondays: this is the one that catches people who planned a Monday around it. The Almshouse 14 tours run every Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday at 12pm and 2pm, last 45 minutes and are free, but you reserve a place at the welcome desk on the day, and the almshouse rooms are not wheelchair accessible.

A set of eighteenth century almshouses holding Rooms Through Time, which shows how domestic life changed over four centuries, one room per period. The Almshouse 14 tours take you into the restored dwellings themselves and show what it was like to live in Hackney two hundred years ago.

It is free, it is quiet, and it is the best building in this guide that nobody arrives intending to visit.

BOXPARK Shoreditch

Address

2 to 10 Bethnal Green Road, E1 6GY

Nearest

Shoreditch High Street

Hours

Monday to Thursday 11am to 11pm, Friday and Saturday 11am to 11.45pm, Sunday 11am to 10.30pm

How to get in

Come for the programme rather than the food. There is something on most nights, from live music and quiz nights to sports screenings and comedy, and a happy hour from 5pm to 8pm Monday to Thursday. It is loud and it is communal seating, so it solves an evening for a group and not a dinner for two.

A row of shipping containers holding street food traders and a bar, running an events programme most nights of the week. It is the obvious Shoreditch thing to do and it is genuinely good at what it is, as long as what you want is that.

Brat

Address

First floor, 4 Redchurch Street, E1 6JL

Nearest

Shoreditch High Street

Hours

Kitchen Monday to Sunday, 12pm to 10pm

Booking

Online, or bookings@bratrestaurant.com

Standing

A second site, Brat X Climpson's Arch, at Arch 374 Helmsley Place in Hackney

How to get in

Read the address again: first floor. There is no ground floor dining room and people walk past it. The kitchen runs straight through from noon to ten, seven days, which in this postcode makes it the reliable answer to an awkward hour.

Wood fire cooking, one Michelin star, and the room that did more than any other to make Redchurch Street a destination rather than a shortcut. The rest of the Shoreditch restaurants are arranged by the hour they stop serving. The seven day, ten hour kitchen is the practical point: almost nothing else good around here is open at four o’clock on a Tuesday.

How to plan it by the day

Sunday is the best day and it is not close. Columbia Road from eight, breakfast on the street, Old Spitalfields from ten, the Museum of the Home in the afternoon. Everything in this guide is open.

Thursday is the connoisseur’s day. Old Spitalfields antiques from 8am, which is the one morning the hall belongs to dealers rather than to shoppers. Dennis Severs’ House in the evening.

Monday is the day to go somewhere else. The Museum of the Home is closed, there is no market on Columbia Road, and Old Spitalfields is trading without a specialist market over the top of it. Shoreditch on a Monday is bars and graffiti, which is how it gets its reputation.

Brunch in Shoreditch

Two corrections before the recommendations, because the lists get both wrong.

Rochelle Canteen does not serve brunch. Its own opening times are lunch from midday to 2.45pm, Monday to Sunday, and supper 5.30pm to 7.30pm Wednesday to Saturday, with guests asked to leave by 10pm. It is a lunch room in a walled garden, it opened in 2004, and it is very good. It is not somewhere to eat at half past ten.

Dishoom Shoreditch is mostly a walk in cafe and says so. On Boundary Street, open all day every day, with breakfast running to a bacon naan roll, a kejriwal or house granola. The booking rule is the useful part: groups of any size can book during the day, but after 6pm it only takes bookings for six or more. So for brunch you walk in, and for dinner in a pair you also walk in.

For the wider list, the best brunch in London covers the Sri Lankan breakfast at Hoppers, which is 12.50 pounds, the same price as its smoked salmon plate, and takes no bookings either.

The best bars in Shoreditch

Two of them are on the world list and one is a basement that does not want to be found.

Callooh Callay has been on Rivington Street since 2008 and is the one with the reputation: it has appeared in the World’s 50 Best Bars and is ranked in the top 500 globally today. The theme is Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, there is a hidden room called the JubJub Bar, and the menus have taken the form of cassette tapes and comic books. It also runs cocktail masterclasses, which is the thing to know if you are organising something rather than just drinking.

Happiness Forgets is in the basement at 8 to 9 Hoxton Square, N1 6NU, and opens at 5pm every day. Its own description of itself is five words long: great cocktails, no wallies. There is now a second one in St Albans called No Nuisance.

For the wider list, the best bars in London covers Nightjar on City Road and Satan’s Whiskers, both of which are a short walk from here.

Shoreditch pubs

The Old Blue Last is the one with the published bargain: 4.60 pounds a drink for early birds, weekdays from 1pm to 5pm. That is a City-adjacent postcode at a price nothing else around here matches, and it is on their own site rather than an offer you have to ask about.

It is also a live music venue with a seven day programme, and it has 300 years of history behind it. Early shows by Arctic Monkeys, Amy Winehouse, IDLES and George Ezra all happened here. Sunday Jazz runs every week at 7pm and is free, as are a good number of the week’s other gigs.

The Ten Bells in Spitalfields is the historic one, with roots in the 18th century and preserved interiors. It is now run by the London Beer Factory, so the taps are LBF brews plus guests, and there are two private rooms upstairs.

The oldest pubs in London covers which age claims actually hold up, and the best pubs covers the rest of the city.

Practical notes

Shoreditch High Street is the station, not Old Street. The Overground platform at Shoreditch High Street puts you between BOXPARK and Redchurch Street. Old Street is a roundabout fifteen minutes north west and serves a different part of the area.

Walk between them. Old Spitalfields to Columbia Road is about fifteen minutes, Columbia Road to the Museum of the Home about ten. The walking is part of it and the streets change character every few hundred metres.

The good things are early and the loud things are late. Both markets are morning events. The bars are the evening. There is a flat hour in the middle of the afternoon when Shoreditch has very little to offer, and Brat is the answer to it.

Everything here was taken from each venue’s own published information and rechecked on 28 September 2026. Market days and museum hours change. Confirm before travelling.

The other districts covered here: Soho, Mayfair, Notting Hill, Marylebone, Chelsea and Knightsbridge. Each is written the same way, on what the places themselves publish rather than on atmosphere.

Where to go next

Brick Lane has its own page, with which of the five markets are open on a weekday and which only at the weekend.

The Vietnamese guide is the one that belongs to this postcode most directly: Kingsland Road, running north out of Shoreditch, has held London’s Vietnamese restaurants for decades and is known to everyone who eats there as Pho Mile.

For the drinking rather than the daytime, London’s hidden bars covers the rooms in this postcode that are worth finding, and London after dark covers the rest of the evening.

Spitalfields Market sits at the southern edge of this postcode and needs reading before a visit rather than after. The Victorian hall and the estate wrapped around it publish separate opening hours, Thursday is the antiques day and starts two hours early, and the restaurants on one side shut at four at weekends.

Shoreditch now holds a Michelin starred vegan restaurant. Plates, on Old Street, has a star and the Michelin Guide lists its cuisine simply as Vegan. It opens Wednesday to Saturday, takes no walk ins and caps its tables at six. The vegan guide covers the conditions in full.

Soho is the west end version of the same idea and works in reverse: nothing there depends on which day you go. For the wider field, our main London guide covers a visit end to end.

Questions we get asked

Where is Shoreditch in London?

East London, immediately north of the City, with Liverpool Street on its southern edge and Hoxton above it. Shoreditch High Street and Liverpool Street are the two stations to aim for. Be aware that the name has stretched: Old Spitalfields Market and Dennis Severs' House are Spitalfields, Columbia Road is Bethnal Green and the Museum of the Home is Hoxton, though all are within a twenty minute walk.

What borough is Shoreditch in?

The London Borough of Hackney. It was its own metropolitan borough until 1965, which is part of why the name is still used so loosely for the area around it. The neighbouring bits people call Shoreditch are split between Hackney and Tower Hamlets, so the postcode on a listing is a better guide than the name.

Is Shoreditch east London?

Yes. It sits just north of the City of London and is firmly part of the East End, in the London Borough of Hackney. It is not central London in the Zone 1 tourist sense, though Liverpool Street is on its edge and puts it a few minutes from the City.

What is there to do in Shoreditch?

Markets, mostly, and which day you come matters more than anything else you decide. Old Spitalfields is the antiques market on Thursdays, when it opens at 8am rather than 10am. Columbia Road is Sunday morning only. Dennis Severs' House on Folgate Street is the one to book ahead, and the Silent Night visit is the version worth having. Come on the wrong day and you will conclude Shoreditch is a street of bars and some graffiti.

Is Shoreditch safe?

Yes, with the caution any busy nightlife district deserves. It is well populated until late and the streets you will be on are the busy ones. The genuine risk is phone snatching, which is a known problem across east London and is opportunistic rather than confrontational: do not walk along holding a phone out in front of you, particularly near the main roads late at night.

Where should you eat in Shoreditch?

The area has become one of the strongest eating districts in London, and the Shoreditch restaurants guide covers it properly. For a market day, Old Spitalfields has 45 food and drink traders under one Victorian roof, which solves lunch without a booking.

How should you spend a day in Shoreditch?

Pick Sunday. Columbia Road Flower Market from 8am, which is stalls only on Sundays, then Old Spitalfields Market from 10am, then the Museum of the Home in the afternoon, which is free and open Tuesday to Sunday. That sequence is about thirty five minutes of walking end to end and everything in it is open on the same day.

Is it worth visiting Shoreditch?

On the right day, yes, and on the wrong one not especially. The two markets that justify the trip run on fixed days: Columbia Road is Sunday only, and Old Spitalfields is at its best on Thursday, when it opens at 8am for the antiques dealers. Come on a Monday and you will find bars and street art, which is not what the area is actually for.

What are the hidden gems in Shoreditch?

Dennis Severs' House at 18 Folgate Street, a Georgian house arranged as though its occupants left the room a moment ago, best taken as the candlelit Silent Night visit. And the Museum of the Home on Kingsland Road, a set of eighteenth century almshouses showing four centuries of domestic interiors, which is free, quiet and almost nobody arrives intending to visit.

Which station is best for Shoreditch?

Shoreditch High Street on the Overground, which puts you between BOXPARK and Redchurch Street. Old Street is a roundabout about fifteen minutes north west and serves a different part of the area, and Liverpool Street is the one for Spitalfields and Dennis Severs' House.