{"areas":[{"slug":"angel-islington","name":"Angel & Islington","verdict":"A mile of Upper Street, two small theatres and an antiques passage, on the old road north out of London.","note":"Islington was a village on the Great North Road, the last stop before London for drovers bringing cattle to Smithfield and the first inn for anyone coming south. One of those inns was the Angel, which is why the junction is called that and the village is not. What turned it into a town was water and buses: the New River, a channel cut in 1613 to bring clean water down from Hertfordshire, ends here, and the horse omnibus arrived in 1830. The population went from ten thousand in 1801 to over three hundred thousand by 1891.\n\nIt was somewhere to go out long before it was fashionable. Upper Street had fifty-six alehouse keepers on it by 1716; the Victorians replaced them with music halls, and Collins's on the Green ran from 1862 to 1958. Sadler's Wells, which began as a spa with a theatre attached to it, is still going and is now where the country's dance companies perform.\n\nThe Georgian terraces went cheap after the war and were bought back street by street from the 1960s, which is how Islington acquired its reputation for politics and dinner parties. What a visitor gets is Upper Street, a mile of restaurants and small shops; Camden Passage, antiques on Wednesdays and Saturdays; Chapel Market, which still sells fruit and vegetables to the people who live here; and two theatres, the Almeida and the King's Head, small enough to see the actors' faces.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-angel-islington-4.jpg?v=9274c558","thumb":"/img/area-angel-islington-4-480.jpg?v=f51ada2e","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The Regent's Canal on a bright spring day: narrowboats moored along both banks, a willow in new leaf, a lock and a footbridge in the distance, an old brick chimney and warehouse on the right and glass towers beyond, with people walking the towpath.","caption":"The Regent's Canal at Angel."},"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-angel-islington.jpg?v=e39c533c","thumb":"/img/area-angel-islington-480.jpg?v=baa1c5cd","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The Screen on the Green cinema on Islington Green: a curved white front under a red neon sign, with the week's films on the letterboard","caption":"The Screen on the Green, on Islington Green.","credit":"Photo by Philafrenzy, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Screen_on_the_Green_14_Sept._2016.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-angel-islington-3.jpg?v=ac3e2d39","thumb":"/img/area-angel-islington-3-480.jpg?v=81d9e451","width":1024,"height":682,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The Camden Head's Victorian pub front in low evening sun: gilt lettering on a dark fascia, etched glass, polished granite pilasters and red brick above.","caption":"The Camden Head, on Camden Passage behind Upper Street.","credit":"Photo by Jim Osley, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Islington_,_%22Camden_Head%22_public_house,_Camden_Passage_-_geograph.org.uk_-_7635570.jpg"}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Liverpool Road","Holloway Road","St Paul's Road","Essex Road","City Road"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.1056,51.5322],[-0.1057,51.53321],[-0.10592,51.53316],[-0.1069,51.53386],[-0.1072,51.53505],[-0.10684,51.53882],[-0.10609,51.54115],[-0.10747,51.54466],[-0.1108,51.54947],[-0.11,51.55091],[-0.10581,51.54765],[-0.10314,51.54613],[-0.10217,51.54609],[-0.10048,51.5463],[-0.09652,51.54729],[-0.09287,51.5472],[-0.08819,51.5468],[-0.0873,51.54644],[-0.08794,51.54549],[-0.08851,51.54507],[-0.09146,51.54299],[-0.09556,51.54049],[-0.09246,51.53857],[-0.0895,51.5359],[-0.09285,51.53446],[-0.09499,51.53355],[-0.09709,51.53288],[-0.097,51.53285],[-0.0951,51.5301],[-0.09538,51.52919],[-0.10411,51.53144],[-0.1056,51.5322]]]},"centre":[-0.10015,51.537],"bounds":[[-0.1108,51.52919],[-0.0873,51.55091]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":44,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":6,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":3,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":4,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"breakfast","name":"Breakfast & Brunch","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"beer","name":"Beer","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"cocktails","name":"Cocktails","count":3,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"wine","name":"Wine","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"beautiful-streets","name":"Beautiful Streets","count":3,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"8TURN","slug":"8turn","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/islington-assembly-hall/8turn/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-27","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.541548,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"K-pop in a nine-hundred-capacity room."},{"name":"Alexandra Haddow: Deadly (work in progress)","slug":"alexandra-haddow-deadly-work-in-progress","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-bill-murray/alexandra-haddow-deadly-work-in-progress/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-09-10"},"lat":51.536251,"lng":-0.098819,"verdict":"A quarter to ten, an unfinished hour, five pounds or so."},{"name":"Allie Sherlock","slug":"allie-sherlock","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/islington-assembly-hall/allie-sherlock/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-09-16"},"lat":51.541548,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"The Irish singer who started out busking on Grafton Street."},{"name":"Almeida Theatre Tour","slug":"almeida-theatre-tour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/almeida-theatre/almeida-theatre-tour/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.53944,"lng":-0.103076,"verdict":"Behind the scenes of a converted Islington music hall, on selected Saturdays."},{"name":"Aterciopelados","slug":"aterciopelados","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/islington-assembly-hall/aterciopelados/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-04","to":"2026-10-04"},"lat":51.541548,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"The Colombian rock band who have been at it since 1992."},{"name":"Bongeziwe Mabandla + Zola Marcelle","slug":"bongeziwe-mabandla-zola-marcelle","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/union-chapel/bongeziwe-mabandla-zola-marcelle/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-19","to":"2026-11-19"},"lat":51.544765,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"Xhosa songwriting with a folk guitar and a producer's ear, from the Eastern Cape by way of Johannesburg."},{"name":"Carbon Based Lifeforms","slug":"carbon-based-lifeforms","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/islington-assembly-hall/carbon-based-lifeforms/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.541548,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"Swedish ambient techno, played to a seated room."},{"name":"Carla Accardi","slug":"carla-accardi","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/estorick-collection-of-modern-italian-art/carla-accardi/","runs":{"from":"2027-01-20","to":"2027-06-13"},"lat":51.543915,"lng":-0.100449,"verdict":"The first UK institutional show for the post-war Italian abstractionist."},{"name":"Catherine Bohart: work in progress","slug":"catherine-bohart-work-in-progress","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-bill-murray/catherine-bohart-work-in-progress/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-15","to":"2026-09-15"},"lat":51.536251,"lng":-0.098819,"verdict":"The Irish comedian trying an hour out before it is finished."},{"name":"Charlotte Dos Santos + TRIADA","slug":"charlotte-dos-santos-triada","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/union-chapel/charlotte-dos-santos-triada/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-18","to":"2026-11-18"},"lat":51.544765,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"A Norwegian-Brazilian singer and producer whose debut made Pitchfork sit up, back with a band."},{"name":"Dave Okumu and Friends: Music that Changes the World","slug":"dave-okumu-and-friends-music-that-changes-the-world","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/union-chapel/dave-okumu-and-friends-music-that-changes-the-world/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-15","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.544765,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"Nina Simone to Sly Stone to Kendrick Lamar, in a Victorian chapel, with a band assembled for the night."},{"name":"Desire Under the Elms","slug":"desire-under-the-elms","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/almeida-theatre/desire-under-the-elms/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-10","to":"2026-12-23"},"lat":51.53944,"lng":-0.103076,"verdict":"O'Neill's New England farm tragedy, which is Greek underneath."},{"name":"Deva Premal and Miten","slug":"deva-premal-and-miten","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/union-chapel/deva-premal-and-miten/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-30","to":"2026-09-30"},"lat":51.544765,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"Sanskrit mantra sung to a full chapel, which is what the room was built for."},{"name":"Drink the Sea","slug":"drink-the-sea","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/islington-assembly-hall/drink-the-sea/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-10-02"},"lat":51.541548,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"At Islington Assembly Hall."},{"name":"Exploring Birdsong","slug":"exploring-birdsong","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/islington-assembly-hall/exploring-birdsong/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-24"},"lat":51.541548,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"A Liverpool trio with piano, voice and drums and no guitar at all."},{"name":"Gaerea","slug":"gaerea","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/islington-assembly-hall/gaerea/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.541548,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"Portuguese black metal, played in hoods."},{"name":"Golden Boy","slug":"golden-boy","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/almeida-theatre/golden-boy/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.53944,"lng":-0.103076,"verdict":"Clifford Odets's 1937 play about a violinist who becomes a prize-fighter."},{"name":"Grace Petrie","slug":"grace-petrie","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/union-chapel/grace-petrie/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.544765,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"Protest songs with jokes, in a Victorian chapel with pews."},{"name":"Harriet Kemsley: work in progress","slug":"harriet-kemsley-work-in-progress","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-bill-murray/harriet-kemsley-work-in-progress/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-14","to":"2026-09-14"},"lat":51.536251,"lng":-0.098819,"verdict":"New material, half six on a Monday."},{"name":"Hernan Bas: TIME TO SHINE! (the salesmen)","slug":"hernan-bas-time-to-shine-the-salesmen","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/victoria-miro/hernan-bas-time-to-shine-the-salesmen/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.530417,"lng":-0.095107,"verdict":"Paintings about the people on the wrong side of a transaction."},{"name":"Ivo Graham: One hour talking about lime bikes","slug":"ivo-graham-one-hour-talking-about-lime-bikes","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-bill-murray/ivo-graham-one-hour-talking-about-lime-bikes/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-14","to":"2026-09-14"},"lat":51.536251,"lng":-0.098819,"verdict":"Exactly what the title says, for an hour."},{"name":"Joan as Police Woman: twenty years of Real Life","slug":"joan-as-police-woman-twenty-years-of-real-life","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/union-chapel/joan-as-police-woman-twenty-years-of-real-life/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-06","to":"2026-11-06"},"lat":51.544765,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"Joan Wasser's first album, twenty years on."},{"name":"Khalif Tahir Thompson: Send in the Clowns","slug":"khalif-tahir-thompson-send-in-the-clowns","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/victoria-miro/khalif-tahir-thompson-send-in-the-clowns/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-08","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.530417,"lng":-0.095107,"verdict":"Brooklyn interiors, remembered and rebuilt in paint and collage."},{"name":"Kyoto Jazz Massive with the Echoes of a New Dawn Orchestra","slug":"kyoto-jazz-massive-with-the-echoes-of-a-new-dawn-orchestra","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/islington-assembly-hall/kyoto-jazz-massive-with-the-echoes-of-a-new-dawn-orchestra/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-22","to":"2026-11-22"},"lat":51.541548,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"The Japanese duo Gilles Peterson championed, back in Europe after fifteen years away."},{"name":"La K'onga","slug":"la-konga","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/islington-assembly-hall/la-konga/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-06","to":"2026-10-06"},"lat":51.541548,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"Argentine cuarteto, which is dance music from C\u00f3rdoba and nowhere else."},{"name":"Laibach","slug":"laibach","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/islington-assembly-hall/laibach/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-29","to":"2026-09-29"},"lat":51.541548,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"The Slovenian group who have spent forty-five years being deliberately hard to read."},{"name":"Magnum","slug":"magnum","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/islington-assembly-hall/magnum/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.541548,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"Birmingham melodic rock, more than fifty years on."},{"name":"Mary Coughlan","slug":"mary-coughlan","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/union-chapel/mary-coughlan/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-10-02"},"lat":51.544765,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"An Irish singer who has been telling the truth on stage since 1985."},{"name":"Mexican Independence Day 2026: Grupo Ca\u00f1averal","slug":"mexican-independence-day-2026-grupo-canaveral","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/islington-assembly-hall/mexican-independence-day-2026-grupo-canaveral/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-09-13"},"lat":51.541548,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"Cumbia for the fiestas patrias, in an art deco town hall."},{"name":"Os Garotin","slug":"os-garotin","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/islington-assembly-hall/os-garotin/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.541548,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"Brazilian soul out of S\u00e3o Gon\u00e7alo, three voices and a lot of warmth."},{"name":"Rich Fulcher: work in progress","slug":"rich-fulcher-work-in-progress","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-bill-murray/rich-fulcher-work-in-progress/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-09-10"},"lat":51.536251,"lng":-0.098819,"verdict":"The Mighty Boosh's Bob Fossil trying an hour out."},{"name":"Roast Battle UK","slug":"roast-battle-uk","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-bill-murray/roast-battle-uk/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.536251,"lng":-0.098819,"verdict":"Comedians insulting each other to a judged scoreline, at eleven at night."},{"name":"Rory O'Hanlon: Morning Guys","slug":"rory-ohanlon-morning-guys","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-bill-murray/rory-ohanlon-morning-guys/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-09-13"},"lat":51.536251,"lng":-0.098819,"verdict":"The Irish comedian's hour, seven o'clock on a Sunday."},{"name":"Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes","slug":"sam-gendel-and-sam-wilkes","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/union-chapel/sam-gendel-and-sam-wilkes/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-17","to":"2026-11-17"},"lat":51.544765,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"A saxophone treated as a synthesiser, a bass treated as a band, in a chapel with no amplification to spare."},{"name":"Sam Serrano: Mars","slug":"sam-serrano-mars","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-bill-murray/sam-serrano-mars/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-09-13"},"lat":51.536251,"lng":-0.098819,"verdict":"A Sunday afternoon hour at Angel Comedy's pub."},{"name":"Sarah Jane Morris: Sisterhood 2","slug":"sarah-jane-morris-sisterhood-2","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/union-chapel/sarah-jane-morris-sisterhood-2/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-20","to":"2026-09-20"},"lat":51.544765,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"The voice from Don't Leave Me This Way, four decades on, singing other women's songs."},{"name":"Sergi Polo: LIVE in Spanish","slug":"sergi-polo-live-in-spanish","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-bill-murray/sergi-polo-live-in-spanish/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-15","to":"2026-09-15"},"lat":51.536251,"lng":-0.098819,"verdict":"Stand-up in Spanish, in an Islington pub."},{"name":"Shawn Colvin: thirty years of A Few Small Repairs","slug":"shawn-colvin-thirty-years-of-a-few-small-repairs","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/union-chapel/shawn-colvin-thirty-years-of-a-few-small-repairs/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.544765,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"The album with Sunny Came Home on it, played in full."},{"name":"The Cleaners from Venus","slug":"the-cleaners-from-venus","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/islington-assembly-hall/the-cleaners-from-venus/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-30","to":"2026-10-05"},"lat":51.541548,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"Martin Newell's home-taped English pop, played live twice."},{"name":"The Hoosiers","slug":"the-hoosiers","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/islington-assembly-hall/the-hoosiers/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-13","to":"2026-10-13"},"lat":51.541548,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"Worried About Ray, twenty years on."},{"name":"Tom Ballard: Be Funny Challenge (Impossible)","slug":"tom-ballard-be-funny-challenge-impossible","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-bill-murray/tom-ballard-be-funny-challenge-impossible/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.536251,"lng":-0.098819,"verdict":"The Australian comedian setting himself a task he says cannot be done."},{"name":"WU LYF","slug":"wu-lyf","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/islington-assembly-hall/wu-lyf/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-17"},"lat":51.541548,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"The Manchester band who broke up in 2012, playing again."},{"name":"Wanda and Marion Wulz: Avant-garde Photography in 20th-Century Italy","slug":"wanda-and-marion-wulz-avant-garde-photography-in-20th-century-italy","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/estorick-collection-of-modern-italian-art/wanda-and-marion-wulz-avant-garde-photography-in-20th-century-italy/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-12-20"},"lat":51.543915,"lng":-0.100449,"verdict":"The Trieste sisters whose studio portraits turned Futurist."},{"name":"Yasar","slug":"yasar","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/islington-assembly-hall/yasar/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-07","to":"2026-10-07"},"lat":51.541548,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"Turkish pop at Islington Assembly Hall."},{"name":"Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art","slug":"estorick-collection-of-modern-italian-art","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/estorick-collection-of-modern-italian-art/","lat":51.543915,"lng":-0.100449,"verdict":"The only collection of modern Italian art in Britain, Futurists to Morandi, in a Georgian house on Canonbury Square.","thumb":"/img/estorick-collection-of-modern-italian-art-480.jpg?v=40c6cf63","img":"/img/estorick-collection-of-modern-italian-art.jpg","w":1024,"h":473},{"name":"Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art","slug":"estorick-collection-of-modern-italian-art","cat":"art","url":"/art/estorick-collection-of-modern-italian-art/","lat":51.543915,"lng":-0.100449,"verdict":"The only collection of modern Italian art in Britain, Futurists to Morandi, in a Georgian house on Canonbury Square.","thumb":"/img/estorick-collection-of-modern-italian-art-480.jpg?v=40c6cf63","img":"/img/estorick-collection-of-modern-italian-art.jpg","w":1024,"h":473},{"name":"Victoria Miro","slug":"victoria-miro","cat":"art","url":"/art/victoria-miro/","deep":true,"lat":51.530417,"lng":-0.095107,"verdict":"A former furniture factory on the Regent's Canal, with a garden, that shows Yayoi Kusama, Grayson Perry and Chris Ofili.","thumb":"/img/victoria-miro-480.jpg?v=fcc6b905","img":"/img/victoria-miro.jpg","w":1024,"h":681},{"name":"Almeida Theatre","slug":"almeida-theatre","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/almeida-theatre/","lat":51.53944,"lng":-0.103076,"verdict":"A Victorian scientific institute, derelict for years, now 325 seats that reach the West End."},{"name":"Hen and Chickens Theatre","slug":"hen-and-chickens-theatre","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/hen-and-chickens-theatre/","lat":51.546024,"lng":-0.101947,"verdict":"Fifty-four seats above an Islington pub, running comedy and new plays since 1985."},{"name":"Islington Assembly Hall","slug":"islington-assembly-hall","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/islington-assembly-hall/","lat":51.541548,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"The art deco ballroom attached to Islington Town Hall, with the original sprung floor."},{"name":"The Bill Murray","slug":"the-bill-murray","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/the-bill-murray/","lat":51.536251,"lng":-0.098819,"verdict":"Angel Comedy's own pub, where much of the circuit tries material for free."},{"name":"The Garage","slug":"the-garage","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/the-garage/","lat":51.546754,"lng":-0.10396,"verdict":"Highbury Corner's indie room, where the band you have just heard of plays next month."},{"name":"Union Chapel","slug":"union-chapel","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/union-chapel/","lat":51.544765,"lng":-0.102439,"verdict":"A working Congregational church, a homeless drop-in and one of the best-sounding rooms in London, in that order.","thumb":"/img/union-chapel-480.jpg?v=a6c381b9","img":"/img/union-chapel.jpg","w":684,"h":1024},{"name":"Pophams","slug":"pophams","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/pophams/","lat":51.536851,"lng":-0.096338,"verdict":"A bakery first, but the coffee is not an afterthought."},{"name":"Trampoline","slug":"trampoline","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/trampoline/","lat":51.534966,"lng":-0.103826,"verdict":"A Camden Passage cafe that trains and employs refugees, and then helps them leave for something better."},{"name":"Vagabond N7","slug":"vagabond-n7","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/vagabond-n7/","lat":51.54812,"lng":-0.10674,"verdict":"Holloway Road, from one of north London's own roasters."},{"name":"Buns From Home","slug":"buns-from-home-angel","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/buns-from-home-angel/","lat":51.535009,"lng":-0.10361,"verdict":"Camden Passage, and still selling buns long after every other bakery has locked up."},{"name":"Copains Islington","slug":"copains-islington","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/copains-islington/","lat":51.539091,"lng":-0.102556,"verdict":"Gluten-free croissants, babka and brioche on Upper Street, from a bakery that makes nothing else."},{"name":"Jolene Colebrooke Row","slug":"jolene-colebrooke-row","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/jolene-colebrooke-row/","lat":51.536531,"lng":-0.101402,"verdict":"Stone-ground flour, own farm, and a shop that shuts at three."},{"name":"Sourdough Sophia","slug":"sourdough-sophia","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/sourdough-sophia/","lat":51.539291,"lng":-0.098331,"verdict":"Essex Road, and later on a Sunday than most of its rivals."},{"name":"Badiani Angel","slug":"badiani-angel","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/badiani-angel/","lat":51.535047,"lng":-0.103576,"verdict":"A Florentine gelateria among the antique shops of Camden Passage."},{"name":"Brother Marcus","slug":"brother-marcus-angel","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/brother-marcus-angel/","lat":51.53525,"lng":-0.1036,"verdict":"Eastern Mediterranean breakfast in the antiques passage."},{"name":"Ottolenghi","slug":"ottolenghi","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/ottolenghi/","lat":51.539749,"lng":-0.10225,"verdict":"Meringues in the window, shakshuka behind them."},{"name":"House of Hammerton","slug":"house-of-hammerton","cat":"beer","url":"/beer/house-of-hammerton/","lat":51.547995,"lng":-0.106557,"verdict":"The Islington brewery's own pub, a stroll from the Emirates."},{"name":"69 Colebrooke Row","slug":"69-colebrooke-row","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/69-colebrooke-row/","lat":51.53649,"lng":-0.101042,"verdict":"\"The bar with no name\" \u2014 a tiny room that changed London drinking."},{"name":"Homeboy","slug":"homeboy","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/homeboy/","lat":51.53898,"lng":-0.09827,"verdict":"An Irish-run bar on Essex Road with a Guinness and a good martini."},{"name":"Tramps Bar","slug":"tramps-bar","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/tramps-bar/","lat":51.530085,"lng":-0.094964,"verdict":"A small Hoxton bar with no interest in impressing you."},{"name":"The Sampler","slug":"the-sampler","cat":"wine","url":"/wine/the-sampler/","lat":51.542795,"lng":-0.102857,"verdict":"Eighty wines open at once, poured by the machine in whatever measure you like."},{"name":"Camden Passage","slug":"camden-passage","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/camden-passage/","lat":51.5356,"lng":-0.102999,"verdict":"A narrow pedestrian lane off Upper Street, lined with antique dealers and Georgian shopfronts.","thumb":"/img/street-camden-passage-480.jpg?v=f679d086","img":"/img/street-camden-passage.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Canonbury Square","slug":"canonbury-square","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/canonbury-square/","lat":51.543646,"lng":-0.099882,"verdict":"Islington's first square, and still its quietest: brown brick and plane trees round a garden.","thumb":"/img/street-canonbury-square-480.jpg?v=3fe3d784","img":"/img/street-canonbury-square.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Duncan Terrace","slug":"duncan-terrace","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/duncan-terrace/","lat":51.53252,"lng":-0.103973,"verdict":"A Georgian terrace facing a long ribbon of garden, with a church spire closing the view.","thumb":"/img/street-duncan-terrace-480.jpg?v=db99b200","img":"/img/street-duncan-terrace.jpg","w":768,"h":1024}]},{"slug":"bayswater-paddington","name":"Bayswater & Paddington","verdict":"Two neighbourhoods either side of a railway: canal boats and stucco terraces, and the platform Paddington Bear was found on.","note":"Paddington is the station and what grew round it. Brunel's terminus opened in 1838 and was rebuilt in 1854 with the iron and glass train shed still over the platforms; before the trains there was the canal, which reached here in 1801 and gave the district a basin full of narrowboats and a corner called Little Venice, where three waterways meet under willow trees.\n\nBayswater is the housing: cream stucco terraces and garden squares laid out from the 1820s on a plan meant to rival Belgravia. It never quite managed it, and that is the making of the place. The big houses became hotels and flats, and the area filled with people from everywhere, so Queensway and Westbourne Grove are among the most mixed shopping streets in London and you can eat Lebanese, Greek, Brazilian and Chinese within a few hundred yards.\n\nTwo things happened here that changed the world. At St Mary's Hospital on Praed Street, Alexander Fleming came back from holiday in 1928 to a dish of bacteria he had left by an open window, found mould growing on it, and named what the mould was making penicillin; the little laboratory is a museum. And at the station in 1958, Michael Bond set down a small bear from Peru with a label round his neck and named him after it. The statue is on Platform 1, and there is usually a queue to be photographed with it.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-bayswater-paddington.jpg?v=9bda77fc","thumb":"/img/area-bayswater-paddington-480.jpg?v=f1c53b80","width":1024,"height":682,"thumb_width":500,"alt":"Narrowboats moored along the canal at Little Venice under autumn trees","caption":"Little Venice, where the canals meet.","credit":"Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London_UK_Little-Venice-01.jpg"},"figures":[],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Westway","Edgware Road","Bayswater Road"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.19702,51.50899],[-0.19738,51.50964],[-0.19772,51.51156],[-0.19719,51.5133],[-0.19627,51.51422],[-0.19504,51.51503],[-0.19917,51.51454],[-0.19991,51.51685],[-0.20077,51.518],[-0.19845,51.5186],[-0.20111,51.5216],[-0.20101,51.52159],[-0.19942,51.52158],[-0.19739,51.52131],[-0.19332,51.52011],[-0.19024,51.51968],[-0.18493,51.51956],[-0.18,51.52005],[-0.17223,51.52001],[-0.17123,51.52067],[-0.16992,51.51979],[-0.16159,51.5142],[-0.16088,51.5138],[-0.1588,51.5132],[-0.16266,51.51302],[-0.1715,51.51209],[-0.18357,51.51043],[-0.19154,51.50988],[-0.19259,51.50968],[-0.19524,51.50927],[-0.19535,51.50925],[-0.19702,51.50899]]]},"centre":[-0.18326,51.5151],"bounds":[[-0.20111,51.50899],[-0.1588,51.5216]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":16,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"outdoors","name":"Outdoors & Nature","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":4,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"breakfast","name":"Breakfast & Brunch","count":5,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"royal","name":"Royal London","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"architecture","name":"Architecture","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"monuments","name":"Monuments & Ruins","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"science","name":"Science & Engineering","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":3,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"Berliner Ensemble: De Profundis","slug":"berliner-ensemble-de-profundis","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/berliner-ensemble-de-profundis/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-10-07"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"Brecht's company performing Wilde's prison letter, in German."},{"name":"Boram Kim: Gwantong 18","slug":"boram-kim-gwantong-18","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/boram-kim-gwantong-18/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-22","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"Korean movement work, three nights."},{"name":"Chen Yi Studio: Current/y","slug":"chen-yi-studio-current-y","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/chen-yi-studio-current-y/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"Three nights of new movement work in a stripped Victorian theatre."},{"name":"D_Antidote: Non-Ordinary Services","slug":"d-antidote-non-ordinary-services","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/d-antidote-non-ordinary-services/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-28","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"Four nights of something the theatre files under neither play nor performance."},{"name":"D_Antidote: Palingenesis","slug":"d-antidote-palingenesis","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/d-antidote-palingenesis/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-29","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"The second half of D_Antidote's residency, overlapping the first."},{"name":"Det Norske Teatret: Skodespelet by Jon Fosse","slug":"det-norske-teatret-skodespelet-by-jon-fosse","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/det-norske-teatret-skodespelet-by-jon-fosse/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-26","to":"2026-11-29"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"Norway's Nynorsk national theatre performing the Nobel laureate, in Nynorsk."},{"name":"Frameless","slug":"frameless","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/frameless/","lat":51.51353,"lng":-0.16015,"verdict":"Four galleries of paintings projected floor to ceiling, moving."},{"name":"GoBoat Paddington","slug":"goboat-paddington","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/goboat-paddington/","lat":51.519022,"lng":-0.172869,"verdict":"Drive your own picnic boat out of Paddington Basin."},{"name":"Made in Prague: Ballerinas","slug":"made-in-prague-ballerinas","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/made-in-prague-ballerinas/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-06","to":"2026-11-06"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"A Czech film for one night, part of the Made in Prague festival."},{"name":"Movana Chen: Questioning the Line","slug":"movana-chen-questioning-the-line","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/movana-chen-questioning-the-line/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-14","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"The Hong Kong artist who knits shredded books into cloth."},{"name":"Poetry Club: Anthony Joseph, Rachel Long and Roger Robinson","slug":"poetry-club-anthony-joseph-rachel-long-and-roger-robinson","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/poetry-club-anthony-joseph-rachel-long-and-roger-robinson/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"Three poets, two of them T. S. Eliot Prize winners, in one room."},{"name":"Poetry Club: November","slug":"poetry-club-november","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/poetry-club-november/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-19","to":"2026-11-19"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"The Coronet's poetry night returns."},{"name":"Propstore music memorabilia: the free exhibition","slug":"propstore-music-memorabilia-the-free-exhibition","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/propstore-music-memorabilia-the-free-exhibition/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.513887,"lng":-0.158531,"verdict":"Freddie Mercury's stage clothes and John Lennon's glasses, on show for four days before they are sold."},{"name":"Tacit Group: Frankentacit","slug":"tacit-group-frankentacit","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/tacit-group-frankentacit/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-13","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"Korean audiovisual performance built from algorithms."},{"name":"The Coronet Theatre Jazz Festival: Friday","slug":"the-coronet-theatre-jazz-festival-friday","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/the-coronet-theatre-jazz-festival-friday/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-11","to":"2026-12-11"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"The first of two nights of jazz in the stripped auditorium."},{"name":"The Coronet Theatre Jazz Festival: Saturday","slug":"the-coronet-theatre-jazz-festival-saturday","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/the-coronet-theatre-jazz-festival-saturday/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-12","to":"2026-12-12"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"The second night of the Coronet's own jazz festival."},{"name":"Fleming Museum","slug":"fleming-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/fleming-museum/","lat":51.517222,"lng":-0.173056,"verdict":"The cluttered laboratory at St Mary's where Fleming noticed the mould in 1928, put back as it was that morning."},{"name":"The Coronet Theatre","slug":"the-coronet-theatre","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/","lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"An 1898 theatre at Notting Hill Gate, worn back to the brick and left that way."},{"name":"GoBoat Paddington","slug":"goboat-paddington","cat":"outdoors","url":"/outdoors/goboat-paddington/","lat":51.519022,"lng":-0.172869,"verdict":"Drive your own picnic boat out of Paddington Basin."},{"name":"FCB Coffee","slug":"fcb-coffee-paddington","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/fcb-coffee-paddington/","lat":51.516196,"lng":-0.177165,"verdict":"The Paddington branch, for the twenty minutes before a train."},{"name":"Guillam Bayswater","slug":"guillam-bayswater","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/guillam-bayswater/","lat":51.512209,"lng":-0.191119,"verdict":"A side-street room off Moscow Road."},{"name":"Guillam Notting Hill","slug":"guillam-notting-hill","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/guillam-notting-hill/","lat":51.509591,"lng":-0.194284,"verdict":"Single-origin coffee on Notting Hill Gate."},{"name":"Guillam The Whiteley","slug":"guillam-the-whiteley","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/guillam-the-whiteley/","lat":51.514565,"lng":-0.187914,"verdict":"Single-origin coffee inside the rebuilt Whiteleys."},{"name":"Badiani Notting Hill","slug":"badiani-notting-hill","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/badiani-notting-hill/","lat":51.509464,"lng":-0.194945,"verdict":"Florentine gelato on Notting Hill Gate, and the Buontalenti is the one to get."},{"name":"Melt Chocolates","slug":"melt-chocolates","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/melt-chocolates/","lat":51.514142,"lng":-0.199227,"verdict":"Chocolates tempered and moulded in the room behind the counter."},{"name":"Granger & Co.","slug":"granger-co","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/granger-co/","lat":51.514621,"lng":-0.197777,"verdict":"Bill Granger's London room, and the ricotta hotcakes."},{"name":"Guillam Bayswater","slug":"guillam-bayswater","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/guillam-bayswater/","lat":51.512209,"lng":-0.191119,"verdict":"A side-street room off Moscow Road."},{"name":"Guillam Notting Hill","slug":"guillam-notting-hill","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/guillam-notting-hill/","lat":51.509591,"lng":-0.194284,"verdict":"Single-origin coffee on Notting Hill Gate."},{"name":"Guillam The Whiteley","slug":"guillam-the-whiteley","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/guillam-the-whiteley/","lat":51.514565,"lng":-0.187914,"verdict":"Single-origin coffee inside the rebuilt Whiteleys."},{"name":"Tab x Tab","slug":"tab-x-tab","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/tab-x-tab/","lat":51.51585,"lng":-0.18968,"verdict":"Speciality tea taken as seriously as the coffee."},{"name":"Market Halls Paddington","slug":"market-halls-paddington","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/market-halls-paddington/","lat":51.5154,"lng":-0.175,"verdict":"Eight kitchens and a terrace at the foot of Paddington Square."},{"name":"Lindo Wing, St Mary's Hospital","slug":"lindo-wing-st-marys-hospital","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/lindo-wing-st-marys-hospital/","lat":51.517488,"lng":-0.174332,"verdict":"The steps where Diana showed the world William and Harry, and where Catherine appeared with George, Charlotte and Louis."},{"name":"Marble Arch","slug":"marble-arch","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/marble-arch/","lat":51.513184,"lng":-0.158905,"verdict":"Buckingham Palace's original front gate, moved to the corner of Hyde Park in 1851 when the palace grew around it.","thumb":"/img/marble-arch-480.jpg?v=a18babf8","img":"/img/marble-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"23 and 24 Leinster Gardens","slug":"23-and-24-leinster-gardens","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/23-and-24-leinster-gardens/","lat":51.512447,"lng":-0.183335,"verdict":"Two houses in a Bayswater terrace with nothing behind them: painted windows, no rooms, no floors.","thumb":"/img/23-and-24-leinster-gardens-480.jpg?v=8b72ff59","img":"/img/23-and-24-leinster-gardens.jpg","w":480,"h":640},{"name":"Marble Arch","slug":"marble-arch","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/marble-arch/","lat":51.513184,"lng":-0.158905,"verdict":"Nash's gateway to Buckingham Palace, moved to a traffic island where nobody may drive through it.","thumb":"/img/marble-arch-480.jpg?v=a18babf8","img":"/img/marble-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Fleming Museum","slug":"fleming-museum","cat":"science","url":"/science/fleming-museum/","lat":51.517222,"lng":-0.173056,"verdict":"The cluttered laboratory at St Mary's where Fleming noticed the mould in 1928, put back as it was that morning."},{"name":"Paddington station","slug":"paddington-station","cat":"science","url":"/science/paddington-station/","lat":51.517095,"lng":-0.177317,"verdict":"Brunel's terminus of 1854, three arched spans of iron and glass with Matthew Digby Wyatt's ornament, the Great Western's London end.","thumb":"/img/paddington-station-480.jpg?v=cc5099f6","img":"/img/paddington-station.jpg","w":1024,"h":481},{"name":"Paddington Bear statue","slug":"paddington-bear-statue","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/paddington-bear-statue/","lat":51.516596,"lng":-0.177729,"verdict":"Paddington under the clock at the station where the Browns found him, suitcase and label and all.","thumb":"/img/paddington-bear-statue-480.jpg?v=48f9a1f8","img":"/img/paddington-bear-statue.jpg","w":764,"h":1024},{"name":"Alexander Herzen","slug":"alexander-herzen","cat":"world","url":"/world/alexander-herzen/","lat":51.517883,"lng":-0.183394,"verdict":"The Bayswater house of the exile whose newspaper the Tsar read before breakfast.","thumb":"/img/alexander-herzen-480.jpg?v=aa7802c2","img":"/img/alexander-herzen.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Guglielmo Marconi","slug":"guglielmo-marconi","cat":"world","url":"/world/guglielmo-marconi/","lat":51.516481,"lng":-0.194521,"verdict":"The Bayswater lodging where a 21-year-old from Bologna filed the first patent for wireless.","thumb":"/img/guglielmo-marconi-480.jpg?v=686a2e2d","img":"/img/guglielmo-marconi.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Richard Wagner","slug":"richard-wagner","cat":"world","url":"/world/richard-wagner/","lat":51.510717,"lng":-0.190045,"verdict":"Where Wagner stayed for five weeks in 1877, conducting at the Albert Hall to pay for Bayreuth.","thumb":"/img/richard-wagner-480.jpg?v=7ad11c71","img":"/img/richard-wagner.jpg","w":768,"h":1024}]},{"slug":"belgravia","name":"Belgravia","verdict":"One white palace of a neighbourhood, built to a single design, with mews lanes and old pubs hidden behind it.","note":"Fields until 1826, and dangerous ones: this was the Five Fields, crossed by a path where people were robbed after dark. Then the Grosvenor family, who owned the land, put Thomas Cubitt to work on it. Cubitt was a builder rather than an architect, and he did something new by employing every trade himself instead of parcelling the work out, which is how the terraces went up between 1830 and 1847 to one height, one design and one colour.\n\nThat colour is the point of Belgravia. The brick is faced with render and painted cream, so a whole street reads as a single enormous palace rather than as a row of houses. Belgrave Square has forty-nine mansions round a private garden; Eaton Square, longer and plainer, took twenty-nine years to finish. Behind them run the mews, the back lanes where the horses and coachmen were kept, now some of the most expensive small houses in the country.\n\nHardly anybody can afford to live in most of it and increasingly nobody does: the grandest houses are embassies, and others are held empty as investments. What is left for a visitor is the walking, which is genuinely good. The squares are handsome, the mews are quiet enough to hear your own footsteps, and the pubs tucked into them, the Star Tavern and the Grenadier down its cobbled dead end, are about the only places in the neighbourhood where anything happens at street level.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-belgravia-2.jpg?v=86c11ea7","thumb":"/img/area-belgravia-2-480.jpg?v=c62568d7","width":682,"height":1024,"thumb_width":320,"alt":"A row of cream stucco porches with fluted Doric columns receding down a Belgravia terrace, the house numbers 42, 43 and 44 painted in black on the columns, black iron railings between them and a paved pavement alongside.","caption":"Cubitt's porches, one after another, on a Belgravia terrace."},"figures":[{"src":"/img/street-wilton-row.jpg?v=951b98b5","thumb":"/img/street-wilton-row-480.jpg?v=0cd2396e","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Wilton Row, a cobbled lane under a chestnut tree with the Grenadier pub at the end","caption":"The Grenadier at the end of Wilton Row."}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Knightsbridge","Grosvenor Place","Buckingham Palace Road","Ebury Bridge Road","Chelsea Bridge Road","Sloane Street"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.16,51.5019],[-0.15817,51.50226],[-0.1554,51.50243],[-0.1522,51.5031],[-0.15167,51.50189],[-0.14877,51.50005],[-0.14677,51.49819],[-0.14684,51.49797],[-0.14545,51.49603],[-0.14787,51.49265],[-0.14984,51.49076],[-0.15033,51.48907],[-0.15174,51.48708],[-0.15582,51.48962],[-0.15693,51.49031],[-0.15756,51.49227],[-0.15783,51.49232],[-0.15787,51.49237],[-0.15805,51.49265],[-0.15807,51.49389],[-0.15991,51.50052],[-0.16,51.5019]]]},"centre":[-0.1525,51.49634],"bounds":[[-0.16,51.48708],[-0.14545,51.5031]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":38,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"shopping","name":"Shopping","count":3,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":3,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":5,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"royal","name":"Royal London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"beautiful-streets","name":"Beautiful Streets","count":3,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"monuments","name":"Monuments & Ruins","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"classic-british-shops","name":"Classic British Shops","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"secrets","name":"Secrets & Espionage","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":3,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"A Night at the Opera by Candlelight","slug":"a-night-at-the-opera-by-candlelight","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/a-night-at-the-opera-by-candlelight/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-28","to":"2026-10-28"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Arias and overtures by candle, from a chamber group that has been doing this for thirty years."},{"name":"Andy Sheppard Trio with Norma Winstone and Kit Downes","slug":"andy-sheppard-trio-with-norma-winstone-and-kit-downes","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/andy-sheppard-trio-with-norma-winstone-and-kit-downes/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-18","to":"2026-11-18"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Two sets from four of the people who built the sound of British and European jazz."},{"name":"Blood of my Blood","slug":"blood-of-my-blood","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-court-theatre/blood-of-my-blood/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.492574,"lng":-0.15635,"verdict":"A South Carolina plantation in 1862, with the war two counties away."},{"name":"Charpentier: David and Jonathan","slug":"charpentier-david-and-jonathan","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/charpentier-david-and-jonathan/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-20","to":"2026-10-20"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"A 1688 French baroque tragedy about two men who loved each other, staged in English."},{"name":"Chelsea Arts Festival","slug":"chelsea-arts-festival","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/chelsea-arts-festival/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-09-20","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Five days of Chelsea given over to writers, dancers and jazz."},{"name":"Classical Kate Bush","slug":"classical-kate-bush","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/classical-kate-bush/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-06","to":"2026-11-06"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Cloudbusting and forty players from the West London Sinfonia, on the orchestral arrangements."},{"name":"Comedy at Cadogan Hall: David O'Doherty","slug":"comedy-at-cadogan-hall-david-odoherty","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/comedy-at-cadogan-hall-david-odoherty/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Five stand-ups in a concert hall, headlined by the man with the tiny keyboard."},{"name":"Faure's Requiem with the RPO and Brighton Festival Chorus","slug":"faures-requiem-with-the-rpo-and-brighton-festival-chorus","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/faures-requiem-with-the-rpo-and-brighton-festival-chorus/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-11","to":"2026-10-11"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"The gentlest of all requiems, on a Sunday afternoon."},{"name":"Flanders Symphony Orchestra with Alexandra Soumm","slug":"flanders-symphony-orchestra-with-alexandra-soumm","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/flanders-symphony-orchestra-with-alexandra-soumm/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-03","to":"2026-11-03"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"The Lark Ascending and Mozart's Fifth Concerto, from a Belgian orchestra on tour."},{"name":"Frankenstein with the RPO playing live","slug":"frankenstein-with-the-rpo-playing-live","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/frankenstein-with-the-rpo-playing-live/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-25","to":"2026-10-25"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"The 1931 film with an orchestra in the room, which it never had in 1931."},{"name":"Gerald Clayton Trio","slug":"gerald-clayton-trio","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/gerald-clayton-trio/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-21","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"A pianist with six Grammy nominations, playing without anywhere to hide."},{"name":"John Simpson: Leaders and Lunatics","slug":"john-simpson-leaders-and-lunatics","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/john-simpson-leaders-and-lunatics/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-04","to":"2026-11-04"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Sixty years of interviewing the people in charge, and telling one kind from the other."},{"name":"L'Antidote and Naissam Jalal with Roberto Negro","slug":"lantidote-and-naissam-jalal-with-roberto-negro","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/lantidote-and-naissam-jalal-with-roberto-negro/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-14","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Persian percussion, an Albanian cello and a Lebanese piano, then a flute and piano duo."},{"name":"Lizz Wright with Kenny Banks Sr and Rian Peters","slug":"lizz-wright-with-kenny-banks-sr-and-rian-peters","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/lizz-wright-with-kenny-banks-sr-and-rian-peters/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-15","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"A contralto from Georgia who sings gospel, blues and Americana as if they were one thing."},{"name":"London Gay Symphony Orchestra at thirty","slug":"london-gay-symphony-orchestra-at-thirty","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/london-gay-symphony-orchestra-at-thirty/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-18","to":"2026-10-18"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Rachmaninov's Third and a world premiere, thirty years on from the first rehearsal."},{"name":"London Metropolitan Orchestra: a Schnell premiere","slug":"london-metropolitan-orchestra-a-schnell-premiere","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/london-metropolitan-orchestra-a-schnell-premiere/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-09-13"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"A whole evening of one living composer, ending on a concerto nobody has heard."},{"name":"Lucy Worsley: My Royal Life","slug":"lucy-worsley-my-royal-life","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/lucy-worsley-my-royal-life/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-26","to":"2026-10-26"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Twenty years as chief curator of the royal palaces, and what she found in them."},{"name":"Magic Mountains: Berg and Strauss in 1915","slug":"magic-mountains-berg-and-strauss-in-1915","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/magic-mountains-berg-and-strauss-in-1915/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-22","to":"2026-09-22"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Juliet Stevenson reads Thomas Mann between two enormous scores written in the same wartime year."},{"name":"Man to Man","slug":"man-to-man","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-court-theatre/man-to-man/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.492574,"lng":-0.15635,"verdict":"A woman puts on her dead husband's trousers in 1930s Germany, and does not take them off for forty years."},{"name":"Mary Beard: More Secret Histories of Ancient Rome","slug":"mary-beard-more-secret-histories-of-ancient-rome","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/mary-beard-more-secret-histories-of-ancient-rome/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-06","to":"2026-10-06"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Rome from the people the histories leave out, with questions from the floor."},{"name":"NDR Radio Philharmonic with Nikolai 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conducting."},{"name":"Polish Jazz Festival","slug":"polish-jazz-festival","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/polish-jazz-festival/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-26","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"A fortnight of Polish jazz at Cadogan Hall, from the legends to the new wave."},{"name":"RHS Chelsea Flower Show","slug":"rhs-chelsea-flower-show","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/rhs-chelsea-flower-show/","runs":{"from":"2027-05-18","to":"2027-05-22","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.488869,"lng":-0.154634,"verdict":"The show gardens the whole gardening year is judged against, on eleven acres of Chelsea."},{"name":"Roberto Fonseca and Vincent Segal","slug":"roberto-fonseca-and-vincent-segal","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/roberto-fonseca-and-vincent-segal/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-17","to":"2026-11-17"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"A Cuban pianist out of the Buena Vista Social Club and a French cellist, as a duo."},{"name":"Royal Philharmonic Orchestra 2026-27","slug":"royal-philharmonic-orchestra-2026-27","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/royal-philharmonic-orchestra-2026-27/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2027-06-24"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"The RPO's own season at its London home, October to June."},{"name":"Royal Philharmonic Orchestra: Brahms 1","slug":"royal-philharmonic-orchestra-brahms-1","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/royal-philharmonic-orchestra-brahms-1/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-21","to":"2026-10-21"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Brahms's first symphony, twenty-one years in the writing, after a new nocturne for cello."},{"name":"Royal Philharmonic Orchestra: Mozart Revealed","slug":"royal-philharmonic-orchestra-mozart-revealed","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/royal-philharmonic-orchestra-mozart-revealed/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"An hour on the Jupiter symphony: taken apart, then played whole."},{"name":"Royal Philharmonic Orchestra: Sibelius Violin Concerto","slug":"royal-philharmonic-orchestra-sibelius-violin-concerto","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/royal-philharmonic-orchestra-sibelius-violin-concerto/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-08","to":"2026-10-08"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Liya Petrova in the Sibelius, and Vaughan Williams's wartime vision of peace after it."},{"name":"Swingin' with Strings: Ella and Louis sing Gershwin","slug":"swingin-with-strings-ella-and-louis-sing-gershwin","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/swingin-with-strings-ella-and-louis-sing-gershwin/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-22","to":"2026-11-22"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Porgy and Bess as Fitzgerald and Armstrong recorded it, with a fifty-piece orchestra."},{"name":"Tania Giannouli and Nils Petter Molvaer, with Elliot Galvin and Laura Jurd","slug":"tania-giannouli-and-nils-petter-molvaer-with-elliot-galvin-and-laura-jurd","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/tania-giannouli-and-nils-petter-molvaer-with-elliot-galvin-and-laura-jurd/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-20","to":"2026-11-20"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"A Norwegian trumpet and a Greek piano, then two British improvisers, on one bill."},{"name":"The Afronauts","slug":"the-afronauts","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-court-theatre/the-afronauts/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-14","to":"2026-12-19"},"lat":51.492574,"lng":-0.15635,"verdict":"Zambia, 1964, and a schoolteacher who decided his country should reach the moon first."},{"name":"The Hanover Band: Haydn's trumpet concerto on gut strings","slug":"the-hanover-band-haydns-trumpet-concerto-on-gut-strings","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/the-hanover-band-haydns-trumpet-concerto-on-gut-strings/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-21","to":"2026-09-21"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Period instruments for Haydn's trumpet concerto and Schubert's Great C major."},{"name":"The Tallis Scholars: Rachmaninov's Vespers with Arvo Part","slug":"the-tallis-scholars-rachmaninovs-vespers-with-arvo-part","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/the-tallis-scholars-rachmaninovs-vespers-with-arvo-part/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-07","to":"2026-10-07"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"The All-Night Vigil complete, with Part's prayers for peace threaded through it."},{"name":"Thomas: Hamlet, in concert","slug":"thomas-hamlet-in-concert","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/thomas-hamlet-in-concert/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-01","to":"2026-11-01"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"The French Hamlet, with the mad scene that made Ophelie famous, sung in concert."},{"name":"Will Guidara and Rory Sutherland on hospitality","slug":"will-guidara-and-rory-sutherland-on-hospitality","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/will-guidara-and-rory-sutherland-on-hospitality/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-24"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"The restaurateur behind Eleven Madison Park, in conversation with an advertising man who studies why people behave as they do."},{"name":"Young Musicians Symphony Orchestra: Wagner","slug":"young-musicians-symphony-orchestra-wagner","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/young-musicians-symphony-orchestra-wagner/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-14","to":"2026-10-14"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"A Wagner night from the orchestra that has been giving young players a full-size score since 1955."},{"name":"Apsley House","slug":"apsley-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/apsley-house/","lat":51.503488,"lng":-0.151712,"verdict":"Number One London: the Duke of Wellington's house at Hyde Park Corner, still full of what Europe gave him, with Napoleon naked in the stairwell.","thumb":"/img/apsley-house-480.jpg?v=8f66f6bc","img":"/img/apsley-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":738},{"name":"Wellington Arch","slug":"wellington-arch","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/wellington-arch/","lat":51.502536,"lng":-0.150818,"verdict":"Decimus Burton's arch at Hyde Park Corner, with the largest bronze sculpture in Europe on top and balconies inside to climb to.","thumb":"/img/wellington-arch-480.jpg?v=3fc925e4","img":"/img/wellington-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":669},{"name":"Wellington Arch","slug":"wellington-arch","cat":"art","url":"/art/wellington-arch/","lat":51.502536,"lng":-0.150818,"verdict":"Decimus Burton's arch at Hyde Park Corner, with the largest bronze sculpture in Europe on top and balconies inside to climb to.","thumb":"/img/wellington-arch-480.jpg?v=3fc925e4","img":"/img/wellington-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":669},{"name":"Cadogan Hall","slug":"cadogan-hall","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/","lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"A Byzantine-looking Christian Science church of 1907, emptied of its congregation and turned into a 950-seat hall.","thumb":"/img/cadogan-hall-480.jpg?v=be6ba700","img":"/img/cadogan-hall.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Royal Court Theatre","slug":"royal-court-theatre","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/royal-court-theatre/","lat":51.492574,"lng":-0.15635,"verdict":"The theatre that made new writing the point, and helped end stage censorship."},{"name":"Harvey Nichols","slug":"harvey-nichols","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/harvey-nichols/","lat":51.501623,"lng":-0.159717,"verdict":"Eight floors of fashion and beauty, with a food market and a dining room on the fifth.","thumb":"/img/harvey-nichols-480.jpg?v=235baeb0","img":"/img/harvey-nichols.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Peter Jones","slug":"peter-jones","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/peter-jones/","lat":51.492255,"lng":-0.158938,"verdict":"A wall of glass curving round Sloane Square, and one of the first modern buildings in Britain.","thumb":"/img/peter-jones-480.jpg?v=03f86300","img":"/img/peter-jones.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Sloane Street","slug":"sloane-street","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/sloane-street/","lat":51.497238,"lng":-0.158998,"verdict":"The fashion houses' other row, from Knightsbridge to Sloane Square."},{"name":"Bread Ahead","slug":"bread-ahead-hans-town","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/bread-ahead-hans-town/","lat":51.493402,"lng":-0.158679,"verdict":"Pavilion Road, which is Chelsea pretending to be a village."},{"name":"C\u00e9dric Grolet at The Berkeley","slug":"cedric-grolet-at-the-berkeley","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/cedric-grolet-at-the-berkeley/","lat":51.502208,"lng":-0.156132,"verdict":"Trompe-l'\u0153il fruit that costs more than lunch, and is worth seeing once."},{"name":"Poil\u00e2ne","slug":"poilane","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/poilane/","lat":51.493807,"lng":-0.150831,"verdict":"The Paris institution's London arm, still selling the same enormous loaf."},{"name":"Badiani Victoria","slug":"badiani-victoria","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/badiani-victoria/","lat":51.496405,"lng":-0.144259,"verdict":"A cone on the Victoria Street walk to the station."},{"name":"L'Artisan du Chocolat","slug":"lartisan-du-chocolat","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/lartisan-du-chocolat/","lat":51.489919,"lng":-0.156134,"verdict":"Salted caramels in a shell thin enough to break on the tongue."},{"name":"Peggy Porschen","slug":"peggy-porschen","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/peggy-porschen/","lat":51.493293,"lng":-0.150544,"verdict":"The pink corner shop on Ebury Street, and a patisserie counter that earns the queue outside it."},{"name":"Pierre Herm\u00e9","slug":"pierre-herme","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/pierre-herme/","lat":51.498758,"lng":-0.157279,"verdict":"The macarons that made the pastry chef famous, in one small Belgravia room."},{"name":"Rococo Chocolates Belgravia","slug":"rococo-chocolates-belgravia","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/rococo-chocolates-belgravia/","lat":51.499323,"lng":-0.156436,"verdict":"The Motcomb Street shop, with a counter for hot chocolate as well as a shop floor."},{"name":"Wellington Arch","slug":"wellington-arch","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/wellington-arch/","lat":51.502536,"lng":-0.150818,"verdict":"The arch at Hyde Park Corner where the Queen's coffin left the gun carriage for the hearse in September 2022, and the walk to Windsor began.","thumb":"/img/wellington-arch-480.jpg?v=3fc925e4","img":"/img/wellington-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":669},{"name":"Elizabeth Street","slug":"elizabeth-street","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/elizabeth-street/","lat":51.493119,"lng":-0.149748,"verdict":"Three blocks of awnings and window boxes, and a cake shop painted pink to the door frame.","thumb":"/img/street-ebury-street-480.jpg?v=33d95dfb","img":"/img/street-ebury-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Pavilion Road","slug":"pavilion-road","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/pavilion-road/","lat":51.493526,"lng":-0.158815,"verdict":"A back lane of stables turned into a street of food shops, one trade to a door.","thumb":"/img/street-pavilion-road-480.jpg?v=5fa2380f","img":"/img/street-pavilion-road.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Wilton Row","slug":"wilton-row","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/wilton-row/","lat":51.501039,"lng":-0.154724,"verdict":"A cobbled Belgravia backwater with one of London's best-hidden pubs at the end of it.","thumb":"/img/street-wilton-row-480.jpg?v=0cd2396e","img":"/img/street-wilton-row.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Royal Artillery Memorial","slug":"royal-artillery-memorial","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/royal-artillery-memorial/","lat":51.502566,"lng":-0.151953,"verdict":"A stone howitzer and four bronze gunners, one of them dead under his greatcoat: the most honest war memorial in London.","thumb":"/img/royal-artillery-memorial-480.jpg?v=660ad31d","img":"/img/royal-artillery-memorial.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Wellington Arch","slug":"wellington-arch","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/wellington-arch/","lat":51.502536,"lng":-0.150818,"verdict":"Decimus Burton's arch at Hyde Park Corner, with the largest bronze sculpture in Europe on top and balconies inside to climb to.","thumb":"/img/wellington-arch-480.jpg?v=3fc925e4","img":"/img/wellington-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":669},{"name":"David Mellor","slug":"david-mellor","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/david-mellor/","lat":51.492908,"lng":-0.158738,"verdict":"The shop of the cutler who designed Britain's traffic lights, selling kitchen equipment chosen with the same eye.","thumb":"/img/david-mellor-480.jpg?v=90ddfc74","img":"/img/david-mellor.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Ian Fleming's house, 22 Ebury Street","slug":"ian-flemings-house-22-ebury-street","cat":"secrets","url":"/secrets/ian-flemings-house-22-ebury-street/","lat":51.495918,"lng":-0.147616,"verdict":"Where Bond's creator lived through the war, a Belgravia bachelor flat with a black-painted sitting room and a plaque from English Heritage.","thumb":"/img/ian-flemings-house-22-ebury-street-480.jpg?v=14258070","img":"/img/ian-flemings-house-22-ebury-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Felix Mendelssohn","slug":"felix-mendelssohn","cat":"world","url":"/world/felix-mendelssohn/","lat":51.497688,"lng":-0.148558,"verdict":"The lodging of a composer who visited ten times and called London the grandest monster on earth.","thumb":"/img/felix-mendelssohn-480.jpg?v=7a4d3f1c","img":"/img/felix-mendelssohn.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Prince Metternich","slug":"prince-metternich","cat":"world","url":"/world/prince-metternich/","lat":51.495277,"lng":-0.151393,"verdict":"The Belgravia refuge of the man who had run Europe for thirty years, until Europe had had enough.","thumb":"/img/prince-metternich-480.jpg?v=705da282","img":"/img/prince-metternich.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart","slug":"wolfgang-amadeus-mozart","cat":"world","url":"/world/wolfgang-amadeus-mozart/","lat":51.491416,"lng":-0.152483,"verdict":"The house where an eight-year-old wrote his first symphony while his father was ill upstairs.","thumb":"/img/wolfgang-amadeus-mozart-480.jpg?v=397d2da5","img":"/img/wolfgang-amadeus-mozart.jpg","w":1023,"h":1024}]},{"slug":"bloomsbury","name":"Bloomsbury","verdict":"Georgian squares, the British Museum, and the university that grew up around it.","note":"The estate of one family. The Russells, Dukes of Bedford, married into this land in the seventeenth century and laid it out as squares: Bloomsbury Square from the 1660s, then Bedford Square, and then Russell Square, for which the fifth Duke pulled down his own house in 1800. What survives is the most complete piece of Georgian planning in London, brick terraces round gardens at a size a person can walk in an afternoon.\n\nWhat filled it was learning. The British Museum, open to the public since 1759, sits in the middle of it. The University of London spread around the museum, with Senate House at the centre, the tower Orwell had in mind when he wrote the Ministry of Truth. Great Ormond Street children's hospital and the National Hospital for Neurology are a few streets away, and so are the publishers, including the one that took Harry Potter after a dozen others had turned it down.\n\nIt also gave its name to a set of people. The Bloomsbury Group met in these houses before the First World War, and between them Virginia Woolf, Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and the Bells rearranged English writing, economics and painting; blue plaques mark the addresses, several of them within sight of one another. For a visitor it is the quietest of the central districts: gardens to sit in, one of the great museums, and secondhand bookshops on the streets between.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-bloomsbury-3.jpg?v=84dc7648","thumb":"/img/area-bloomsbury-3-480.jpg?v=1e15a8c0","width":1024,"height":726,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The British Museum's front from its forecourt: a long row of Ionic columns under a sculpted pediment, a flag at half mast, and people sitting on the steps and along the lawn under a blue sky.","caption":"The British Museum on Great Russell Street.","credit":"Photo by Paasikivi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Museum_London_2016_Facade_04.JPG"},"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-bloomsbury.jpg?v=b7444853","thumb":"/img/area-bloomsbury-480.jpg?v=3bd128e5","width":768,"height":1024,"thumb_width":360,"alt":"A Georgian doorway on Great James Street, columns either side of a black door under a carved pediment","caption":"A doorway on Great James Street."},{"src":"/img/area-bloomsbury-lead2.jpg?v=d5df46de","thumb":"/img/area-bloomsbury-lead2-480.jpg?v=ee43dfb1","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The west side of Bedford Square: a dark-brick Georgian terrace with white window frames and railings, the square's trees in front","caption":"Bedford Square, the best-kept Georgian square in London.","credit":"Photo by Jeremysm, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AAbedfordsq.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-bloomsbury-4.jpg?v=2fdfcf2c","thumb":"/img/area-bloomsbury-4-480.jpg?v=e243261c","width":1024,"height":1005,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The Great Court of the British Museum from above: the round Reading Room in the middle under a glass roof of triangular panes, curved staircases either side and people crossing the white floor.","caption":"The Great Court, under Foster's roof of 2000.","credit":"Photo by Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Museum_Great_Court,_London,_UK_-_Diliff.jpg"}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Euston Road","Gray's Inn Road","High Holborn","Tottenham Court Road"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.13814,51.52492],[-0.13709,51.52526],[-0.12944,51.5277],[-0.12258,51.53056],[-0.12132,51.53039],[-0.12048,51.5299],[-0.11955,51.52866],[-0.1173,51.52567],[-0.11387,51.5223],[-0.11139,51.51815],[-0.1124,51.51826],[-0.11291,51.51826],[-0.11383,51.51822],[-0.11472,51.51818],[-0.12043,51.51752],[-0.1224,51.51729],[-0.1248,51.51715],[-0.13037,51.51642],[-0.13086,51.51718],[-0.13624,51.52256],[-0.13814,51.52492]]]},"centre":[-0.12518,51.52283],"bounds":[[-0.13814,51.51642],[-0.11139,51.53056]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":65,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":17,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":6,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":4,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"shopping","name":"Shopping","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":6,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":6,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"beer","name":"Beer","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"cocktails","name":"Cocktails","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"wine","name":"Wine","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"politics","name":"Power & Politics","count":3,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"sacred","name":"Sacred London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"beautiful-streets","name":"Beautiful Streets","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"architecture","name":"Architecture","count":3,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"classic-british-shops","name":"Classic British Shops","count":4,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"science","name":"Science & Engineering","count":5,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"secrets","name":"Secrets & Espionage","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":7,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":5,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"harry-potter","name":"Harry Potter","count":1,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"300 Years of the 'Rival Queens': Handel's 1726 Opera Season","slug":"300-years-of-the-rival-queens-handels-1726-opera-season","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/foundling-museum/300-years-of-the-rival-queens-handels-1726-opera-season/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-30","to":"2026-10-25"},"lat":51.525214,"lng":-0.121673,"verdict":"Two sopranos, one castrato and the season London decided was a feud."},{"name":"A Mind Full","slug":"a-mind-full","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/a-mind-full/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-30","to":"2026-09-30"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"A man with impulse problems moves into a Buddhist community and tries, badly, to meditate."},{"name":"Adam Larter: Who Remembers The 90s?","slug":"adam-larter-who-remembers-the-90s","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/adam-larter-who-remembers-the-90s/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-16","to":"2026-10-16"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"An arthouse nostalgia show about a decade that was already strange at the time."},{"name":"Aida Piano Trio","slug":"aida-piano-trio","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/conway-hall/aida-piano-trio/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-01","to":"2026-11-01"},"lat":51.51986,"lng":-0.118313,"verdict":"A Sunday evening of piano trios in Red Lion Square."},{"name":"Audrey Amiss: The Surviving Exhibitions","slug":"audrey-amiss-the-surviving-exhibitions","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/wellcome-collection/audrey-amiss-the-surviving-exhibitions/","runs":{"from":"2026-07-10","to":"2027-02-07"},"lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"Fifty thousand sketchbook pages by an artist who fought the mental health system with them."},{"name":"Bayeux Late: medieval making","slug":"bayeux-late-medieval-making","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/british-museum/bayeux-late-medieval-making/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-09","to":"2026-10-09"},"lat":51.519312,"lng":-0.126877,"verdict":"The first Bayeux Late: workshops and making, free, on a Friday night."},{"name":"Being Human","slug":"being-human","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/wellcome-collection/being-human/","lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"Fifty objects on what it is to be a person now, including a jukebox of epidemics."},{"name":"Boyce Avenue","slug":"boyce-avenue","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/boyce-avenue/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-15","to":"2026-09-15"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Three brothers from Florida who built an audience on YouTube covers."},{"name":"British Comedy Guide Awards Final","slug":"british-comedy-guide-awards-final","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/british-comedy-guide-awards-final/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-20","to":"2026-11-20"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"Five acts compete for the BCG Pro Talent Award, hosted by somebody who already has one."},{"name":"British Museum guided tours","slug":"british-museum-guided-tours","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/british-museum/british-museum-guided-tours/","lat":51.519312,"lng":-0.126877,"verdict":"Free volunteer-led tours most days, and a ticketed lap of the highlights at weekends."},{"name":"CHXRRY","slug":"chxrry","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/chxrry/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Toronto R&B, signed to the Weeknd's label."},{"name":"Character Comedy Showcase","slug":"character-comedy-showcase","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/character-comedy-showcase/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-11-17"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"Twelve comic characters, each built in six weeks, tried out on a room in one night."},{"name":"Chrissy Chlapecka","slug":"chrissy-chlapecka","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/chrissy-chlapecka/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"The bimbo-theory internet performer, live with songs."},{"name":"Club Antichrist's Vampire Ball","slug":"club-antichrists-vampire-ball","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/club-antichrists-vampire-ball/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"A long-running fetish and alternative club night, with a dress code."},{"name":"Conversations about Death","slug":"conversations-about-death","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/wellcome-collection/conversations-about-death/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"A session for talking about the thing nobody talks about."},{"name":"Conway Hall Sunday Concerts","slug":"conway-hall-sunday-concerts","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/conway-hall/conway-hall-sunday-concerts/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-11-29"},"lat":51.51986,"lng":-0.118313,"verdict":"Chamber music on a Sunday evening, in a series running since the 1880s."},{"name":"Declaring Independence: USA 250","slug":"declaring-independence-usa-250","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/british-museum/declaring-independence-usa-250/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-30","to":"2026-11-29"},"lat":51.519312,"lng":-0.126877,"verdict":"The Museum's own take on 1776, for the 250th anniversary."},{"name":"Dvorak Piano Quartet","slug":"dvorak-piano-quartet","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/conway-hall/dvorak-piano-quartet/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-25","to":"2026-10-25"},"lat":51.51986,"lng":-0.118313,"verdict":"A Czech group playing both Dvorak piano quartets in one evening."},{"name":"Early Netherlandish drawings","slug":"early-netherlandish-drawings","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/british-museum/early-netherlandish-drawings/","runs":{"to":"2026-09-20"},"lat":51.519312,"lng":-0.126877,"verdict":"The moment a drawing stopped being a preparatory sketch and became the finished thing."},{"name":"Edinburgh Quartet at Conway Hall","slug":"edinburgh-quartet-at-conway-hall","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/conway-hall/edinburgh-quartet-at-conway-hall/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-11","to":"2026-10-11"},"lat":51.51986,"lng":-0.118313,"verdict":"Haydn and late Schubert, with Rebecca Clarke and Puccini's funeral piece between."},{"name":"Embroidery Traditions of Afghanistan","slug":"embroidery-traditions-of-afghanistan","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/soas-gallery/embroidery-traditions-of-afghanistan/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.521683,"lng":-0.128623,"verdict":"Afghan embroidery from the Karun Thakar collection, in the SOAS gallery almost nobody finds."},{"name":"Emer Maguire: Perfectly Chaotic","slug":"emer-maguire-perfectly-chaotic","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/emer-maguire-perfectly-chaotic/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-17","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"Storytelling, quick wit and irreverent songs from one of Ireland\u2019s fastest-rising comics."},{"name":"Fingers on Buzzers","slug":"fingers-on-buzzers","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/fingers-on-buzzers/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-06","to":"2026-11-03"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"The Chase's Vixen and Lucy Porter record their quiz podcast in front of you, twice a night."},{"name":"Gary Faulds: Panic at the Midlife Disco","slug":"gary-faulds-panic-at-the-midlife-disco","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/gary-faulds-panic-at-the-midlife-disco/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-07","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"A Glaswegian comic having a public meltdown about turning fifty."},{"name":"Getting Triggy With It: Matt Parker does the maths","slug":"getting-triggy-with-it-matt-parker-does-the-maths","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/getting-triggy-with-it-matt-parker-does-the-maths/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-16","to":"2026-10-16"},"lat":51.525044,"lng":-0.132814,"verdict":"Matt Parker's solo stand-up maths show, on trigonometry of all things, ending its tour at the Bloomsbury Theatre with the cameras on."},{"name":"Greenwich Trio with Boris Bizjak","slug":"greenwich-trio-with-boris-bizjak","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/conway-hall/greenwich-trio-with-boris-bizjak/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-08","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.51986,"lng":-0.118313,"verdict":"Piano trio plus flute, which is a rarer combination than it sounds."},{"name":"Gresham College lectures","slug":"gresham-college-lectures","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/gresham-college-lectures/","lat":51.5177,"lng":-0.1105,"verdict":"Free public lectures since 1597, from a professor of music, of astronomy, of law and the rest, in a medieval hall off Holborn."},{"name":"Halloween at the Charles Dickens Museum","slug":"halloween-at-the-charles-dickens-museum","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/charles-dickens-museum/halloween-at-the-charles-dickens-museum/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-28","to":"2026-11-01"},"lat":51.523594,"lng":-0.116323,"verdict":"Ghost stories told in Dickens's own house, from a family afternoon to Nancy's murder after dark."},{"name":"Harlots, Strumpets & Tarts walking tour","slug":"harlots-strumpets-tarts-walking-tour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/foundling-museum/harlots-strumpets-tarts-walking-tour/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.525214,"lng":-0.121673,"verdict":"Georgian London's sex trade, walked and performed."},{"name":"Hidden London: Holborn \u2014 the secret platforms","slug":"hidden-london-holborn-the-secret-platforms","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-holborn-the-secret-platforms/","lat":51.51721,"lng":-0.119874,"verdict":"A third of Holborn is closed to the public. This is that third."},{"name":"Holly Stars: A Scandal in Bohemia","slug":"holly-stars-a-scandal-in-bohemia","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/holly-stars-a-scandal-in-bohemia/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-05","to":"2026-12-05"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"Sherlock Holmes solved by his neighbour, who cannot leave anything alone."},{"name":"Holy Fuck + The Itch","slug":"holy-fuck-the-itch","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/holy-fuck-the-itch/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-24"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Toronto four-piece who make electronic music without any of it being programmed."},{"name":"James Campbell's Comedy 4 Kids: Reducks","slug":"james-campbells-comedy-4-kids-reducks","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/james-campbells-comedy-4-kids-reducks/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-12-20"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"The man who invented stand-up for children, back at it after ten years of writing books."},{"name":"John Constable: views of nature","slug":"john-constable-views-of-nature","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/british-museum/john-constable-views-of-nature/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-02","to":"2026-10-04"},"lat":51.519312,"lng":-0.126877,"verdict":"Constable's cloud studies and sketches, free, in the Museum's drawings rooms."},{"name":"Katie Pritchard is Sir Elton Scone","slug":"katie-pritchard-is-sir-elton-scone","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/katie-pritchard-is-sir-elton-scone/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-22","to":"2026-10-22"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"A musical comedy gameshow with no rules and a suit made out of curtains."},{"name":"Korea","slug":"korea","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/british-museum/korea/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2027-01-31"},"lat":51.519312,"lng":-0.126877,"verdict":"Two thousand years of Korean art, most of it never seen in Britain before."},{"name":"Madelon Vriesendorp: Mind Games","slug":"madelon-vriesendorp-mind-games","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/sir-john-soanes-museum/madelon-vriesendorp-mind-games/","runs":{"from":"2026-07-15","to":"2026-09-20"},"lat":51.517075,"lng":-0.117469,"verdict":"Fifty works by the Soane Medal winner who paints skyscrapers in bed together."},{"name":"Mark Padmore and Harriet Burns: In Sweet Music Is Such Art","slug":"mark-padmore-and-harriet-burns-in-sweet-music-is-such-art","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/conway-hall/mark-padmore-and-harriet-burns-in-sweet-music-is-such-art/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-18","to":"2026-10-18"},"lat":51.51986,"lng":-0.118313,"verdict":"Padmore and a soprano on Schumann, Brahms and Britten's Purcell."},{"name":"Martha + Trust Fund","slug":"martha-trust-fund","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/martha-trust-fund/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"County Durham punk with tunes, and a band who have kept the same four members throughout."},{"name":"New Comedian of the Year 2026: heats","slug":"new-comedian-of-the-year-2026-heats","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/new-comedian-of-the-year-2026-heats/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-10-11"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"Forty heats to find one new comedian, and the past winners tell you why it matters."},{"name":"Not Just a Game Show","slug":"not-just-a-game-show","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/not-just-a-game-show/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-02","to":"2026-12-23"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"Family Fortunes and Catchphrase run through a blender, with the audience as contestants."},{"name":"Nous Quartet","slug":"nous-quartet","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/conway-hall/nous-quartet/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-04","to":"2026-10-04"},"lat":51.51986,"lng":-0.118313,"verdict":"An Italian quartet in the oldest chamber series in Europe."},{"name":"Outernet","slug":"outernet","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/outernet/","lat":51.515643,"lng":-0.129796,"verdict":"Four storeys of wraparound screen by Tottenham Court Road, free to walk into."},{"name":"Piatti Quartet with Peter Cigleris","slug":"piatti-quartet-with-peter-cigleris","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/conway-hall/piatti-quartet-with-peter-cigleris/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-27","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.51986,"lng":-0.118313,"verdict":"British rarities beside the romantic repertoire, with a talk first."},{"name":"Rachel Parris: Tour Preview","slug":"rachel-parris-tour-preview","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/rachel-parris-tour-preview/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-07","to":"2026-10-22"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"A career of musical comedy songs, tried out at the piano before the tour proper."},{"name":"Reggaeton Latino: Bad Bunny Casita Edition","slug":"reggaeton-latino-bad-bunny-casita-edition","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/reggaeton-latino-bad-bunny-casita-edition/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"A reggaeton night built around one artist's record."},{"name":"Richard Ashcroft Revived My Libido","slug":"richard-ashcroft-revived-my-libido","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/richard-ashcroft-revived-my-libido/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-16","to":"2026-10-16"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"A sexual reawakening at Crystal Palace Park Bowl, told by a Partridge and Catherine Tate writer."},{"name":"Rudy Loewe: Intimacies of Care","slug":"rudy-loewe-intimacies-of-care","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/wellcome-collection/rudy-loewe-intimacies-of-care/","runs":{"from":"2026-07-10","to":"2027-02-07"},"lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"Sculpture, painting and sound on Black mental healthcare in Britain, made with the people who use it."},{"name":"Shit Kid + Clutter","slug":"shit-kid-clutter","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/shit-kid-clutter/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-17"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Swedish lo-fi pop, deliberately rough."},{"name":"Sir John Soane's Museum Highlights Tour","slug":"sir-john-soanes-museum-highlights-tour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/sir-john-soanes-museum/sir-john-soanes-museum-highlights-tour/","lat":51.517075,"lng":-0.117469,"verdict":"An hour through Soane's house as he left it in 1837, with the sarcophagus and the Hogarths."},{"name":"Strawberry Guy + Malena Zavala","slug":"strawberry-guy-malena-zavala","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/strawberry-guy-malena-zavala/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-20","to":"2026-09-20"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Liverpool dream pop, played on a lot of keyboards."},{"name":"Tenderness and Rage","slug":"tenderness-and-rage","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/wellcome-collection/tenderness-and-rage/","runs":{"from":"2026-05-29","to":"2027-05-30"},"lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"HIV and AIDS from the 1980s wards to today's activists, and a placard-making table."},{"name":"Terror at the Haunted Starbucks","slug":"terror-at-the-haunted-starbucks","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/terror-at-the-haunted-starbucks/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-29","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"The Weirdos' annual Halloween show: part comedy farce, part horror pantomime, barely rehearsed."},{"name":"The Bayeux Tapestry","slug":"the-bayeux-tapestry","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/british-museum/the-bayeux-tapestry/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2027-07-11"},"lat":51.519312,"lng":-0.126705,"verdict":"Seventy metres of 11th-century embroidery, in England for the first time since it was made."},{"name":"The British Museum's permanent galleries","slug":"the-british-museums-permanent-galleries","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/british-museum/the-british-museums-permanent-galleries/","lat":51.519312,"lng":-0.126877,"verdict":"The Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon sculptures, Sutton Hoo and the mummies, all free."},{"name":"The Coming of Age","slug":"the-coming-of-age","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/wellcome-collection/the-coming-of-age/","runs":{"from":"2026-03-26","to":"2026-11-29"},"lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"150 works on getting older, from Paula Rego to a Japanese restaurant staffed by people with dementia."},{"name":"The Foundling Museum's permanent galleries","slug":"the-foundling-museums-permanent-galleries","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/foundling-museum/the-foundling-museums-permanent-galleries/","lat":51.525214,"lng":-0.121673,"verdict":"The tokens mothers left with their babies, kept in case they could ever come back."},{"name":"The Instant Musical","slug":"the-instant-musical","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/the-instant-musical/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-30","to":"2026-11-25"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"A whole musical improvised from a suggestion, songs and plot twists included."},{"name":"The Tubs","slug":"the-tubs","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/the-tubs/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-30","to":"2026-09-30"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Welsh jangle and misery, from the people who were Joanna Gruesome."},{"name":"The Wanted 2.0","slug":"the-wanted-2-0","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/the-wanted-2-0/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-06","to":"2026-10-06"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"The boy band's return, without Tom Parker."},{"name":"Trio Archai","slug":"trio-archai","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/conway-hall/trio-archai/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-20","to":"2026-09-20"},"lat":51.51986,"lng":-0.118313,"verdict":"Three piano trios across a century and a half, from a prize-winning young group."},{"name":"Voices in the Room","slug":"voices-in-the-room","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/foundling-museum/voices-in-the-room/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-16","to":"2026-11-01"},"lat":51.525214,"lng":-0.121673,"verdict":"Three new acquisitions - Kneebone, van Essen and Grayson Perry - on children, memory and belonging."},{"name":"Wellcome Collection Lates: The Friendship Effect","slug":"wellcome-collection-lates-the-friendship-effect","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/wellcome-collection/wellcome-collection-lates-the-friendship-effect/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-24"},"lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"A free Thursday night on friendship: philosophers, jewellers, dancers and a Care Caf\u00e9."},{"name":"Wellcome Collection daily tours","slug":"wellcome-collection-daily-tours","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/wellcome-collection/wellcome-collection-daily-tours/","lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"Free half-hour drop-in tours and discussions, three times a day, Tuesday to Sunday."},{"name":"Where We Grow: nature, nurture & childhood","slug":"where-we-grow-nature-nurture-childhood","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/foundling-museum/where-we-grow-nature-nurture-childhood/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-17","to":"2027-04-18"},"lat":51.525214,"lng":-0.121673,"verdict":"What growing up outdoors has meant, from the Foundling Hospital's country nurses to now."},{"name":"British Museum","slug":"british-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/british-museum/","lat":51.519312,"lng":-0.126877,"verdict":"Eight million objects and the first national museum in the world, free since 1759: the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon sculptures and Sutton Hoo under one roof.","thumb":"/img/british-museum-480.jpg?v=6d20fa16","img":"/img/british-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":637},{"name":"Charles Dickens Museum","slug":"charles-dickens-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/charles-dickens-museum/","lat":51.523594,"lng":-0.116323,"verdict":"The only one of Dickens's London homes still standing, laid out as he kept it.","thumb":"/img/charles-dickens-museum-480.jpg?v=2bd721e6","img":"/img/charles-dickens-museum.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Foundling Museum","slug":"foundling-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/foundling-museum/","lat":51.525214,"lng":-0.121673,"verdict":"The story of Britain's first children's charity, and the artists who funded it.","thumb":"/img/foundling-museum-480.jpg?v=8857de81","img":"/img/foundling-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Galton Collection","slug":"galton-collection","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/galton-collection/","deep":true,"lat":51.524722,"lng":-0.133611,"verdict":"UCL's collection from the founder of eugenics, shown critically."},{"name":"Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy","slug":"grant-museum-of-zoology-and-comparative-anatomy","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/grant-museum-of-zoology-and-comparative-anatomy/","lat":51.523732,"lng":-0.134266,"verdict":"One crowded Victorian room of skeletons and specimens, free.","thumb":"/img/grant-museum-of-zoology-and-comparative-anatomy-480.jpg?v=4c19625e","img":"/img/grant-museum-of-zoology-and-comparative-anatomy.jpg","w":1024,"h":683},{"name":"Institute of Archaeology Collections","slug":"institute-of-archaeology-collections","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/institute-of-archaeology-collections/","deep":true,"lat":51.525,"lng":-0.131667,"verdict":"Part of the University College London, open by appointment only, prehistoric ceramics and stone artefacts, Classical Greek and Roman ceramics."},{"name":"Magic Circle Museum","slug":"magic-circle-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/magic-circle-museum/","lat":51.526389,"lng":-0.135556,"verdict":"The Magic Circle's own collection of two centuries of stage magic, in its Euston headquarters, seen only on booked evenings."},{"name":"Museum of Comedy","slug":"museum-of-comedy","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/museum-of-comedy/","lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"Comedy's props, scripts and posters in the crypt of a Hawksmoor church, with shows most nights.","thumb":"/img/museum-of-comedy-480.jpg?v=3244dcee","img":"/img/museum-of-comedy.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Novelty Automation","slug":"novelty-automation","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/novelty-automation/","lat":51.519686,"lng":-0.116909,"verdict":"Tim Hunkin's handmade satirical arcade in a Holborn shopfront: nuclear reactors, divorces and the housing ladder, played with tokens.","thumb":"/img/novelty-automation.jpg?v=d645d0d0","img":"/img/novelty-automation.jpg","w":500,"h":667},{"name":"Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology","slug":"petrie-museum-of-egyptian-archaeology","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/petrie-museum-of-egyptian-archaeology/","lat":51.523578,"lng":-0.132984,"verdict":"Eighty thousand Egyptian and Sudanese objects in two dim rooms of wooden cases, free, with the oldest dress in the world among them.","thumb":"/img/petrie-museum-of-egyptian-archaeology-480.jpg?v=ca7667a7","img":"/img/petrie-museum-of-egyptian-archaeology.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Pushkin House","slug":"pushkin-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/pushkin-house/","deep":true,"lat":51.518251,"lng":-0.12312,"verdict":"Russian art and culture.","thumb":"/img/pushkin-house-480.jpg?v=a8a0fe9c","img":"/img/pushkin-house.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"SOAS Gallery","slug":"soas-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/soas-gallery/","deep":true,"lat":51.521683,"lng":-0.128623,"verdict":"The university's own gallery: three or four free exhibitions a year from Asia, Africa and the Middle East, with a Japanese garden on the roof."},{"name":"Sir John Soane's Museum","slug":"sir-john-soanes-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/sir-john-soanes-museum/","lat":51.517075,"lng":-0.117469,"verdict":"An architect's house left exactly as he arranged it, and the strangest interior in London.","thumb":"/img/sir-john-soanes-museum-480.jpg?v=157bf66f","img":"/img/sir-john-soanes-museum.jpg","w":590,"h":1024},{"name":"The Building Centre","slug":"the-building-centre","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/the-building-centre/","deep":true,"lat":51.519513,"lng":-0.131581,"verdict":"Exhibits on architecture and design."},{"name":"UCL Geology Collections","slug":"ucl-geology-collections","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/ucl-geology-collections/","deep":true,"lat":51.524722,"lng":-0.133611,"verdict":"Part of the University College London, rocks, minerals, fossils on display in the Rock Room."},{"name":"Wellcome Collection","slug":"wellcome-collection","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/wellcome-collection/","lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"Medicine, art and the human body, free, and consistently the most interesting free show in London.","thumb":"/img/wellcome-collection-480.jpg?v=49c3f5a3","img":"/img/wellcome-collection.jpg","w":1024,"h":556},{"name":"Wiener Library","slug":"wiener-library","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/wiener-library/","lat":51.521606,"lng":-0.127996,"verdict":"The world's oldest archive of the Holocaust, begun in 1933 before it happened, free to read in a Russell Square townhouse.","thumb":"/img/wiener-library-480.jpg?v=409d570a","img":"/img/wiener-library.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"British Museum","slug":"british-museum","cat":"art","url":"/art/british-museum/","lat":51.519312,"lng":-0.126877,"verdict":"Eight million objects and the first national museum in the world, free since 1759: the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon sculptures and Sutton Hoo under one roof.","thumb":"/img/british-museum-480.jpg?v=6d20fa16","img":"/img/british-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":637},{"name":"Foundling Museum","slug":"foundling-museum","cat":"art","url":"/art/foundling-museum/","lat":51.525214,"lng":-0.121673,"verdict":"The story of Britain's first children's charity, and the artists who funded it.","thumb":"/img/foundling-museum-480.jpg?v=8857de81","img":"/img/foundling-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"L. Cornelissen & Son","slug":"l-cornelissen-and-son","cat":"art","url":"/art/l-cornelissen-and-son/","lat":51.517647,"lng":-0.129073,"verdict":"A Victorian artists\u2019 colourman where raw pigment is still sold by the jar.","thumb":"/img/own-cornelissen-480.jpg?v=5e2038d1","img":"/img/own-cornelissen.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Newton after Blake","slug":"newton-after-blake","cat":"art","url":"/art/newton-after-blake/","lat":51.529037,"lng":-0.127576,"verdict":"Eduardo Paolozzi's giant Newton, bent over his compasses in the British Library piazza.","thumb":"/img/newton-after-blake-480.jpg?v=bcb6e27b","img":"/img/newton-after-blake.jpg","w":1024,"h":691},{"name":"SOAS Gallery","slug":"soas-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/soas-gallery/","lat":51.521683,"lng":-0.128623,"verdict":"The university's own gallery: three or four free exhibitions a year from Asia, Africa and the Middle East, with a Japanese garden on the roof."},{"name":"Sir John Soane's Museum","slug":"sir-john-soanes-museum","cat":"art","url":"/art/sir-john-soanes-museum/","lat":51.517075,"lng":-0.117469,"verdict":"An architect's house left exactly as he arranged it, and the strangest interior in London.","thumb":"/img/sir-john-soanes-museum-480.jpg?v=157bf66f","img":"/img/sir-john-soanes-museum.jpg","w":590,"h":1024},{"name":"Conway Hall","slug":"conway-hall","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/conway-hall/","lat":51.51986,"lng":-0.118313,"verdict":"The oldest continuous chamber music series in the world, in a hall built for freethinkers, on Sunday evenings from October.","thumb":"/img/conway-hall-480.jpg?v=63c375f8","img":"/img/conway-hall.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Museum of Comedy","slug":"museum-of-comedy","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/","lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"A comedy museum and a hundred-seat club, in the crypt of a Hawksmoor church.","thumb":"/img/museum-of-comedy-480.jpg?v=3244dcee","img":"/img/museum-of-comedy.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Scala","slug":"scala","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/scala/","lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Four floors of a 1920 cinema, stacked so you can hear the band from the stairs."},{"name":"The Place","slug":"the-place","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/the-place/","lat":51.527437,"lng":-0.128733,"verdict":"A Victorian drill hall behind Euston where British contemporary dance was invented."},{"name":"James Smith & Sons","slug":"james-smith-sons","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/james-smith-sons/","lat":51.51683,"lng":-0.126612,"verdict":"An umbrella shop of 1857 with its Victorian shopfront entirely intact, still making sticks and umbrellas on the premises.","thumb":"/img/james-smith-sons-480.jpg?v=d5062aba","img":"/img/james-smith-sons.jpg","w":1024,"h":553},{"name":"Fortitude Bakehouse","slug":"fortitude-bakehouse","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/fortitude-bakehouse/","lat":51.522839,"lng":-0.124203,"verdict":"A back-alley bakery that happens to take its coffee seriously."},{"name":"Half Cup","slug":"half-cup-kings-cross","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/half-cup-kings-cross/","lat":51.527834,"lng":-0.124811,"verdict":"The civilised alternative to drinking station coffee before a train."},{"name":"Origin Coffee","slug":"origin-euston-road","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/origin-euston-road/","lat":51.529177,"lng":-0.126613,"verdict":"Cornwall's best-known roaster, on the Euston Road."},{"name":"Redemption Roasters","slug":"redemption-lambs-conduit","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/redemption-lambs-conduit/","lat":51.5225,"lng":-0.1185,"verdict":"Coffee roasted by a company that trains prisoners to make it."},{"name":"Store Street Espresso","slug":"store-street-espresso","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/store-street-espresso/","lat":51.5205,"lng":-0.1305,"verdict":"The one place in Bloomsbury where the laptops are actually welcome."},{"name":"Store Street Espresso","slug":"store-street-espresso-st-pancras","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/store-street-espresso-st-pancras/","lat":51.525661,"lng":-0.125019,"verdict":"Square Mile's Red Brick, plus whichever guest roaster is up."},{"name":"Donutelier Soho Place","slug":"donutelier-soho-place","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/donutelier-soho-place/","lat":51.515893,"lng":-0.130453,"verdict":"A doughnut counter run like a pastry kitchen, on the ground floor of Soho Place."},{"name":"Fortitude Bakehouse","slug":"fortitude-bakehouse","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/fortitude-bakehouse/","lat":51.522839,"lng":-0.124203,"verdict":"A cobbled back-alley bakery most people walk past the end of."},{"name":"Fred Bakery","slug":"fred-bakery-holborn","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/fred-bakery-holborn/","lat":51.522173,"lng":-0.114202,"verdict":"Pistachio rolls, tiramisu rolls, and a tiramisu latte that went viral."},{"name":"Konditor","slug":"konditor-grays-inn-road","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/konditor-grays-inn-road/","lat":51.519653,"lng":-0.11189,"verdict":"Eight to six on weekdays, and shut precisely when the offices are."},{"name":"P\u00e2tisserie Deux Amis","slug":"patisserie-deux-amis","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/patisserie-deux-amis/","lat":51.526664,"lng":-0.124259,"verdict":"A French patisserie and caf\u00e9 of about six tables, on the Judd Street run down to St Pancras."},{"name":"Ta'mini Lebanese Bakery","slug":"tamini-lebanese-bakery","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/tamini-lebanese-bakery/","lat":51.525512,"lng":-0.12531,"verdict":"Manakish baked to order - za'atar, akkawi cheese, spiced lamb - and ka'ak by the armful."},{"name":"Darlish Bloomsbury","slug":"darlish-bloomsbury","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/darlish-bloomsbury/","lat":51.518584,"lng":-0.124716,"verdict":"Persian ice cream - saffron, rose and pistachio - two minutes from the British Museum."},{"name":"Mille Patisserie Russell Square","slug":"mille-patisserie-russell-square","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/mille-patisserie-russell-square/","lat":51.524155,"lng":-0.12396,"verdict":"Mille-cr\u00eape cakes - twenty layers of paper-thin cr\u00eape and pastry cream - in the Brunswick Centre."},{"name":"Arcade Food Hall","slug":"arcade-food-hall","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/arcade-food-hall/","lat":51.516278,"lng":-0.129543,"verdict":"JKS restaurants in a food hall, with a games room attached."},{"name":"The Euston Tap","slug":"the-euston-tap","cat":"beer","url":"/beer/the-euston-tap/","lat":51.526975,"lng":-0.132562,"verdict":"A stone lodge of the lost Euston Arch, full of Czech lager."},{"name":"Scarfes Bar","slug":"scarfes-bar","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/scarfes-bar/","lat":51.51757,"lng":-0.118133,"verdict":"Gerald Scarfe caricatures, a fire, and live jazz nightly."},{"name":"The Coral Room","slug":"the-coral-room","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/the-coral-room/","lat":51.51713,"lng":-0.12911,"verdict":"A tall coral-pink salon off Great Russell Street, strong on English sparkling."},{"name":"Noble Rot","slug":"noble-rot","cat":"wine","url":"/wine/noble-rot/","lat":51.52188,"lng":-0.118695,"verdict":"The wine magazine's own bar, and the list reads like the magazine."},{"name":"Conway Hall","slug":"conway-hall","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/conway-hall/","lat":51.51986,"lng":-0.118313,"verdict":"The hall of the oldest surviving freethought organisation in the world, and a century of the arguments of the left.","thumb":"/img/conway-hall-480.jpg?v=63c375f8","img":"/img/conway-hall.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Gray's Inn","slug":"grays-inn","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/grays-inn/","lat":51.519074,"lng":-0.112202,"verdict":"Bacon's garden, Shakespeare's first Comedy of Errors, and a hall rebuilt after one night of the Blitz.","thumb":"/img/grays-inn-480.jpg?v=71e59de7","img":"/img/grays-inn.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Jeremy Bentham's Auto-Icon","slug":"jeremy-benthams-auto-icon","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/jeremy-benthams-auto-icon/","lat":51.524736,"lng":-0.13238,"verdict":"The philosopher who wanted every institution judged by how much happiness it produced, sitting in a glass case in a student building.","thumb":"/img/jeremy-benthams-auto-icon-480.jpg?v=609d14a3","img":"/img/jeremy-benthams-auto-icon.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"St George's Bloomsbury","slug":"st-georges-bloomsbury","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/st-georges-bloomsbury/","lat":51.51771,"lng":-0.124727,"verdict":"Hawksmoor's church with a stepped pyramid for a steeple and George I standing on the top of it.","thumb":"/img/st-georges-bloomsbury-480.jpg?v=d63ca501","img":"/img/st-georges-bloomsbury.jpg","w":1019,"h":1024},{"name":"Lamb's Conduit Street","slug":"lambs-conduit-street","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/lambs-conduit-street/","lat":51.521546,"lng":-0.118313,"verdict":"A Bloomsbury high street of independent shops that has kept every one of them.","thumb":"/img/street-lambs-conduit-street-480.jpg?v=7b3a7727","img":"/img/street-lambs-conduit-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Centre Point","slug":"centre-point","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/centre-point/","lat":51.516185,"lng":-0.129736,"verdict":"A precast concrete lattice of 1966 that stood completely empty for nine years.","thumb":"/img/centre-point-480.jpg?v=7bbba464","img":"/img/centre-point.jpg","w":617,"h":1024},{"name":"Sir John Soane's Museum","slug":"sir-john-soanes-museum","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/sir-john-soanes-museum/","lat":51.517075,"lng":-0.117469,"verdict":"An architect's own house, left exactly as he arranged it, with mirrors and light shafts everywhere.","thumb":"/img/sir-john-soanes-museum-480.jpg?v=157bf66f","img":"/img/sir-john-soanes-museum.jpg","w":590,"h":1024},{"name":"St Pancras","slug":"st-pancras","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/st-pancras/","lat":51.529877,"lng":-0.125502,"verdict":"The largest enclosed space in the world in 1868, with a Gothic hotel bolted across the front of it.","thumb":"/img/st-pancras-480.jpg?v=7f1fdb82","img":"/img/st-pancras.jpg","w":1024,"h":863},{"name":"James Smith & Sons","slug":"james-smith-sons","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/james-smith-sons/","lat":51.51683,"lng":-0.126612,"verdict":"An umbrella shop of 1857 with its Victorian shopfront entirely intact, still making sticks and umbrellas on the premises.","thumb":"/img/james-smith-sons-480.jpg?v=d5062aba","img":"/img/james-smith-sons.jpg","w":1024,"h":553},{"name":"L. Cornelissen & Son","slug":"l-cornelissen-son","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/l-cornelissen-son/","lat":51.517647,"lng":-0.129073,"verdict":"A Victorian artists' colourman opposite the British Museum, selling raw pigment by the jar from the original fittings.","thumb":"/img/l-cornelissen-son-480.jpg?v=99c6dd09","img":"/img/l-cornelissen-son.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Maggs Bros.","slug":"maggs-bros","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/maggs-bros/","lat":51.518483,"lng":-0.129267,"verdict":"One of the oldest antiquarian booksellers in the world, dealing from a Georgian house on Bedford Square."},{"name":"Present & Correct","slug":"present-correct","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/present-correct/","lat":51.518474,"lng":-0.124172,"verdict":"Stationery treated as graphic design, with a strong line in old stock nobody else kept."},{"name":"Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy","slug":"grant-museum-of-zoology-and-comparative-anatomy","cat":"science","url":"/science/grant-museum-of-zoology-and-comparative-anatomy/","lat":51.523732,"lng":-0.134266,"verdict":"One crowded Victorian room of skeletons and specimens, free.","thumb":"/img/grant-museum-of-zoology-and-comparative-anatomy-480.jpg?v=4c19625e","img":"/img/grant-museum-of-zoology-and-comparative-anatomy.jpg","w":1024,"h":683},{"name":"Jeremy Bentham's Auto-Icon","slug":"jeremy-benthams-auto-icon","cat":"science","url":"/science/jeremy-benthams-auto-icon/","lat":51.524736,"lng":-0.13238,"verdict":"A body left to anatomy in 1832 and still on show, wax head and all, because its owner wanted a corpse to be useful.","thumb":"/img/jeremy-benthams-auto-icon-480.jpg?v=609d14a3","img":"/img/jeremy-benthams-auto-icon.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Kingsway tram subway","slug":"kingsway-tram-subway","cat":"science","url":"/science/kingsway-tram-subway/","lat":51.51859,"lng":-0.120836,"verdict":"The ramp in the middle of Southampton Row where the trams went underground, the only survivor of London's tramways below street level.","thumb":"/img/kingsway-tram-subway-480.jpg?v=7214d917","img":"/img/kingsway-tram-subway.jpg","w":1024,"h":686},{"name":"Newton after Blake","slug":"newton-after-blake","cat":"science","url":"/science/newton-after-blake/","lat":51.529037,"lng":-0.127576,"verdict":"Eduardo Paolozzi's giant Newton, bent over his compasses in the British Library piazza.","thumb":"/img/newton-after-blake-480.jpg?v=bcb6e27b","img":"/img/newton-after-blake.jpg","w":1024,"h":691},{"name":"Wellcome Collection","slug":"wellcome-collection","cat":"science","url":"/science/wellcome-collection/","lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"Medicine, art and the human body, free, and consistently the most interesting free show in London.","thumb":"/img/wellcome-collection-480.jpg?v=49c3f5a3","img":"/img/wellcome-collection.jpg","w":1024,"h":556},{"name":"Magic Circle Museum","slug":"magic-circle-museum","cat":"secrets","url":"/secrets/magic-circle-museum/","lat":51.526389,"lng":-0.135556,"verdict":"Behind a discreet door near Euston, the headquarters of the society of magicians, whose members swear to keep the secrets and who let you in on tour nights."},{"name":"Noor Inayat Khan memorial, Gordon Square","slug":"noor-inayat-khan-memorial-gordon-square","cat":"secrets","url":"/secrets/noor-inayat-khan-memorial-gordon-square/","lat":51.5242,"lng":-0.1305,"verdict":"The first memorial in Britain to an Asian woman: the SOE wireless operator who kept transmitting from Paris when the rest of her network had been taken.","thumb":"/img/noor-inayat-khan-memorial-gordon-square-480.jpg?v=a33fa3a4","img":"/img/noor-inayat-khan-memorial-gordon-square.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Charles Dickens Museum","slug":"charles-dickens-museum","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/charles-dickens-museum/","lat":51.523594,"lng":-0.116323,"verdict":"The only London house of Dickens's still standing, where Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby were written.","thumb":"/img/charles-dickens-museum-480.jpg?v=2bd721e6","img":"/img/charles-dickens-museum.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Faber & Faber, 24 Russell Square","slug":"faber-faber-24-russell-square","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/faber-faber-24-russell-square/","lat":51.52165,"lng":-0.12603,"verdict":"T. S. Eliot's office for forty years, where the author of The Waste Land read other people's poems for a living.","thumb":"/img/faber-faber-24-russell-square-480.jpg?v=21363eaf","img":"/img/faber-faber-24-russell-square.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Gay's the Word","slug":"gays-the-word","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/gays-the-word/","lat":51.525423,"lng":-0.125198,"verdict":"Britain's first lesbian and gay bookshop, on Marchmont Street since 1979.","thumb":"/img/gays-the-word-480.jpg?v=df50db6e","img":"/img/gays-the-word.jpg","w":1002,"h":1024},{"name":"Gordon Square","slug":"gordon-square","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/gordon-square/","lat":51.524262,"lng":-0.130872,"verdict":"Where the Bloomsbury Group began: No. 46, the Stephen siblings' house of 1904, later Keynes's for thirty years, with Strachey at 51 and the group's plaque on 50.","thumb":"/img/gordon-square-480.jpg?v=75e83a40","img":"/img/gordon-square.jpg","w":1024,"h":647},{"name":"Senate House","slug":"senate-house","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/senate-house/","lat":51.521002,"lng":-0.12876,"verdict":"The Ministry of Truth: Orwell's model for Minitrue in Nineteen Eighty-Four.","thumb":"/img/senate-house-480.jpg?v=6343f6ae","img":"/img/senate-house.jpg","w":765,"h":1024},{"name":"Swedenborg House","slug":"swedenborg-house","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/swedenborg-house/","lat":51.517964,"lng":-0.122841,"verdict":"Bloomsbury's hidden house of the mystic who shaped Blake, Baudelaire and Borges: a library, a bookshop and a lecture hall.","thumb":"/img/swedenborg-house-480.jpg?v=6082132b","img":"/img/swedenborg-house.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Tavistock Square","slug":"tavistock-square","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/tavistock-square/","lat":51.525041,"lng":-0.129024,"verdict":"Bloomsbury's square: Virginia Woolf's bust, Gandhi in the middle, and the site of the Hogarth Press at No. 52.","thumb":"/img/tavistock-square-480.jpg?v=b2700388","img":"/img/tavistock-square.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Francisco de Miranda and Andr\u00e9s Bello","slug":"francisco-de-miranda","cat":"world","url":"/world/francisco-de-miranda/","lat":51.52349,"lng":-0.137964,"verdict":"The headquarters of Spanish-American independence, run for eight years from a terrace in Fitzrovia.","thumb":"/img/francisco-de-miranda-480.jpg?v=d4b1dfa2","img":"/img/francisco-de-miranda.jpg","w":639,"h":478},{"name":"Raja Ram Mohan Roy","slug":"ram-mohan-roy","cat":"world","url":"/world/ram-mohan-roy/","lat":51.51858,"lng":-0.129235,"verdict":"The Bloomsbury lodging of the reformer who came as the Mughal emperor's envoy and never went home.","thumb":"/img/ram-mohan-roy-480.jpg?v=254924f6","img":"/img/ram-mohan-roy.jpg","w":1024,"h":947},{"name":"Sir Syed Ahmad Khan","slug":"syed-ahmad-khan","cat":"world","url":"/world/syed-ahmad-khan/","lat":51.525297,"lng":-0.117606,"verdict":"Where the founder of Aligarh came to study English universities so he could build one for Indian Muslims.","thumb":"/img/syed-ahmad-khan-480.jpg?v=ebedbe70","img":"/img/syed-ahmad-khan.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Sun Yat-sen","slug":"sun-yat-sen","cat":"world","url":"/world/sun-yat-sen/","lat":51.518943,"lng":-0.114224,"verdict":"Where the father of the Chinese republic lodged in exile, before his own legation kidnapped him.","thumb":"/img/sun-yat-sen-480.jpg?v=75d92dc3","img":"/img/sun-yat-sen.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"The Ch\u014dsh\u016b Five","slug":"choshu-five","cat":"world","url":"/world/choshu-five/","lat":51.524721,"lng":-0.133513,"verdict":"The college where five young samurai, smuggled out of Japan on pain of death, learned how a modern country worked.","thumb":"/img/choshu-five-480.jpg?v=7ff4c51c","img":"/img/choshu-five.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"St Pancras Renaissance Hotel","slug":"st-pancras-renaissance-hotel","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/st-pancras-renaissance-hotel/","lat":51.529877,"lng":-0.125502,"verdict":"The Gothic hotel that played the outside of King's Cross in Chamber of Secrets, when the Ford Anglia took off.","thumb":"/img/st-pancras-renaissance-hotel-480.jpg?v=7f1fdb82","img":"/img/st-pancras-renaissance-hotel.jpg","w":1024,"h":863}]},{"slug":"borough-bermondsey","name":"Borough & Bermondsey","verdict":"The old way into London: coaching inns, a thousand-year-old market, and warehouse streets down to Tower Bridge.","note":"The land at the southern end of London Bridge, which for centuries was where you waited to get into the city. Borough High Street was lined with inns where the coaches stopped, and the George, rebuilt in 1677, is the last galleried coaching inn left in London. Borough Market grew up beside it and has been selling food on or near this spot for something close to a thousand years.\n\nBermondsey behind it was made by an abbey founded in 1082, whose monks drained the marsh and embanked the river. What came next was industry of a particularly strong-smelling kind. The tanneries took the hides, and Leathermarket Street and Morocco Street still carry the trade in their names; the food factories took everything else, with Peek Freans baking biscuits here from 1857 and Hartley's boiling jam, so much of it that the district was called the larder of London. Along the water stood three and a half miles of warehouses holding what the ships brought in.\n\nThen it stopped. The docks closed, the factories went, and the warehouses stood empty until the 1980s turned Shad Thames and Butler's Wharf into flats and restaurants. What is left is a walk with more texture than almost anywhere in London: the market, Southwark Cathedral, the narrow brick canyon of Shad Thames with its iron bridges overhead, Bermondsey Street's Georgian shopfronts, and an antiques market that opens at dawn on Fridays.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-borough-bermondsey-2.jpg?v=cbe36a52","thumb":"/img/area-borough-bermondsey-2-480.jpg?v=be0c7d0f","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Borough Market under its green iron roof: wheels of cheese and cut wedges on a stall in front, red and yellow awnings lettered with the market's name, a charcuterie counter and shoppers in winter coats between the stalls.","caption":"Borough Market, the cheese stalls under the iron roof.","credit":"Photo by MOs810, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Borough_Market_2019_(27).jpg"},"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-borough-bermondsey-6.jpg?v=ffbf20cd","thumb":"/img/area-borough-bermondsey-6-480.jpg?v=ccc8a637","width":1024,"height":827,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The George's white-painted front with its two tiers of wooden galleries hung with baskets of ivy, a painted inn sign of St George on horseback dated 1676, and green-framed windows of the Gallery Bar below.","caption":"The George's galleries, in its yard off Borough High Street.","credit":"Photo by It's No Game from Leicestershire, UK, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_George_at_Southwark_(8553233399).jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-borough-bermondsey-7.jpg?v=efe2fb82","thumb":"/img/area-borough-bermondsey-7-480.jpg?v=107e2fd1","width":1024,"height":576,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A stall set into a brick railway arch, its green shutters painted with a turnip, a sign reading Wild Mushroom Risotto, steam rising from a wide pan, and a queue of people in coats at the counter.","caption":"A risotto stall in one of Borough Market's railway arches.","credit":"Photo by Tom Page, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wild_Mushroom_Risotto_Borough_Market_2024-01-11.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-borough-bermondsey-9.jpg?v=636af14a","thumb":"/img/area-borough-bermondsey-9-480.jpg?v=6a4c088b","width":1024,"height":769,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Southwark Cathedral from the north-west: its chequered stone tower and long slate roof, the flint chapter house in front, and the Shard rising behind on a bright day.","caption":"Southwark Cathedral, with the Shard behind.","credit":"Photo by Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Northwest_View_of_Southwark_Cathedral_(01).jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-borough-bermondsey-8.jpg?v=7f7a224e","thumb":"/img/area-borough-bermondsey-8-480.jpg?v=c54a975d","width":1024,"height":682,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The cathedral's great stone screen: two rows of carved figures in canopied niches, bishops, kings and saints, with a gilded Virgin and Child in the middle and gilt angels at the foot.","caption":"The great screen of Southwark Cathedral, its statues added in 1905.","credit":"Photo by CrisNYCa, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Southwark_Cathedral_6.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-borough-bermondsey-10.jpg?v=52f1f85b","thumb":"/img/area-borough-bermondsey-10-480.jpg?v=09ebae04","width":1024,"height":576,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The black hull of a replica galleon with red and yellow painted arches, its rigging tied off through wooden blocks, and a cannon's muzzle at a gunport.","caption":"The Golden Hinde, in St Mary Overie Dock.","credit":"Photo by Garth Weals, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Golden_Hinde_(reconstructed),_London.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-borough-bermondsey-4.jpg?v=f0837681","thumb":"/img/area-borough-bermondsey-4-480.jpg?v=086d9c32","width":1024,"height":576,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Tower Bridge from the south bank: the two stone towers, the high walkways and the pale blue chains, a red bus crossing, under a blue sky with light cloud.","caption":"Tower Bridge from the south bank.","credit":"Photo by Helen Ilus, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tower_Bridge_from_South_Bank.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-borough-bermondsey-5.jpg?v=3cafa5f4","thumb":"/img/area-borough-bermondsey-5-480.jpg?v=025197d7","width":1024,"height":645,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The south bank from the river: the brick warehouses of Butler's Wharf on the left, the Shard rising behind, City Hall's glass, and Tower Bridge on the right with sailing barges moored in front.","caption":"Butler's Wharf, the Shard, City Hall and Tower Bridge, from the river.","credit":"Photo by \u0412\u0432\u043b\u0430\u0441\u0435\u043d\u043a\u043e, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Butler's_Wharf,_The_Shard,_City_Hall,_Tower_Bridge,_Hermitage_Community_Moorings_-_view_from_The_Thames.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-borough-bermondsey.jpg?v=71dba18e","thumb":"/img/area-borough-bermondsey-480.jpg?v=5a4ab6f0","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A black pre-war saloon parked outside R.W. 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like."},{"name":"The Colombian Coffee Company","slug":"the-colombian-coffee-company-borough-market","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/the-colombian-coffee-company-borough-market/","lat":51.5056,"lng":-0.0896,"verdict":"A Borough Market stall pouring Colombian coffee the Colombian way."},{"name":"The Colombian Coffee Company","slug":"the-colombian-coffee-company-flat-iron-square","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/the-colombian-coffee-company-flat-iron-square/","lat":51.50422,"lng":-0.0954,"verdict":"The roastery itself, under a railway arch at Flat Iron Square."},{"name":"WatchHouse","slug":"watchhouse","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/watchhouse/","lat":51.503651,"lng":-0.074418,"verdict":"The Shad Thames room, a few minutes from the roastery that supplies it."},{"name":"WatchHouse","slug":"watchhouse-bermondsey","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/watchhouse-bermondsey/","lat":51.497999,"lng":-0.081241,"verdict":"A nineteenth-century watchman's hut, now the neatest bar on the street.","thumb":"/img/watchhouse-bermondsey-480.jpg?v=1cd876f2","img":"/img/watchhouse-bermondsey.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Bread Ahead","slug":"bread-ahead","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/bread-ahead/","lat":51.505968,"lng":-0.090417,"verdict":"The Borough Market arch, and the doughnut that started all of this."},{"name":"Comptoir Gourmand","slug":"comptoir-gourmand","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/comptoir-gourmand/","lat":51.500833,"lng":-0.081982,"verdict":"French pastry on Bermondsey Street, with an unusually long Saturday."},{"name":"Konditor","slug":"konditor-joiner-street","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/konditor-joiner-street/","lat":51.5053,"lng":-0.08675,"verdict":"In the tiled passage under London Bridge, built for people with a train to catch."},{"name":"St John Bakery","slug":"st-john-bakery","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/st-john-bakery/","lat":51.499837,"lng":-0.075585,"verdict":"The custard doughnut that started the London doughnut argument."},{"name":"St John Bakery","slug":"st-john-bakery-the-borough","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/st-john-bakery-the-borough/","lat":51.501658,"lng":-0.093034,"verdict":"The Borough counter, a minute from the station."},{"name":"The Free From Bakehouse","slug":"the-free-from-bakehouse","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/the-free-from-bakehouse/","lat":51.505588,"lng":-0.09031,"verdict":"Award-winning free-from baking on a Borough Market stall, from a dedicated kitchen."},{"name":"Longboys","slug":"longboys","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/longboys/","lat":51.507071,"lng":-0.092341,"verdict":"Eclairs made a foot long and filled while you wait, in Borough Yards."},{"name":"Lantana London Bridge","slug":"lantana-london-bridge","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/lantana-london-bridge/","lat":51.5049,"lng":-0.094277,"verdict":"All-day Australian cooking on Southwark Street."},{"name":"Where The Pancakes 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arches.","thumb":"/img/maltby-street-market-480.jpg?v=0e01d58f","img":"/img/maltby-street-market.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Vinegar Yard","slug":"vinegar-yard","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/vinegar-yard/","lat":51.502503,"lng":-0.083544,"verdict":"A terrace in the shadow of the Shard, with the view to match.","thumb":"/img/vinegar-yard-480.jpg?v=6db3e3e4","img":"/img/vinegar-yard.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Cloudwater Taproom","slug":"cloudwater-taproom","cat":"beer","url":"/beer/cloudwater-taproom/","lat":51.497742,"lng":-0.072581,"verdict":"Manchester's best-known brewery, in a Bermondsey arch with nineteen taps."},{"name":"Southwark Brewing Company","slug":"southwark-brewing-company","cat":"beer","url":"/beer/southwark-brewing-company/","lat":51.500594,"lng":-0.077144,"verdict":"A Druid Street arch brewing proper bitter on the Beer Mile."},{"name":"The Rake","slug":"the-rake","cat":"beer","url":"/beer/the-rake/","lat":51.506177,"lng":-0.091269,"verdict":"A tiny beer bar wedged into Borough Market since 2006."},{"name":"G\u014eNG","slug":"gong","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/gong/","lat":51.504366,"lng":-0.086474,"verdict":"Level 52 of the Shard, and the highest hotel bar in western Europe."},{"name":"Nancy's","slug":"nancys","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/nancys/","lat":51.506173,"lng":-0.08742,"verdict":"A small, dark room by London Bridge that stays open to 02:00."},{"name":"40 Maltby Street","slug":"40-maltby-street","cat":"wine","url":"/wine/40-maltby-street/","lat":51.499624,"lng":-0.076109,"verdict":"A railway arch that is a wine importer by day and a kitchen by night."},{"name":"Lant Street Wine","slug":"lant-street-wine","cat":"wine","url":"/wine/lant-street-wine/","lat":51.500794,"lng":-0.094465,"verdict":"A former cork factory off Borough High Street, stocked from family estates."},{"name":"The Boot & Flogger","slug":"the-boot-flogger","cat":"wine","url":"/wine/the-boot-flogger/","lat":51.5042,"lng":-0.093551,"verdict":"The original Davy's, trading on a wine-only licence since 1965."},{"name":"Southwark Cathedral","slug":"southwark-cathedral","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/southwark-cathedral/","lat":51.50613,"lng":-0.08958,"verdict":"Shakespeare's parish church while he lived on Bankside, with his brother buried in it.","thumb":"/img/southwark-cathedral-480.jpg?v=2ffb11bd","img":"/img/southwark-cathedral.jpg","w":1024,"h":769},{"name":"Bermondsey Street","slug":"bermondsey-street","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/bermondsey-street/","lat":51.497473,"lng":-0.081823,"verdict":"Georgian and Victorian fronts the whole way down, with a castellated church halfway along.","thumb":"/img/street-bermondsey-street-480.jpg?v=e59dfa32","img":"/img/street-bermondsey-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":657},{"name":"Borough Yards","slug":"borough-yards","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/borough-yards/","lat":51.506183,"lng":-0.092378,"verdict":"Victorian railway arches opened up into a run of lanes between Borough Market and the river.","thumb":"/img/street-borough-yards-480.jpg?v=ad82e729","img":"/img/street-borough-yards.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Park Street","slug":"park-street","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/park-street/","lat":51.505351,"lng":-0.091634,"verdict":"Georgian brick and warehouse fronts running into Borough Market, with the cathedral tower at the end.","thumb":"/img/street-park-street-480.jpg?v=9e48b9a7","img":"/img/street-park-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Shad Thames","slug":"shad-thames","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/shad-thames/","lat":51.503354,"lng":-0.073574,"verdict":"A canyon of warehouses crossed overhead by the iron gangways that carried the goods across.","thumb":"/img/street-shad-thames-480.jpg?v=eeba3c9b","img":"/img/street-shad-thames.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Cross Bones Graveyard","slug":"cross-bones-graveyard","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/cross-bones-graveyard/","lat":51.503951,"lng":-0.093163,"verdict":"An unconsecrated burial ground for the outcast dead of Southwark, its gates hung with ribbons.","thumb":"/img/cross-bones-graveyard-480.jpg?v=be511945","img":"/img/cross-bones-graveyard.jpg","w":1024,"h":681},{"name":"John Keats statue","slug":"john-keats-statue","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/john-keats-statue/","lat":51.503884,"lng":-0.087985,"verdict":"Keats, who trained as a surgeon at Guy's, sitting in a stone alcove that once stood on old London Bridge.","thumb":"/img/john-keats-statue-480.jpg?v=a66a1dc0","img":"/img/john-keats-statue.jpg","w":769,"h":1024},{"name":"Winchester Palace","slug":"winchester-palace","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/winchester-palace/","lat":51.506871,"lng":-0.090956,"verdict":"The rose window of a bishop's great hall, standing alone among the Bankside warehouses.","thumb":"/img/winchester-palace-480.jpg?v=4388934a","img":"/img/winchester-palace.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"HMS Belfast","slug":"hms-belfast","cat":"science","url":"/science/hms-belfast/","lat":51.506563,"lng":-0.081311,"verdict":"A Second World War cruiser kept as she was, nine decks to climb through, moored between the bridges.","thumb":"/img/own-hms-belfast-480.jpg?v=439bec86","img":"/img/own-hms-belfast.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret","slug":"old-operating-theatre-museum-and-herb-garret","cat":"science","url":"/science/old-operating-theatre-museum-and-herb-garret/","lat":51.50506,"lng":-0.0885,"verdict":"Europe's oldest surviving operating theatre, from the years before anaesthetics, in a church attic up fifty-two spiral steps."},{"name":"Tower Bridge","slug":"tower-bridge","cat":"science","url":"/science/tower-bridge/","lat":51.505517,"lng":-0.075366,"verdict":"The Victorian steam engines that used to raise the bridge, kept in the rooms under the south tower, with a glass floor over the road on the way to them.","thumb":"/img/own-tower-bridge-480.jpg?v=b557d989","img":"/img/own-tower-bridge.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"John Keats statue","slug":"john-keats-statue","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/john-keats-statue/","lat":51.503884,"lng":-0.087985,"verdict":"Keats as a medical student, sitting in an alcove from old London Bridge in the courtyard of the hospital that trained him.","thumb":"/img/john-keats-statue-480.jpg?v=a66a1dc0","img":"/img/john-keats-statue.jpg","w":769,"h":1024},{"name":"Marshalsea wall & St George the Martyr","slug":"marshalsea-prison-wall","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/marshalsea-prison-wall/","lat":51.501641,"lng":-0.091575,"verdict":"The one surviving wall of the Marshalsea, where Dickens's father was jailed, and the church where Little Dorrit was christened and married."},{"name":"Rose Theatre Exhibition","slug":"rose-theatre-exhibition","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/rose-theatre-exhibition/","lat":51.507215,"lng":-0.095469,"verdict":"The playhouse where Marlowe's plays were first staged, its footprint uncovered in 1989 and kept."},{"name":"Site of the Tabard Inn","slug":"site-of-the-tabard-inn","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/site-of-the-tabard-inn/","lat":51.504082,"lng":-0.090218,"verdict":"Where Chaucer's pilgrims gathered: the site of the Tabard, in a yard off Borough High Street."},{"name":"Site of the original Globe","slug":"site-of-the-original-globe","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/site-of-the-original-globe/","lat":51.506838,"lng":-0.094742,"verdict":"Where the first Globe stood, traced in dark stones across the pavement of Park Street."},{"name":"Southwark Cathedral","slug":"southwark-cathedral","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/southwark-cathedral/","lat":51.50613,"lng":-0.08958,"verdict":"Shakespeare's parish church while he lived on Bankside, with his brother buried in it.","thumb":"/img/southwark-cathedral-480.jpg?v=2ffb11bd","img":"/img/southwark-cathedral.jpg","w":1024,"h":769},{"name":"The George Inn","slug":"the-george-inn","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/the-george-inn/","lat":51.504182,"lng":-0.089999,"verdict":"London's last galleried coaching inn, which Dickens knew and put into Little Dorrit.","thumb":"/img/the-george-inn-480.jpg?v=b5731010","img":"/img/the-george-inn.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"The Leaky Cauldron, Stoney Street","slug":"the-leaky-cauldron-stoney-street","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/the-leaky-cauldron-stoney-street/","lat":51.50528,"lng":-0.09113,"verdict":"The Leaky Cauldron's door in Prisoner of Azkaban, under the railway on the edge of Borough Market."},{"name":"Tower Bridge","slug":"tower-bridge","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/tower-bridge/","lat":51.505517,"lng":-0.075366,"verdict":"The Order flies Harry up the Thames and between the towers of Tower Bridge in Order of the Phoenix.","thumb":"/img/own-tower-bridge-480.jpg?v=b557d989","img":"/img/own-tower-bridge.jpg","w":1024,"h":768}]},{"slug":"camden","name":"Camden","verdict":"Markets in a Victorian goods yard, and the small venues where London bands play their first real gigs.","note":"Camden Town was laid out from 1791 as a respectable suburb, named after the Earl Camden who owned the ground, and then had its respectability taken away by transport. The Regent's Canal came through in 1816 and the railway arrived in 1837. Everything that makes the place now is the wreckage of that, put to another use: the goods yards, the horse hospital where the animals that hauled the barges were stabled, and the Roundhouse of 1847, a shed built to turn locomotives and now a concert hall.\n\nThe markets began small, with a craft market at Camden Lock in 1973 in a yard beside the canal. It spread into the stables and the streets around them and now runs most of the way from the station to Chalk Farm. What it sells has changed, less craft and more street food, but the crowd it pulls has not.\n\nMusic is the other half. The Roundhouse had Pink Floyd and Hendrix in the 1960s; the Electric Ballroom, the Dublin Castle and the Underworld are where bands play the gig before anyone has heard of them, and the pubs were Britpop's front room. Amy Winehouse lived, drank and sang here, and her statue stands in the Stables Market.\n\nIt is loud, crowded and not remotely polished, which is the appeal. Come on a weekday to see the place; come on a Saturday to see everybody else.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-camden.jpg?v=4100b22f","thumb":"/img/area-camden-480.jpg?v=368df12b","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":500,"alt":"Camden Lock seen from the market, the roving bridge over the canal","caption":"The lock and the bridge, from the market.","credit":"Photo by ell brown, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Camden_Lock_from_Camden_Market_-_Jamestown_Wharf_-_Roving_Bridge_-_The_Ice_Wharf.jpg"},"figures":[],"reading_links":[],"edges":["St Pancras Way","Camden Road","Camden High Street","Regent's Park Road"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.1389,51.5346],[-0.1326,51.53552],[-0.13311,51.53808],[-0.13406,51.53898],[-0.13515,51.53963],[-0.13573,51.54035],[-0.13544,51.5416],[-0.13579,51.54197],[-0.13585,51.542],[-0.13746,51.54281],[-0.13937,51.54076],[-0.14112,51.53998],[-0.14261,51.53893],[-0.14413,51.54069],[-0.14639,51.54204],[-0.14807,51.54266],[-0.15263,51.54383],[-0.1548,51.54333],[-0.15522,51.54267],[-0.15492,51.54205],[-0.15015,51.5399],[-0.14865,51.53777],[-0.14683,51.5372],[-0.14631,51.53677],[-0.1454,51.53643],[-0.14408,51.5364],[-0.1411,51.53718],[-0.13967,51.5358],[-0.1389,51.5346]]]},"centre":[-0.13719,51.53763],"bounds":[[-0.15522,51.5346],[-0.1326,51.54383]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":52,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":6,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"shopping","name":"Shopping","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"architecture","name":"Architecture","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":2,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"Afriquoi","slug":"afriquoi","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/jazz-cafe/afriquoi/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-24","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.538602,"lng":-0.143035,"verdict":"Kora, guitar and a rhythm section pointed squarely at the dancefloor."},{"name":"Alfredo Rodriguez and Pedrito Martinez","slug":"alfredo-rodriguez-and-pedrito-martinez","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/alfredo-rodriguez-and-pedrito-martinez/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-15","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"Two Havana musicians who left for the States and came back to each other, piano against congas."},{"name":"An Irish Shindig","slug":"an-irish-shindig","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/electric-ballroom/an-irish-shindig/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.539704,"lng":-0.142984,"verdict":"Traditional Irish music in the hall that was built for Camden's Irish community."},{"name":"Balimaya Project","slug":"balimaya-project","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/jazz-cafe/balimaya-project/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.538602,"lng":-0.143035,"verdict":"Sixteen players on Mande music from West Africa, made in south London."},{"name":"Balkanplus","slug":"balkanplus","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cecil-sharp-house/balkanplus/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.538159,"lng":-0.149322,"verdict":"Balkan dancing at the English folk society's headquarters, monthly."},{"name":"Banda El Recodo","slug":"banda-el-recodo","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/banda-el-recodo/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-20","to":"2026-09-20"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"The most famous banda in Mexico, playing Camden."},{"name":"Bellaire + Dublon + Jeremy Underground","slug":"bellaire-dublon-jeremy-underground","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/roundhouse/bellaire-dublon-jeremy-underground/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.543248,"lng":-0.151974,"verdict":"French house in the round, with two more DJs either side of it."},{"name":"Brigitte Calls Me Baby","slug":"brigitte-calls-me-baby","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/brigitte-calls-me-baby/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-15","to":"2026-09-15"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"Chicago five-piece with a singer who sounds like Roy Orbison and dresses like it."},{"name":"Chameleons","slug":"chameleons","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/chameleons/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-23","to":"2026-10-23"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"The Middleton post-punk band whose records everyone else borrowed from."},{"name":"China Moses","slug":"china-moses","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/jazz-cafe/china-moses/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.538602,"lng":-0.143035,"verdict":"Dee Dee Bridgewater's daughter, who sings soul-jazz in her own right and has for twenty years."},{"name":"DJ Krush","slug":"dj-krush","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/jazz-cafe/dj-krush/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-06","to":"2026-10-06"},"lat":51.538602,"lng":-0.143035,"verdict":"The Japanese producer who built instrumental hip-hop out of jazz records."},{"name":"Drug Church","slug":"drug-church","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/electric-ballroom/drug-church/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.539704,"lng":-0.142984,"verdict":"Albany hardcore with tunes, which is the argument the band keeps winning."},{"name":"Everybody Loves The Sunshine: fifty years of Roy Ayers","slug":"everybody-loves-the-sunshine-fifty-years-of-roy-ayers","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/jazz-cafe/everybody-loves-the-sunshine-fifty-years-of-roy-ayers/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.538602,"lng":-0.143035,"verdict":"The vibraphone record that half of hip-hop has sampled, played live."},{"name":"Ezra Collective & Friends","slug":"ezra-collective-friends","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/ezra-collective-friends/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-24"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"The Mercury-winning quintet, with guests, in a room the size they left behind."},{"name":"Fatoumata Diawara + Thanda Choir","slug":"fatoumata-diawara-thanda-choir","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/roundhouse/fatoumata-diawara-thanda-choir/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-18","to":"2026-11-18"},"lat":51.543248,"lng":-0.151974,"verdict":"A Malian singer who turns hard subjects into songs people dance to."},{"name":"Fela Kuti's birthday","slug":"fela-kutis-birthday","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/jazz-cafe/fela-kutis-birthday/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-15","to":"2026-10-15"},"lat":51.538602,"lng":-0.143035,"verdict":"The Jazz Cafe's annual afrobeat night for the man who invented it."},{"name":"Fickle Friends","slug":"fickle-friends","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/electric-ballroom/fickle-friends/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.539704,"lng":-0.142984,"verdict":"Brighton synth-pop with a decade of singles behind it."},{"name":"Good Kid + Last Dinosaurs","slug":"good-kid-last-dinosaurs","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/roundhouse/good-kid-last-dinosaurs/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.543248,"lng":-0.151974,"verdict":"Toronto indie rock that built its audience entirely online."},{"name":"Hoodoo Gurus","slug":"hoodoo-gurus","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/electric-ballroom/hoodoo-gurus/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-28","to":"2026-09-28"},"lat":51.539704,"lng":-0.142984,"verdict":"Sydney garage rock, on the road since 1981."},{"name":"I AM WARRIOR: Tomorrow's Warriors","slug":"i-am-warrior-tomorrows-warriors","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/jazz-cafe/i-am-warrior-tomorrows-warriors/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-10-02"},"lat":51.538602,"lng":-0.143035,"verdict":"The organisation that trained most of the current London jazz scene, showing this year's intake."},{"name":"Isaiah Sharkey RED","slug":"isaiah-sharkey-red","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/jazz-cafe/isaiah-sharkey-red/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-19","to":"2026-11-19"},"lat":51.538602,"lng":-0.143035,"verdict":"The guitarist behind D'Angelo and John Mayer, out front for once."},{"name":"Jack Harlow","slug":"jack-harlow","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/jack-harlow/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-13","to":"2026-10-13"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"The Louisville rapper in a fourteen-hundred-capacity room."},{"name":"James Felice","slug":"james-felice","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/green-note/james-felice/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-09-10"},"lat":51.537291,"lng":-0.145948,"verdict":"Half of the Felice Brothers, alone, in a room that holds sixty."},{"name":"Jazz Re:fest","slug":"jazz-re-fest","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/jazz-re-fest/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-09-13"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"A day of British jazz in a Victorian theatre, run by Jazz re:freshed."},{"name":"Jess Klein","slug":"jess-klein","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/green-note/jess-klein/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.537291,"lng":-0.145948,"verdict":"An American songwriter's matin\u00e9e, in a Camden back room."},{"name":"Joyce Manor","slug":"joyce-manor","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/electric-ballroom/joyce-manor/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-08","to":"2026-10-08"},"lat":51.539704,"lng":-0.142984,"verdict":"Californian emo-punk, and almost every song under three minutes."},{"name":"Lion Babe","slug":"lion-babe","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/electric-ballroom/lion-babe/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-17"},"lat":51.539704,"lng":-0.142984,"verdict":"New York soul duo, live with a band."},{"name":"London Metalfest 2026","slug":"london-metalfest-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/electric-ballroom/london-metalfest-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.539704,"lng":-0.142984,"verdict":"An all-day metal bill in Camden, starting at half past three."},{"name":"Mago De Oz","slug":"mago-de-oz","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/electric-ballroom/mago-de-oz/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-12","to":"2026-10-12"},"lat":51.539704,"lng":-0.142984,"verdict":"Spanish folk metal with a violinist and a following that travels."},{"name":"Man/Woman/Chainsaw","slug":"man-woman-chainsaw","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/electric-ballroom/man-woman-chainsaw/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-07","to":"2026-10-07"},"lat":51.539704,"lng":-0.142984,"verdict":"Six south Londoners with a violin, and one of the most argued-about new bands in the city."},{"name":"Maria Jose Llergo","slug":"maria-jose-llergo","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/jazz-cafe/maria-jose-llergo/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-22","to":"2026-09-22"},"lat":51.538602,"lng":-0.143035,"verdict":"Flamenco from a singer who grew up in an Andalusian village and now fills concert halls."},{"name":"Matt Carmichael","slug":"matt-carmichael","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cecil-sharp-house/matt-carmichael/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-17","to":"2026-11-17"},"lat":51.538159,"lng":-0.149322,"verdict":"A Glasgow saxophonist launching an album that sits between John Coltrane and Big Thief."},{"name":"Mazaika Duo","slug":"mazaika-duo","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/green-note/mazaika-duo/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.537291,"lng":-0.145948,"verdict":"Russian folk, tango, klezmer and Balkan beat, played by two people."},{"name":"Melvyn Robinson: Hill Drawings","slug":"melvyn-robinson-hill-drawings","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cecil-sharp-house/melvyn-robinson-hill-drawings/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-15","to":"2026-09-15"},"lat":51.538159,"lng":-0.149322,"verdict":"Paintings of chalk hill figures, in the folk society's gallery."},{"name":"Myles Sanko","slug":"myles-sanko","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/jazz-cafe/myles-sanko/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-10","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.538602,"lng":-0.143035,"verdict":"A soul-jazz singer with a voice built for exactly this size of room."},{"name":"Nu Genea Live Band","slug":"nu-genea-live-band","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/roundhouse/nu-genea-live-band/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.543248,"lng":-0.151974,"verdict":"Neapolitan disco with a full band, which is how it was always meant to sound."},{"name":"PJ Morton","slug":"pj-morton","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/pj-morton/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-12","to":"2026-10-12"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"Maroon 5's keyboard player, who is a much better soul singer than that suggests."},{"name":"Pale Waves","slug":"pale-waves","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/pale-waves/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"Manchester four-piece, goth in look and pure pop underneath."},{"name":"Rymden","slug":"rymden","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/jazz-cafe/rymden/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-18","to":"2026-11-18"},"lat":51.538602,"lng":-0.143035,"verdict":"Three Scandinavians who between them built most of what Europe now calls a piano trio."},{"name":"Saint Etienne","slug":"saint-etienne","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/roundhouse/saint-etienne/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.543248,"lng":-0.151974,"verdict":"The band who spent thirty years writing pop songs about London."},{"name":"Sam Carter sings Nic Jones","slug":"sam-carter-sings-nic-jones","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cecil-sharp-house/sam-carter-sings-nic-jones/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-09-16"},"lat":51.538159,"lng":-0.149322,"verdict":"A folk award winner playing the guitarist whose career a car crash ended."},{"name":"Songs in the Key of Life at fifty","slug":"songs-in-the-key-of-life-at-fifty","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/jazz-cafe/songs-in-the-key-of-life-at-fifty/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-09","to":"2026-10-09"},"lat":51.538602,"lng":-0.143035,"verdict":"Stevie Wonder's double album, played through, half a century on."},{"name":"The Coral","slug":"the-coral","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/the-coral/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-16","to":"2026-10-16"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"Twenty-five years of Merseyside psychedelia."},{"name":"The Crazy World of Arthur Brown","slug":"the-crazy-world-of-arthur-brown","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/jazz-cafe/the-crazy-world-of-arthur-brown/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-31","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.538602,"lng":-0.143035,"verdict":"The man who sang Fire in 1968 with his head on fire, on Halloween."},{"name":"The Jayhawks","slug":"the-jayhawks","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/electric-ballroom/the-jayhawks/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-09-16"},"lat":51.539704,"lng":-0.142984,"verdict":"Minneapolis country rock, forty years on and still harmonising."},{"name":"The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble","slug":"the-kilimanjaro-darkjazz-ensemble","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/jazz-cafe/the-kilimanjaro-darkjazz-ensemble/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-23","to":"2026-10-23"},"lat":51.538602,"lng":-0.143035,"verdict":"Dutch band who put jazz instruments to work on something closer to a horror soundtrack."},{"name":"The London Barndance Company","slug":"the-london-barndance-company","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cecil-sharp-house/the-london-barndance-company/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.538159,"lng":-0.149322,"verdict":"An English barn dance with a live band and a caller, played fast."},{"name":"The Meltdown","slug":"the-meltdown","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/jazz-cafe/the-meltdown/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-15","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.538602,"lng":-0.143035,"verdict":"Melbourne's answer to Stax, ten years in and touring a new record."},{"name":"Unprocessed","slug":"unprocessed","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/electric-ballroom/unprocessed/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-10-02"},"lat":51.539704,"lng":-0.142984,"verdict":"German progressive metal that keeps folding jazz chords into the riffs."},{"name":"Vanessa Paradis","slug":"vanessa-paradis","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/vanessa-paradis/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"The French singer and actress, on a rare London night."},{"name":"WILLOW","slug":"willow","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/willow/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"The pop-punk turn, played live by the person who made it."},{"name":"Young The Giant","slug":"young-the-giant","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/young-the-giant/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-08","to":"2026-10-08"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"Californian indie rock with fifteen years of festival choruses behind it."},{"name":"Jewish Museum London","slug":"jewish-museum-london","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/jewish-museum-london/","lat":51.537304,"lng":-0.144584,"verdict":"Anglo-Jewish history \u2014 currently without a building of its own.","thumb":"/img/jewish-museum-london-480.jpg?v=dbffbc4e","img":"/img/jewish-museum-london.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Cecil Sharp House","slug":"cecil-sharp-house","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/cecil-sharp-house/","lat":51.538159,"lng":-0.149322,"verdict":"The home of English folk since 1930, with a mural that took Ivon Hitchens three years."},{"name":"Electric Ballroom","slug":"electric-ballroom","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/electric-ballroom/","lat":51.539704,"lng":-0.142984,"verdict":"An Irish dance hall that became a punk venue and has stayed in the same family throughout."},{"name":"Green Note","slug":"green-note","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/green-note/","lat":51.537291,"lng":-0.145948,"verdict":"Sixty seats in a Camden back room, folk and acoustic seven nights a week."},{"name":"Jazz Cafe","slug":"jazz-cafe","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/jazz-cafe/","lat":51.538602,"lng":-0.143035,"verdict":"A former bank in Camden where the definition of jazz has always been generous and the balcony is the place to be.","thumb":"/img/jazz-cafe-480.jpg?v=7e211405","img":"/img/jazz-cafe.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"KOKO","slug":"koko","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/koko/","lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"A 1900 theatre with three tiers of gilt balcony, rebuilt after a fire and reopened in 2022."},{"name":"Roundhouse","slug":"roundhouse","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/roundhouse/","lat":51.543248,"lng":-0.151974,"verdict":"A Victorian engine shed in the round, where the audience stands under a ring of iron columns.","thumb":"/img/roundhouse-480.jpg?v=44ade82a","img":"/img/roundhouse.jpg","w":640,"h":480},{"name":"Camden High Street","slug":"camden-high-street","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/camden-high-street/","lat":51.539764,"lng":-0.143343,"verdict":"The markets, and the shops that grew out of them."},{"name":"Old Post Office Bakery","slug":"old-post-office-bakery-chalk-farm","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/old-post-office-bakery-chalk-farm/","lat":51.541756,"lng":-0.138648,"verdict":"The Brixton organic bakery, transplanted to Camden Road."},{"name":"Camden Market","slug":"camden-market","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/camden-market/","lat":51.542378,"lng":-0.147195,"verdict":"Hawker stalls in the West Yard, cheap and from everywhere.","thumb":"/img/own-camden-market-480.jpg?v=a63cc0c9","img":"/img/own-camden-market.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Roundhouse","slug":"roundhouse","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/roundhouse/","lat":51.543248,"lng":-0.151974,"verdict":"A railway engine shed of 1847 built round a turntable, obsolete in ten years and useful ever since.","thumb":"/img/roundhouse-480.jpg?v=44ade82a","img":"/img/roundhouse.jpg","w":640,"h":480},{"name":"Rimbaud and Verlaine, Royal College Street","slug":"rimbaud-and-verlaine-royal-college-street","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/rimbaud-and-verlaine-royal-college-street/","lat":51.53652,"lng":-0.13618,"verdict":"The Camden terrace where Rimbaud and Verlaine lived in 1873, before the shot in Brussels.","thumb":"/img/rimbaud-and-verlaine-royal-college-street-480.jpg?v=567620c8","img":"/img/rimbaud-and-verlaine-royal-college-street.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Rimbaud and Verlaine","slug":"rimbaud-and-verlaine","cat":"world","url":"/world/rimbaud-and-verlaine/","lat":51.53776,"lng":-0.1343,"verdict":"The Camden house where two French poets lived together for two months, before the shooting.","thumb":"/img/rimbaud-and-verlaine-480.jpg?v=e013b548","img":"/img/rimbaud-and-verlaine.jpg","w":480,"h":640},{"name":"Ruth First and Joe Slovo","slug":"ruth-first-and-joe-slovo","cat":"world","url":"/world/ruth-first-and-joe-slovo/","lat":51.540509,"lng":-0.138573,"verdict":"The Camden home of two South African communists in exile, one of whom was murdered by a parcel bomb.","thumb":"/img/ruth-first-and-joe-slovo-480.jpg?v=55c7b055","img":"/img/ruth-first-and-joe-slovo.jpg","w":768,"h":1024}]},{"slug":"chelsea","name":"Chelsea","verdict":"A riverside village that became an artists' colony, then the King's Road, and kept the pensioners in scarlet coats.","note":"Chelsea was a village on the Thames with a wharf, and grand enough by Tudor times that Sir Thomas More built a house here and Henry VIII took the manor in 1536. Two institutions from the century after still set its tone. The Chelsea Physic Garden was planted in 1673 so that apprentice apothecaries could learn to tell one plant from another, and it is still a walled garden of medicinal beds by the river. The Royal Hospital, founded by Charles II in 1682 and built by Wren, still houses army pensioners, who wear scarlet coats in summer and are the reason the Flower Show happens on their lawn each May.\n\nIn the nineteenth century the artists came for the light off the river and the cheap rooms. Turner died in a cottage on Cheyne Walk under a false name; Whistler, Rossetti and Sargent all worked within a few streets of it, and the blue plaques along the embankment read like a gallery catalogue.\n\nThen the King's Road had two decades that changed how the country dressed. Mary Quant opened a shop here in 1955 and the street became the centre of the 1960s; twenty years later, at number 430, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren ran the shop that clothed punk. Almost none of that survives commercially. What does survive is the walking: Cheyne Walk, the old churchyard, and the small streets behind the river.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-chelsea-2.jpg?v=6814157e","thumb":"/img/area-chelsea-2-480.jpg?v=58b5e438","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The Royal Hospital's Figure Court: a gilded statue of Charles II in Roman dress on a stone plinth, facing Wren's red-brick range with its white portico, clock and lantern, under a grey sky.","caption":"The Royal Hospital's Figure Court, Charles II in gilt before Wren's portico.","credit":"Photo by Amanda Slater from Coventry, West Midlands, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Royal_Hospital_Chelsea_(49588292142).jpg"},"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-chelsea-3.jpg?v=d38af8a3","thumb":"/img/area-chelsea-3-480.jpg?v=659d12ff","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Beds and palms in the Chelsea Physic Garden, with the glasshouses beyond","caption":"The Chelsea Physic Garden.","credit":"Photo by maggie jones., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chelsea_Physic_Garden_-_47067569994.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-chelsea-9.jpg?v=c479d9f2","thumb":"/img/area-chelsea-9-480.jpg?v=624fa281","width":1024,"height":682,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A terracotta urn on a stone pier at the end of a brick path between box hedges, under a spreading tree in the Physic Garden, with a bench beyond.","caption":"An urn in the Chelsea Physic Garden.","credit":"Photo by Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Urns_-_Chelsea_Physic_Garden_-_DSC02798.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-chelsea-4.jpg?v=392d0c6f","thumb":"/img/area-chelsea-4-480.jpg?v=fdd1f834","width":1024,"height":682,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A wall of memorials inside Chelsea Old Church: a round white tablet to Sir Hans Sloane, physician, naturalist and founder of the British Museum, among carved stone monuments, a tall candle in front and a brass chandelier above.","caption":"Inside Chelsea Old Church.","credit":"Photo by Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sir_Hans_Sloane_tablet,_et_al_-_Chelsea_Old_Church,_London_-_DSC02947.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-chelsea-6.jpg?v=a3e4a758","thumb":"/img/area-chelsea-6-480.jpg?v=8972f4b5","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A marble monument of a woman reclining on a cushion in loose robes, one hand on her breast, against a black tablet of gilt Latin inscription, on a dark marble tomb chest.","caption":"Lady Jane Cheyne's monument of 1672 in Chelsea Old Church, by Antonio Raggi.","credit":"Photo by Ocloudsunfold, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chelsea_Old_Church,_Lady_Cheyne_monument_Raggi_sculpture.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-chelsea-7.jpg?v=78be1bea","thumb":"/img/area-chelsea-7-480.jpg?v=beb5719d","width":1024,"height":531,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Albert Bridge's white cables and towers across the Thames under a dark storm sky, houseboats moored in front and the towers of the City far behind, seen from under a plane tree on the embankment.","caption":"Albert Bridge, from Chelsea Embankment.","credit":"Photo by GrindtXX, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albert_Bridge_2021.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-chelsea-5.jpg?v=60998bfa","thumb":"/img/area-chelsea-5-480.jpg?v=b23b2b87","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Chelsea Fire Station on the King's Road: a low white 1960s block with a row of red appliance doors, a drill tower behind and a pedestrian crossing in front.","caption":"Chelsea Fire Station, on the King's Road.","credit":"Photo by Spudgun67, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chelsea_Fire_Station_264_Kings_Road_London_SW3_5UF.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-chelsea-8.jpg?v=1882b84a","thumb":"/img/area-chelsea-8-480.jpg?v=f35b4d29","width":1024,"height":538,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Sloane Square in Flower Show week: a giant slice of watermelon in red felt, a topiary dragon and a wall of red baubles and alliums among the plane trees, with people sheltering under umbrellas.","caption":"Chelsea in Bloom on Sloane Square, each May in Flower Show week.","credit":"Photo by Matt Brown, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Panorama_of_Chelsea_in_Bloom_in_Sloane_Square_2024-05-22.jpg"}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Fulham Road","Edith Grove","River Thames","Chelsea Bridge Road"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.16011,51.49273],[-0.16247,51.49148],[-0.16596,51.49299],[-0.16757,51.4935],[-0.16975,51.49345],[-0.17103,51.49224],[-0.17953,51.4868],[-0.18428,51.48411],[-0.18378,51.48391],[-0.18055,51.48067],[-0.17973,51.48016],[-0.17643,51.47888],[-0.17538,51.47988],[-0.17424,51.48054],[-0.17218,51.48137],[-0.17081,51.4817],[-0.16348,51.48283],[-0.16018,51.4831],[-0.14983,51.48454],[-0.15011,51.48577],[-0.15094,51.48658],[-0.15174,51.48708],[-0.15582,51.48962],[-0.15693,51.49031],[-0.15756,51.49227],[-0.15783,51.49232],[-0.15787,51.49237],[-0.15814,51.49242],[-0.16011,51.49273]]]},"centre":[-0.16759,51.48733],"bounds":[[-0.18428,51.47888],[-0.14983,51.4935]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":11,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":5,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"shopping","name":"Shopping","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"outdoors","name":"Outdoors & Nature","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":6,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"architecture","name":"Architecture","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"classic-british-shops","name":"Classic British Shops","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"science","name":"Science & Engineering","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"secrets","name":"Secrets & Espionage","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":3,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":8,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"Blood of my Blood","slug":"blood-of-my-blood","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-court-theatre/blood-of-my-blood/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.492574,"lng":-0.15635,"verdict":"A South Carolina plantation in 1862, with the war two counties away."},{"name":"British Art Fair","slug":"british-art-fair","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/saatchi-gallery/british-art-fair/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.490653,"lng":-0.158763,"verdict":"The only fair devoted entirely to modern and contemporary British art, running since 1988."},{"name":"Chelsea Physic Garden Christmas Fair","slug":"chelsea-physic-garden-christmas-fair","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/chelsea-physic-garden/chelsea-physic-garden-christmas-fair/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-26","to":"2026-11-29","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.484648,"lng":-0.162161,"verdict":"A hundred small makers among the medicinal beds, four days at the end of November."},{"name":"Drawn on the Western Front: Paul Sarrut and the Indian Army","slug":"drawn-on-the-western-front-paul-sarrut-and-the-indian-army","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-army-museum/drawn-on-the-western-front-paul-sarrut-and-the-indian-army/","runs":{"from":"2026-07-07","to":"2027-02-21"},"lat":51.48624,"lng":-0.160287,"verdict":"Fifty sketches of Indian soldiers in France, unseen for a century, with two Victoria Crosses beside them."},{"name":"Man to Man","slug":"man-to-man","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-court-theatre/man-to-man/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.492574,"lng":-0.15635,"verdict":"A woman puts on her dead husband's trousers in 1930s Germany, and does not take them off for forty years."},{"name":"Myth and Reality: Military Art in the Age of Queen Victoria","slug":"myth-and-reality-military-art-in-the-age-of-queen-victoria","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-army-museum/myth-and-reality-military-art-in-the-age-of-queen-victoria/","runs":{"to":"2026-11-01"},"lat":51.48624,"lng":-0.160287,"verdict":"A hundred Victorian paintings of soldiers, and the moment artists stopped painting only the generals."},{"name":"RHS Chelsea Flower Show","slug":"rhs-chelsea-flower-show","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/rhs-chelsea-flower-show/","runs":{"from":"2027-05-18","to":"2027-05-22","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.488869,"lng":-0.154634,"verdict":"The show gardens the whole gardening year is judged against, on eleven acres of Chelsea."},{"name":"RPS International Photography Exhibition 167","slug":"rps-international-photography-exhibition-167","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/saatchi-gallery/rps-international-photography-exhibition-167/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.490653,"lng":-0.158763,"verdict":"The oldest photography competition in the world, in its hundred and sixty-seventh year."},{"name":"The Afronauts","slug":"the-afronauts","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-court-theatre/the-afronauts/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-14","to":"2026-12-19"},"lat":51.492574,"lng":-0.15635,"verdict":"Zambia, 1964, and a schoolteacher who decided his country should reach the moon first."},{"name":"The National Army Museum's permanent galleries","slug":"the-national-army-museums-permanent-galleries","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-army-museum/the-national-army-museums-permanent-galleries/","lat":51.48624,"lng":-0.160287,"verdict":"Five free galleries on what a soldier's life has actually been, for 350 years."},{"name":"The Raw & The Cooked","slug":"the-raw-the-cooked","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/saatchi-gallery/the-raw-the-cooked/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.490653,"lng":-0.158763,"verdict":"Eleven contemporary artists working in a medieval register, free, in Gallery 3."},{"name":"Carlyle's House","slug":"carlyles-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/carlyles-house/","lat":51.484114,"lng":-0.169792,"verdict":"The Chelsea house where the Carlyles lived, quarrelled and wrote for half a century, kept almost as they left it."},{"name":"Chelsea Physic Garden","slug":"chelsea-physic-garden","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/chelsea-physic-garden/","lat":51.484648,"lng":-0.162161,"verdict":"London's oldest botanic garden, walled beside the river since 1673 and still laid out by what the plants are for, with the largest olive tree in Britain.","thumb":"/img/chelsea-physic-garden-480.jpg?v=066939d7","img":"/img/chelsea-physic-garden.jpg","w":1024,"h":819},{"name":"National Army Museum","slug":"national-army-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/national-army-museum/","lat":51.48624,"lng":-0.160287,"verdict":"The British Army's own museum, free, beside the Royal Hospital, and unusually frank about what soldiers have been asked to do.","thumb":"/img/national-army-museum-480.jpg?v=9c4356ee","img":"/img/national-army-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":525},{"name":"Royal Hospital Chelsea Museum","slug":"royal-hospital-chelsea-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/royal-hospital-chelsea-museum/","lat":51.487429,"lng":-0.15711,"verdict":"Wren's retirement home for old soldiers, founded by Charles II in 1682 and still lived in by three hundred veterans in scarlet, with a small museum and tours led by them.","thumb":"/img/royal-hospital-chelsea-museum-480.jpg?v=ecfa3fd4","img":"/img/royal-hospital-chelsea-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":577},{"name":"Saatchi Gallery","slug":"saatchi-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/saatchi-gallery/","lat":51.490653,"lng":-0.158763,"verdict":"The gallery that made the Young British Artists, now a charity filling fifteen rooms of a Chelsea barracks with big shows, some of them free.","thumb":"/img/saatchi-gallery-480.jpg?v=4fdbe0ee","img":"/img/saatchi-gallery.jpg","w":1024,"h":681},{"name":"Saatchi Gallery","slug":"saatchi-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/saatchi-gallery/","lat":51.490653,"lng":-0.158763,"verdict":"The gallery that made the Young British Artists, now a charity filling fifteen rooms of a Chelsea barracks with big shows, some of them free.","thumb":"/img/saatchi-gallery-480.jpg?v=4fdbe0ee","img":"/img/saatchi-gallery.jpg","w":1024,"h":681},{"name":"Royal Court Theatre","slug":"royal-court-theatre","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/royal-court-theatre/","lat":51.492574,"lng":-0.15635,"verdict":"The theatre that made new writing the point, and helped end stage censorship."},{"name":"King's Road","slug":"kings-road","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/kings-road/","lat":51.48706,"lng":-0.169837,"verdict":"Fashion since the sixties, and the interiors shops that followed."},{"name":"Peter Jones","slug":"peter-jones","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/peter-jones/","lat":51.492255,"lng":-0.158938,"verdict":"A wall of glass curving round Sloane Square, and one of the first modern buildings in Britain.","thumb":"/img/peter-jones-480.jpg?v=03f86300","img":"/img/peter-jones.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Chelsea Physic Garden","slug":"chelsea-physic-garden","cat":"outdoors","url":"/outdoors/chelsea-physic-garden/","lat":51.484648,"lng":-0.162161,"verdict":"Four walled acres of plants kept for what they do, not how they look, since 1673.","thumb":"/img/chelsea-physic-garden-480.jpg?v=066939d7","img":"/img/chelsea-physic-garden.jpg","w":1024,"h":819},{"name":"Bread Ahead","slug":"bread-ahead-hans-town","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/bread-ahead-hans-town/","lat":51.493402,"lng":-0.158679,"verdict":"Pavilion Road, which is Chelsea pretending to be a village."},{"name":"Badiani Chelsea","slug":"badiani-chelsea","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/badiani-chelsea/","lat":51.48686,"lng":-0.179225,"verdict":"The Fulham Road end of Chelsea, and a Florentine cone."},{"name":"Knoops Chelsea","slug":"knoops-chelsea","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/knoops-chelsea/","lat":51.489353,"lng":-0.163825,"verdict":"Hot chocolate ordered by cocoa percentage, on the King's Road."},{"name":"L'Artisan du Chocolat","slug":"lartisan-du-chocolat","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/lartisan-du-chocolat/","lat":51.489919,"lng":-0.156134,"verdict":"Salted caramels in a shell thin enough to break on the tongue."},{"name":"Ma\u00eetre Choux King's Road","slug":"maitre-choux-kings-road","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/maitre-choux-kings-road/","lat":51.489686,"lng":-0.163131,"verdict":"Eclairs and Paris-Brest, and nothing that is not choux."},{"name":"Rococo Chocolates King's Road","slug":"rococo-chocolates-kings-road","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/rococo-chocolates-kings-road/","lat":51.484472,"lng":-0.175542,"verdict":"The shop Chantal Coady opened in 1983, where the whole thing started."},{"name":"Venchi King's Road","slug":"venchi-kings-road","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/venchi-kings-road/","lat":51.489174,"lng":-0.164254,"verdict":"Turin chocolate and gelato on the King's Road."},{"name":"Michelin House","slug":"michelin-house","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/michelin-house/","lat":51.493072,"lng":-0.16847,"verdict":"A tyre depot of 1911 with Bibendum in stained glass and the walls tiled like a swimming bath.","thumb":"/img/michelin-house-480.jpg?v=4fd8b21c","img":"/img/michelin-house.jpg","w":640,"h":439},{"name":"David Mellor","slug":"david-mellor","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/david-mellor/","lat":51.492908,"lng":-0.158738,"verdict":"The shop of the cutler who designed Britain's traffic lights, selling kitchen equipment chosen with the same eye.","thumb":"/img/david-mellor-480.jpg?v=90ddfc74","img":"/img/david-mellor.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Chelsea Physic Garden","slug":"chelsea-physic-garden","cat":"science","url":"/science/chelsea-physic-garden/","lat":51.484648,"lng":-0.162161,"verdict":"London's oldest botanic garden, walled beside the river since 1673 and still laid out by what the plants are for, with the largest olive tree in Britain.","thumb":"/img/chelsea-physic-garden-480.jpg?v=066939d7","img":"/img/chelsea-physic-garden.jpg","w":1024,"h":819},{"name":"Rosalind Franklin's flat, Donovan Court","slug":"rosalind-franklins-flat-donovan-court","cat":"science","url":"/science/rosalind-franklins-flat-donovan-court/","lat":51.487411,"lng":-0.179128,"verdict":"The Chelsea flat of the crystallographer whose Photo 51 showed the shape of DNA, a mile from the King's College laboratory where she took it.","thumb":"/img/rosalind-franklins-flat-donovan-court-480.jpg?v=ded19190","img":"/img/rosalind-franklins-flat-donovan-court.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Bywater Street: George Smiley's house","slug":"bywater-street-george-smileys-house","cat":"secrets","url":"/secrets/bywater-street-george-smileys-house/","lat":51.490026,"lng":-0.163791,"verdict":"No. 9, the little Chelsea house le Carr\u00e9 gave George Smiley, where Ann leaves and the spies come calling.","thumb":"/img/bywater-street-george-smileys-house-480.jpg?v=b93ebd73","img":"/img/bywater-street-george-smileys-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Carlyle's House","slug":"carlyles-house","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/carlyles-house/","lat":51.484114,"lng":-0.169792,"verdict":"Thomas and Jane Carlyle's Chelsea house, kept almost as they left it, from the soundproof attic down."},{"name":"Cheyne Walk","slug":"cheyne-walk","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/cheyne-walk/","lat":51.48335,"lng":-0.1669,"verdict":"Chelsea's riverside terrace of writers: George Eliot died at No. 4, Rossetti kept a wombat at No. 16, Henry James and T. S. Eliot lived in Carlyle Mansions."},{"name":"John Sandoe Books","slug":"john-sandoe-books","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/john-sandoe-books/","lat":51.491374,"lng":-0.160931,"verdict":"Chelsea's independent bookshop since 1957, three small Georgian houses packed to the ceilings.","thumb":"/img/john-sandoe-books-480.jpg?v=797938f0","img":"/img/john-sandoe-books.jpg","w":1024,"h":626},{"name":"Bob Marley","slug":"bob-marley","cat":"world","url":"/world/bob-marley/","lat":51.484628,"lng":-0.167966,"verdict":"The Chelsea house where Marley finished Exodus, a few months after someone tried to kill him.","thumb":"/img/bob-marley-480.jpg?v=25c415d2","img":"/img/bob-marley.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"B\u00e9la Bart\u00f3k","slug":"bela-bartok","cat":"world","url":"/world/bela-bartok/","lat":51.492312,"lng":-0.172004,"verdict":"The South Kensington house where Bart\u00f3k stayed whenever he came to play, a guest of friends for fifteen years.","thumb":"/img/bela-bartok-480.jpg?v=f12b9982","img":"/img/bela-bartok.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Fran\u00e7ois Guizot","slug":"francois-guizot","cat":"world","url":"/world/francois-guizot/","lat":51.492637,"lng":-0.171322,"verdict":"The minister whose advice was 'get rich', who lost his job in a week and spent a year here reading.","thumb":"/img/francois-guizot-480.jpg?v=a5c0ce2c","img":"/img/francois-guizot.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Frederick Douglass","slug":"frederick-douglass","cat":"world","url":"/world/frederick-douglass/","lat":51.492311,"lng":-0.164974,"verdict":"Where an escaped slave lodged as a free man's guest, and left Britain owning himself.","thumb":"/img/frederick-douglass-480.jpg?v=f2ae2a78","img":"/img/frederick-douglass.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"James McNeill Whistler","slug":"james-mcneill-whistler-house","cat":"world","url":"/world/james-mcneill-whistler-house/","lat":51.482185,"lng":-0.174414,"verdict":"Where an American painted the Thames at night and invented the nocturne.","thumb":"/img/james-mcneill-whistler-house-480.jpg?v=f1a4fc29","img":"/img/james-mcneill-whistler-house.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"John Singer Sargent","slug":"john-singer-sargent","cat":"world","url":"/world/john-singer-sargent/","lat":51.485228,"lng":-0.159988,"verdict":"The studio house where Sargent painted Edwardian London's rich, and worked until the morning he died.","thumb":"/img/john-singer-sargent-480.jpg?v=1454d53f","img":"/img/john-singer-sargent.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Mark Twain","slug":"mark-twain","cat":"world","url":"/world/mark-twain/","lat":51.487071,"lng":-0.162655,"verdict":"The house Twain rented cheaply after his bankruptcy, where a reporter asked if he was dead.","thumb":"/img/mark-twain-480.jpg?v=1c580ba1","img":"/img/mark-twain.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Percy Grainger","slug":"percy-grainger","cat":"world","url":"/world/percy-grainger/","lat":51.491757,"lng":-0.159217,"verdict":"The Chelsea flat of the Australian pianist who went out with a phonograph and saved English folk song.","thumb":"/img/percy-grainger-480.jpg?v=3748caad","img":"/img/percy-grainger.jpg","w":768,"h":1024}]},{"slug":"covent-garden","name":"Covent Garden","verdict":"London's first square, a market building of 1830, and more theatres within a few streets than anywhere else.","note":"The name is a corruption of convent garden: this was the walled garden of Westminster Abbey, farmed by monks from about 1200. After the Reformation it went to the Earls of Bedford, and in 1630 the fourth Earl asked Inigo Jones to build something Italian on it. What Jones laid out, a piazza with arcaded houses on two sides and a church on the third, was the first square in London and the model for every estate that followed.\n\nA fruit and vegetable market started in it by accident around 1654, was regulated by Parliament in 1813, and grew until it was feeding the city and choking it: the wholesale trade finally moved out to Nine Elms in 1974. What it left behind is Charles Fowler's market building of 1830, which nearly came down and is now full of shops.\n\nThe theatres arrived with the market and stayed. The Theatre Royal on Drury Lane has been putting on plays since 1663 and is the oldest working theatre in London; the Royal Opera House next door began in 1732 and is where the Royal Ballet and the Royal Opera are based. St Paul's, Jones's church on the square, is known as the actors' church and is lined with memorials to them. Samuel Pepys watched the first Punch and Judy show in England in front of its portico in May 1662, and there has been a busker on that spot most days since.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-covent-garden.jpg?v=7918b6c1","thumb":"/img/area-covent-garden-480.jpg?v=fe029ad7","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Covent Garden's piazza at night from above, the market building lit and crowds crossing the cobbles","caption":"The piazza at night, from the Opera House terrace."},"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-covent-garden-lead2.jpg?v=07c89540","thumb":"/img/area-covent-garden-lead2-480.jpg?v=506a0654","width":1024,"height":683,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Inside Covent Garden Market: the glass-roofed arcade with lamps, caf\u00e9 tables and shoppers along the central aisle","caption":"The market hall of 1830, under its later glass roof.","credit":"Photo by Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Covent_Garden_Market,_London_-_DSC00666.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-covent-garden-3.jpg?v=9aed019e","thumb":"/img/area-covent-garden-3-480.jpg?v=5e828d4f","width":1024,"height":678,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The Cambridge Theatre on Seven Dials, its curved corner and name above the entrance","caption":"The Cambridge Theatre, Seven Dials.","credit":"Photo by Bert Seghers, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cambridge_Theater-landscape.JPG"}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Charing Cross Road","New Oxford Street","Kingsway","River Thames","Northumberland Avenue"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.12744,51.50949],[-0.12822,51.51034],[-0.12844,51.51211],[-0.12952,51.514],[-0.13037,51.51642],[-0.1248,51.51715],[-0.1224,51.51729],[-0.12043,51.51752],[-0.11736,51.51321],[-0.11856,51.51244],[-0.11898,51.51149],[-0.11914,51.51133],[-0.1183,51.51028],[-0.11711,51.5088],[-0.11689,51.50872],[-0.11775,51.50835],[-0.11834,51.5081],[-0.11958,51.507],[-0.12019,51.50646],[-0.12187,51.50693],[-0.12257,51.50665],[-0.12263,51.50658],[-0.12735,51.5074],[-0.12549,51.50863],[-0.12718,51.50857],[-0.12744,51.50949]]]},"centre":[-0.12384,51.51389],"bounds":[[-0.13037,51.50646],[-0.11689,51.51752]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":152,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":9,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":5,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":12,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"shopping","name":"Shopping","count":5,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":5,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":8,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":6,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"breakfast","name":"Breakfast & Brunch","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"beer","name":"Beer","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"cocktails","name":"Cocktails","count":9,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"wine","name":"Wine","count":3,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"politics","name":"Power & Politics","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"sacred","name":"Sacred London","count":3,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"beautiful-streets","name":"Beautiful Streets","count":8,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"architecture","name":"Architecture","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"monuments","name":"Monuments & Ruins","count":6,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"classic-british-shops","name":"Classic British Shops","count":7,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"science","name":"Science & Engineering","count":4,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"secrets","name":"Secrets & Espionage","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":8,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":4,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"harry-potter","name":"Harry Potter","count":3,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair","slug":"1-54-contemporary-african-art-fair","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/somerset-house/1-54-contemporary-african-art-fair/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-16","to":"2026-10-18","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.510934,"lng":-0.117456,"verdict":"The African art fair in Somerset House's courtyard rooms, the same weekend as Frieze."},{"name":"A Mind Full","slug":"a-mind-full","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/a-mind-full/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-30","to":"2026-09-30"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"A man with impulse problems moves into a Buddhist community and tries, badly, to meditate."},{"name":"A Month in the Country","slug":"a-month-in-the-country","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/donmar-warehouse/a-month-in-the-country/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.513942,"lng":-0.125773,"verdict":"Turgenev by way of Brian Friel, in a room where nobody is more than four rows back."},{"name":"A National Portrait for the National Portrait Gallery","slug":"a-national-portrait-for-the-national-portrait-gallery","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-portrait-gallery/a-national-portrait-for-the-national-portrait-gallery/","runs":{"from":"2026-05-14","to":"2026-10-26"},"lat":51.509304,"lng":-0.128212,"verdict":"Sit for Es Devlin's collective digital portrait of the nation."},{"name":"Academy of St Martin in the Fields with Stella Chen","slug":"academy-of-st-martin-in-the-fields-with-stella-chen","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/academy-of-st-martin-in-the-fields-with-stella-chen/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"The orchestra named after this church, playing in it."},{"name":"Adam Larter: Who Remembers The 90s?","slug":"adam-larter-who-remembers-the-90s","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/adam-larter-who-remembers-the-90s/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-16","to":"2026-10-16"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"An arthouse nostalgia show about a decade that was already strange at the time."},{"name":"Adriana Mater","slug":"adriana-mater","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/london-coliseum/adriana-mater/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-28","to":"2026-12-12"},"lat":51.510007,"lng":-0.12624,"verdict":"Saariaho's opera about a woman who keeps the child of the man who attacked her."},{"name":"Allegri's Miserere by Candlelight","slug":"allegris-miserere-by-candlelight","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/allegris-miserere-by-candlelight/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-03","to":"2026-11-03"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"The Miserere, whose top C the Vatican tried to keep to itself."},{"name":"Allysha Joy and the Actions of Love Choir","slug":"allysha-joy-and-the-actions-of-love-choir","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/allysha-joy-and-the-actions-of-love-choir/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-27","to":"2026-10-27"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Melbourne keys and voice, with a choir behind them."},{"name":"An Evening of Unnecessary Detail at the Cambridge Theatre","slug":"an-evening-of-unnecessary-detail-at-the-cambridge-theatre","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/an-evening-of-unnecessary-detail-at-the-cambridge-theatre/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-30","to":"2026-11-30"},"lat":51.513633,"lng":-0.12653,"verdict":"The science variety bill scaled up to a West End house for one night."},{"name":"Angel's Bone","slug":"angels-bone","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/london-coliseum/angels-bone/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-16","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.510007,"lng":-0.12624,"verdict":"Two angels fall to earth and are taken in by a couple who work out what they are worth."},{"name":"Art deco: the golden age of poster design","slug":"art-deco-the-golden-age-of-poster-design","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/london-transport-museum/art-deco-the-golden-age-of-poster-design/","runs":{"to":"2027-05-31"},"lat":51.511987,"lng":-0.121221,"verdict":"A hundred original posters from the 1920s and 30s, and Charles Holden's stations."},{"name":"Baaba Maal","slug":"baaba-maal","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/baaba-maal/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-04","to":"2026-10-06"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Three nights from the Senegalese singer whose voice opened Black Panther."},{"name":"Balladeste","slug":"balladeste","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/balladeste/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-05","to":"2026-11-05"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"Violin and oud together, with an opening set from Gabriel Prokofiev."},{"name":"Baroque Classics by Candlelight","slug":"baroque-classics-by-candlelight","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/baroque-classics-by-candlelight/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Bach and Handel by candlelight, sung by the church's own voices."},{"name":"Berlin to Broadway: Kurt Weill songs","slug":"berlin-to-broadway-kurt-weill-songs","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/berlin-to-broadway-kurt-weill-songs/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Weill from the Berlin cabarets to Broadway, and fish and chips in the crypt after."},{"name":"Brandee Younger","slug":"brandee-younger","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/brandee-younger/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-08","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"The harpist who took the instrument back into jazz and hip hop."},{"name":"Breaking the Waves","slug":"breaking-the-waves","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/london-coliseum/breaking-the-waves/","runs":{"from":"2027-02-13","to":"2027-02-25"},"lat":51.510007,"lng":-0.12624,"verdict":"Missy Mazzoli's opera of the Lars von Trier film, reaching the UK for the first time."},{"name":"British Comedy Guide Awards Final","slug":"british-comedy-guide-awards-final","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/british-comedy-guide-awards-final/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-20","to":"2026-11-20"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"Five acts compete for the BCG Pro Talent Award, hosted by somebody who already has one."},{"name":"Bustronome","slug":"bustronome","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/bustronome/","lat":51.510213,"lng":-0.117156,"verdict":"A tasting menu on the top deck of a glass-roofed bus."},{"name":"Carice Singers at fifteen: Symphony of Psalms","slug":"carice-singers-at-fifteen-symphony-of-psalms","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/carice-singers-at-fifteen-symphony-of-psalms/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-24"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, which he wrote to the glory of God and for the Boston orchestra."},{"name":"Carmen","slug":"carmen","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-opera-house/carmen/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-29","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.512883,"lng":-0.122497,"verdict":"Bizet's Carmen at Covent Garden, in Damiano Michieletto's staging, sung in French."},{"name":"Character Comedy Showcase","slug":"character-comedy-showcase","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/character-comedy-showcase/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-11-17"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"Twelve comic characters, each built in six weeks, tried out on a room in one night."},{"name":"Choral Classics","slug":"choral-classics","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/choral-classics/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-12-20"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Half an hour of choral music on a Sunday afternoon, free, no ticket."},{"name":"Come and Sing: Mozart's Requiem","slug":"come-and-sing-mozarts-requiem","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/come-and-sing-mozarts-requiem/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-31","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"An afternoon actually singing the Requiem, rather than listening to it."},{"name":"Cory Henry Presents: A Jam Good Time","slug":"cory-henry-presents-a-jam-good-time","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/cory-henry-presents-a-jam-good-time/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-05","to":"2026-12-07"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Three nights of organ, gospel chords and no set list to speak of."},{"name":"Crypt Close-Up: Rachel Podger and Lucie Horsch","slug":"crypt-close-up-rachel-podger-and-lucie-horsch","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/crypt-close-up-rachel-podger-and-lucie-horsch/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-28","to":"2026-10-28"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Baroque violin and recorder in the crypt, on showpieces and folk songs."},{"name":"Crypt Close-Up: Ruby Hughes and Jonas Nordberg","slug":"crypt-close-up-ruby-hughes-and-jonas-nordberg","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/crypt-close-up-ruby-hughes-and-jonas-nordberg/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-13","to":"2026-10-13"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Lute songs at eight in the evening, in the crypt under the church."},{"name":"Darbar: Carnatic music at lunchtime","slug":"darbar-carnatic-music-at-lunchtime","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/darbar-carnatic-music-at-lunchtime/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-10-02"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"South Indian classical music in a Georgian church, for an hour at 12:00."},{"name":"Digable Planets","slug":"digable-planets","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/digable-planets/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-18","to":"2026-12-19"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"The 1993 jazz-rap record, played live by the people who made it."},{"name":"Diwali on the Square","slug":"diwali-on-the-square","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/diwali-on-the-square/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-25","to":"2026-10-25","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.508,"lng":-0.1281,"verdict":"Two hundred dancers open the Mayor's Diwali on Trafalgar Square, free, no ticket."},{"name":"Don Giovanni","slug":"don-giovanni","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-opera-house/don-giovanni/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-10-15"},"lat":51.512883,"lng":-0.122497,"verdict":"Mozart's seducer on the Covent Garden main stage, sung in Italian for five weeks."},{"name":"Ecstasy of the Virtues","slug":"ecstasy-of-the-virtues","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/ecstasy-of-the-virtues/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"A new mystery opera under the chapel dome."},{"name":"Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius","slug":"elgar-the-dream-of-gerontius","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/elgar-the-dream-of-gerontius/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-17","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Gerontius by candlelight, for the church's three hundredth year."},{"name":"Emer Maguire: Perfectly Chaotic","slug":"emer-maguire-perfectly-chaotic","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/emer-maguire-perfectly-chaotic/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-17","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"Storytelling, quick wit and irreverent songs from one of Ireland\u2019s fastest-rising comics."},{"name":"Emily Bear","slug":"emily-bear","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/emily-bear/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-14","to":"2026-10-14"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"A pianist who was a prodigy and is now a composer with a Grammy."},{"name":"Ex Cathedra: Spem in Alium in forty parts","slug":"ex-cathedra-spem-in-alium-in-forty-parts","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/ex-cathedra-spem-in-alium-in-forty-parts/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-22","to":"2026-10-22"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Forty separate voice parts at once, and new pieces written to match."},{"name":"Experimental Perfume Club","slug":"experimental-perfume-club","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/experimental-perfume-club/","lat":51.513427,"lng":-0.126993,"verdict":"Learn how a fragrance is built, then blend one and take it away."},{"name":"Family Classics: A Space Exploration","slug":"family-classics-a-space-exploration","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/family-classics-a-space-exploration/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-24","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Forty-five minutes of orchestral music about space, for any age."},{"name":"Faris Ishaq","slug":"faris-ishaq","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/faris-ishaq/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-14","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"A Palestinian nay player treating a five-thousand-year-old flute as a modern instrument."},{"name":"Fingers on Buzzers","slug":"fingers-on-buzzers","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/fingers-on-buzzers/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-06","to":"2026-11-03"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"The Chase's Vixen and Lucy Porter record their quiz podcast in front of you, twice a night."},{"name":"Fireworks Music by Candlelight","slug":"fireworks-music-by-candlelight","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/fireworks-music-by-candlelight/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-05","to":"2026-11-05"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Handel's Royal Fireworks music on Bonfire Night, indoors, by candle."},{"name":"Flamenc Oh!!","slug":"flamenc-oh","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/peacock-theatre/flamenc-oh/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-30","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.51441,"lng":-0.117636,"verdict":"A flamenco season in the West End house, ten days of it."},{"name":"Fleurs de Villes DIANA","slug":"fleurs-de-villes-diana","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/somerset-house/fleurs-de-villes-diana/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-10-06"},"lat":51.510934,"lng":-0.117456,"verdict":"Fifteen of Diana's outfits rebuilt in fresh flowers by British florists."},{"name":"Garefowl","slug":"garefowl","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/garefowl/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-31","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"Hallowe'en night in a deconsecrated chapel, which is the right room for it."},{"name":"Gary Crosby Quartet feat. CHERISE","slug":"gary-crosby-quartet-feat-cherise","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/gary-crosby-quartet-feat-cherise/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-07","to":"2026-10-07"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"The bassist who trained half of British jazz, with one of its newer singers."},{"name":"Gary Faulds: Panic at the Midlife Disco","slug":"gary-faulds-panic-at-the-midlife-disco","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/gary-faulds-panic-at-the-midlife-disco/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-07","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"A Glaswegian comic having a public meltdown about turning fifty."},{"name":"Gillian Wearing: Spiritual Family","slug":"gillian-wearing-spiritual-family","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-portrait-gallery/gillian-wearing-spiritual-family/","runs":{"from":"2026-01-09","to":"2027-01-10"},"lat":51.509304,"lng":-0.128212,"verdict":"Four self-portraits in which Wearing becomes the artists she counts as family."},{"name":"Grand Opening \u2013 Robert Glasper","slug":"grand-opening-robert-glasper","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/grand-opening-robert-glasper/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-24"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"The club's first two nights, on what would have been Coltrane's hundredth birthday."},{"name":"Great Sacred Music","slug":"great-sacred-music","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/great-sacred-music/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-12-17"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Thirty-five minutes of choral music and commentary, every Thursday at one, free."},{"name":"Hak Baker","slug":"hak-baker","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/hak-baker/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-18","to":"2026-10-18"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"East London folk, sung in the accent it was written in."},{"name":"Harry Potter and the Cursed Child","slug":"harry-potter-and-the-cursed-child","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/palace-theatre/harry-potter-and-the-cursed-child/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2027-09-08"},"lat":51.5131,"lng":-0.129788,"verdict":"Nineteen years after the last book, in two parts or one long day."},{"name":"Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2026","slug":"herbert-smith-freehills-kramer-portrait-award-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-portrait-gallery/herbert-smith-freehills-kramer-portrait-award-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-25","to":"2026-10-07"},"lat":51.509304,"lng":-0.128212,"verdict":"The year's painted portraits, free on Floor 2, with a vote for your favourite."},{"name":"Hidden London: Charing Cross tour & afternoon tea","slug":"hidden-london-charing-cross-tour-afternoon-tea","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-charing-cross-tour-afternoon-tea/","lat":51.507966,"lng":-0.126394,"verdict":"The same secret platforms, then scones upstairs at the Clermont."},{"name":"Hidden London: Charing Cross \u2014 behind the Silver Screen","slug":"hidden-london-charing-cross-behind-the-silver-screen","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-charing-cross-behind-the-silver-screen/","lat":51.507966,"lng":-0.126394,"verdict":"Disused platforms under Trafalgar Square that keep turning up in films."},{"name":"Hidden London: Holborn \u2014 the secret platforms","slug":"hidden-london-holborn-the-secret-platforms","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-holborn-the-secret-platforms/","lat":51.51721,"lng":-0.119874,"verdict":"A third of Holborn is closed to the public. This is that third."},{"name":"Historians in Conversation: Tom Cutterham and Leanne O'Boyle","slug":"historians-in-conversation-tom-cutterham-and-leanne-oboyle","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/benjamin-franklin-house/historians-in-conversation-tom-cutterham-and-leanne-oboyle/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-17"},"lat":51.507651,"lng":-0.124892,"verdict":"Britain's part in the American Revolution, argued in the house Franklin lived in."},{"name":"Holly Stars: A Scandal in Bohemia","slug":"holly-stars-a-scandal-in-bohemia","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/holly-stars-a-scandal-in-bohemia/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-05","to":"2026-12-05"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"Sherlock Holmes solved by his neighbour, who cannot leave anything alone."},{"name":"IMEHO \u2013 An Intimate Experience with Erykah Badu","slug":"imeho-an-intimate-experience-with-erykah-badu","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/imeho-an-intimate-experience-with-erykah-badu/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-10","to":"2026-10-11"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Erykah Badu in a two-hundred-and-fifty-seat room."},{"name":"Ilford Boy","slug":"ilford-boy","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/donmar-warehouse/ilford-boy/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-10","to":"2026-11-28"},"lat":51.513942,"lng":-0.125773,"verdict":"Danny Lee Wynter on the families you are given and the ones you pick."},{"name":"Iphig\u00e9nie en Tauride","slug":"iphigenie-en-tauride","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/london-coliseum/iphigenie-en-tauride/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-06","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.510007,"lng":-0.12624,"verdict":"Gluck's siblings, each certain the other is dead, in a new staging by Lyndsey Turner."},{"name":"James Campbell's Comedy 4 Kids: Reducks","slug":"james-campbells-comedy-4-kids-reducks","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/james-campbells-comedy-4-kids-reducks/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-12-20"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"The man who invented stand-up for children, back at it after ten years of writing books."},{"name":"James Carter: 'Trane, A Centennial Supreme","slug":"james-carter-trane-a-centennial-supreme","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/james-carter-trane-a-centennial-supreme/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-09","to":"2026-11-10"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"A saxophonist of enormous appetite, on Coltrane at a hundred."},{"name":"Jamie Cullum","slug":"jamie-cullum","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/jamie-cullum/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-28","to":"2026-10-09"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Four nights across two weeks from the pianist who took jazz onto daytime radio."},{"name":"Jazzanova Live feat. Wayne Snow","slug":"jazzanova-live-feat-wayne-snow","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/jazzanova-live-feat-wayne-snow/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-27","to":"2026-11-27"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"The Berlin collective that has been rebuilding jazz from records since 1995."},{"name":"Jenkin van Zyl: Enclosure","slug":"jenkin-van-zyl-enclosure","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/somerset-house/jenkin-van-zyl-enclosure/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-11-29"},"lat":51.510934,"lng":-0.117456,"verdict":"A new film about a facility that stores copies of you, and the wreck of it as a walk-in set."},{"name":"Jesus Christ Superstar","slug":"jesus-christ-superstar","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/theatre-royal-drury-lane/jesus-christ-superstar/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-16","to":"2027-01-09"},"lat":51.512995,"lng":-0.120204,"verdict":"Lloyd Webber and Rice's 1970 rock opera, in the house Lloyd Webber owns."},{"name":"KOKOROKO","slug":"kokoroko","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/kokoroko/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-16","to":"2026-12-16"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Eight players, West African highlife and horns arranged like a choir."},{"name":"Kahil El'Zabar & Isaiah Collier","slug":"kahil-elzabar-isaiah-collier","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/kahil-elzabar-isaiah-collier/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-08","to":"2026-12-08"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Two generations of Chicago's spiritual jazz on one bill."},{"name":"Katie Pritchard is Sir Elton Scone","slug":"katie-pritchard-is-sir-elton-scone","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/katie-pritchard-is-sir-elton-scone/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-22","to":"2026-10-22"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"A musical comedy gameshow with no rules and a suit made out of curtains."},{"name":"Keyon Harrold","slug":"keyon-harrold","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/keyon-harrold/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-24","to":"2026-10-25"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"The trumpeter who played Miles Davis on screen, playing himself."},{"name":"La Serenissima: Baroque Energy","slug":"la-serenissima-baroque-energy","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/la-serenissima-baroque-energy/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Vivaldi, Corelli and the contemporaries nobody has heard of, played fast."},{"name":"La traviata","slug":"la-traviata","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/london-coliseum/la-traviata/","runs":{"from":"2027-02-03","to":"2027-03-13"},"lat":51.510007,"lng":-0.12624,"verdict":"Konwitschny's stripped Verdi: red curtains, a chair, and nothing to hide behind."},{"name":"Laura Mvula","slug":"laura-mvula","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/laura-mvula/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-29","to":"2026-10-30"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Two nights from a singer who writes for orchestras and sings like a soul record."},{"name":"London Mozart Players and Sean Shibe","slug":"london-mozart-players-and-sean-shibe","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/london-mozart-players-and-sean-shibe/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Baroque concertos rearranged for guitar, and Scottish tunes after them."},{"name":"London Mozart Players: Mozart with Roderick Williams and Sophie Bevan","slug":"london-mozart-players-mozart-with-roderick-williams-and-sophie-bevan","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/london-mozart-players-mozart-with-roderick-williams-and-sophie-bevan/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-29","to":"2026-10-29"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Late Mozart, symphonic and operatic, with two of the best British singers."},{"name":"London Transport Museum guided tours","slug":"london-transport-museum-guided-tours","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/london-transport-museum/london-transport-museum-guided-tours/","lat":51.511987,"lng":-0.121221,"verdict":"Free daily tours and talks from the information desk, ten people at a time."},{"name":"London Voices: Video Games Go Choral","slug":"london-voices-video-games-go-choral","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/london-voices-video-games-go-choral/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-08","to":"2026-10-08"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Halo and BioShock next to Howells and Part, sung by the choir that recorded them."},{"name":"MOURN","slug":"mourn","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/mourn/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-08","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"Three nights from FIGURE and Alkanna Graeca."},{"name":"Manon","slug":"manon","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-opera-house/manon/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-13","to":"2026-11-25"},"lat":51.512883,"lng":-0.122497,"verdict":"MacMillan's 1974 ballet of a woman caught between love and money, revived on the main stage."},{"name":"Manu Delago and Max ZT","slug":"manu-delago-and-max-zt","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/manu-delago-and-max-zt/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-15","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"A handpan and a hammered dulcimer, played by two people who have made careers out of odd instruments."},{"name":"Mark Kavuma & the Banger Factory","slug":"mark-kavuma-the-banger-factory","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/mark-kavuma-the-banger-factory/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"A trumpeter and the loose collective he has built around him."},{"name":"Mary Cassatt: Radical Impressionist","slug":"mary-cassatt-radical-impressionist","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-portrait-gallery/mary-cassatt-radical-impressionist/","runs":{"from":"2027-03-11","to":"2027-06-13"},"lat":51.509304,"lng":-0.128212,"verdict":"The first UK retrospective of the American Impressionist, a century after her death."},{"name":"Milena Casado","slug":"milena-casado","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/milena-casado/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-31","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"A Spanish trumpeter and composer at the start of a career worth watching."},{"name":"Moses Yoofee Trio","slug":"moses-yoofee-trio","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/moses-yoofee-trio/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-12","to":"2026-10-13"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Berlin piano trio playing jazz with the rhythmic logic of hip hop."},{"name":"Mozart's Requiem by Candlelight","slug":"mozarts-requiem-by-candlelight","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/mozarts-requiem-by-candlelight/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-07","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"The Requiem by candle, with Whitacre before it."},{"name":"Muireann Bradley","slug":"muireann-bradley","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/muireann-bradley/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-13","to":"2026-11-13"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"An eighteen-year-old from Donegal playing pre-war American country blues, note for note and then some."},{"name":"New Comedian of the Year 2026: heats","slug":"new-comedian-of-the-year-2026-heats","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/new-comedian-of-the-year-2026-heats/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-10-11"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"Forty heats to find one new comedian, and the past winners tell you why it matters."},{"name":"New Regency Orchestra","slug":"new-regency-orchestra","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/new-regency-orchestra/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-03","to":"2026-12-03"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"An eighteen-piece Afro-Cuban big band, made in London."},{"name":"Nik West","slug":"nik-west","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/nik-west/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-30","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Funk bass played hard, by a player Prince took on tour."},{"name":"No Man's Land","slug":"no-mans-land","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/donmar-warehouse/no-mans-land/","runs":{"from":"2027-02-13","to":"2027-04-10"},"lat":51.513942,"lng":-0.125773,"verdict":"Pinter's two old writers drinking through an evening, with Simon Russell Beale and Rupert Everett."},{"name":"Not Just a Game Show","slug":"not-just-a-game-show","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/not-just-a-game-show/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-02","to":"2026-12-23"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"Family Fortunes and Catchphrase run through a blender, with the audience as contestants."},{"name":"Nubiyan Twist","slug":"nubiyan-twist","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/nubiyan-twist/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-10-02"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Nine or ten people on stage, playing Afrobeat, highlife and dub as one thing."},{"name":"Nubya Garcia","slug":"nubya-garcia","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/nubya-garcia/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-15","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Three nights from the tenor saxophonist who defined the London sound."},{"name":"Nutcracker","slug":"nutcracker","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/london-coliseum/nutcracker/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-17","to":"2027-01-10"},"lat":51.510007,"lng":-0.12624,"verdict":"English National Ballet's Christmas Nutcracker, with its own orchestra in the pit."},{"name":"Outernet","slug":"outernet","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/outernet/","lat":51.515643,"lng":-0.129796,"verdict":"Four storeys of wraparound screen by Tottenham Court Road, free to walk into."},{"name":"Paint, Powder and Politics: Hair in the Georgian Age","slug":"paint-powder-and-politics-hair-in-the-georgian-age","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/benjamin-franklin-house/paint-powder-and-politics-hair-in-the-georgian-age/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.507651,"lng":-0.124892,"verdict":"How a hairstyle told a room your politics."},{"name":"Portraits for Guitar","slug":"portraits-for-guitar","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/portraits-for-guitar/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-23","to":"2026-10-23"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"Ahmed Dickinson plays Cuban and Trinidadian composers for classical guitar."},{"name":"Rachel Parris: Tour Preview","slug":"rachel-parris-tour-preview","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/rachel-parris-tour-preview/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-07","to":"2026-10-22"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"A career of musical comedy songs, tried out at the piano before the tour proper."},{"name":"Reviving Craft: Reflection of the Mind","slug":"reviving-craft-reflection-of-the-mind","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/somerset-house/reviving-craft-reflection-of-the-mind/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.510934,"lng":-0.117456,"verdict":"Sixty Chinese makers in ceramics, glass, jewellery, textile and furniture, free for twelve days."},{"name":"Rhapsody in Blue by Candlelight","slug":"rhapsody-in-blue-by-candlelight","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/rhapsody-in-blue-by-candlelight/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-10","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Gershwin by candle, with Florence Price and Shostakovich either side."},{"name":"Richard Ashcroft Revived My Libido","slug":"richard-ashcroft-revived-my-libido","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/richard-ashcroft-revived-my-libido/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-16","to":"2026-10-16"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"A sexual reawakening at Crystal Palace Park Bowl, told by a Partridge and Catherine Tate writer."},{"name":"Richard Bona Trio","slug":"richard-bona-trio","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/richard-bona-trio/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-02","to":"2026-11-03"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"The Cameroonian bassist who sings as high as he plays low."},{"name":"Robert Glasper","slug":"robert-glasper","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/robert-glasper/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-13","to":"2026-11-22"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Three solo nights from the pianist who opened the club, inside a ten-day residency."},{"name":"Robert Glasper with Special Guest Common","slug":"robert-glasper-with-special-guest-common","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/robert-glasper-with-special-guest-common/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-20","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Glasper and Common, who have made records together for fifteen years."},{"name":"Robert Glasper with Special Guest Marsha Ambrosius","slug":"robert-glasper-with-special-guest-marsha-ambrosius","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/robert-glasper-with-special-guest-marsha-ambrosius/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-14","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Glasper with the voice from Floetry."},{"name":"SANSARA: Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet","slug":"sansara-jesus-blood-never-failed-me-yet","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/sansara-jesus-blood-never-failed-me-yet/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-09","to":"2026-10-09"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Gavin Bryars's piece built on a homeless man singing, on the eve of World Homeless Day."},{"name":"Salman Toor: Someone Like You","slug":"salman-toor-someone-like-you","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/courtauld-gallery/salman-toor-someone-like-you/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2027-01-10"},"lat":51.511624,"lng":-0.1177,"verdict":"Nineteen paintings of queer and immigrant lives, one of them answering Manet's Bar downstairs."},{"name":"Sampa the Great","slug":"sampa-the-great","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/sampa-the-great/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-04","to":"2026-11-04"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Zambian-Australian rapper and singer, live with a band."},{"name":"School of Wok","slug":"school-of-wok","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/school-of-wok/","lat":51.510158,"lng":-0.124961,"verdict":"Hands-on Asian cookery, with knife skills and dim sum folding."},{"name":"Shabaka","slug":"shabaka","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/shabaka/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-19","to":"2026-10-20"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"The saxophonist who put down the saxophone, and picked up the flute."},{"name":"Sinead Harnett","slug":"sinead-harnett","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/sinead-harnett/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"The London singer whose R&B has been quietly everywhere for a decade."},{"name":"Skate at Somerset House","slug":"skate-at-somerset-house","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/somerset-house/skate-at-somerset-house/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-11","to":"2027-01-10","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.510934,"lng":-0.117456,"verdict":"The courtyard rink under a forty-foot tree, with apr\u00e8s-ski, from November to January."},{"name":"Slum Village ft Blue Lab Beats & Friends","slug":"slum-village-ft-blue-lab-beats-friends","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/slum-village-ft-blue-lab-beats-friends/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-17","to":"2026-11-18"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Detroit hip hop, live, with a London production duo."},{"name":"Soho Hidden Jazz Club","slug":"soho-hidden-jazz-club","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/soho-hidden-jazz-club/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-10-02"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"A jazz night in a former nightclub in a former chapel."},{"name":"Somerset House Historical Highlights Tour","slug":"somerset-house-historical-highlights-tour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/somerset-house/somerset-house-historical-highlights-tour/","lat":51.510934,"lng":-0.117456,"verdict":"An hour through the parts of Somerset House that are normally shut, down to the Deadhouse."},{"name":"Spooky Children's Day","slug":"spooky-childrens-day","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/benjamin-franklin-house/spooky-childrens-day/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-27","to":"2026-10-27"},"lat":51.507651,"lng":-0.124892,"verdict":"Butter churning, dressing up and a scavenger hunt through a Georgian house."},{"name":"St Martin's Baroque Classics","slug":"st-martins-baroque-classics","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/st-martins-baroque-classics/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-15","to":"2026-10-15"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"The music this church heard when it was new, for its three hundredth birthday."},{"name":"Steam Down X Nyjo Big Band","slug":"steam-down-x-nyjo-big-band","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/steam-down-x-nyjo-big-band/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-22","to":"2026-10-23"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"The Deptford collective meets a full big band."},{"name":"Tank and the Bangas","slug":"tank-and-the-bangas","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/tank-and-the-bangas/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-29","to":"2026-11-29"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"New Orleans spoken word, funk and gospel, at full volume."},{"name":"Terror at the Haunted Starbucks","slug":"terror-at-the-haunted-starbucks","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/terror-at-the-haunted-starbucks/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-29","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"The Weirdos' annual Halloween show: part comedy farce, part horror pantomime, barely rehearsed."},{"name":"The 12 Ensemble and James McVinnie: Poulenc Organ Concerto","slug":"the-12-ensemble-and-james-mcvinnie-poulenc-organ-concerto","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/the-12-ensemble-and-james-mcvinnie-poulenc-organ-concerto/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-23","to":"2026-10-23"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Poulenc's concerto for organ, strings and timpani, which he called half-monastery, half-music hall."},{"name":"The Brand New Heavies","slug":"the-brand-new-heavies","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/the-brand-new-heavies/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-13","to":"2026-12-22"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Six nights across two weeks from the band that invented acid jazz."},{"name":"The Courtauld's permanent galleries","slug":"the-courtaulds-permanent-galleries","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/courtauld-gallery/the-courtaulds-permanent-galleries/","lat":51.511624,"lng":-0.1177,"verdict":"Manet's barmaid and Van Gogh's bandaged ear, up a spiral staircase in Somerset House."},{"name":"The English Concert: Handel's Scipione","slug":"the-english-concert-handels-scipione","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/the-english-concert-handels-scipione/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-16","to":"2026-10-16"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"A Handel opera that had its hit run in the Haymarket in 1726 and then vanished."},{"name":"The Instant Musical","slug":"the-instant-musical","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/the-instant-musical/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-30","to":"2026-11-25"},"lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"A whole musical improvised from a suggestion, songs and plot twists included."},{"name":"The Journey: twenty-five years of Tenebrae","slug":"the-journey-twenty-five-years-of-tenebrae","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/the-journey-twenty-five-years-of-tenebrae/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-17"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Nigel Short's choir at twenty-five, singing the pieces that got them there."},{"name":"The King's Ransom","slug":"the-kings-ransom","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/donmar-warehouse/the-kings-ransom/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-05","to":"2027-02-06"},"lat":51.513942,"lng":-0.125773,"verdict":"A Southern-fried dark comedy about a crime too strange to have been invented."},{"name":"The King's Singers: Finding Harmony","slug":"the-kings-singers-finding-harmony","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/the-kings-singers-finding-harmony/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-30","to":"2026-10-30"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Six voices, no instruments, and the range they have made their own since 1968."},{"name":"The Last Ship","slug":"the-last-ship","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/theatre-royal-drury-lane/the-last-ship/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-22","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.512995,"lng":-0.120204,"verdict":"Sting's musical about the Wallsend shipyard he grew up beside."},{"name":"The Lion King","slug":"the-lion-king","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/lyceum-theatre/the-lion-king/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2027-09-08"},"lat":51.51148,"lng":-0.120057,"verdict":"In its twenty-seventh year at the Lyceum, and still the best-looking thing in the West End."},{"name":"The London Transport Museum's permanent galleries","slug":"the-london-transport-museums-permanent-galleries","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/london-transport-museum/the-london-transport-museums-permanent-galleries/","lat":51.511987,"lng":-0.121221,"verdict":"Two hundred years of getting about London, and most of the vehicles can be climbed into."},{"name":"The National Portrait Gallery's permanent galleries","slug":"the-national-portrait-gallerys-permanent-galleries","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/national-portrait-gallery/the-national-portrait-gallerys-permanent-galleries/","lat":51.509304,"lng":-0.128212,"verdict":"Seven hundred years of British faces, free, and best walked downwards."},{"name":"The Soul Rebels","slug":"the-soul-rebels","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/the-soul-rebels/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-26","to":"2026-10-26"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"A New Orleans brass band that plays hip hop as if it were second line."},{"name":"Theon Cross","slug":"theon-cross","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/theon-cross/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-02","to":"2026-12-02"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"A tuba played as the bass instrument it always could have been."},{"name":"Tim Walker's Fairyland: Love and Legends","slug":"tim-walkers-fairyland-love-and-legends","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-portrait-gallery/tim-walkers-fairyland-love-and-legends/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-09","to":"2027-02-07"},"lat":51.509304,"lng":-0.128212,"verdict":"Five years of Tim Walker photographing queer trailblazers, in his fairytale style."},{"name":"To Begin the World Over Again: the Life of Thomas Paine","slug":"to-begin-the-world-over-again-the-life-of-thomas-paine","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/benjamin-franklin-house/to-begin-the-world-over-again-the-life-of-thomas-paine/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-15","to":"2026-10-15"},"lat":51.507651,"lng":-0.124892,"verdict":"A one-man play about the corset-maker who wrote Common Sense."},{"name":"Tosca","slug":"tosca","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/london-coliseum/tosca/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-30","to":"2026-12-11"},"lat":51.510007,"lng":-0.12624,"verdict":"Puccini's thriller moved into a concert hall in a European state coming apart."},{"name":"Trial by Jury & The Zoo","slug":"trial-by-jury-the-zoo","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/london-coliseum/trial-by-jury-the-zoo/","runs":{"from":"2027-03-04","to":"2027-03-12"},"lat":51.510007,"lng":-0.12624,"verdict":"Two short Victorian comedies by Sullivan, one of them almost never staged."},{"name":"Un ballo in maschera","slug":"un-ballo-in-maschera","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-opera-house/un-ballo-in-maschera/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-30","to":"2026-12-18"},"lat":51.512883,"lng":-0.122497,"verdict":"A new production of Verdi's masked-ball opera, where a conspiracy and a love affair run into each other."},{"name":"Vivaldi's Four Seasons by Candlelight","slug":"vivaldis-four-seasons-by-candlelight","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/vivaldis-four-seasons-by-candlelight/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"The Four Seasons in a Georgian church lit by candles, on Trafalgar Square."},{"name":"Waaju X Majid Bekkas","slug":"waaju-x-majid-bekkas","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/waaju-x-majid-bekkas/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-04","to":"2026-12-04"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"A London band and a Moroccan gnawa master, on the same stage."},{"name":"Wind Alone, Sand Alone: Make No Sound","slug":"wind-alone-sand-alone-make-no-sound","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/wind-alone-sand-alone-make-no-sound/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"Korean music at the K-Music Festival, in a stripped chapel."},{"name":"Windborne: Courageous Change","slug":"windborne-courageous-change","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/windborne-courageous-change/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"American four-part harmony singing, in the protest tradition it came from."},{"name":"Winifred Gill: A Bloomsbury Pioneer","slug":"winifred-gill-a-bloomsbury-pioneer","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/courtauld-gallery/winifred-gill-a-bloomsbury-pioneer/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-14","to":"2027-01-20"},"lat":51.511624,"lng":-0.1177,"verdict":"The woman who ran the Omega Workshops, remembered through her toys and sketchbooks."},{"name":"Winston Taylor Photo Portrait Prize 2026","slug":"winston-taylor-photo-portrait-prize-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-portrait-gallery/winston-taylor-photo-portrait-prize-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-05","to":"2027-01-17"},"lat":51.509304,"lng":-0.128212,"verdict":"The photographic portrait prize formerly known as Taylor Wessing, in its new name."},{"name":"World News Day Book Drive","slug":"world-news-day-book-drive","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/benjamin-franklin-house/world-news-day-book-drive/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-28","to":"2026-09-28"},"lat":51.507651,"lng":-0.124892,"verdict":"Bring a book, get into Franklin's house free."},{"name":"Yazmin Lacey","slug":"yazmin-lacey","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/yazmin-lacey/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-05","to":"2026-11-05"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Nottingham soul, sung low and unhurried."},{"name":"Yussef Dayes","slug":"yussef-dayes","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/yussef-dayes/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-27","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"The drummer at the centre of the current London scene."},{"name":"Zara McFarlane","slug":"zara-mcfarlane","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/zara-mcfarlane/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-07","to":"2026-10-07"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"A voice that moves between jazz standards and Jamaican roots."},{"name":"corto.alto","slug":"corto-alto","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/corto-alto/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"Glasgow's most restless jazz project, led by a trombonist who plays everything."},{"name":"midori jaeger: (Re)planted","slug":"midori-jaeger-re-planted","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/midori-jaeger-re-planted/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-21","to":"2026-10-21"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"A cellist and singer launching an EP under the dome."},{"name":"Benjamin Franklin House","slug":"benjamin-franklin-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/benjamin-franklin-house/","lat":51.507651,"lng":-0.124892,"verdict":"The only house of Benjamin Franklin left standing anywhere, on Craven Street, where he lodged for sixteen years and where the basement was full of bones.","thumb":"/img/benjamin-franklin-house-480.jpg?v=acfd733e","img":"/img/benjamin-franklin-house.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Bow Street Museum of Crime and Justice","slug":"bow-street-museum-of-crime-and-justice","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/bow-street-museum-of-crime-and-justice/","lat":51.51349,"lng":-0.121726,"verdict":"Where policing began: the Bow Street Runners' station, with its cells kept, opened as a museum in 2021 under the hotel that took over the old court.","thumb":"/img/bow-street-museum-of-crime-and-justice-480.jpg?v=dff27f55","img":"/img/bow-street-museum-of-crime-and-justice.jpg","w":1024,"h":834},{"name":"British Optical Association Museum","slug":"british-optical-association-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/british-optical-association-museum/","deep":true,"lat":51.507892,"lng":-0.125392,"verdict":"History of eye care (by appointment only)."},{"name":"Courtauld Gallery","slug":"courtauld-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/courtauld-gallery/","lat":51.511624,"lng":-0.1177,"verdict":"One floor of Impressionists in Somerset House: Manet's Bar at the Folies-Berg\u00e8re, Van Gogh's bandaged self-portrait and a wall of C\u00e9zanne.","thumb":"/img/courtauld-gallery-480.jpg?v=6f391cf0","img":"/img/courtauld-gallery.jpg","w":1024,"h":809},{"name":"Library and Museum of Freemasonry","slug":"library-and-museum-of-freemasonry","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/library-and-museum-of-freemasonry/","deep":true,"lat":51.515009,"lng":-0.121267,"verdict":"Library, artefacts and regalia of Freemasonry.","thumb":"/img/library-and-museum-of-freemasonry-480.jpg?v=080f34eb","img":"/img/library-and-museum-of-freemasonry.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"London Transport Museum","slug":"london-transport-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/london-transport-museum/","lat":51.511987,"lng":-0.121221,"verdict":"London's buses, trams and trains, from the horse omnibus to the Tube, in the old flower market in Covent Garden.","thumb":"/img/london-transport-museum-480.jpg?v=4c41f354","img":"/img/london-transport-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Museum of Comedy","slug":"museum-of-comedy","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/museum-of-comedy/","lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"Comedy's props, scripts and posters in the crypt of a Hawksmoor church, with shows most nights.","thumb":"/img/museum-of-comedy-480.jpg?v=3244dcee","img":"/img/museum-of-comedy.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"National Portrait Gallery","slug":"national-portrait-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/national-portrait-gallery/","lat":51.509304,"lng":-0.128212,"verdict":"British history told through faces, from the Chandos Shakespeare to last year's photographs, reopened in 2023 with far more room.","thumb":"/img/national-portrait-gallery-480.jpg?v=0636eea1","img":"/img/national-portrait-gallery.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Somerset House","slug":"somerset-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/somerset-house/","lat":51.510934,"lng":-0.117456,"verdict":"A Georgian government palace on the Strand, now a courtyard of fountains and an ice rink, with the Courtauld's Impressionists upstairs.","thumb":"/img/own-somerset-house-480.jpg?v=a5484d4f","img":"/img/own-somerset-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Charles I at Charing Cross","slug":"charles-i-at-charing-cross","cat":"art","url":"/art/charles-i-at-charing-cross/","lat":51.507334,"lng":-0.127655,"verdict":"The oldest bronze equestrian statue in England, and the point from which every distance to London is measured.","thumb":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross-480.jpg?v=db81f3c1","img":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Courtauld Gallery","slug":"courtauld-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/courtauld-gallery/","lat":51.511624,"lng":-0.1177,"verdict":"One floor of Impressionists in Somerset House: Manet's Bar at the Folies-Berg\u00e8re, Van Gogh's bandaged self-portrait and a wall of C\u00e9zanne.","thumb":"/img/courtauld-gallery-480.jpg?v=6f391cf0","img":"/img/courtauld-gallery.jpg","w":1024,"h":809},{"name":"National Portrait Gallery","slug":"national-portrait-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/national-portrait-gallery/","lat":51.509304,"lng":-0.128212,"verdict":"British history told through faces, from the Chandos Shakespeare to last year's photographs, reopened in 2023 with far more room.","thumb":"/img/national-portrait-gallery-480.jpg?v=0636eea1","img":"/img/national-portrait-gallery.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Somerset House","slug":"somerset-house","cat":"art","url":"/art/somerset-house/","lat":51.510934,"lng":-0.117456,"verdict":"A Georgian government palace on the Strand, now a courtyard of fountains and an ice rink, with the Courtauld's Impressionists upstairs.","thumb":"/img/own-somerset-house-480.jpg?v=a5484d4f","img":"/img/own-somerset-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Trafalgar Square & Nelson's Column","slug":"nelsons-column","cat":"art","url":"/art/nelsons-column/","lat":51.507759,"lng":-0.12793,"verdict":"The symbolic heart of London: Barry's square with Nelson fifty-two metres above it, and Landseer's lions to climb on.","thumb":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2-480.jpg?v=b27c88fb","img":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Blue Note London","slug":"blue-note-london","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/blue-note-london/","lat":51.51046,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"The New York club's first London room, two shows a night under St Martin's Lane."},{"name":"Donmar Warehouse","slug":"donmar-warehouse","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/donmar-warehouse/","lat":51.513942,"lng":-0.125773,"verdict":"A hops warehouse and banana-ripening depot, now 251 seats and no bad ones."},{"name":"London Coliseum","slug":"london-coliseum","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/london-coliseum/","lat":51.510007,"lng":-0.12624,"verdict":"Frank Matcham's 1904 variety palace, the largest theatre in London, where English National Opera sings everything in English.","thumb":"/img/london-coliseum-480.jpg?v=019efbb6","img":"/img/london-coliseum.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Lyceum Theatre","slug":"lyceum-theatre","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/lyceum-theatre/","lat":51.51148,"lng":-0.120057,"verdict":"Bram Stoker managed the house here, and watched his employer turn into Dracula."},{"name":"Museum of Comedy","slug":"museum-of-comedy","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/museum-of-comedy/","lat":51.517555,"lng":-0.124801,"verdict":"A comedy museum and a hundred-seat club, in the crypt of a Hawksmoor church.","thumb":"/img/museum-of-comedy-480.jpg?v=3244dcee","img":"/img/museum-of-comedy.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Palace Theatre","slug":"palace-theatre","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/palace-theatre/","lat":51.5131,"lng":-0.129788,"verdict":"Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, in the theatre it has filled since 2016.","thumb":"/img/palace-theatre-480.jpg?v=272da0fe","img":"/img/palace-theatre.jpg","w":1024,"h":800},{"name":"Peacock Theatre","slug":"peacock-theatre","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/peacock-theatre/","lat":51.51441,"lng":-0.117636,"verdict":"Sadler's Wells' West End house, for the dance that wants a bigger room than Rosebery Avenue.","thumb":"/img/peacock-theatre-480.jpg?v=b84c3df7","img":"/img/peacock-theatre.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Royal Opera House","slug":"royal-opera-house","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/royal-opera-house/","lat":51.512883,"lng":-0.122497,"verdict":"The house of the Royal Opera and the Royal Ballet, and the third theatre to stand on the spot after the first two burned down.","thumb":"/img/royal-opera-house-480.jpg?v=782f46a7","img":"/img/royal-opera-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":925},{"name":"St Martin-in-the-Fields","slug":"st-martin-in-the-fields","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/","lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Free lunchtime recitals under Gibbs's ceiling, and candlelit concerts by night, in the church on the corner of Trafalgar Square.","thumb":"/img/st-martin-in-the-fields-480.jpg?v=f9f394b5","img":"/img/st-martin-in-the-fields.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Stone Nest","slug":"stone-nest","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/stone-nest/","lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"A Welsh chapel of 1888 that became the Limelight, then a squat, and is now a theatre."},{"name":"The Top Secret Comedy Club","slug":"the-top-secret-comedy-club","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/the-top-secret-comedy-club/","lat":51.515469,"lng":-0.123017,"verdict":"A Drury Lane basement where the bill is not announced until you are in it."},{"name":"Theatre Royal, Drury Lane","slug":"theatre-royal-drury-lane","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/theatre-royal-drury-lane/","lat":51.512995,"lng":-0.120204,"verdict":"Four theatres have stood on this ground since 1663, and one of them is still working."},{"name":"Cecil Court","slug":"cecil-court","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/cecil-court/","lat":51.510725,"lng":-0.127675,"verdict":"A pedestrian lane of antiquarian bookshops, maps and prints, the book trade's since the 1890s.","thumb":"/img/cecil-court-480.jpg?v=de6d1805","img":"/img/cecil-court.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Charing Cross Road","slug":"charing-cross-road","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/charing-cross-road/","lat":51.5129,"lng":-0.128892,"verdict":"The bookshop street, Foyles at the top of it.","thumb":"/img/charing-cross-road-480.jpg?v=07695816","img":"/img/charing-cross-road.jpg","w":1024,"h":790},{"name":"Foyles","slug":"foyles","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/foyles/","lat":51.514278,"lng":-0.130058,"verdict":"Four miles of shelving up an atrium, on the road that used to be nothing but bookshops.","thumb":"/img/foyles-480.jpg?v=ee329b23","img":"/img/foyles.jpg","w":1024,"h":771},{"name":"James Smith & Sons","slug":"james-smith-sons","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/james-smith-sons/","lat":51.51683,"lng":-0.126612,"verdict":"An umbrella shop of 1857 with its Victorian shopfront entirely intact, still making sticks and umbrellas on the premises.","thumb":"/img/james-smith-sons-480.jpg?v=d5062aba","img":"/img/james-smith-sons.jpg","w":1024,"h":553},{"name":"Seven Dials","slug":"seven-dials","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/seven-dials/","lat":51.514,"lng":-0.127,"verdict":"The seven streets off the sundial: independent fashion, beauty and the Neal's Yard shops."},{"name":"% Arabica","slug":"arabica-covent-garden","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/arabica-covent-garden/","lat":51.511704,"lng":-0.124025,"verdict":"The first %Arabica in Britain, a few steps off the Piazza."},{"name":"Fernandez & Wells","slug":"fernandez-wells","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/fernandez-wells/","lat":51.515339,"lng":-0.129027,"verdict":"Sandwiches with heft, and coffee roasted to their own spec."},{"name":"Kiss the Hippo","slug":"kiss-the-hippo-covent-garden","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/kiss-the-hippo-covent-garden/","lat":51.511125,"lng":-0.126511,"verdict":"Carbon-negative coffee, three UK Barista Championships behind it."},{"name":"Monmouth Coffee Company","slug":"monmouth-coffee-company-seven-dials","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/monmouth-coffee-company-seven-dials/","lat":51.514366,"lng":-0.1268,"verdict":"Where Monmouth started in 1978, and nobody has redesigned it since.","thumb":"/img/monmouth-coffee-company-seven-dials-480.jpg?v=c14b330f","img":"/img/monmouth-coffee-company-seven-dials.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"The Colombian Coffee Company","slug":"the-colombian-coffee-company-soho","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/the-colombian-coffee-company-soho/","lat":51.513759,"lng":-0.130487,"verdict":"Single-origin Colombian, served the way Colombians actually drink it."},{"name":"Arome Bakery","slug":"arome-bakery","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/arome-bakery/","lat":51.512992,"lng":-0.126141,"verdict":"French lamination, Asian flavours, and a honey butter toast worth the detour."},{"name":"Copains Covent Garden","slug":"copains-covent-garden","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/copains-covent-garden/","lat":51.514652,"lng":-0.125841,"verdict":"Parisian gluten-free viennoiserie, and croissants that actually flake."},{"name":"Donutelier Charing Cross Road","slug":"donutelier-charing-cross-road","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/donutelier-charing-cross-road/","lat":51.511942,"lng":-0.12821,"verdict":"Doughnuts finished by hand behind a window, in a room lit by chandeliers shaped like piping bags."},{"name":"Donutelier Soho Place","slug":"donutelier-soho-place","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/donutelier-soho-place/","lat":51.515893,"lng":-0.130453,"verdict":"A doughnut counter run like a pastry kitchen, on the ground floor of Soho Place."},{"name":"Donutelier Strand","slug":"donutelier-strand","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/donutelier-strand/","lat":51.508858,"lng":-0.125296,"verdict":"Croissants and hand-decorated doughnuts at the Aldwych end of the Strand."},{"name":"Fabrique","slug":"fabrique-seven-dials","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/fabrique-seven-dials/","lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.12838,"verdict":"The Earlham Street branch, for the same cardamom bun in the middle of town."},{"name":"Sakurado","slug":"sakurado-covent-garden","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/sakurado-covent-garden/","lat":51.510761,"lng":-0.122032,"verdict":"Japanese patisserie on Southampton Street: mille crepe, jiggly cheesecake, mochi made fresh."},{"name":"\u00d4 Craquelin","slug":"o-craquelin","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/o-craquelin/","lat":51.512273,"lng":-0.119896,"verdict":"A choux specialist, and a Paris-Brest worth sitting down for."},{"name":"Badiani Covent Garden","slug":"badiani-covent-garden","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/badiani-covent-garden/","lat":51.513219,"lng":-0.125725,"verdict":"Gelato on the quiet lane between Long Acre and Seven Dials."},{"name":"Knoops Covent Garden","slug":"knoops-covent-garden","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/knoops-covent-garden/","lat":51.511007,"lng":-0.126639,"verdict":"Hot chocolate ordered by cocoa percentage, on the lane behind the Coliseum."},{"name":"Kova Patisserie Chinatown","slug":"kova-patisserie-chinatown","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/kova-patisserie-chinatown/","lat":51.511882,"lng":-0.128898,"verdict":"The Chinatown counter, open to eleven at weekends."},{"name":"La Gelatiera","slug":"la-gelatiera","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/la-gelatiera/","lat":51.511099,"lng":-0.126774,"verdict":"Gelato churned slowly enough to keep the air out, on the lane between Covent Garden and St Martin's Lane."},{"name":"Venchi Long Acre","slug":"venchi-long-acre","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/venchi-long-acre/","lat":51.512851,"lng":-0.124421,"verdict":"Turin chocolate and gelato on the busiest walking route across Covent Garden."},{"name":"WA Caf\u00e9","slug":"wa-cafe","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/wa-cafe/","lat":51.511041,"lng":-0.126334,"verdict":"Japanese patisserie on a Covent Garden side street, French method and Japanese flavours."},{"name":"Dishoom Covent Garden","slug":"dishoom-covent-garden","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/dishoom-covent-garden/","lat":51.512454,"lng":-0.126821,"verdict":"The first one, on Upper St Martin's Lane."},{"name":"Milk Beach Soho","slug":"milk-beach-soho","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/milk-beach-soho/","lat":51.514581,"lng":-0.130326,"verdict":"Modern Australian cooking that treats breakfast as a service, not an afterthought."},{"name":"Arcade Food Hall","slug":"arcade-food-hall","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/arcade-food-hall/","lat":51.516278,"lng":-0.129543,"verdict":"JKS restaurants in a food hall, with a games room attached."},{"name":"Seven Dials Market","slug":"seven-dials-market","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/seven-dials-market/","lat":51.514027,"lng":-0.126047,"verdict":"A former banana warehouse, now the best eating in Covent Garden.","thumb":"/img/seven-dials-market-480.jpg?v=941c2ccc","img":"/img/seven-dials-market.jpg","w":1024,"h":771},{"name":"Guinness Open Gate Brewery London","slug":"guinness-open-gate-brewery-london","cat":"beer","url":"/beer/guinness-open-gate-brewery-london/","lat":51.513717,"lng":-0.125107,"verdict":"A working Guinness microbrewery in Covent Garden, and you pour your own."},{"name":"The Harp","slug":"the-harp","cat":"beer","url":"/beer/the-harp/","lat":51.509719,"lng":-0.125955,"verdict":"A narrow, award-winning ale house yards from Trafalgar Square."},{"name":"American Bar at The Savoy","slug":"american-bar","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/american-bar/","lat":51.510127,"lng":-0.120499,"verdict":"London's oldest surviving cocktail bar, open since 1893."},{"name":"Bar Termini","slug":"bar-termini","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/bar-termini/","lat":51.513669,"lng":-0.129783,"verdict":"Thirty seats, an Italian aperitivo list, and very good coffee."},{"name":"Beaufort Bar","slug":"beaufort-bar","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/beaufort-bar/","lat":51.510127,"lng":-0.120499,"verdict":"Black and gold, on the Savoy's old cabaret stage."},{"name":"Below Stone Nest","slug":"below-stone-nest","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/below-stone-nest/","lat":51.512958,"lng":-0.129358,"verdict":"Candlelit highballs in the cellar of an 1888 Welsh chapel.","thumb":"/img/own-below-stone-nest-480.jpg?v=c6d85303","img":"/img/own-below-stone-nest.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Milroy's","slug":"milroys","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/milroys/","lat":51.51482,"lng":-0.13121,"verdict":"A whisky shop with a bar hidden behind the bookcase."},{"name":"Oriole","slug":"oriole","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/oriole/","lat":51.51265,"lng":-0.126337,"verdict":"Smithfield basement, live music, drinks by continent."},{"name":"Side Hustle","slug":"side-hustle","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/side-hustle/","lat":51.513506,"lng":-0.122096,"verdict":"A Latin-leaning bar in the old Bow Street magistrates' court."},{"name":"Swift","slug":"swift","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/swift/","lat":51.513737,"lng":-0.129991,"verdict":"A quick one upstairs, a long one in the basement."},{"name":"The Coral Room","slug":"the-coral-room","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/the-coral-room/","lat":51.51713,"lng":-0.12911,"verdict":"A tall coral-pink salon off Great Russell Street, strong on English sparkling."},{"name":"Gordon's Wine Bar","slug":"gordons-wine-bar","cat":"wine","url":"/wine/gordons-wine-bar/","lat":51.507942,"lng":-0.123583,"verdict":"Candlelit cellars off Villiers Street, where the room is the reason to come."},{"name":"Noble Rot Soho","slug":"noble-rot-soho","cat":"wine","url":"/wine/noble-rot-soho/","lat":51.514861,"lng":-0.131242,"verdict":"The Soho Noble Rot, in the old Gay Hussar \u2014 and the one you cannot drop into for a glass."},{"name":"The 10 Cases","slug":"the-10-cases","cat":"wine","url":"/wine/the-10-cases/","lat":51.514285,"lng":-0.124212,"verdict":"A Covent Garden bistrot \u00e0 vin that buys ten cases and moves on."},{"name":"Charles I at Charing Cross","slug":"charles-i-at-charing-cross","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/charles-i-at-charing-cross/","lat":51.507334,"lng":-0.127655,"verdict":"The king Parliament executed, put back on his horse and pointed at the place where it happened.","thumb":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross-480.jpg?v=db81f3c1","img":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Trafalgar Square & Nelson's Column","slug":"nelsons-column","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/nelsons-column/","lat":51.507759,"lng":-0.12793,"verdict":"Built to celebrate a naval victory; used ever since by crowds arguing with the government behind it.","thumb":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2-480.jpg?v=b27c88fb","img":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"St George's Bloomsbury","slug":"st-georges-bloomsbury","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/st-georges-bloomsbury/","lat":51.51771,"lng":-0.124727,"verdict":"Hawksmoor's church with a stepped pyramid for a steeple and George I standing on the top of it.","thumb":"/img/st-georges-bloomsbury-480.jpg?v=d63ca501","img":"/img/st-georges-bloomsbury.jpg","w":1019,"h":1024},{"name":"St Martin-in-the-Fields","slug":"st-martin-in-the-fields","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/st-martin-in-the-fields/","lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"The church on Trafalgar Square, with concerts by candlelight upstairs and a caf\u00e9 in the crypt.","thumb":"/img/st-martin-in-the-fields-480.jpg?v=f9f394b5","img":"/img/st-martin-in-the-fields.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"St Paul's Covent Garden","slug":"st-pauls-covent-garden","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/st-pauls-covent-garden/","lat":51.511547,"lng":-0.123689,"verdict":"Inigo Jones's barn of a church, and the actors' church since the theatres arrived.","thumb":"/img/own-st-pauls-covent-garden-480.jpg?v=102db891","img":"/img/own-st-pauls-covent-garden.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Cecil Court","slug":"cecil-court","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/cecil-court/","lat":51.510727,"lng":-0.127657,"verdict":"A Victorian shopping street of antiquarian booksellers, unchanged shopfronts end to end.","thumb":"/img/street-cecil-court-480.jpg?v=19347ed8","img":"/img/street-cecil-court.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Drury Lane","slug":"drury-lane","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/drury-lane/","lat":51.514051,"lng":-0.120868,"verdict":"One of the oldest streets in London, with the oldest working theatre in the country on it.","thumb":"/img/drury-lane-480.jpg?v=e73f06ce","img":"/img/drury-lane.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Floral Street","slug":"floral-street","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/floral-street/","lat":51.512195,"lng":-0.124978,"verdict":"A narrow cobbled run behind the Royal Opera House, hung with bunting and lined with shops.","thumb":"/img/street-floral-street-480.jpg?v=9565776b","img":"/img/street-floral-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Inigo Place","slug":"inigo-place","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/inigo-place/","lat":51.511238,"lng":-0.124395,"verdict":"A short passage off Bedford Street that opens into the rose garden behind the Actors' Church.","thumb":"/img/street-inigo-place-480.jpg?v=4f2c1d98","img":"/img/street-inigo-place.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"King Street","slug":"king-street","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/king-street/","lat":51.511647,"lng":-0.124478,"verdict":"The handsomest street on the Covent Garden estate, paved in granite setts from end to end.","thumb":"/img/street-king-street-480.jpg?v=da622e70","img":"/img/street-king-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Maiden Lane","slug":"maiden-lane","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/maiden-lane/","lat":51.510678,"lng":-0.123193,"verdict":"A narrow lane behind the Strand with the oldest restaurant in London on it, and Turner born over a barber's shop.","thumb":"/img/maiden-lane-480.jpg?v=10e05469","img":"/img/maiden-lane.jpg","w":1024,"h":685},{"name":"Neal's Yard","slug":"neals-yard","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/neals-yard/","lat":51.514428,"lng":-0.126414,"verdict":"A courtyard off Seven Dials painted in every colour, reached through an alley you would walk past.","thumb":"/img/street-neals-yard-480.jpg?v=36effb6a","img":"/img/street-neals-yard.jpg","w":1024,"h":963},{"name":"Seven Dials & Monmouth Street","slug":"seven-dials-monmouth-street","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/seven-dials-monmouth-street/","lat":51.514446,"lng":-0.126901,"verdict":"Seven streets meeting at a sundial pillar, with small shops down every spoke.","thumb":"/img/seven-dials-monmouth-street-480.jpg?v=b2e2cf28","img":"/img/seven-dials-monmouth-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Centre Point","slug":"centre-point","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/centre-point/","lat":51.516185,"lng":-0.129736,"verdict":"A precast concrete lattice of 1966 that stood completely empty for nine years.","thumb":"/img/centre-point-480.jpg?v=7bbba464","img":"/img/centre-point.jpg","w":617,"h":1024},{"name":"Freemasons' Hall","slug":"freemasons-hall","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/freemasons-hall/","lat":51.515129,"lng":-0.120854,"verdict":"A vast Art Deco temple behind a Covent Garden street door, built as a war memorial.","thumb":"/img/freemasons-hall-480.jpg?v=1ed4f086","img":"/img/freemasons-hall.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Charles I at Charing Cross","slug":"charles-i-at-charing-cross","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/charles-i-at-charing-cross/","lat":51.507334,"lng":-0.127655,"verdict":"The oldest bronze equestrian statue in England, and the point from which every distance to London is measured.","thumb":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross-480.jpg?v=db81f3c1","img":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Cleopatra's Needle","slug":"cleopatras-needle","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/cleopatras-needle/","lat":51.508515,"lng":-0.120316,"verdict":"A 3,500-year-old Egyptian obelisk on the Embankment, with bomb scars from 1917 and a time capsule underneath.","thumb":"/img/cleopatras-needle-480.jpg?v=0254c0c7","img":"/img/cleopatras-needle.jpg","w":1024,"h":685},{"name":"Edith Cavell Memorial","slug":"edith-cavell-memorial","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/edith-cavell-memorial/","lat":51.509375,"lng":-0.127167,"verdict":"Frampton's white memorial to the nurse the Germans shot in 1915, outside the National Portrait Gallery, with her last words cut into it.","thumb":"/img/edith-cavell-memorial-480.jpg?v=0e516382","img":"/img/edith-cavell-memorial.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Eleanor Cross","slug":"eleanor-cross","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/eleanor-cross/","lat":51.50844,"lng":-0.125294,"verdict":"A Victorian Gothic cross in front of the station, standing in for the medieval one that gave the place its name.","thumb":"/img/eleanor-cross-480.jpg?v=ca6a2773","img":"/img/eleanor-cross.jpg","w":526,"h":1024},{"name":"Seven Dials Sundial Pillar","slug":"seven-dials-sundial-pillar","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/seven-dials-sundial-pillar/","lat":51.513774,"lng":-0.126997,"verdict":"A Doric column with six sundials at the meeting of seven streets. The seventh dial is the column.","thumb":"/img/seven-dials-sundial-pillar-480.jpg?v=67f24509","img":"/img/seven-dials-sundial-pillar.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Trafalgar Square & Nelson's Column","slug":"nelsons-column","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/nelsons-column/","lat":51.507759,"lng":-0.12793,"verdict":"The symbolic heart of London: Barry's square with Nelson fifty-two metres above it, and Landseer's lions to climb on.","thumb":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2-480.jpg?v=b27c88fb","img":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Cecil Court","slug":"cecil-court","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/cecil-court/","lat":51.510727,"lng":-0.127657,"verdict":"A Victorian passage of antiquarian booksellers and print dealers, unchanged shopfront by shopfront.","thumb":"/img/cecil-court-480.jpg?v=de6d1805","img":"/img/cecil-court.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Choosing Keeping","slug":"choosing-keeping","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/choosing-keeping/","lat":51.513144,"lng":-0.127471,"verdict":"A stationery shop of unusual seriousness: specialist papers, inks, and pens sourced from small makers worldwide."},{"name":"James Smith & Sons","slug":"james-smith-sons","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/james-smith-sons/","lat":51.51683,"lng":-0.126612,"verdict":"An umbrella shop of 1857 with its Victorian shopfront entirely intact, still making sticks and umbrellas on the premises.","thumb":"/img/james-smith-sons-480.jpg?v=d5062aba","img":"/img/james-smith-sons.jpg","w":1024,"h":553},{"name":"Neal's Yard Dairy","slug":"neals-yard-dairy","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/neals-yard-dairy/","lat":51.514244,"lng":-0.126237,"verdict":"The shop that saved British farmhouse cheese, maturing it in its own cellars and selling it at the peak.","thumb":"/img/neals-yard-dairy-480.jpg?v=c36adb7a","img":"/img/neals-yard-dairy.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Sotheran's","slug":"sotherans","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/sotherans/","lat":51.51077,"lng":-0.12751,"verdict":"Antiquarian booksellers since 1761, now in Cecil Court with the rare material round the corner.","thumb":"/img/sotherans-480.jpg?v=5fc4b690","img":"/img/sotherans.jpg","w":775,"h":1024},{"name":"Stanfords","slug":"stanfords","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/stanfords/","lat":51.513006,"lng":-0.125355,"verdict":"The map shop explorers used, selling charts, guides and globes since 1853.","thumb":"/img/stanfords-480.jpg?v=9d390681","img":"/img/stanfords.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Stephen Jones Millinery","slug":"stephen-jones-millinery","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/stephen-jones-millinery/","lat":51.515193,"lng":-0.121867,"verdict":"The studio of the milliner who has made hats for Dior, Vivienne Westwood and most of British pop since 1980."},{"name":"Bazalgette memorial","slug":"bazalgette-memorial","cat":"science","url":"/science/bazalgette-memorial/","lat":51.506094,"lng":-0.122356,"verdict":"The bust of the engineer who built the sewers and the Embankment you are standing on, with the inscription that he put the river in chains.","thumb":"/img/bazalgette-memorial-480.jpg?v=5ecef41a","img":"/img/bazalgette-memorial.jpg","w":1024,"h":683},{"name":"Benjamin Franklin House","slug":"benjamin-franklin-house","cat":"science","url":"/science/benjamin-franklin-house/","lat":51.507651,"lng":-0.124892,"verdict":"The only house of Benjamin Franklin left standing anywhere, on Craven Street, where he lodged for sixteen years and where the basement was full of bones.","thumb":"/img/benjamin-franklin-house-480.jpg?v=acfd733e","img":"/img/benjamin-franklin-house.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"London Transport Museum","slug":"london-transport-museum","cat":"science","url":"/science/london-transport-museum/","lat":51.511987,"lng":-0.121221,"verdict":"London's buses, trams and trains, from the horse omnibus to the Tube, in the old flower market in Covent Garden.","thumb":"/img/london-transport-museum-480.jpg?v=4c41f354","img":"/img/london-transport-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Michael Faraday statue, Savoy Place","slug":"michael-faraday-statue-savoy-place","cat":"science","url":"/science/michael-faraday-statue-savoy-place/","lat":51.509925,"lng":-0.11888,"verdict":"Faraday in bronze outside the Institution of Engineering and Technology, the copy of the marble in the Royal Institution he made famous.","thumb":"/img/own-michael-faraday-statue-savoy-place-480.jpg?v=5a4f399d","img":"/img/own-michael-faraday-statue-savoy-place.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Cambridge Circus: le Carr\u00e9's Circus","slug":"cambridge-circus-le-carres-circus","cat":"secrets","url":"/secrets/cambridge-circus-le-carres-circus/","lat":51.513254,"lng":-0.129123,"verdict":"The junction that gave John le Carr\u00e9's Secret Service its name: the Circus, headquarters of Smiley's people, in a building that was never there.","thumb":"/img/cambridge-circus-le-carres-circus-480.jpg?v=5e653934","img":"/img/cambridge-circus-le-carres-circus.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Library and Museum of Freemasonry","slug":"library-and-museum-of-freemasonry","cat":"secrets","url":"/secrets/library-and-museum-of-freemasonry/","lat":51.515009,"lng":-0.121267,"verdict":"Inside Freemasons' Hall, the art deco temple of the United Grand Lodge on Great Queen Street, a free museum of regalia, ritual and the secrets that are not really secret.","thumb":"/img/library-and-museum-of-freemasonry-480.jpg?v=080f34eb","img":"/img/library-and-museum-of-freemasonry.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"84 Charing Cross Road","slug":"84-charing-cross-road","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/84-charing-cross-road/","lat":51.51326,"lng":-0.12849,"verdict":"Where Marks & Co stood, the antiquarian bookshop of Helene Hanff's twenty-year correspondence."},{"name":"A Conversation with Oscar Wilde","slug":"a-conversation-with-oscar-wilde","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/a-conversation-with-oscar-wilde/","lat":51.508719,"lng":-0.125857,"verdict":"Maggi Hambling's Wilde rising out of a granite coffin behind St Martin-in-the-Fields, inviting you to sit and talk.","thumb":"/img/a-conversation-with-oscar-wilde-480.jpg?v=25cbdd10","img":"/img/a-conversation-with-oscar-wilde.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Agatha Christie memorial","slug":"agatha-christie-memorial","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/agatha-christie-memorial/","lat":51.511779,"lng":-0.127366,"verdict":"A bronze book with Christie's face in it, on the corner where The Mousetrap has run since 1952.","thumb":"/img/agatha-christie-memorial-480.jpg?v=4c0f7f16","img":"/img/agatha-christie-memorial.jpg","w":706,"h":1024},{"name":"Cecil Court","slug":"cecil-court","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/cecil-court/","lat":51.510727,"lng":-0.127657,"verdict":"Booksellers' Row: a Victorian pedestrian alley of antiquarian and specialist bookshops off Charing Cross Road.","thumb":"/img/cecil-court-480.jpg?v=de6d1805","img":"/img/cecil-court.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Courtauld Gallery","slug":"courtauld-gallery","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/courtauld-gallery/","lat":51.511624,"lng":-0.1177,"verdict":"Roger Fry's own collection, and Bloomsbury's painters hung together as they were meant to be seen.","thumb":"/img/courtauld-gallery-480.jpg?v=6f391cf0","img":"/img/courtauld-gallery.jpg","w":1024,"h":809},{"name":"Stanfords","slug":"stanfords","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/stanfords/","lat":51.513006,"lng":-0.125355,"verdict":"The map and travel bookshop of 1853, where Holmes sent for his map of Dartmoor.","thumb":"/img/stanfords-480.jpg?v=9d390681","img":"/img/stanfords.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Swedenborg House","slug":"swedenborg-house","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/swedenborg-house/","lat":51.517964,"lng":-0.122841,"verdict":"Bloomsbury's hidden house of the mystic who shaped Blake, Baudelaire and Borges: a library, a bookshop and a lecture hall.","thumb":"/img/swedenborg-house-480.jpg?v=6082132b","img":"/img/swedenborg-house.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"The Old Curiosity Shop","slug":"the-old-curiosity-shop","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/the-old-curiosity-shop/","lat":51.514988,"lng":-0.117321,"verdict":"A crooked sixteenth-century shop that borrowed Dickens's title and has kept it ever since.","thumb":"/img/the-old-curiosity-shop-480.jpg?v=052f6996","img":"/img/the-old-curiosity-shop.jpg","w":1024,"h":896},{"name":"Benjamin Franklin","slug":"benjamin-franklin-house","cat":"world","url":"/world/benjamin-franklin-house/","lat":51.507651,"lng":-0.124892,"verdict":"The only Franklin home left anywhere in the world, where he spent sixteen years trying to keep America British.","thumb":"/img/benjamin-franklin-house-480.jpg?v=acfd733e","img":"/img/benjamin-franklin-house.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Claude Monet","slug":"claude-monet","cat":"world","url":"/world/claude-monet/","lat":51.510124,"lng":-0.120257,"verdict":"The hotel window from which Monet painted the Thames in fog, nearly a hundred times.","thumb":"/img/claude-monet-480.jpg?v=7ce9cf1a","img":"/img/claude-monet.jpg","w":1024,"h":582},{"name":"Heinrich Heine","slug":"heinrich-heine","cat":"world","url":"/world/heinrich-heine/","lat":51.507404,"lng":-0.124593,"verdict":"The Craven Street lodging of Germany's greatest lyric poet, who found London too much.","thumb":"/img/heinrich-heine-480.jpg?v=9901a734","img":"/img/heinrich-heine.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Voltaire","slug":"voltaire","cat":"world","url":"/world/voltaire/","lat":51.510674,"lng":-0.122893,"verdict":"Where Voltaire lodged above a wigmaker's, and learned what a free country looked like.","thumb":"/img/voltaire-480.jpg?v=714f4aee","img":"/img/voltaire.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Australia House","slug":"australia-house","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/australia-house/","lat":51.51286,"lng":-0.11626,"verdict":"Gringotts: the marble banking hall of Australia House on the Strand.","thumb":"/img/australia-house-480.jpg?v=dbaa77ce","img":"/img/australia-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Charing Cross Road","slug":"charing-cross-road","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/charing-cross-road/","lat":51.51236,"lng":-0.12844,"verdict":"The Leaky Cauldron of the books is on Charing Cross Road, between a bookshop and a record shop.","thumb":"/img/charing-cross-road-480.jpg?v=07695816","img":"/img/charing-cross-road.jpg","w":1024,"h":790},{"name":"Palace Theatre","slug":"palace-theatre","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/palace-theatre/","lat":51.5131,"lng":-0.129788,"verdict":"Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, in the theatre it has filled since 2016.","thumb":"/img/palace-theatre-480.jpg?v=272da0fe","img":"/img/palace-theatre.jpg","w":1024,"h":800}]},{"slug":"farringdon-clerkenwell","name":"Farringdon & Clerkenwell","verdict":"Monks, then clockmakers, then printers: a district of workshops that turned into kitchens and studios.","note":"Named after a well where the parish clerks of London performed mystery plays, first recorded in 1100 and still there under a window on Farringdon Lane. The Knights Hospitaller, the order that ran hospitals for pilgrims to Jerusalem, had their English headquarters here, and their gatehouse of 1504 still spans St John's Lane, looking like a piece of a castle dropped into a street of offices.\n\nAfter the monasteries went, Clerkenwell filled with trades that needed daylight and small rooms. Clockmakers and watchmakers worked in the streets around Northampton Square; printers spread up from Fleet Street; brewers, distillers and the meat market at Smithfield took the rest. From the 1850s the Italian quarter grew around Saffron Hill, which is why St Peter's Italian Church holds a procession through these streets every July.\n\nThe workshops emptied in the twentieth century and were taken over by architects, designers and cooks, which is what the district is now. St John on St John Street built a whole style of British cooking out of the parts the meat market next door could not sell. Exmouth Market has a food market on weekdays; Clerkenwell Green, which has had no grass for three hundred years, has the Marx Memorial Library on it, where Lenin edited a revolutionary paper in 1902. Farringdon station, open since 1863, was one of the first stops on the first underground railway in the world.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-farringdon-clerkenwell.jpg?v=621d3b4e","thumb":"/img/area-farringdon-clerkenwell-480.jpg?v=52bfed0c","width":768,"height":1024,"thumb_width":360,"alt":"A white vintage Rolls-Royce outside St Peter's Italian Church on Clerkenwell Road, beside the Casa Italiana","caption":"A wedding at the Italian church on Clerkenwell Road."},"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-farringdon-clerkenwell-lead2.jpg?v=ac105a66","thumb":"/img/area-farringdon-clerkenwell-lead2-480.jpg?v=8550bc65","width":1024,"height":739,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A pair of Georgian houses on Clerkenwell Green, white-painted with black railings and tall sash windows","caption":"Clerkenwell Green.","credit":"Photo by Mx. Granger, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:12-13_Clerkenwell_Green.jpg"}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Gray's Inn Road","Pentonville Road","Goswell Road","the City line"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.1158,51.52948],[-0.11623,51.52993],[-0.11698,51.53021],[-0.11968,51.53091],[-0.10984,51.53178],[-0.10746,51.53185],[-0.1056,51.5322],[-0.10456,51.53114],[-0.10128,51.52893],[-0.09899,51.52383],[-0.09803,51.52285],[-0.09786,51.52267],[-0.09738,51.52178],[-0.09769,51.52071],[-0.1005,51.52009],[-0.10785,51.51776],[-0.11139,51.51815],[-0.11387,51.5223],[-0.1173,51.52567],[-0.11955,51.52866],[-0.1158,51.52948]]]},"centre":[-0.10888,51.52656],"bounds":[[-0.11968,51.51776],[-0.09738,51.5322]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":35,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":7,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":3,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"shopping","name":"Shopping","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"breakfast","name":"Breakfast & Brunch","count":3,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"cocktails","name":"Cocktails","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"politics","name":"Power & Politics","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"sacred","name":"Sacred London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"beautiful-streets","name":"Beautiful Streets","count":3,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"classic-british-shops","name":"Classic British Shops","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"science","name":"Science & Engineering","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":5,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":4,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"harry-potter","name":"Harry Potter","count":2,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: Legacy","slug":"alvin-ailey-american-dance-theater-legacy","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/sadlers-wells/alvin-ailey-american-dance-theater-legacy/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.529485,"lng":-0.106183,"verdict":"Revelations, the piece the company has closed with since 1960."},{"name":"Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: New Works","slug":"alvin-ailey-american-dance-theater-new-works","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/sadlers-wells/alvin-ailey-american-dance-theater-new-works/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-15","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.529485,"lng":-0.106183,"verdict":"The company that made Revelations, with everything except Revelations."},{"name":"Boyce Avenue","slug":"boyce-avenue","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/boyce-avenue/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-15","to":"2026-09-15"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Three brothers from Florida who built an audience on YouTube covers."},{"name":"Breakin' Convention: Open Art Surgery","slug":"breakin-convention-open-art-surgery","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/sadlers-wells/breakin-convention-open-art-surgery/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.529485,"lng":-0.106183,"verdict":"Hip hop choreographers show unfinished work and are told what is wrong with it."},{"name":"CHXRRY","slug":"chxrry","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/chxrry/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Toronto R&B, signed to the Weeknd's label."},{"name":"Chrissy Chlapecka","slug":"chrissy-chlapecka","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/chrissy-chlapecka/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"The bimbo-theory internet performer, live with songs."},{"name":"Club Antichrist's Vampire Ball","slug":"club-antichrists-vampire-ball","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/club-antichrists-vampire-ball/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"A long-running fetish and alternative club night, with a dress code."},{"name":"Eliza: A Bloomin' New Ballet","slug":"eliza-a-bloomin-new-ballet","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/sadlers-wells/eliza-a-bloomin-new-ballet/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-29","to":"2026-09-29"},"lat":51.529485,"lng":-0.106183,"verdict":"Pygmalion done as ballet, in the studio, for one night."},{"name":"English National Ballet: Rhythm Riot","slug":"english-national-ballet-rhythm-riot","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/sadlers-wells/english-national-ballet-rhythm-riot/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.529485,"lng":-0.106183,"verdict":"A triple bill with no tutus, no tiaras and no story in the first piece."},{"name":"Enigma Quests","slug":"enigma-quests","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/enigma-quests/","lat":51.517226,"lng":-0.10965,"verdict":"Story-heavy rooms with sets built like theatre, not like a warehouse."},{"name":"Georgia Tegou: In the Quiet of Us","slug":"georgia-tegou-in-the-quiet-of-us","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/sadlers-wells/georgia-tegou-in-the-quiet-of-us/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-19","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.529485,"lng":-0.106183,"verdict":"Three nights of new contemporary work in the studio upstairs."},{"name":"Gresham College lectures","slug":"gresham-college-lectures","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/gresham-college-lectures/","lat":51.5177,"lng":-0.1105,"verdict":"Free public lectures since 1597, from a professor of music, of astronomy, of law and the rest, in a medieval hall off Holborn."},{"name":"Halloween at the Charles Dickens Museum","slug":"halloween-at-the-charles-dickens-museum","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/charles-dickens-museum/halloween-at-the-charles-dickens-museum/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-28","to":"2026-11-01"},"lat":51.523594,"lng":-0.116323,"verdict":"Ghost stories told in Dickens's own house, from a family afternoon to Nancy's murder after dark."},{"name":"Heavy House Society","slug":"heavy-house-society","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/fabric/heavy-house-society/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.519608,"lng":-0.102516,"verdict":"Eleven at night until six in the morning, in the Smithfield cold store."},{"name":"Holy Fuck + The Itch","slug":"holy-fuck-the-itch","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/holy-fuck-the-itch/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-24"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Toronto four-piece who make electronic music without any of it being programmed."},{"name":"Library display: Sophy Hollington","slug":"library-display-sophy-hollington","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/quentin-blake-centre-for-illustration/library-display-sophy-hollington/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-06","to":"2026-12-31"},"lat":51.528594,"lng":-0.107645,"verdict":"Linocut demons and moons with faces, in the free library."},{"name":"London Dance Collaborative and Grad Pro: A Selection of New Works","slug":"london-dance-collaborative-and-grad-pro-a-selection-of-new-works","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/sadlers-wells/london-dance-collaborative-and-grad-pro-a-selection-of-new-works/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.529485,"lng":-0.106183,"verdict":"Two nights of new work by dancers at the start of their careers."},{"name":"London Museum opens at Smithfield","slug":"london-museum-opens-at-smithfield","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/london-museum-opens-at-smithfield/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-28"},"lat":51.5189,"lng":-0.1027,"verdict":"The Museum of London's ten-year move into Smithfield's General Market, with trains running past the galleries."},{"name":"MURUGIAH: Ever Feel Like\u2026","slug":"murugiah-ever-feel-like","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/quentin-blake-centre-for-illustration/murugiah-ever-feel-like/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-05","to":"2026-10-04"},"lat":51.528594,"lng":-0.107645,"verdict":"Flower-headed, skull-headed characters from an illustrator who trained as an architect."},{"name":"Mail Rail","slug":"mail-rail","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/postal-museum/mail-rail/","lat":51.524724,"lng":-0.113998,"verdict":"A ride on the driverless railway that carried London's post underground.","thumb":"/img/own-mail-rail-platform-480.jpg?v=67c522f0","img":"/img/own-mail-rail-platform.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Mail Rail Tunnel Walks","slug":"mail-rail-tunnel-walks","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/postal-museum/mail-rail-tunnel-walks/","lat":51.524724,"lng":-0.113998,"verdict":"A hard-hat walk through the parts of the Post Office railway the train never reaches.","thumb":"/img/own-mail-rail-tunnel-480.jpg?v=987e0635","img":"/img/own-mail-rail-tunnel.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Making and Me","slug":"making-and-me","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/quentin-blake-centre-for-illustration/making-and-me/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-04","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.528594,"lng":-0.107645,"verdict":"Print trails made by older artists from the Peel community centre, and a soundscape of them talking."},{"name":"Martha + Trust Fund","slug":"martha-trust-fund","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/martha-trust-fund/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"County Durham punk with tunes, and a band who have kept the same four members throughout."},{"name":"Pre-show talk with Natalie Haynes","slug":"pre-show-talk-with-natalie-haynes","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/sadlers-wells/pre-show-talk-with-natalie-haynes/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.529485,"lng":-0.106183,"verdict":"The classicist on Prometheus, before the ballet that reworks him."},{"name":"Queer as Comics","slug":"queer-as-comics","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/quentin-blake-centre-for-illustration/queer-as-comics/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-05","to":"2026-10-04"},"lat":51.528594,"lng":-0.107645,"verdict":"Eighty years of LGBTQIA+ comics, most of the artwork never shown before."},{"name":"Quentin Blake: Performance","slug":"quentin-blake-performance","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/quentin-blake-centre-for-illustration/quentin-blake-performance/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-05","to":"2027-04-01"},"lat":51.528594,"lng":-0.107645,"verdict":"Over a hundred Blake drawings about the stage, from Punch and Judy to Godot."},{"name":"Reggaeton Latino: Bad Bunny Casita Edition","slug":"reggaeton-latino-bad-bunny-casita-edition","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/reggaeton-latino-bad-bunny-casita-edition/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"A reggaeton night built around one artist's record."},{"name":"San Francisco Ballet: Mere Mortals","slug":"san-francisco-ballet-mere-mortals","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/sadlers-wells/san-francisco-ballet-mere-mortals/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.529485,"lng":-0.106183,"verdict":"Prometheus retold as a rave, with a live electronic score."},{"name":"Shit Kid + Clutter","slug":"shit-kid-clutter","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/shit-kid-clutter/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-17"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Swedish lo-fi pop, deliberately rough."},{"name":"Strawberry Guy + Malena Zavala","slug":"strawberry-guy-malena-zavala","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/strawberry-guy-malena-zavala/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-20","to":"2026-09-20"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Liverpool dream pop, played on a lot of keyboards."},{"name":"The Jolly Postman","slug":"the-jolly-postman","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/postal-museum/the-jolly-postman/","runs":{"from":"2026-02-14","to":"2027-01-31"},"lat":51.524724,"lng":-0.113998,"verdict":"Deliver to the Three Bears, Cinderella and the Wicked Witch, forty years after the book."},{"name":"The Postal Museum's permanent exhibitions","slug":"the-postal-museums-permanent-exhibitions","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/postal-museum/the-postal-museums-permanent-exhibitions/","lat":51.524724,"lng":-0.113998,"verdict":"A whole sheet of Penny Blacks, and a narrow-gauge railway under Mount Pleasant."},{"name":"The Tubs","slug":"the-tubs","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/the-tubs/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-30","to":"2026-09-30"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Welsh jangle and misery, from the people who were Joanna Gruesome."},{"name":"The Wanted 2.0","slug":"the-wanted-2-0","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/the-wanted-2-0/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-06","to":"2026-10-06"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"The boy band's return, without Tom Parker."},{"name":"fabric presents Mount Kimbie mix launch","slug":"fabric-presents-mount-kimbie-mix-launch","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/fabric/fabric-presents-mount-kimbie-mix-launch/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.519608,"lng":-0.102516,"verdict":"A fabric mix launch, eleven till seven."},{"name":"Charles Dickens Museum","slug":"charles-dickens-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/charles-dickens-museum/","lat":51.523594,"lng":-0.116323,"verdict":"The only one of Dickens's London homes still standing, laid out as he kept it.","thumb":"/img/charles-dickens-museum-480.jpg?v=2bd721e6","img":"/img/charles-dickens-museum.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Goldsmiths' Centre","slug":"goldsmiths-centre","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/goldsmiths-centre/","deep":true,"lat":51.520986,"lng":-0.102893,"verdict":"Changing exhibits of contemporary jewellery and silversmithing, operated by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths."},{"name":"Islington Museum","slug":"islington-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/islington-museum/","lat":51.52649,"lng":-0.1045,"verdict":"The borough's history in a gallery under Finsbury Library, free, from Lenin's bust to the library books Joe Orton went to prison for.","thumb":"/img/islington-museum-480.jpg?v=e9dbe39a","img":"/img/islington-museum.jpg","w":640,"h":480},{"name":"Museum of the Order of St John","slug":"museum-of-the-order-of-st-john","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/museum-of-the-order-of-st-john/","lat":51.522006,"lng":-0.102556,"verdict":"A Tudor gatehouse and a Norman crypt in Clerkenwell, free, and the road from the crusader knights to the St John Ambulance.","thumb":"/img/museum-of-the-order-of-st-john-480.jpg?v=49be93c3","img":"/img/museum-of-the-order-of-st-john.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Postal Museum","slug":"postal-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/postal-museum/","lat":51.524724,"lng":-0.113998,"verdict":"Five centuries of post, and a ride through the Post Office's own underground railway.","thumb":"/img/own-mail-rail-train-480.jpg?v=2a981c33","img":"/img/own-mail-rail-train.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration","slug":"quentin-blake-centre-for-illustration","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/quentin-blake-centre-for-illustration/","lat":51.528594,"lng":-0.107645,"verdict":"The UK's only public gallery for illustration, founded by Quentin Blake, now open in the old New River Head waterworks in Clerkenwell."},{"name":"The Charterhouse","slug":"the-charterhouse","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/the-charterhouse/","lat":51.521464,"lng":-0.099784,"verdict":"A plague pit, a monastery, a Tudor palace and, since 1611, an almshouse whose residents still live around the courts, with a free museum and tours led by them.","thumb":"/img/own-the-charterhouse-480.jpg?v=e853e870","img":"/img/own-the-charterhouse.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Hollybush Gardens","slug":"hollybush-gardens","cat":"art","url":"/art/hollybush-gardens/","deep":true,"lat":51.5232,"lng":-0.111129,"verdict":"A Clerkenwell gallery in a Victorian yard, with Lubaina Himid, Andrea B\u00fcttner and Claire Barclay."},{"name":"Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration","slug":"quentin-blake-centre-for-illustration","cat":"art","url":"/art/quentin-blake-centre-for-illustration/","lat":51.528594,"lng":-0.107645,"verdict":"The UK's only public gallery for illustration, founded by Quentin Blake, now open in the old New River Head waterworks in Clerkenwell."},{"name":"Sadler's Wells","slug":"sadlers-wells","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/sadlers-wells/","lat":51.529485,"lng":-0.106183,"verdict":"The country's dance house, on a site that has had a theatre on it since 1683."},{"name":"Scala","slug":"scala","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/scala/","lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Four floors of a 1920 cinema, stacked so you can hear the band from the stairs."},{"name":"fabric","slug":"fabric","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/fabric/","lat":51.519608,"lng":-0.102516,"verdict":"Three rooms in a Smithfield cold store, and a dancefloor that plays through your feet."},{"name":"Hatton Garden","slug":"hatton-garden","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/hatton-garden/","lat":51.519905,"lng":-0.10827,"verdict":"The jewellery trade's own street: rings made and priced without a Bond Street frontage."},{"name":"Prufrock Coffee","slug":"prufrock","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/prufrock/","lat":51.51995,"lng":-0.10952,"verdict":"The training room that became a neighbourhood fixture."},{"name":"Fred Bakery","slug":"fred-bakery-holborn","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/fred-bakery-holborn/","lat":51.522173,"lng":-0.114202,"verdict":"Pistachio rolls, tiramisu rolls, and a tiramisu latte that went viral."},{"name":"Konditor","slug":"konditor-grays-inn-road","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/konditor-grays-inn-road/","lat":51.519653,"lng":-0.11189,"verdict":"Eight to six on weekdays, and shut precisely when the offices are."},{"name":"Bourne & Hollingsworth Buildings","slug":"bourne-hollingsworth-buildings","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/bourne-hollingsworth-buildings/","lat":51.525546,"lng":-0.10736,"verdict":"A white-tiled greenhouse of a room, given over to weekend brunch."},{"name":"Caravan","slug":"caravan-exmouth-market","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/caravan-exmouth-market/","lat":51.525468,"lng":-0.110094,"verdict":"The first Caravan, with the roastery underneath it."},{"name":"Prufrock Coffee","slug":"prufrock","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/prufrock/","lat":51.51995,"lng":-0.10952,"verdict":"The Leather Lane room that trained a generation of baristas."},{"name":"Leather Lane Market","slug":"leather-lane-market","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/leather-lane-market/","lat":51.520456,"lng":-0.109672,"verdict":"Camden's largest street market, and a weekday lunch run of street food stalls.","thumb":"/img/leather-lane-market-480.jpg?v=66101748","img":"/img/leather-lane-market.jpg","w":1024,"h":685},{"name":"Caf\u00e9 Kick","slug":"cafe-kick","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/cafe-kick/","lat":51.526043,"lng":-0.109074,"verdict":"Table football, continental beer and a decent drink, since 1997."},{"name":"Gray's Inn","slug":"grays-inn","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/grays-inn/","lat":51.519074,"lng":-0.112202,"verdict":"Bacon's garden, Shakespeare's first Comedy of Errors, and a hall rebuilt after one night of the Blitz.","thumb":"/img/grays-inn-480.jpg?v=71e59de7","img":"/img/grays-inn.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Marx Memorial Library","slug":"marx-memorial-library","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/marx-memorial-library/","lat":51.52301,"lng":-0.10574,"verdict":"The Clerkenwell building where Lenin edited a newspaper, kept as a working library of the left.","thumb":"/img/marx-memorial-library-480.jpg?v=d7b144fb","img":"/img/marx-memorial-library.jpg","w":1024,"h":576},{"name":"St Etheldreda's","slug":"st-etheldredas","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/st-etheldredas/","lat":51.518643,"lng":-0.1074,"verdict":"The chapel of the medieval Bishops of Ely, built in the 1280s, and the oldest Catholic church in England still in use.","thumb":"/img/st-etheldredas-480.jpg?v=dddc4b77","img":"/img/st-etheldredas.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Clerkenwell Green","slug":"clerkenwell-green","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/clerkenwell-green/","lat":51.522795,"lng":-0.10534,"verdict":"No grass for three hundred years, but a spire at one end and a Georgian pub at the other.","thumb":"/img/street-clerkenwell-green-480.jpg?v=049742e6","img":"/img/street-clerkenwell-green.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Exmouth Market","slug":"exmouth-market","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/exmouth-market/","lat":51.525475,"lng":-0.109878,"verdict":"A pedestrian street of restaurants under festoon lights, with a street food market at lunchtime.","thumb":"/img/street-exmouth-market-480.jpg?v=4e1132df","img":"/img/street-exmouth-market.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Lloyd Square","slug":"lloyd-square","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/lloyd-square/","lat":51.528588,"lng":-0.111591,"verdict":"Paired villas with pediments round a garden \u2014 a London square that looks nothing like the others.","thumb":"/img/street-lloyd-square-480.jpg?v=f80c3929","img":"/img/street-lloyd-square.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Hatton Garden","slug":"hatton-garden","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/hatton-garden/","lat":51.520671,"lng":-0.108695,"verdict":"London's jewellery quarter for four hundred years, with the workshops still upstairs above the shops."},{"name":"Postal Museum","slug":"postal-museum","cat":"science","url":"/science/postal-museum/","lat":51.524724,"lng":-0.113998,"verdict":"Five centuries of post, and a ride through the Post Office's own underground railway.","thumb":"/img/own-mail-rail-train-480.jpg?v=2a981c33","img":"/img/own-mail-rail-train.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Charles Dickens Museum","slug":"charles-dickens-museum","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/charles-dickens-museum/","lat":51.523594,"lng":-0.116323,"verdict":"The only London house of Dickens's still standing, where Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby were written.","thumb":"/img/charles-dickens-museum-480.jpg?v=2bd721e6","img":"/img/charles-dickens-museum.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Marx Memorial Library","slug":"marx-memorial-library","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/marx-memorial-library/","lat":51.52301,"lng":-0.10574,"verdict":"The library founded in 1933 in Clerkenwell's radical schoolhouse, where Lenin edited Iskra and a 1935 fresco covers the wall.","thumb":"/img/marx-memorial-library-480.jpg?v=d7b144fb","img":"/img/marx-memorial-library.jpg","w":1024,"h":576},{"name":"Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration","slug":"quentin-blake-centre-for-illustration","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/quentin-blake-centre-for-illustration/","lat":51.528594,"lng":-0.107645,"verdict":"The country's home for illustration, opened in 2026 in the old waterworks at New River Head, Clerkenwell."},{"name":"The Charterhouse","slug":"the-charterhouse","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/the-charterhouse/","lat":51.521464,"lng":-0.099784,"verdict":"Thackeray's school, and the Grey Friars where Colonel Newcome dies in The Newcomes.","thumb":"/img/own-the-charterhouse-480.jpg?v=e853e870","img":"/img/own-the-charterhouse.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"magCulture","slug":"magculture","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/magculture/","lat":51.52658,"lng":-0.103717,"verdict":"The best magazine shop in London, a curated wall of independent titles from around the world on St John Street.","thumb":"/img/magculture-480.jpg?v=50dfeec6","img":"/img/magculture.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Giuseppe Mazzini","slug":"giuseppe-mazzini","cat":"world","url":"/world/giuseppe-mazzini/","lat":51.518111,"lng":-0.107606,"verdict":"The plaque London's Italians put up to the prophet of their united country, in the old Italian quarter.","thumb":"/img/giuseppe-mazzini-480.jpg?v=9e5001d9","img":"/img/giuseppe-mazzini.jpg","w":866,"h":1024},{"name":"Lenin at Clerkenwell Green","slug":"marx-memorial-library","cat":"world","url":"/world/marx-memorial-library/","lat":51.52301,"lng":-0.10574,"verdict":"The room where Lenin edited Iskra, in a Georgian charity school that became the Marx Memorial Library.","thumb":"/img/marx-memorial-library-480.jpg?v=d7b144fb","img":"/img/marx-memorial-library.jpg","w":1024,"h":576},{"name":"Lenin in Percy Circus","slug":"lenin-in-percy-circus","cat":"world","url":"/world/lenin-in-percy-circus/","lat":51.52921,"lng":-0.114742,"verdict":"Where Lenin lodged during the 1905 congress, on a circus of houses in Clerkenwell.","thumb":"/img/lenin-in-percy-circus-480.jpg?v=c92f3c14","img":"/img/lenin-in-percy-circus.jpg","w":800,"h":600},{"name":"Sir Syed Ahmad Khan","slug":"syed-ahmad-khan","cat":"world","url":"/world/syed-ahmad-khan/","lat":51.525297,"lng":-0.117606,"verdict":"Where the founder of Aligarh came to study English universities so he could build one for Indian Muslims.","thumb":"/img/syed-ahmad-khan-480.jpg?v=ebedbe70","img":"/img/syed-ahmad-khan.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Claremont Square","slug":"claremont-square","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/claremont-square/","lat":51.531233,"lng":-0.110365,"verdict":"Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place: the terrace on Claremont Square is the Black family house.","thumb":"/img/claremont-square-480.jpg?v=b12022bf","img":"/img/claremont-square.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Enigma Quests","slug":"enigma-quests","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/enigma-quests/","lat":51.517226,"lng":-0.10965,"verdict":"An hour-long escape room built as a school of witchcraft and wizardry, several rooms deep, on Fetter Lane."}]},{"slug":"fitzrovia","name":"Fitzrovia","verdict":"The bohemian half of the West End: Charlotte Street restaurants, the BT Tower overhead, and pubs full of dead writers.","note":"A district that had to be given a name. The streets between Oxford Street and Euston Road belonged to the Fitzroy family, and in the late 1930s the drinkers of the Fitzroy Tavern started calling the area Fitzrovia after their pub; a gossip column printed it in 1940 and it stuck.\n\nIt was where people came who wanted London without paying Mayfair prices for it. Painters worked in the studios round Fitzroy Square, which Robert Adam had a hand in designing; Virginia Woolf lived on it, and George Bernard Shaw before her. Dylan Thomas, George Orwell and half of literary London drank in the Fitzroy and the Wheatsheaf, and Rimbaud and Verlaine lodged nearby. The trades were the rag trade and furniture making, and the advertising business grew up on Charlotte Street among them.\n\nOverhead is the BT Tower, finished in 1964 and for a while the tallest building in the country, with a revolving restaurant at the top that closed after a bomb went off in it in 1971 and never reopened. It is the thing you navigate by from every street corner.\n\nWhat the area is now is somewhere to eat. Charlotte Street and the lanes off it hold more restaurants per yard than anywhere else in the West End, and Fitzroy Square, cobbled and closed to traffic, is one of the few places in central London where you can hear birds.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-fitzrovia-2.jpg?v=aa83326c","thumb":"/img/area-fitzrovia-2-480.jpg?v=0e3bc310","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The top of the BT Tower against a pale evening sky: stacked round galleries of glass and the aerials above them, a purple band with the BT logo below the top, seen from street level.","caption":"The tower, from Riding House Street.","credit":"Photo by Sebastiandoe5, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Top_of_BT_Tower_at_Dusk.jpg"},"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-fitzrovia-lead2.jpg?v=fcf3e66f","thumb":"/img/area-fitzrovia-lead2-480.jpg?v=62aac94a","width":1024,"height":687,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The white stucco of Fitzroy Square, with the street's nameplate on the railings and the garden's trees beyond","caption":"Fitzroy Square, Robert Adam's square of the 1790s.","credit":"Photo by Maggie Jones from London, England, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fitzroy_Square_W1_(4334705045).jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-fitzrovia-3.jpg?v=0abafa70","thumb":"/img/area-fitzrovia-3-480.jpg?v=2ded4cd3","width":1024,"height":660,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The ceiling of the Fitzrovia Chapel from below: gold mosaic vaults crossed by patterned ribs, marble-lined walls and stained-glass windows all round.","caption":"The Fitzrovia Chapel, all that is left of the Middlesex Hospital.","credit":"Photo by Colin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fitzrovia_Chapel_2017-09-17-7.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-fitzrovia-4.jpg?v=c53f14f9","thumb":"/img/area-fitzrovia-4-480.jpg?v=fa9167ab","width":769,"height":1024,"thumb_width":360,"alt":"The Wheatsheaf's black-and-white half-timbered front with leaded windows, a hanging sign and baskets of flowers, and two people at a table outside on the pavement.","caption":"The Wheatsheaf, on Rathbone Place.","credit":"Photo by Ewan-M, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wheatsheaf,_Fitzrovia,_W1.jpg"}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Euston Road","Tottenham Court Road","Oxford Street","Great Portland Street"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.1441,51.5245],[-0.14226,51.52407],[-0.13814,51.52492],[-0.13624,51.52256],[-0.13086,51.51718],[-0.13037,51.51642],[-0.13483,51.51603],[-0.14062,51.51554],[-0.14406,51.52333],[-0.1441,51.5245]]]},"centre":[-0.13745,51.51862],"bounds":[[-0.1441,51.51554],[-0.13037,51.52492]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":18,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":3,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":6,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":4,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":3,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"breakfast","name":"Breakfast & Brunch","count":3,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"cocktails","name":"Cocktails","count":3,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"sacred","name":"Sacred London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"beautiful-streets","name":"Beautiful Streets","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"architecture","name":"Architecture","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"science","name":"Science & Engineering","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":4,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":5,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"6T's Northern Soul All-Nighter","slug":"6ts-northern-soul-all-nighter","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/100-club/6ts-northern-soul-all-nighter/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-31","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.516108,"lng":-0.135357,"verdict":"Eleven at night until six in the morning, records only, since 1979."},{"name":"Chess Club Records","slug":"chess-club-records","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-social/chess-club-records/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.517319,"lng":-0.140818,"verdict":"A label night from the people who signed Mumford & Sons and Wolf Alice early."},{"name":"Does My Head Look Big in This? The Art of Portrait Caricature","slug":"does-my-head-look-big-in-this-the-art-of-portrait-caricature","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/cartoon-museum/does-my-head-look-big-in-this-the-art-of-portrait-caricature/","runs":{"from":"2026-05-23","to":"2026-11-01"},"lat":51.517577,"lng":-0.138581,"verdict":"Caricature from Renaissance Italy to the front pages, rude by design."},{"name":"Fifty years of punk: X, Generation X and Stinky Toys","slug":"fifty-years-of-punk-x-generation-x-and-stinky-toys","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/100-club/fifty-years-of-punk-x-generation-x-and-stinky-toys/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.516108,"lng":-0.135357,"verdict":"The room the 1976 punk festival happened in, marking fifty years of it."},{"name":"Fracas","slug":"fracas","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-social/fracas/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.517319,"lng":-0.140818,"verdict":"#STDrums, Polyop, Dead Wells and Camberwell Group."},{"name":"Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now","slug":"japanese-women-photographers-from-1950s-to-now","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/the-photographers-gallery/japanese-women-photographers-from-1950s-to-now/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-24","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.514926,"lng":-0.139018,"verdict":"Twenty-seven photographers, two hundred works, and a history of Japanese photography retold."},{"name":"Localism: Ch\u00e9 Wax","slug":"localism-che-wax","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-social/localism-che-wax/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.517319,"lng":-0.140818,"verdict":"The Social's own club night, in the basement."},{"name":"Localism: Heavenly Jukebox","slug":"localism-heavenly-jukebox","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-social/localism-heavenly-jukebox/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.517319,"lng":-0.140818,"verdict":"The label's own records, played late in its own basement."},{"name":"Marland","slug":"marland","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-social/marland/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.517319,"lng":-0.140818,"verdict":"At The Social, Fitzrovia."},{"name":"NINAGAWA Mika: Captive Blooms","slug":"ninagawa-mika-captive-blooms","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/the-photographers-gallery/ninagawa-mika-captive-blooms/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-19","to":"2027-06-01"},"lat":51.514926,"lng":-0.139018,"verdict":"Goldfish, cherry blossom and saturated flowers on the walls of Ramillies Street, free, for a year."},{"name":"Outernet","slug":"outernet","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/outernet/","lat":51.515643,"lng":-0.129796,"verdict":"Four storeys of wraparound screen by Tottenham Court Road, free to walk into."},{"name":"Plumbing the Death Star Live","slug":"plumbing-the-death-star-live","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-social/plumbing-the-death-star-live/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-09-10"},"lat":51.517319,"lng":-0.140818,"verdict":"A comedy podcast recorded in a basement off Oxford Circus."},{"name":"Ray Gelato and the Giants","slug":"ray-gelato-and-the-giants","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/100-club/ray-gelato-and-the-giants/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.516108,"lng":-0.135357,"verdict":"Jump blues and swing in the basement, played straight and loud."},{"name":"Recogniser, The Brothers Bula and Doomed Yaoi","slug":"recogniser-the-brothers-bula-and-doomed-yaoi","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-social/recogniser-the-brothers-bula-and-doomed-yaoi/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.517319,"lng":-0.140818,"verdict":"Three bands, free entry, a minute from Oxford Circus."},{"name":"Samsara: Nikhil, Saint Raavan, Sann Rao, Mistry and Rojo","slug":"samsara-nikhil-saint-raavan-sann-rao-mistry-and-rojo","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-social/samsara-nikhil-saint-raavan-sann-rao-mistry-and-rojo/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.517319,"lng":-0.140818,"verdict":"A South Asian club night with five on the bill."},{"name":"September Communion","slug":"september-communion","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-social/september-communion/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-17"},"lat":51.517319,"lng":-0.140818,"verdict":"Four songwriters on one bill: Jack Dean, I C Roses, Lambros and Alex Helsby."},{"name":"Swimmers Jackson: Komorebi release party","slug":"swimmers-jackson-komorebi-release-party","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-social/swimmers-jackson-komorebi-release-party/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-09-13"},"lat":51.517319,"lng":-0.140818,"verdict":"An album launch played twice in one day."},{"name":"The 5.6.7.8's","slug":"the-5-6-7-8s","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/100-club/the-5-6-7-8s/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-18","to":"2026-10-18"},"lat":51.516108,"lng":-0.135357,"verdict":"The Japanese garage trio from the Kill Bill teahouse scene."},{"name":"Cartoon Museum","slug":"cartoon-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/cartoon-museum/","lat":51.517577,"lng":-0.138581,"verdict":"British cartooning from Hogarth and Gillray to the Beano and last week's papers, on Wells Street.","thumb":"/img/cartoon-museum.jpg?v=6430200e","img":"/img/cartoon-museum.jpg","w":572,"h":1024},{"name":"The Building Centre","slug":"the-building-centre","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/the-building-centre/","deep":true,"lat":51.519513,"lng":-0.131581,"verdict":"Exhibits on architecture and design."},{"name":"The Photographers' Gallery","slug":"the-photographers-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/the-photographers-gallery/","lat":51.514926,"lng":-0.139018,"verdict":"Britain's first public gallery for photography alone, since 1971, on several floors behind Oxford Street.","thumb":"/img/the-photographers-gallery-480.jpg?v=02468dbb","img":"/img/the-photographers-gallery.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Cartoon Museum","slug":"cartoon-museum","cat":"art","url":"/art/cartoon-museum/","lat":51.517577,"lng":-0.138581,"verdict":"British cartooning from Hogarth and Gillray to the Beano and last week's papers, on Wells Street.","thumb":"/img/cartoon-museum.jpg?v=6430200e","img":"/img/cartoon-museum.jpg","w":572,"h":1024},{"name":"The Photographers' Gallery","slug":"the-photographers-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/the-photographers-gallery/","lat":51.514926,"lng":-0.139018,"verdict":"Britain's first public gallery for photography alone, since 1971, on several floors behind Oxford Street.","thumb":"/img/the-photographers-gallery-480.jpg?v=02468dbb","img":"/img/the-photographers-gallery.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"100 Club","slug":"100-club","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/100-club/","lat":51.516108,"lng":-0.135357,"verdict":"The oldest independent music venue in the world, a basement under Oxford Street where jazz started in 1942 and punk in 1976.","thumb":"/img/100-club-480.jpg?v=d208d7ef","img":"/img/100-club.jpg","w":619,"h":1024},{"name":"The Social","slug":"the-social","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/the-social/","lat":51.517319,"lng":-0.140818,"verdict":"A record label's basement bar off Oxford Street, open since 1999."},{"name":"Attendant","slug":"attendant-foley","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/attendant-foley/","lat":51.519217,"lng":-0.140699,"verdict":"A Victorian gentlemen's lavatory, converted. Better than it sounds."},{"name":"Kaffeine","slug":"kaffeine","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/kaffeine/","lat":51.518452,"lng":-0.140344,"verdict":"Fitzrovia's Antipodean bar, holding the same standard since 2009."},{"name":"Kaffeine","slug":"kaffeine-east-marylebone","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/kaffeine-east-marylebone/","lat":51.516879,"lng":-0.137156,"verdict":"The Eastcastle Street Kaffeine, step-free with tables on the pavement."},{"name":"Kiss The Hippo","slug":"kiss-the-hippo-east-marylebone","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/kiss-the-hippo-east-marylebone/","lat":51.518593,"lng":-0.137469,"verdict":"Berners Street, and one of the most carefully sourced cups in Fitzrovia."},{"name":"Kiss the Hippo","slug":"kiss-the-hippo","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/kiss-the-hippo/","lat":51.516483,"lng":-0.14162,"verdict":"Margaret Street, two minutes from Oxford Circus and a world calmer."},{"name":"Oma Coffee Roaster","slug":"oma-coffee-roaster","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/oma-coffee-roaster/","lat":51.516569,"lng":-0.13892,"verdict":"A Hong Kong roaster's first London room, and 94th in Europe."},{"name":"Donutelier Soho Place","slug":"donutelier-soho-place","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/donutelier-soho-place/","lat":51.515893,"lng":-0.130453,"verdict":"A doughnut counter run like a pastry kitchen, on the ground floor of Soho Place."},{"name":"Fabrique","slug":"fabrique","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/fabrique/","lat":51.519075,"lng":-0.136125,"verdict":"A Swedish stone-oven bakery, and the cardamom bun London measures others against."},{"name":"Fred Bakery","slug":"fred-bakery-oxford-circus","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/fred-bakery-oxford-circus/","lat":51.516497,"lng":-0.141519,"verdict":"A split-level room two minutes from Oxford Circus, and the same pistachio roll."},{"name":"Happy Sky Japanese Bakery","slug":"happy-sky-japanese-bakery","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/happy-sky-japanese-bakery/","lat":51.516552,"lng":-0.132663,"verdict":"Japanese baking on Hanway Street, four days a week."},{"name":"Crosstown Fitzrovia","slug":"crosstown-fitzrovia","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/crosstown-fitzrovia/","lat":51.51696,"lng":-0.135092,"verdict":"Sourdough doughnuts in Rathbone Square, a minute off Oxford Street."},{"name":"Italian Bear Chocolate","slug":"italian-bear-chocolate","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/italian-bear-chocolate/","lat":51.517825,"lng":-0.134485,"verdict":"Italian drinking chocolate thick enough to stand a spoon in, on Rathbone Place."},{"name":"XO Chocolate","slug":"xo-chocolate","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/xo-chocolate/","lat":51.518693,"lng":-0.140327,"verdict":"Bonbons made a few streets away, in a glass box off Great Portland Street."},{"name":"Kaffeine","slug":"kaffeine","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/kaffeine/","lat":51.518452,"lng":-0.140344,"verdict":"Antipodean espresso and a breakfast menu rewritten every week."},{"name":"Lantana","slug":"lantana-fitzrovia","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/lantana-fitzrovia/","lat":51.518948,"lng":-0.135997,"verdict":"The room the Aussie brunch habit started in."},{"name":"Scarlett Green","slug":"scarlett-green","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/scarlett-green/","lat":51.515248,"lng":-0.135795,"verdict":"Australian brunch off Berwick Street, loud and thoroughly green."},{"name":"Arcade Food Hall","slug":"arcade-food-hall","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/arcade-food-hall/","lat":51.516278,"lng":-0.129543,"verdict":"JKS restaurants in a food hall, with a games room attached."},{"name":"Mr Fogg's","slug":"mr-foggs","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/mr-foggs/","lat":51.515498,"lng":-0.134457,"verdict":"Victorian-explorer theatre, played entirely straight."},{"name":"The Punch Room","slug":"the-punch-room","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/the-punch-room/","lat":51.516779,"lng":-0.136055,"verdict":"Oak panelling, low light, and punch served by the bowl."},{"name":"The Social","slug":"the-social","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/the-social/","lat":51.517319,"lng":-0.140818,"verdict":"A record-label bar with a jukebox and a basement stage."},{"name":"Fitzrovia Chapel","slug":"fitzrovia-chapel","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/fitzrovia-chapel/","lat":51.518969,"lng":-0.138277,"verdict":"The Middlesex Hospital is gone; the gold chapel it was built around is still standing.","thumb":"/img/fitzrovia-chapel-480.jpg?v=a2a6d369","img":"/img/fitzrovia-chapel.jpg","w":1024,"h":685},{"name":"Charlotte Place","slug":"charlotte-place","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/charlotte-place/","lat":51.518928,"lng":-0.136049,"verdict":"A one-block lane behind Goodge Street where the tables come out and the lamp comes on.","thumb":"/img/street-charlotte-place-480.jpg?v=71a086b2","img":"/img/street-charlotte-place.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Fitzroy Square","slug":"fitzroy-square","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/fitzroy-square/","lat":51.522967,"lng":-0.140083,"verdict":"A Georgian square in Fitzrovia, paved rather than grassed, and lit like a stage set after dark.","thumb":"/img/street-fitzroy-square-480.jpg?v=69e5e085","img":"/img/street-fitzroy-square.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Centre Point","slug":"centre-point","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/centre-point/","lat":51.516185,"lng":-0.129736,"verdict":"A precast concrete lattice of 1966 that stood completely empty for nine years.","thumb":"/img/centre-point-480.jpg?v=7bbba464","img":"/img/centre-point.jpg","w":617,"h":1024},{"name":"Broadcasting House","slug":"broadcasting-house","cat":"science","url":"/science/broadcasting-house/","lat":51.518782,"lng":-0.143416,"verdict":"The BBC's first purpose-built home, shaped like a ship because the site was shaped like a prow.","thumb":"/img/own-broadcasting-house-480.jpg?v=01316d53","img":"/img/own-broadcasting-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Joseph Lister's house, 12 Park Crescent","slug":"joseph-listers-house-12-park-crescent","cat":"science","url":"/science/joseph-listers-house-12-park-crescent/","lat":51.5236,"lng":-0.1445,"verdict":"The house of the surgeon who made operations survivable, on Nash's crescent at the top of Portland Place."},{"name":"Fitzroy Square","slug":"fitzroy-square","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/fitzroy-square/","lat":51.522967,"lng":-0.140083,"verdict":"Virginia Stephen's house at No. 29, and No. 33, where Roger Fry's Omega Workshops sold Bloomsbury's painted furniture and fabrics from 1913.","thumb":"/img/fitzroy-square-480.jpg?v=057681b7","img":"/img/fitzroy-square.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"George Orwell statue, Broadcasting House","slug":"george-orwell-statue-broadcasting-house","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/george-orwell-statue-broadcasting-house/","lat":51.518775,"lng":-0.142953,"verdict":"Orwell outside the BBC he worked for and disliked, with his line about liberty cut into the wall behind him.","thumb":"/img/george-orwell-statue-broadcasting-house-480.jpg?v=ebd24154","img":"/img/george-orwell-statue-broadcasting-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":1024},{"name":"The Fitzroy Tavern","slug":"the-fitzroy-tavern","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/the-fitzroy-tavern/","lat":51.518648,"lng":-0.134645,"verdict":"The pub of bohemian London between the wars, which gave Fitzrovia its name and Dylan Thomas his local.","thumb":"/img/the-fitzroy-tavern-480.jpg?v=60a9a9c7","img":"/img/the-fitzroy-tavern.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"The Wheatsheaf","slug":"the-wheatsheaf","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/the-wheatsheaf/","lat":51.517749,"lng":-0.134035,"verdict":"Dylan Thomas met his wife in this bar in 1936, and proposed with his head in her lap."},{"name":"Carl Maria von Weber","slug":"carl-maria-von-weber","cat":"world","url":"/world/carl-maria-von-weber/","lat":51.519516,"lng":-0.142567,"verdict":"The house where the composer of Der Freisch\u00fctz died, having come to London to conduct his last opera.","thumb":"/img/carl-maria-von-weber-480.jpg?v=11fc2e62","img":"/img/carl-maria-von-weber.jpg","w":1024,"h":1024},{"name":"Francisco de Miranda and Andr\u00e9s Bello","slug":"francisco-de-miranda","cat":"world","url":"/world/francisco-de-miranda/","lat":51.52349,"lng":-0.137964,"verdict":"The headquarters of Spanish-American independence, run for eight years from a terrace in Fitzrovia.","thumb":"/img/francisco-de-miranda-480.jpg?v=d4b1dfa2","img":"/img/francisco-de-miranda.jpg","w":639,"h":478},{"name":"Mary Seacole","slug":"mary-seacole","cat":"world","url":"/world/mary-seacole/","lat":51.5158,"lng":-0.132192,"verdict":"Where the nurse of the Crimea wrote her memoir, bankrupt and famous, in the year after the war.","thumb":"/img/mary-seacole-480.jpg?v=dcdae6a3","img":"/img/mary-seacole.jpg","w":1024,"h":890},{"name":"Olaudah Equiano","slug":"olaudah-equiano","cat":"world","url":"/world/olaudah-equiano/","lat":51.519515,"lng":-0.138865,"verdict":"Where a former slave published the book that made him the voice of abolition.","thumb":"/img/olaudah-equiano-480.jpg?v=4829e5cf","img":"/img/olaudah-equiano.jpg","w":1024,"h":872},{"name":"Stefan Zweig","slug":"stefan-zweig","cat":"world","url":"/world/stefan-zweig/","lat":51.520554,"lng":-0.143924,"verdict":"The Marylebone flat of the most translated writer in the world, who had just lost his country.","thumb":"/img/stefan-zweig-480.jpg?v=c11bba96","img":"/img/stefan-zweig.jpg","w":768,"h":1024}]},{"slug":"greenwich","name":"Greenwich","verdict":"A palace site, a naval hospital, an observatory and a tea clipper, arranged along one bend of the Thames.","note":"Greenwich is where England arranged its monarchy, its navy and its science along one bend of the Thames, and the whole scheme is still legible from the top of the hill. A Tudor palace stood on the riverbank - Henry VIII and Elizabeth I were both born on the ground the Old Royal Naval College now covers - and after it decayed, William III and Mary II founded a hospital there for injured and elderly seamen. Christopher Wren laid it out in four blocks, split down the middle so the Queen's House behind kept its view of the water. That house, begun for Anne of Denmark in 1616 and finished for Henrietta Maria, was the first properly classical building in England; it is now the middle of the National Maritime Museum, the largest museum of the sea in the world. Up the hill, Charles II founded the Royal Observatory in 1675 to solve a practical problem: how a ship out of sight of land could know its longitude. The answer turned out to be an accurate clock, and John Harrison's are here; the world took its prime meridian from a line drawn through a telescope in this building. Down by the pier the Cutty Sark, the last of the tea clippers, is held three metres above her dock so that you can walk under the hull. Around all of it: a covered market, a deer park, pubs on the water, and the best way in, which is by boat.","figure":{"src":"/img/own-greenwich-riverside.jpg?v=988b2949","thumb":"/img/own-greenwich-riverside-480.jpg?v=87731939","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Greenwich across the water at dusk, a green dome by the river and the Cutty Sark's masts against a pink sky","caption":"Dusk over the river, the Cutty Sark's masts behind the foot tunnel dome."},"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-greenwich-lead2.jpg?v=51412bb5","thumb":"/img/area-greenwich-lead2-480.jpg?v=ce5df6a8","width":1024,"height":459,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The view from the Royal Observatory: the lawns of Greenwich Park, the Queen's House and the Old Royal Naval College, with the towers of Canary Wharf behind","caption":"Greenwich Park from the Observatory, the classic view.","credit":"Photo by Mx. Granger, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greenwich_Park,_London,_from_the_observatory.jpg"},{"src":"/img/own-greenwich-lawn.jpg?v=08c7cf70","thumb":"/img/own-greenwich-lawn-480.jpg?v=c1d37e8e","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A lawn at the Old Royal Naval College in low sun, one classical range lit gold and Canary Wharf behind the trees","caption":"The lawns at the Naval College, Canary Wharf behind."},{"src":"/img/area-greenwich-3.jpg?v=6f175660","thumb":"/img/area-greenwich-3-480.jpg?v=176e5db5","width":1024,"height":610,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Greenwich Market under its roof: stalls and shoppers along the covered lanes","caption":"Greenwich Market.","credit":"Photo by Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greenwich_Market_-_London,_England_-_DSC00967.jpg"}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Maze Hill","Charlton Way","Blackheath Hill","Greenwich South Street"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.0106,51.48474],[-0.00575,51.48581],[-0.00438,51.48438],[-0.00312,51.48286],[0.0009,51.48392],[0.00176,51.48235],[0.00361,51.48054],[0.00486,51.47992],[0.01016,51.47513],[0.00136,51.47245],[0.0001,51.47187],[-0.0054,51.47233],[-0.00872,51.47275],[-0.01295,51.47236],[-0.01526,51.47303],[-0.01301,51.47551],[-0.01212,51.47792],[-0.01017,51.47918],[-0.00935,51.48012],[-0.00952,51.4809],[-0.01004,51.48153],[-0.00992,51.48233],[-0.0106,51.48474]]]},"centre":[-0.00295,51.47732],"bounds":[[-0.01526,51.47187],[0.01016,51.48581]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":27,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":7,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"outdoors","name":"Outdoors & Nature","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"wine","name":"Wine","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"royal","name":"Royal London","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"politics","name":"Power & Politics","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"sacred","name":"Sacred London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"science","name":"Science & Engineering","count":2,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"Aboard the Cutty Sark","slug":"aboard-the-cutty-sark","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/cutty-sark-museum/aboard-the-cutty-sark/","lat":51.482858,"lng":-0.009569,"verdict":"The last tea clipper there is, lifted three metres so you can walk under her hull."},{"name":"Afternoon Frequencies","slug":"afternoon-frequencies","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/queens-house/afternoon-frequencies/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-10-23"},"lat":51.481188,"lng":-0.003748,"verdict":"Electronic music in Inigo Jones's Great Hall, free."},{"name":"Astronomy Photographer of the Year","slug":"astronomy-photographer-of-the-year","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-maritime-museum/astronomy-photographer-of-the-year/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.480783,"lng":-0.005405,"verdict":"The winning pictures of the sky, printed big and lit from behind."},{"name":"Character Actors at the Queen's House","slug":"character-actors-at-the-queens-house","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/queens-house/character-actors-at-the-queens-house/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.481188,"lng":-0.003748,"verdict":"People from the house's history, in the house, free."},{"name":"Character Encounters","slug":"character-encounters","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-maritime-museum/character-encounters/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.480783,"lng":-0.005405,"verdict":"Actors playing people from the museum's collection, free, every Saturday."},{"name":"Film Tour: Wigs, Weddings, Powder and Palaces","slug":"film-tour-wigs-weddings-powder-and-palaces","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/old-royal-naval-college/film-tour-wigs-weddings-powder-and-palaces/","lat":51.482951,"lng":-0.006343,"verdict":"Bridgerton and The Crown's locations, with a lesson in fan etiquette thrown in."},{"name":"Komij Mour Ijin / Our Life is Here","slug":"komij-mour-ijin-our-life-is-here","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-maritime-museum/komij-mour-ijin-our-life-is-here/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2026-10-04"},"lat":51.480783,"lng":-0.005405,"verdict":"Marshall Islands artists on nuclear testing and a rising sea. Free."},{"name":"LGBTQ+ history talks","slug":"lgbtq-history-talks","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-maritime-museum/lgbtq-history-talks/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.480783,"lng":-0.005405,"verdict":"A free drop-in talk on queer maritime history, twice a week."},{"name":"Lost Worlds by Luxmuralis","slug":"lost-worlds-by-luxmuralis","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/old-royal-naval-college/lost-worlds-by-luxmuralis/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-06","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.482951,"lng":-0.006343,"verdict":"Wren's dome and the Painted Hall lit from cave art to Atlantis, after dark."},{"name":"Lunar Tours","slug":"lunar-tours","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/royal-observatory-greenwich/lunar-tours/","lat":51.477347,"lng":-0.001176,"verdict":"The Observatory's history of watching, mapping and reaching the Moon, plus a mirror Moon to touch."},{"name":"Mirror Moon","slug":"mirror-moon","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/royal-observatory-greenwich/mirror-moon/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.477347,"lng":-0.001176,"verdict":"Luke Jerram's lunar surface, close enough to touch."},{"name":"Moon Celebration Week","slug":"moon-celebration-week","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-maritime-museum/moon-celebration-week/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-20"},"lat":51.480783,"lng":-0.005405,"verdict":"Nine days of lunar tours, planetarium shows and LEGO across Greenwich's two museums."},{"name":"National Maritime Museum Treasures Tour","slug":"national-maritime-museum-treasures-tour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-maritime-museum/national-maritime-museum-treasures-tour/","lat":51.480783,"lng":-0.005405,"verdict":"Royal barges, Roman anchors, Tudor ship models and Nelson, in an hour with a guide."},{"name":"Niki Gorick: Dock Life","slug":"niki-gorick-dock-life","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/cutty-sark-museum/niki-gorick-dock-life/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.482858,"lng":-0.009569,"verdict":"Photographs of the docklands as they are now, under the last tea clipper."},{"name":"Old Royal Naval College: 600 Years of History tour","slug":"old-royal-naval-college-600-years-of-history-tour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/old-royal-naval-college/old-royal-naval-college-600-years-of-history-tour/","lat":51.482951,"lng":-0.006343,"verdict":"Tudor palace to seamen's hospital to Wren's masterpiece, in forty-five minutes."},{"name":"Prime Meridian","slug":"prime-meridian","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/prime-meridian/","lat":51.4769,"lng":-0.0008,"verdict":"Stand in both hemispheres, and look over London, without paying to go in."},{"name":"RNLI Day at the Cutty Sark","slug":"rnli-day-at-the-cutty-sark","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/cutty-sark-museum/rnli-day-at-the-cutty-sark/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.482858,"lng":-0.009569,"verdict":"Lifeboat crews and rescue demonstrations under the ship."},{"name":"Royal Observatory Treasures Tour","slug":"royal-observatory-treasures-tour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/royal-observatory-greenwich/royal-observatory-treasures-tour/","lat":51.477347,"lng":-0.001176,"verdict":"An hour with the astronomers who fixed time and longitude, on the hill where they did it."},{"name":"Santa's Grotto at the Queen's House","slug":"santas-grotto-at-the-queens-house","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/queens-house/santas-grotto-at-the-queens-house/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-14","to":"2026-12-24"},"lat":51.481188,"lng":-0.003748,"verdict":"The Snow Queen, a hobgoblin and Father Christmas in Inigo Jones's house."},{"name":"Secret Dome Tour","slug":"secret-dome-tour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/old-royal-naval-college/secret-dome-tour/","lat":51.482951,"lng":-0.006343,"verdict":"125 steps up inside Wren's dome to a 360-degree view of Greenwich and the river."},{"name":"Shipkeeping Wednesdays","slug":"shipkeeping-wednesdays","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/cutty-sark-museum/shipkeeping-wednesdays/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.482858,"lng":-0.009569,"verdict":"Watch the ship being maintained, and ask the people doing it."},{"name":"The National Maritime Museum's permanent galleries","slug":"the-national-maritime-museums-permanent-galleries","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-maritime-museum/the-national-maritime-museums-permanent-galleries/","lat":51.480783,"lng":-0.005405,"verdict":"Nelson's coat with the bullet hole in it, and ten free galleries of what the sea did to Britain."},{"name":"The Painted Hall","slug":"the-painted-hall","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/old-royal-naval-college/the-painted-hall/","lat":51.482951,"lng":-0.006343,"verdict":"Three thousand seven hundred square metres of baroque ceiling, painted over nineteen years."},{"name":"The Royal Observatory's permanent galleries","slug":"the-royal-observatorys-permanent-galleries","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/royal-observatory-greenwich/the-royal-observatorys-permanent-galleries/","lat":51.477347,"lng":-0.001176,"verdict":"Stand on the Prime Meridian, and see the clocks that solved longitude."},{"name":"Unboxing the Universe","slug":"unboxing-the-universe","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-maritime-museum/unboxing-the-universe/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.480783,"lng":-0.005405,"verdict":"Science theatre about space, for anyone who will sit still for it."},{"name":"Windrush Food Culture","slug":"windrush-food-culture","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-maritime-museum/windrush-food-culture/","runs":{"to":"2026-09-30"},"lat":51.480783,"lng":-0.005405,"verdict":"How Caribbean cooking went from the margins of Britain to the high street."},{"name":"ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year","slug":"zwo-astronomy-photographer-of-the-year","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-maritime-museum/zwo-astronomy-photographer-of-the-year/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.480783,"lng":-0.005405,"verdict":"A hundred space photographs on lightboxes, chosen from the world's astrophotographers."},{"name":"Cutty Sark Museum","slug":"cutty-sark-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/cutty-sark-museum/","lat":51.482858,"lng":-0.009569,"verdict":"The last tea clipper, lifted three metres so you can walk underneath her.","thumb":"/img/own-cutty-sark-museum-480.jpg?v=ce09ec12","img":"/img/own-cutty-sark-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":531},{"name":"Fan Museum","slug":"fan-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/fan-museum/","lat":51.479098,"lng":-0.008069,"verdict":"Two Georgian houses on Croom's Hill given over entirely to fans, six thousand of them, with an orangery for tea behind.","thumb":"/img/fan-museum-480.jpg?v=ab43fbd4","img":"/img/fan-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":680},{"name":"National Maritime Museum","slug":"national-maritime-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/national-maritime-museum/","lat":51.480783,"lng":-0.005405,"verdict":"Britain and the sea, free, in Greenwich: Nelson's coat with the bullet hole, Turner's Trafalgar and a map of the oceans to walk on.","thumb":"/img/national-maritime-museum-480.jpg?v=34a72803","img":"/img/national-maritime-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":809},{"name":"Old Royal Naval College","slug":"old-royal-naval-college","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/old-royal-naval-college/","lat":51.482951,"lng":-0.006343,"verdict":"Built as a home for old and wounded sailors, with a dining hall whose ceiling took one painter nineteen years.","thumb":"/img/own-old-royal-naval-college-480.jpg?v=e62ca94a","img":"/img/own-old-royal-naval-college.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Queen's House","slug":"queens-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/queens-house/","lat":51.481188,"lng":-0.003748,"verdict":"Inigo Jones's first classical house in England, free, with the Armada Portrait.","thumb":"/img/queens-house-480.jpg?v=29e6cf9e","img":"/img/queens-house.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Ranger's House (Wernher Collection)","slug":"rangers-house-wernher-collection","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/rangers-house-wernher-collection/","lat":51.473427,"lng":-0.001609,"verdict":"A Georgian villa on the edge of Greenwich Park holding a diamond magnate's cabinet of the splendidly ugly, and the outside of the Bridgertons' house.","thumb":"/img/rangers-house-wernher-collection-480.jpg?v=01ce3b59","img":"/img/rangers-house-wernher-collection.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Royal Observatory, Greenwich","slug":"royal-observatory-greenwich","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/royal-observatory-greenwich/","lat":51.477347,"lng":-0.001176,"verdict":"The hill where the world's clocks were set, and where the longitude problem was finally solved.","thumb":"/img/royal-observatory-greenwich-480.jpg?v=c81eab0d","img":"/img/royal-observatory-greenwich.jpg","w":1024,"h":661},{"name":"Queen's House","slug":"queens-house","cat":"art","url":"/art/queens-house/","lat":51.481188,"lng":-0.003748,"verdict":"Inigo Jones's first classical house in England, free, with the Armada Portrait.","thumb":"/img/queens-house-480.jpg?v=29e6cf9e","img":"/img/queens-house.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Ranger's House (Wernher Collection)","slug":"rangers-house-wernher-collection","cat":"art","url":"/art/rangers-house-wernher-collection/","lat":51.473427,"lng":-0.001609,"verdict":"A Georgian villa on the edge of Greenwich Park holding a diamond magnate's cabinet of the splendidly ugly, and the outside of the Bridgertons' house.","thumb":"/img/rangers-house-wernher-collection-480.jpg?v=01ce3b59","img":"/img/rangers-house-wernher-collection.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Greenwich Park","slug":"greenwich-park","cat":"outdoors","url":"/outdoors/greenwich-park/","lat":51.477201,"lng":0.000906,"verdict":"A hill, a herd of deer, and the view down over the Queen's House to Canary Wharf.","thumb":"/img/own-greenwich-park-480.jpg?v=89f76025","img":"/img/own-greenwich-park.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Dark Sugars Cocoa House","slug":"dark-sugars-cocoa-house","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/dark-sugars-cocoa-house/","lat":51.480975,"lng":-0.008995,"verdict":"Four storeys of chocolate by Greenwich Market, open until ten."},{"name":"Dark Sugars Ice Creams","slug":"dark-sugars-ice-creams","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/dark-sugars-ice-creams/","lat":51.480929,"lng":-0.008452,"verdict":"The ice cream made from the chocolate they grind twelve doors along."},{"name":"Greenwich Market","slug":"greenwich-market","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/greenwich-market/","lat":51.481583,"lng":-0.009045,"verdict":"A covered Georgian market, and the best eating in Greenwich.","thumb":"/img/greenwich-market-480.jpg?v=2f76c843","img":"/img/greenwich-market.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Theatre of Wine, Greenwich","slug":"theatre-of-wine-greenwich","cat":"wine","url":"/wine/theatre-of-wine-greenwich/","lat":51.48393,"lng":0.000514,"verdict":"A Greenwich merchant that opens until nine and runs tastings all year."},{"name":"Greenwich Park","slug":"greenwich-park","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/greenwich-park/","lat":51.477201,"lng":0.000906,"verdict":"The oldest enclosed royal park, on the hill above the palace where Henry VIII and Elizabeth I were born.","thumb":"/img/own-greenwich-park-480.jpg?v=89f76025","img":"/img/own-greenwich-park.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Old Royal Naval College","slug":"old-royal-naval-college","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/old-royal-naval-college/","lat":51.482951,"lng":-0.006343,"verdict":"Wren's baroque college on the site of the Tudors' Greenwich Palace, London's most-filmed set - The Crown among three hundred productions.","thumb":"/img/own-old-royal-naval-college-480.jpg?v=e62ca94a","img":"/img/own-old-royal-naval-college.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Old Royal Naval College","slug":"old-royal-naval-college","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/old-royal-naval-college/","lat":51.482951,"lng":-0.006343,"verdict":"Wren's answer to what a naval power owes the sailors it uses up.","thumb":"/img/own-old-royal-naval-college-480.jpg?v=e62ca94a","img":"/img/own-old-royal-naval-college.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"St Alfege Church","slug":"st-alfege-church","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/st-alfege-church/","lat":51.480499,"lng":-0.009708,"verdict":"Hawksmoor's first church, on the spot where the Danes killed an archbishop in 1012, with Thomas Tallis and General Wolfe in its ground and Henry VIII in its font.","thumb":"/img/st-alfege-church-480.jpg?v=1ba837a1","img":"/img/st-alfege-church.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Cutty Sark Museum","slug":"cutty-sark-museum","cat":"science","url":"/science/cutty-sark-museum/","lat":51.482858,"lng":-0.009569,"verdict":"The last tea clipper, lifted three metres so you can walk underneath her.","thumb":"/img/own-cutty-sark-museum-480.jpg?v=ce09ec12","img":"/img/own-cutty-sark-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":531},{"name":"Royal Observatory, Greenwich","slug":"royal-observatory-greenwich","cat":"science","url":"/science/royal-observatory-greenwich/","lat":51.477347,"lng":-0.001176,"verdict":"The hill where the world's clocks were set, and where the longitude problem was finally solved.","thumb":"/img/royal-observatory-greenwich-480.jpg?v=c81eab0d","img":"/img/royal-observatory-greenwich.jpg","w":1024,"h":661}]},{"slug":"holborn","name":"Holborn","verdict":"The legal quarter: barristers' inns with their own gardens, a Tudor frontage on the main road, and the diamond trade next door.","note":"Holborn is named after a river. The Fleet ran through a hollow here on its way to the Thames, and the name is old English for the brook in the hollow; the river is now a sewer under the road, but the dip in the ground is still there when you walk it.\n\nIts business has been the law for six hundred years. The Inns of Court are not colleges or firms but societies that train barristers and call them to the bar, and two of the four, Lincoln's Inn and Gray's Inn, are here, each a walled quarter of chambers, halls and gardens that you can walk into and almost nobody does. Staple Inn on High Holborn is the last of the smaller Inns of Chancery, and its overhanging Tudor front of 1585 is the best surviving stretch of the London that burned in 1666.\n\nNext to the lawyers is the diamond trade. Hatton Garden has been the centre of it since the nineteenth century, and the shopfronts still sell stones by the carat over the counter.\n\nThe other reason to come is a house. Sir John Soane, the architect, filled his home on Lincoln's Inn Fields with antiquities, paintings and mirrors, and secured an Act of Parliament in 1833 leaving it to the nation on condition that nothing be moved. Nothing has been.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-holborn.jpg?v=4ad33f10","thumb":"/img/area-holborn-480.jpg?v=b85400bc","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":500,"alt":"Staple Inn's overhanging Tudor front on High Holborn","caption":"Staple Inn, on High Holborn since 1585.","credit":"Photo by don cload, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Staple_Inn,_Holborn_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3351719.jpg"},"figures":[],"reading_links":[],"edges":["High Holborn","the City line","River Thames","Kingsway"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.11184,51.51579],[-0.11108,51.51383],[-0.11196,51.5137],[-0.11173,51.51319],[-0.11233,51.51302],[-0.11221,51.51289],[-0.11253,51.51273],[-0.11158,51.5118],[-0.11147,51.50977],[-0.11271,51.50962],[-0.11458,51.50939],[-0.11552,51.50912],[-0.11689,51.50872],[-0.11711,51.5088],[-0.1183,51.51028],[-0.11914,51.51133],[-0.11898,51.51149],[-0.11856,51.51244],[-0.11736,51.51321],[-0.12043,51.51752],[-0.11472,51.51818],[-0.11383,51.51822],[-0.11184,51.51579]]]},"centre":[-0.11502,51.5151],"bounds":[[-0.12043,51.50872],[-0.11108,51.51822]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":20,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":5,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":4,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":3,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"shopping","name":"Shopping","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"cocktails","name":"Cocktails","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"politics","name":"Power & Politics","count":3,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"sacred","name":"Sacred London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"beautiful-streets","name":"Beautiful Streets","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"architecture","name":"Architecture","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"monuments","name":"Monuments & Ruins","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"classic-british-shops","name":"Classic British Shops","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"science","name":"Science & Engineering","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":4,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"harry-potter","name":"Harry Potter","count":1,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair","slug":"1-54-contemporary-african-art-fair","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/somerset-house/1-54-contemporary-african-art-fair/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-16","to":"2026-10-18","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.510934,"lng":-0.117456,"verdict":"The African art fair in Somerset House's courtyard rooms, the same weekend as Frieze."},{"name":"Bustronome","slug":"bustronome","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/bustronome/","lat":51.510213,"lng":-0.117156,"verdict":"A tasting menu on the top deck of a glass-roofed bus."},{"name":"Finzi Anniversary Gala","slug":"finzi-anniversary-gala","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/temple-church/finzi-anniversary-gala/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-27","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.513259,"lng":-0.110263,"verdict":"Two concerts in a day for Gerald Finzi, matinee and evening."},{"name":"Flamenc Oh!!","slug":"flamenc-oh","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/peacock-theatre/flamenc-oh/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-30","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.51441,"lng":-0.117636,"verdict":"A flamenco season in the West End house, ten days of it."},{"name":"Fleurs de Villes DIANA","slug":"fleurs-de-villes-diana","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/somerset-house/fleurs-de-villes-diana/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-10-06"},"lat":51.510934,"lng":-0.117456,"verdict":"Fifteen of Diana's outfits rebuilt in fresh flowers by British florists."},{"name":"Gathering Rest","slug":"gathering-rest","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/two-temple-place/gathering-rest/","runs":{"from":"2027-01-23","to":"2027-04-18"},"lat":51.51165,"lng":-0.112284,"verdict":"Two Temple Place's free winter show, this year on rest as healing and imagination."},{"name":"Hidden London: Aldwych family tour","slug":"hidden-london-aldwych-family-tour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-aldwych-family-tour/","lat":51.512017,"lng":-0.115494,"verdict":"The same disused station, with riddles and puzzles instead of a talk."},{"name":"Hidden London: Aldwych \u2014 the end of the line","slug":"hidden-london-aldwych-the-end-of-the-line","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-aldwych-the-end-of-the-line/","lat":51.512017,"lng":-0.115494,"verdict":"A Tube station that shut in 1994, opened up for eighty minutes."},{"name":"Hidden London: Holborn \u2014 the secret platforms","slug":"hidden-london-holborn-the-secret-platforms","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-holborn-the-secret-platforms/","lat":51.51721,"lng":-0.119874,"verdict":"A third of Holborn is closed to the public. This is that third."},{"name":"Jenkin van Zyl: Enclosure","slug":"jenkin-van-zyl-enclosure","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/somerset-house/jenkin-van-zyl-enclosure/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-11-29"},"lat":51.510934,"lng":-0.117456,"verdict":"A new film about a facility that stores copies of you, and the wreck of it as a walk-in set."},{"name":"Madelon Vriesendorp: Mind Games","slug":"madelon-vriesendorp-mind-games","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/sir-john-soanes-museum/madelon-vriesendorp-mind-games/","runs":{"from":"2026-07-15","to":"2026-09-20"},"lat":51.517075,"lng":-0.117469,"verdict":"Fifty works by the Soane Medal winner who paints skyscrapers in bed together."},{"name":"Purcell's Dido and Aeneas at Temple Church","slug":"purcells-dido-and-aeneas-at-temple-church","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/temple-church/purcells-dido-and-aeneas-at-temple-church/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-29","to":"2026-09-29"},"lat":51.513259,"lng":-0.110263,"verdict":"Dido's Lament in a round twelfth-century church built by the Knights Templar."},{"name":"Reviving Craft: Reflection of the Mind","slug":"reviving-craft-reflection-of-the-mind","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/somerset-house/reviving-craft-reflection-of-the-mind/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.510934,"lng":-0.117456,"verdict":"Sixty Chinese makers in ceramics, glass, jewellery, textile and furniture, free for twelve days."},{"name":"Salman Toor: Someone Like You","slug":"salman-toor-someone-like-you","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/courtauld-gallery/salman-toor-someone-like-you/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2027-01-10"},"lat":51.511624,"lng":-0.1177,"verdict":"Nineteen paintings of queer and immigrant lives, one of them answering Manet's Bar downstairs."},{"name":"Sir John Soane's Museum Highlights Tour","slug":"sir-john-soanes-museum-highlights-tour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/sir-john-soanes-museum/sir-john-soanes-museum-highlights-tour/","lat":51.517075,"lng":-0.117469,"verdict":"An hour through Soane's house as he left it in 1837, with the sarcophagus and the Hogarths."},{"name":"Skate at Somerset House","slug":"skate-at-somerset-house","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/somerset-house/skate-at-somerset-house/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-11","to":"2027-01-10","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.510934,"lng":-0.117456,"verdict":"The courtyard rink under a forty-foot tree, with apr\u00e8s-ski, from November to January."},{"name":"Somerset House Historical Highlights Tour","slug":"somerset-house-historical-highlights-tour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/somerset-house/somerset-house-historical-highlights-tour/","lat":51.510934,"lng":-0.117456,"verdict":"An hour through the parts of Somerset House that are normally shut, down to the Deadhouse."},{"name":"The Courtauld's permanent galleries","slug":"the-courtaulds-permanent-galleries","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/courtauld-gallery/the-courtaulds-permanent-galleries/","lat":51.511624,"lng":-0.1177,"verdict":"Manet's barmaid and Van Gogh's bandaged ear, up a spiral staircase in Somerset House."},{"name":"The Lion King","slug":"the-lion-king","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/lyceum-theatre/the-lion-king/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2027-09-08"},"lat":51.51148,"lng":-0.120057,"verdict":"In its twenty-seventh year at the Lyceum, and still the best-looking thing in the West End."},{"name":"Winifred Gill: A Bloomsbury Pioneer","slug":"winifred-gill-a-bloomsbury-pioneer","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/courtauld-gallery/winifred-gill-a-bloomsbury-pioneer/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-14","to":"2027-01-20"},"lat":51.511624,"lng":-0.1177,"verdict":"The woman who ran the Omega Workshops, remembered through her toys and sketchbooks."},{"name":"Courtauld Gallery","slug":"courtauld-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/courtauld-gallery/","lat":51.511624,"lng":-0.1177,"verdict":"One floor of Impressionists in Somerset House: Manet's Bar at the Folies-Berg\u00e8re, Van Gogh's bandaged self-portrait and a wall of C\u00e9zanne.","thumb":"/img/courtauld-gallery-480.jpg?v=6f391cf0","img":"/img/courtauld-gallery.jpg","w":1024,"h":809},{"name":"Hunterian Museum","slug":"hunterian-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/hunterian-museum/","lat":51.515283,"lng":-0.11587,"verdict":"Surgical anatomy in glass jars, unflinching and free.","thumb":"/img/hunterian-museum-480.jpg?v=578a618e","img":"/img/hunterian-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":766},{"name":"Sir John Soane's Museum","slug":"sir-john-soanes-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/sir-john-soanes-museum/","lat":51.517075,"lng":-0.117469,"verdict":"An architect's house left exactly as he arranged it, and the strangest interior in London.","thumb":"/img/sir-john-soanes-museum-480.jpg?v=157bf66f","img":"/img/sir-john-soanes-museum.jpg","w":590,"h":1024},{"name":"Somerset House","slug":"somerset-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/somerset-house/","lat":51.510934,"lng":-0.117456,"verdict":"A Georgian government palace on the Strand, now a courtyard of fountains and an ice rink, with the Courtauld's Impressionists upstairs.","thumb":"/img/own-somerset-house-480.jpg?v=a5484d4f","img":"/img/own-somerset-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Two Temple Place","slug":"two-temple-place","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/two-temple-place/","deep":true,"lat":51.51165,"lng":-0.112284,"verdict":"The estate office William Waldorf Astor built to be safe in, carved with Musketeers, Arthurian heroines and fifty-four gilded heads.","thumb":"/img/two-temple-place-480.jpg?v=6a8862a3","img":"/img/two-temple-place.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Courtauld Gallery","slug":"courtauld-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/courtauld-gallery/","lat":51.511624,"lng":-0.1177,"verdict":"One floor of Impressionists in Somerset House: Manet's Bar at the Folies-Berg\u00e8re, Van Gogh's bandaged self-portrait and a wall of C\u00e9zanne.","thumb":"/img/courtauld-gallery-480.jpg?v=6f391cf0","img":"/img/courtauld-gallery.jpg","w":1024,"h":809},{"name":"Sir John Soane's Museum","slug":"sir-john-soanes-museum","cat":"art","url":"/art/sir-john-soanes-museum/","lat":51.517075,"lng":-0.117469,"verdict":"An architect's house left exactly as he arranged it, and the strangest interior in London.","thumb":"/img/sir-john-soanes-museum-480.jpg?v=157bf66f","img":"/img/sir-john-soanes-museum.jpg","w":590,"h":1024},{"name":"Somerset House","slug":"somerset-house","cat":"art","url":"/art/somerset-house/","lat":51.510934,"lng":-0.117456,"verdict":"A Georgian government palace on the Strand, now a courtyard of fountains and an ice rink, with the Courtauld's Impressionists upstairs.","thumb":"/img/own-somerset-house-480.jpg?v=a5484d4f","img":"/img/own-somerset-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Two Temple Place","slug":"two-temple-place","cat":"art","url":"/art/two-temple-place/","lat":51.51165,"lng":-0.112284,"verdict":"A Thames-side mansion built for William Waldorf Astor, opened once a year for an exhibition drawn from Britain's regional collections.","thumb":"/img/two-temple-place-480.jpg?v=6a8862a3","img":"/img/two-temple-place.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Lyceum Theatre","slug":"lyceum-theatre","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/lyceum-theatre/","lat":51.51148,"lng":-0.120057,"verdict":"Bram Stoker managed the house here, and watched his employer turn into Dracula."},{"name":"Peacock Theatre","slug":"peacock-theatre","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/peacock-theatre/","lat":51.51441,"lng":-0.117636,"verdict":"Sadler's Wells' West End house, for the dance that wants a bigger room than Rosebery Avenue.","thumb":"/img/peacock-theatre-480.jpg?v=b84c3df7","img":"/img/peacock-theatre.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Temple Church","slug":"temple-church","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/temple-church/","lat":51.513259,"lng":-0.110263,"verdict":"The round church of the Knights Templar, with a choir of professional singers and one of the great English organs.","thumb":"/img/temple-church-480.jpg?v=f15f7b51","img":"/img/temple-church.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Twinings","slug":"twinings","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/twinings/","lat":51.513267,"lng":-0.112842,"verdict":"The oldest tea shop in London, nine feet wide, on the site Thomas Twining took in 1706.","thumb":"/img/twinings-480.jpg?v=5fb21d4f","img":"/img/twinings.jpg","w":708,"h":1024},{"name":"Toklas","slug":"toklas","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/toklas/","lat":51.511612,"lng":-0.114977,"verdict":"The bakery counter of a serious Mediterranean restaurant, selling the bread the kitchen uses."},{"name":"\u00d4 Craquelin","slug":"o-craquelin","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/o-craquelin/","lat":51.512273,"lng":-0.119896,"verdict":"A choux specialist, and a Paris-Brest worth sitting down for."},{"name":"Scarfes Bar","slug":"scarfes-bar","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/scarfes-bar/","lat":51.51757,"lng":-0.118133,"verdict":"Gerald Scarfe caricatures, a fire, and live jazz nightly."},{"name":"Lincoln's Inn","slug":"lincolns-inn","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/lincolns-inn/","lat":51.516616,"lng":-0.113097,"verdict":"The Inn with the oldest records of the four, and the hall where Bleak House opens in fog.","thumb":"/img/lincolns-inn-480.jpg?v=b383a3a6","img":"/img/lincolns-inn.jpg","w":1024,"h":734},{"name":"Middle Temple","slug":"middle-temple-hall","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/middle-temple-hall/","lat":51.51237,"lng":-0.11146,"verdict":"One of the four medieval societies that still decide who may call themselves a barrister.","thumb":"/img/middle-temple-hall-480.jpg?v=0e8bd0b8","img":"/img/middle-temple-hall.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Royal Courts of Justice","slug":"royal-courts-of-justice","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/royal-courts-of-justice/","lat":51.514222,"lng":-0.113041,"verdict":"The civil courts of England, given a Gothic palace on the Strand.","thumb":"/img/royal-courts-of-justice-480.jpg?v=a9a42b57","img":"/img/royal-courts-of-justice.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Temple Church","slug":"temple-church","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/temple-church/","lat":51.513259,"lng":-0.110263,"verdict":"The Knights Templar's round church of 1185, with stone knights lying on the floor of it.","thumb":"/img/temple-church-480.jpg?v=f15f7b51","img":"/img/temple-church.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Lincoln's Inn","slug":"lincolns-inn","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/lincolns-inn/","lat":51.516616,"lng":-0.113097,"verdict":"Gatehouse, chapel and hall round two courts and a lawn, in the middle of legal London.","thumb":"/img/street-lincolns-inn-480.jpg?v=4689c62e","img":"/img/street-lincolns-inn.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Sir John Soane's Museum","slug":"sir-john-soanes-museum","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/sir-john-soanes-museum/","lat":51.517075,"lng":-0.117469,"verdict":"An architect's own house, left exactly as he arranged it, with mirrors and light shafts everywhere.","thumb":"/img/sir-john-soanes-museum-480.jpg?v=157bf66f","img":"/img/sir-john-soanes-museum.jpg","w":590,"h":1024},{"name":"Roman Bath, Strand Lane","slug":"roman-bath-strand-lane","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/roman-bath-strand-lane/","lat":51.511773,"lng":-0.115781,"verdict":"Not Roman at all, and a better story for it: a Jacobean cistern that spent two centuries as a plunge bath."},{"name":"The London Silver Vaults","slug":"the-london-silver-vaults","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/the-london-silver-vaults/","lat":51.5172,"lng":-0.112578,"verdict":"Thirty dealers selling silver in a set of underground strongrooms built in 1876 for people's valuables.","thumb":"/img/the-london-silver-vaults-480.jpg?v=1b3185fc","img":"/img/the-london-silver-vaults.jpg","w":1024,"h":681},{"name":"Twinings","slug":"twinings","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/twinings/","lat":51.513267,"lng":-0.112842,"verdict":"The oldest tea shop in London, nine feet wide, on the site Thomas Twining took in 1706.","thumb":"/img/twinings-480.jpg?v=5fb21d4f","img":"/img/twinings.jpg","w":708,"h":1024},{"name":"Hunterian Museum","slug":"hunterian-museum","cat":"science","url":"/science/hunterian-museum/","lat":51.515283,"lng":-0.11587,"verdict":"Surgical anatomy in glass jars, unflinching and free.","thumb":"/img/hunterian-museum-480.jpg?v=578a618e","img":"/img/hunterian-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":766},{"name":"Michael Faraday statue, Savoy Place","slug":"michael-faraday-statue-savoy-place","cat":"science","url":"/science/michael-faraday-statue-savoy-place/","lat":51.509925,"lng":-0.11888,"verdict":"Faraday in bronze outside the Institution of Engineering and Technology, the copy of the marble in the Royal Institution he made famous.","thumb":"/img/own-michael-faraday-statue-savoy-place-480.jpg?v=5a4f399d","img":"/img/own-michael-faraday-statue-savoy-place.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Courtauld Gallery","slug":"courtauld-gallery","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/courtauld-gallery/","lat":51.511624,"lng":-0.1177,"verdict":"Roger Fry's own collection, and Bloomsbury's painters hung together as they were meant to be seen.","thumb":"/img/courtauld-gallery-480.jpg?v=6f391cf0","img":"/img/courtauld-gallery.jpg","w":1024,"h":809},{"name":"Lincoln's Inn","slug":"lincolns-inn","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/lincolns-inn/","lat":51.516616,"lng":-0.113097,"verdict":"The Old Hall where Bleak House opens, in the Inn where Donne and Thomas More were students.","thumb":"/img/lincolns-inn-480.jpg?v=b383a3a6","img":"/img/lincolns-inn.jpg","w":1024,"h":734},{"name":"Middle Temple Hall","slug":"middle-temple-hall","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/middle-temple-hall/","lat":51.51237,"lng":-0.11146,"verdict":"The Elizabethan hall where Twelfth Night was played in February 1602, with its double hammerbeam roof intact.","thumb":"/img/middle-temple-hall-480.jpg?v=0e8bd0b8","img":"/img/middle-temple-hall.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"The Old Curiosity Shop","slug":"the-old-curiosity-shop","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/the-old-curiosity-shop/","lat":51.514988,"lng":-0.117321,"verdict":"A crooked sixteenth-century shop that borrowed Dickens's title and has kept it ever since.","thumb":"/img/the-old-curiosity-shop-480.jpg?v=052f6996","img":"/img/the-old-curiosity-shop.jpg","w":1024,"h":896},{"name":"Sun Yat-sen","slug":"sun-yat-sen","cat":"world","url":"/world/sun-yat-sen/","lat":51.518943,"lng":-0.114224,"verdict":"Where the father of the Chinese republic lodged in exile, before his own legation kidnapped him.","thumb":"/img/sun-yat-sen-480.jpg?v=75d92dc3","img":"/img/sun-yat-sen.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Australia House","slug":"australia-house","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/australia-house/","lat":51.51286,"lng":-0.11626,"verdict":"Gringotts: the marble banking hall of Australia House on the Strand.","thumb":"/img/australia-house-480.jpg?v=dbaa77ce","img":"/img/australia-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":682}]},{"slug":"hyde-park-kensington-gardens","name":"Hyde Park & Kensington Gardens","verdict":"Six hundred acres of royal park across the middle of London, with a lake, a memorial and a corner for arguing.","note":"Two parks that read as one. Together they cover 253 hectares, about 625 acres, and you can walk from Marble Arch to Kensington Palace without leaving grass.\n\nHenry VIII took the land from Westminster Abbey in 1536 and kept deer on it. Charles I opened it to the public in 1637, which makes it one of the first pieces of royal property anybody could simply walk into. Queen Caroline had the Westbourne dammed in the 1730s to make the Serpentine, the long lake that divides the two halves; the bridge across it, of 1826, is the boundary, with Hyde Park to the east and Kensington Gardens to the west.\n\nThe park has taken most of the country's big public moments. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was held here inside Paxton's Crystal Palace, a building of iron and glass the length of three football pitches, which was taken down afterwards and moved to Sydenham. Speakers' Corner has been a place to stand up and say anything since 1872. Rock has been played here since 1968, and Queen drew perhaps 150,000 people in 1976.\n\nThe rest is for ordinary use: the Albert Memorial, gilded and enormous, on the Kensington side; the Diana Memorial Fountain, which children paddle in; the Round Pond, the Serpentine galleries, deckchairs, and the Serpentine Swimming Club, who have swum here on Christmas morning since 1864.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-hyde-park-kensington-gardens-lead2.jpg?v=5d03c44b","thumb":"/img/area-hyde-park-kensington-gardens-lead2-480.jpg?v=fb8c6054","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The Italian Gardens in Kensington Gardens: a stone basin and fountain among clipped planting, with trees behind","caption":"The Italian Gardens, at the top of the Long Water.","credit":"Photo by Romainbehar, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London_-_Kensington_Gardens_-_Italian_Gardens,_fountain.jpg"},"figures":[],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Bayswater Road","Park Lane","Knightsbridge","Kensington Church Street"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.1576,51.51203],[-0.15653,51.51023],[-0.1548,51.50894],[-0.15112,51.5056],[-0.15091,51.50495],[-0.15109,51.50406],[-0.1522,51.5031],[-0.16002,51.50196],[-0.16135,51.50177],[-0.16184,51.5017],[-0.17077,51.50193],[-0.18185,51.50144],[-0.18403,51.5018],[-0.1873,51.50234],[-0.18875,51.5024],[-0.19092,51.50203],[-0.19221,51.50406],[-0.19325,51.50424],[-0.19362,51.50464],[-0.19431,51.50587],[-0.19524,51.50926],[-0.19524,51.50927],[-0.19259,51.50968],[-0.19154,51.50988],[-0.18357,51.51043],[-0.1715,51.51209],[-0.16266,51.51302],[-0.1588,51.5132],[-0.1576,51.51203]]]},"centre":[-0.16407,51.50714],"bounds":[[-0.19524,51.50144],[-0.15091,51.5132]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":20,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":4,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":4,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"shopping","name":"Shopping","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"outdoors","name":"Outdoors & Nature","count":4,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"breakfast","name":"Breakfast & Brunch","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"cocktails","name":"Cocktails","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"royal","name":"Royal London","count":10,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"politics","name":"Power & Politics","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"monuments","name":"Monuments & Ruins","count":6,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"science","name":"Science & Engineering","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":1,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"Amar Kanwar","slug":"amar-kanwar","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/serpentine/amar-kanwar/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2027-01-31"},"lat":51.5047,"lng":-0.1751,"verdict":"Three film works from New Delhi turn Serpentine North into a place to sit and watch."},{"name":"BBC Proms","slug":"bbc-proms","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/bbc-proms/","runs":{"from":"2026-07-17","to":"2026-09-13","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.501007,"lng":-0.177406,"verdict":"Eight weeks of orchestral concerts, and standing tickets for the price of a pint."},{"name":"Beethoven's Ninth","slug":"beethovens-ninth","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/beethovens-ninth/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"The Choral Symphony, in the hall built for choirs this size."},{"name":"Boating on the Serpentine","slug":"boating-on-the-serpentine","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/boating-on-the-serpentine/","lat":51.507425,"lng":-0.165643,"verdict":"Pedalos and rowing boats in the middle of Hyde Park."},{"name":"Classical Coffee Mornings","slug":"classical-coffee-mornings","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/classical-coffee-mornings/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-20","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"Chamber music at eleven on a Sunday in the Elgar Room, with a coffee and a pastry in the price."},{"name":"Frameless","slug":"frameless","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/frameless/","lat":51.51353,"lng":-0.16015,"verdict":"Four galleries of paintings projected floor to ceiling, moving."},{"name":"Hyde Park Winter Wonderland","slug":"hyde-park-winter-wonderland","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hyde-park-winter-wonderland/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-19","to":"2027-01-03","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.5055,"lng":-0.158,"verdict":"A funfair, an ice rink and a great deal of mulled wine, for six weeks in Hyde Park."},{"name":"Jes\u00fas Rafael Soto: P\u00e9n\u00e9trable BBL Jaune","slug":"jesus-rafael-soto-penetrable-bbl-jaune","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/serpentine/jesus-rafael-soto-penetrable-bbl-jaune/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-16","to":"2026-10-25"},"lat":51.5047,"lng":-0.1751,"verdict":"A hanging field of yellow rods outside Serpentine South that you are meant to walk through."},{"name":"Justin Caguiat: Change Ringing","slug":"justin-caguiat-change-ringing","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/serpentine/justin-caguiat-change-ringing/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-08","to":"2027-01-10"},"lat":51.5047,"lng":-0.1751,"verdict":"Heat-sensitive paintings and bronze bells cast as flowers, rung to an English change-ringing score."},{"name":"Melody Gardot","slug":"melody-gardot","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/melody-gardot/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-16","to":"2026-11-16"},"lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"One night with the London Philharmonic, a South African choir and Ibrahim Maalouf."},{"name":"Messiah from Scratch","slug":"messiah-from-scratch","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/messiah-from-scratch/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-08","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"You bring a score and sing it yourself, in the Albert Hall, having rehearsed that afternoon."},{"name":"Orchestral Qawwali Project","slug":"orchestral-qawwali-project","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/orchestral-qawwali-project/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-24","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"Sufi devotional singing scored for a western orchestra."},{"name":"Power, Perfume and Scandal","slug":"power-perfume-and-scandal","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/kensington-palace/power-perfume-and-scandal/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-05","to":"2026-11-22"},"lat":51.505088,"lng":-0.188054,"verdict":"Costumed intrigue in Queen Caroline's court, weekends through the autumn."},{"name":"Propstore music memorabilia: the free exhibition","slug":"propstore-music-memorabilia-the-free-exhibition","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/propstore-music-memorabilia-the-free-exhibition/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.513887,"lng":-0.158531,"verdict":"Freddie Mercury's stage clothes and John Lennon's glasses, on show for four days before they are sold."},{"name":"Rishab Rikhiram Sharma: Sitar for Mental Health","slug":"rishab-rikhiram-sharma-sitar-for-mental-health","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/rishab-rikhiram-sharma-sitar-for-mental-health/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"Ravi Shankar's last student, playing the hall he filled twice over."},{"name":"Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at eighty","slug":"royal-philharmonic-orchestra-at-eighty","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/royal-philharmonic-orchestra-at-eighty/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"The orchestra Beecham founded in 1946, marking eighty years."},{"name":"Serpentine Pavilion 2026","slug":"serpentine-pavilion-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/serpentine/serpentine-pavilion-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-06","to":"2026-10-25","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.5047,"lng":-0.1751,"verdict":"This year's pavilion is a brick crinkle-crankle wall by LANZA atelier of Mexico City."},{"name":"Take Five Showcase: Juliette Lemoine, Emyr Penry Dance and Lucy-Anne Daniels","slug":"take-five-showcase-juliette-lemoine-emyr-penry-dance-and-lucy-anne-daniels","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/take-five-showcase-juliette-lemoine-emyr-penry-dance-and-lucy-anne-daniels/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-18","to":"2026-11-18"},"lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"Three alumni of the festival's artist scheme, one evening, in the Elgar Room."},{"name":"The Last Princesses of Punjab","slug":"the-last-princesses-of-punjab","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/kensington-palace/the-last-princesses-of-punjab/","runs":{"to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.505088,"lng":-0.188054,"verdict":"Sophia Duleep Singh, suffragette and Punjabi princess, and the five women who shaped her."},{"name":"The Planets","slug":"the-planets","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/the-planets/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"Holst's Planets in the round hall it suits, on a Saturday afternoon."},{"name":"Apsley House","slug":"apsley-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/apsley-house/","lat":51.503488,"lng":-0.151712,"verdict":"Number One London: the Duke of Wellington's house at Hyde Park Corner, still full of what Europe gave him, with Napoleon naked in the stairwell.","thumb":"/img/apsley-house-480.jpg?v=8f66f6bc","img":"/img/apsley-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":738},{"name":"Kensington Palace","slug":"kensington-palace","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/kensington-palace/","lat":51.505088,"lng":-0.188054,"verdict":"The palace where Victoria was born and woke up Queen, half a working royal home and half open to the public, on the edge of Kensington Gardens.","thumb":"/img/kensington-palace-480.jpg?v=f85d7397","img":"/img/kensington-palace.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum","slug":"polish-institute-and-sikorski-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/polish-institute-and-sikorski-museum/","deep":true,"lat":51.501436,"lng":-0.172863,"verdict":"Contributions of the Polish Armed Forces in the West in World War II.","thumb":"/img/polish-institute-and-sikorski-museum-480.jpg?v=e91c5ff8","img":"/img/polish-institute-and-sikorski-museum.jpg","w":892,"h":1024},{"name":"Serpentine","slug":"serpentine","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/serpentine/","lat":51.5047,"lng":-0.1751,"verdict":"Two small free galleries in Kensington Gardens, and a pavilion each summer."},{"name":"Achilles statue","slug":"achilles-statue","cat":"art","url":"/art/achilles-statue/","lat":51.504504,"lng":-0.152709,"verdict":"London's first public nude, cast from captured French cannon and paid for by the women of England.","thumb":"/img/achilles-statue-480.jpg?v=1cc7eb67","img":"/img/achilles-statue.jpg","w":823,"h":1024},{"name":"Albert Memorial","slug":"albert-memorial","cat":"art","url":"/art/albert-memorial/","lat":51.502384,"lng":-0.177674,"verdict":"The most extravagant thing the Victorians built, and worth walking round twice.","thumb":"/img/albert-memorial-480.jpg?v=be97b322","img":"/img/albert-memorial.jpg","w":992,"h":1024},{"name":"Peter Pan statue","slug":"peter-pan-statue","cat":"art","url":"/art/peter-pan-statue/","lat":51.508618,"lng":-0.175919,"verdict":"The boy who wouldn't grow up, put up overnight so that the children would think he had arrived by magic.","thumb":"/img/peter-pan-statue-480.jpg?v=4db7cdcf","img":"/img/peter-pan-statue.jpg","w":655,"h":1024},{"name":"Serpentine","slug":"serpentine","cat":"art","url":"/art/serpentine/","lat":51.5047,"lng":-0.1751,"verdict":"Two small free galleries in Kensington Gardens, and a pavilion each summer."},{"name":"Royal Albert Hall","slug":"royal-albert-hall","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/","lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"Victoria's memorial to her husband, built as an amphitheatre for five thousand, and the home of the Proms since the war.","thumb":"/img/royal-albert-hall-480.jpg?v=f03a4073","img":"/img/royal-albert-hall.jpg","w":1024,"h":520},{"name":"Harvey Nichols","slug":"harvey-nichols","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/harvey-nichols/","lat":51.501623,"lng":-0.159717,"verdict":"Eight floors of fashion and beauty, with a food market and a dining room on the fifth.","thumb":"/img/harvey-nichols-480.jpg?v=235baeb0","img":"/img/harvey-nichols.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Boating on the Serpentine","slug":"boating-on-the-serpentine","cat":"outdoors","url":"/outdoors/boating-on-the-serpentine/","lat":51.507425,"lng":-0.165643,"verdict":"Pedalos and rowing boats in the middle of Hyde Park."},{"name":"Hyde Park","slug":"hyde-park","cat":"outdoors","url":"/outdoors/hyde-park/","lat":51.506841,"lng":-0.163765,"verdict":"The Serpentine down the middle, and the only central park big enough to lose people in.","thumb":"/img/hyde-park-480.jpg?v=ce02576a","img":"/img/hyde-park.jpg","w":1024,"h":387},{"name":"Kensington Gardens","slug":"kensington-gardens","cat":"outdoors","url":"/outdoors/kensington-gardens/","lat":51.506694,"lng":-0.180023,"verdict":"Hyde Park's formal other half: the Italian Gardens, the Albert Memorial and a palace.","thumb":"/img/kensington-gardens-480.jpg?v=e8e12d6e","img":"/img/kensington-gardens.jpg","w":876,"h":1024},{"name":"Serpentine Lido","slug":"serpentine-lido","cat":"outdoors","url":"/outdoors/serpentine-lido/","lat":51.504859,"lng":-0.16838,"verdict":"Swim in the Serpentine, in the middle of Hyde Park, with a lawn to lie on after."},{"name":"Guillam Notting Hill","slug":"guillam-notting-hill","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/guillam-notting-hill/","lat":51.509591,"lng":-0.194284,"verdict":"Single-origin coffee on Notting Hill Gate."},{"name":"C\u00e9dric Grolet at The Berkeley","slug":"cedric-grolet-at-the-berkeley","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/cedric-grolet-at-the-berkeley/","lat":51.502208,"lng":-0.156132,"verdict":"Trompe-l'\u0153il fruit that costs more than lunch, and is worth seeing once."},{"name":"Badiani Notting Hill","slug":"badiani-notting-hill","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/badiani-notting-hill/","lat":51.509464,"lng":-0.194945,"verdict":"Florentine gelato on Notting Hill Gate, and the Buontalenti is the one to get."},{"name":"Knoops Kensington","slug":"knoops-kensington","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/knoops-kensington/","lat":51.501934,"lng":-0.191453,"verdict":"Hot chocolate ordered by cocoa percentage, open from half past six in the morning."},{"name":"Guillam Notting Hill","slug":"guillam-notting-hill","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/guillam-notting-hill/","lat":51.509591,"lng":-0.194284,"verdict":"Single-origin coffee on Notting Hill Gate."},{"name":"The Bar at The Dorchester","slug":"the-bar-at-the-dorchester","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/the-bar-at-the-dorchester/","lat":51.507296,"lng":-0.152363,"verdict":"Park Lane grandeur, with live music most evenings."},{"name":"Albert Memorial","slug":"albert-memorial","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/albert-memorial/","lat":51.502384,"lng":-0.177674,"verdict":"Victoria's grief in gilt and marble, the most extravagant monument in London, facing the hall named for him.","thumb":"/img/albert-memorial-480.jpg?v=be97b322","img":"/img/albert-memorial.jpg","w":992,"h":1024},{"name":"Diana Memorial Fountain","slug":"diana-memorial-fountain","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/diana-memorial-fountain/","lat":51.504631,"lng":-0.17146,"verdict":"A ring of Cornish granite with water running round it, opened by the Queen in 2004, and the one memorial in London children are meant to paddle in.","thumb":"/img/diana-memorial-fountain-480.jpg?v=cee71dee","img":"/img/diana-memorial-fountain.jpg","w":1024,"h":815},{"name":"Diana Memorial Playground","slug":"diana-memorial-playground","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/diana-memorial-playground/","lat":51.509052,"lng":-0.188189,"verdict":"A pirate ship on a beach in Kensington Gardens, opened on what would have been Diana's thirty-ninth birthday.","thumb":"/img/diana-memorial-playground-480.jpg?v=7aec331a","img":"/img/diana-memorial-playground.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Diana statue, the Sunken Garden","slug":"diana-statue-the-sunken-garden","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/diana-statue-the-sunken-garden/","lat":51.50575,"lng":-0.186555,"verdict":"The statue William and Harry commissioned of their mother, unveiled together on her sixtieth birthday in the garden she loved.","thumb":"/img/diana-statue-the-sunken-garden-480.jpg?v=b109ab94","img":"/img/diana-statue-the-sunken-garden.jpg","w":719,"h":1024},{"name":"Hyde Park","slug":"hyde-park","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/hyde-park/","lat":51.506841,"lng":-0.163765,"verdict":"The royal hunting ground turned people's park: the Diana fountain, the gun salutes and the site of Albert's Great Exhibition.","thumb":"/img/hyde-park-480.jpg?v=ce02576a","img":"/img/hyde-park.jpg","w":1024,"h":387},{"name":"Kensington Gardens","slug":"kensington-gardens","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/kensington-gardens/","lat":51.506694,"lng":-0.180023,"verdict":"Kensington Palace's own park: Diana's playground and statue, Victoria's statue and Albert's memorial in one walk.","thumb":"/img/kensington-gardens-480.jpg?v=e8e12d6e","img":"/img/kensington-gardens.jpg","w":876,"h":1024},{"name":"Kensington Palace","slug":"kensington-palace","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/kensington-palace/","lat":51.505088,"lng":-0.188054,"verdict":"Diana's home for sixteen years and the London address of William and Catherine, where Victoria was born and the flowers piled against the gates in 1997.","thumb":"/img/kensington-palace-480.jpg?v=f85d7397","img":"/img/kensington-palace.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Marble Arch","slug":"marble-arch","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/marble-arch/","lat":51.513184,"lng":-0.158905,"verdict":"Buckingham Palace's original front gate, moved to the corner of Hyde Park in 1851 when the palace grew around it.","thumb":"/img/marble-arch-480.jpg?v=a18babf8","img":"/img/marble-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Queen Elizabeth Gate","slug":"queen-elizabeth-gate","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/queen-elizabeth-gate/","lat":51.504106,"lng":-0.152375,"verdict":"The gates into Hyde Park put up for the Queen Mother's ninetieth birthday, a lion and a unicorn in painted steel and bronze.","thumb":"/img/queen-elizabeth-gate-480.jpg?v=91ba76e8","img":"/img/queen-elizabeth-gate.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Queen Victoria statue, Kensington Palace","slug":"queen-victoria-statue-kensington-palace","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/queen-victoria-statue-kensington-palace/","lat":51.505391,"lng":-0.186007,"verdict":"Victoria at eighteen, the year she became Queen, carved by her daughter and set in front of the palace where she was born.","thumb":"/img/queen-victoria-statue-kensington-palace-480.jpg?v=790fc47f","img":"/img/queen-victoria-statue-kensington-palace.jpg","w":683,"h":1024},{"name":"Reformers' Tree","slug":"reformers-tree","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/reformers-tree/","lat":51.509106,"lng":-0.161354,"verdict":"A mosaic in the grass marks the burnt stump that made Speakers' Corner possible.","thumb":"/img/reformers-tree-480.jpg?v=612386e4","img":"/img/reformers-tree.jpg","w":1024,"h":683},{"name":"Speakers' Corner","slug":"speakers-corner","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/speakers-corner/","lat":51.511854,"lng":-0.160074,"verdict":"Not an eccentric tradition. A right that had to be forced out of the government of the day.","thumb":"/img/speakers-corner-480.jpg?v=7d6c46d8","img":"/img/speakers-corner.jpg","w":616,"h":920},{"name":"Achilles statue","slug":"achilles-statue","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/achilles-statue/","lat":51.504504,"lng":-0.152709,"verdict":"London's first public nude, cast from captured French cannon and paid for by the women of England.","thumb":"/img/achilles-statue-480.jpg?v=1cc7eb67","img":"/img/achilles-statue.jpg","w":823,"h":1024},{"name":"Albert Memorial","slug":"albert-memorial","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/albert-memorial/","lat":51.502384,"lng":-0.177674,"verdict":"The most extravagant thing the Victorians built, and worth walking round twice.","thumb":"/img/albert-memorial-480.jpg?v=be97b322","img":"/img/albert-memorial.jpg","w":992,"h":1024},{"name":"Animals in War Memorial","slug":"animals-in-war-memorial","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/animals-in-war-memorial/","lat":51.511038,"lng":-0.157502,"verdict":"Two bronze mules carrying a gun through a gap in a wall, and a horse and a dog already on the other side.","thumb":"/img/animals-in-war-memorial-480.jpg?v=c151f30f","img":"/img/animals-in-war-memorial.jpg","w":1024,"h":341},{"name":"Marble Arch","slug":"marble-arch","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/marble-arch/","lat":51.513184,"lng":-0.158905,"verdict":"Nash's gateway to Buckingham Palace, moved to a traffic island where nobody may drive through it.","thumb":"/img/marble-arch-480.jpg?v=a18babf8","img":"/img/marble-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Peter Pan statue","slug":"peter-pan-statue","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/peter-pan-statue/","lat":51.508618,"lng":-0.175919,"verdict":"The boy who wouldn't grow up, put up overnight so that the children would think he had arrived by magic.","thumb":"/img/peter-pan-statue-480.jpg?v=4db7cdcf","img":"/img/peter-pan-statue.jpg","w":655,"h":1024},{"name":"Royal Artillery Memorial","slug":"royal-artillery-memorial","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/royal-artillery-memorial/","lat":51.502566,"lng":-0.151953,"verdict":"A stone howitzer and four bronze gunners, one of them dead under his greatcoat: the most honest war memorial in London.","thumb":"/img/royal-artillery-memorial-480.jpg?v=660ad31d","img":"/img/royal-artillery-memorial.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Edward Jenner statue","slug":"edward-jenner-statue","cat":"science","url":"/science/edward-jenner-statue/","lat":51.51,"lng":-0.1758,"verdict":"The inventor of vaccination in bronze in the Italian Gardens, exiled here from Trafalgar Square because a doctor did not belong among the generals.","thumb":"/img/edward-jenner-statue-480.jpg?v=b384782b","img":"/img/edward-jenner-statue.jpg","w":1024,"h":691},{"name":"Peter Pan statue","slug":"peter-pan-statue","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/peter-pan-statue/","lat":51.508618,"lng":-0.175919,"verdict":"Barrie's Peter Pan, put up in Kensington Gardens overnight in 1912 so that it would seem to have appeared by magic.","thumb":"/img/peter-pan-statue-480.jpg?v=4db7cdcf","img":"/img/peter-pan-statue.jpg","w":655,"h":1024},{"name":"Richard Wagner","slug":"richard-wagner","cat":"world","url":"/world/richard-wagner/","lat":51.510717,"lng":-0.190045,"verdict":"Where Wagner stayed for five weeks in 1877, conducting at the Albert Hall to pay for Bayreuth.","thumb":"/img/richard-wagner-480.jpg?v=7ad11c71","img":"/img/richard-wagner.jpg","w":768,"h":1024}]},{"slug":"kensington","name":"Kensington","verdict":"A palace with a park attached, a high street with a Georgian village behind it, and Leighton's Arab hall.","note":"Kensington was a village in the Domesday Book and would probably have stayed a suburb if William III had not been asthmatic. In 1689 he bought a house at the western edge of the fields, had Wren enlarge it, and moved the court out of the smoke of Whitehall; Kensington Palace has been royal ever since. Queen Victoria was born in it in 1819 and was living there when she was woken at five in the morning to be told she was queen. The State Apartments are open, and the gardens run east from the door for a mile.\n\nThe village became a town in the nineteenth century, and Kensington High Street became one of the great shopping streets, with department stores that have mostly gone; what remains is a broad street with a Georgian village, Kensington Church Street, running north off it, full of antique dealers.\n\nThe best of it is a house that an artist built for himself. Frederic Leighton spent thirty years on Leighton House and gave it an Arab hall lined with Damascus tiles round a fountain, which is as strange and complete a room as London has.\n\nTwo other things sit at the edges: the Design Museum, which moved into the old Commonwealth Institute and its swooping roof in 2016, and Kensington Palace Gardens, a private avenue of embassies and billionaires that is the most expensive street in the country.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-kensington.jpg?v=d11b4c8e","thumb":"/img/area-kensington-480.jpg?v=19a86a66","width":1024,"height":576,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The Arab Hall at Leighton House: a domed room lined with blue and green Damascus tiles under gilding, columns either side and a small fountain set in the dark floor","caption":"Leighton's Arab hall, Damascus tiles round a fountain.","credit":"Photo by Mark Percy, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leighton_House,_The_Arab_Hall_-_geograph.org.uk_-_8094244.jpg"},"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-kensington-lead3.jpg?v=6ccbfb6d","thumb":"/img/area-kensington-lead3-480.jpg?v=56b610aa","width":1024,"height":697,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A quiet Kensington street of tall red-brick houses with white window frames and trees along the kerb","caption":"A Kensington side street.","credit":"Photo by Christian Vasile christianvasile, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Terraced_houses_in_Kensington_(Unsplash).jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-kensington-2.jpg?v=aaadc091","thumb":"/img/area-kensington-2-480.jpg?v=a600fba0","width":1024,"height":466,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The east front of Kensington Palace in brick, with the marble statue of Queen Victoria on a plinth in front of it","caption":"Kensington Palace, and Queen Victoria, who was born in it.","credit":"Photo by Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Queen_Victoria_statue_and_Kensington_Palace_(00705p).jpg"}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Kensington High Street","Gloucester Road","Old Brompton Road","Earl's Court Road"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.19864,51.49908],[-0.19291,51.50104],[-0.19092,51.50203],[-0.18875,51.5024],[-0.1873,51.50234],[-0.18403,51.5018],[-0.18399,51.5],[-0.18368,51.49957],[-0.18373,51.49758],[-0.18289,51.49519],[-0.18188,51.49338],[-0.18004,51.49128],[-0.18254,51.49079],[-0.18521,51.49085],[-0.19022,51.48949],[-0.19146,51.49111],[-0.19435,51.49311],[-0.19672,51.496],[-0.19864,51.49908]]]},"centre":[-0.19021,51.49695],"bounds":[[-0.19864,51.48949],[-0.18004,51.5024]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":1,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"breakfast","name":"Breakfast & Brunch","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"beautiful-streets","name":"Beautiful Streets","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":5,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"Opera Holland Park sings in Earls Court","slug":"opera-holland-park-sings-in-earls-court","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/opera-holland-park-sings-in-earls-court/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-20","to":"2026-10-20"},"lat":51.495843,"lng":-0.196128,"verdict":"The October free concert in the same series, in a church off Earls Court Road."},{"name":"18 Stafford Terrace","slug":"18-stafford-terrace","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/18-stafford-terrace/","lat":51.500485,"lng":-0.196875,"verdict":"A Victorian household kept down to the wallpaper: the Punch cartoonist's house where the Victorian Society was founded.","thumb":"/img/18-stafford-terrace-480.jpg?v=9a386d5a","img":"/img/18-stafford-terrace.jpg","w":1024,"h":845},{"name":"Guillam Gloucester Road","slug":"guillam-gloucester-road","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/guillam-gloucester-road/","lat":51.498989,"lng":-0.183861,"verdict":"Speciality coffee and tea, a minute from Gloucester Road station."},{"name":"Aux Merveilleux de Fred Kensington","slug":"aux-merveilleux-de-fred-kensington","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/aux-merveilleux-de-fred-kensington/","lat":51.500713,"lng":-0.192374,"verdict":"Meringue-and-cream merveilleux from Lille, in an arcade off the Tube station."},{"name":"Knoops Kensington","slug":"knoops-kensington","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/knoops-kensington/","lat":51.501934,"lng":-0.191453,"verdict":"Hot chocolate ordered by cocoa percentage, open from half past six in the morning."},{"name":"Guillam Gloucester Road","slug":"guillam-gloucester-road","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/guillam-gloucester-road/","lat":51.498989,"lng":-0.183861,"verdict":"Speciality coffee and tea, a minute from Gloucester Road station."},{"name":"Kynance Mews","slug":"kynance-mews","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/kynance-mews/","lat":51.49743,"lng":-0.18537,"verdict":"Cobbles, gas-style lamps and wisteria, through two brick archways in South Kensington.","thumb":"/img/street-kynance-mews-480.jpg?v=e9ce6049","img":"/img/street-kynance-mews.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Victoria Road","slug":"victoria-road","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/victoria-road/","lat":51.498379,"lng":-0.185959,"verdict":"White stucco villas and blossom, a few minutes from Kensington High Street and completely silent.","thumb":"/img/street-victoria-road-480.jpg?v=e6bbe5aa","img":"/img/street-victoria-road.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Henry James","slug":"henry-james","cat":"world","url":"/world/henry-james/","lat":51.500129,"lng":-0.185091,"verdict":"The flat where Henry James wrote his middle novels, opposite the house where Browning lived.","thumb":"/img/henry-james-480.jpg?v=65326af0","img":"/img/henry-james.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Jenny Lind","slug":"jenny-lind","cat":"world","url":"/world/jenny-lind/","lat":51.490358,"lng":-0.185605,"verdict":"The last London home of the Swedish Nightingale, who gave up opera at 29 and sang for charity ever after.","thumb":"/img/jenny-lind-480.jpg?v=ab4d5b98","img":"/img/jenny-lind.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Learie Constantine","slug":"learie-constantine","cat":"world","url":"/world/learie-constantine/","lat":51.495485,"lng":-0.195115,"verdict":"The cricketer who took a London hotel to court for turning him away, and won.","thumb":"/img/learie-constantine-480.jpg?v=c4d2e2fd","img":"/img/learie-constantine.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Rudolf Nureyev","slug":"rudolf-nureyev","cat":"world","url":"/world/rudolf-nureyev/","lat":51.499809,"lng":-0.185751,"verdict":"The Kensington house of the dancer who jumped the barrier at Le Bourget and made London his home.","thumb":"/img/rudolf-nureyev-480.jpg?v=033424cd","img":"/img/rudolf-nureyev.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"T. S. Eliot","slug":"t-s-eliot","cat":"world","url":"/world/t-s-eliot/","lat":51.500107,"lng":-0.187817,"verdict":"The last home of the American who became the century's English poet.","thumb":"/img/t-s-eliot-480.jpg?v=27f7cf7f","img":"/img/t-s-eliot.jpg","w":1024,"h":1005}]},{"slug":"kings-cross-st-pancras","name":"King's Cross & St Pancras","verdict":"Two great railway stations, a Gothic hotel, and a goods yard rebuilt as squares, fountains and a library.","note":"Named after a statue. A monument to George IV stood at the crossroads from 1830 to 1845; it was mocked, then used as a police station and a pub, then pulled down, and the name outlived it.\n\nThe two stations are a lesson in Victorian nerve. King's Cross, by Lewis Cubitt in 1852, is plain to the point of severity: two enormous arches and no ornament at all. St Pancras, finished in 1868 next door, is the opposite, with William Barlow's train shed, the largest single span in the world when it went up, hidden behind George Gilbert Scott's red Gothic hotel. St Pancras was nearly demolished in the 1960s and was saved by a campaign led by John Betjeman, whose statue stands on the platform looking up at the roof.\n\nBehind them lay the goods yard, coal drops and gasholders, and after the freight left it became the most notorious quarter in central London. The rebuilding since the 1990s has been the largest in the city: Granary Square with its fountains, the coal drops turned into shops, and the gasholder frames re-erected round a park and a block of flats.\n\nThree things anchor it now. The British Library holds a copy of nearly everything published in Britain and shows the Magna Carta and Beatles lyrics for free; Central Saint Martins fills the granary with art students; and Eurostar leaves from St Pancras for Paris.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-kings-cross-st-pancras.jpg?v=8252761e","thumb":"/img/area-kings-cross-st-pancras-480.jpg?v=68078588","width":1024,"height":682,"thumb_width":500,"alt":"The fountains in Granary Square in front of the old granary building","caption":"Granary Square, in the old goods yard.","credit":"Photo by GilPe, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London,_Camden,_Granary_Square_(101).jpg"},"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-kings-cross-st-pancras-lead2.jpg?v=8e3d1e6c","thumb":"/img/area-kings-cross-st-pancras-lead2-480.jpg?v=f4554c8e","width":1024,"height":771,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Coal Drops Yard: two Victorian coal warehouses joined by the curved kissing roofs of 2018, seen from the north","caption":"Coal Drops Yard, the goods yard turned shopping street.","credit":"Photo by Andy Li, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coal_Drops_Yard_(view_from_the_north)_2025-09-18.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-kings-cross-st-pancras-3.jpg?v=b0fd2c78","thumb":"/img/area-kings-cross-st-pancras-3-480.jpg?v=311e433e","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The train shed of St Pancras International: Barlow's iron roof over the platforms","caption":"St Pancras, under Barlow's roof.","credit":"Photo by Ted Potters, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2024-09-27_London_St_Pancras_International_-_02.jpg"}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Euston Road","Caledonian Road","York Way","St Pancras Way"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.13709,51.52526],[-0.12944,51.5277],[-0.12258,51.53056],[-0.12132,51.53039],[-0.12048,51.5299],[-0.11955,51.52866],[-0.1158,51.52948],[-0.11623,51.52993],[-0.11698,51.53021],[-0.11968,51.53091],[-0.12099,51.5309],[-0.12068,51.53199],[-0.11704,51.53484],[-0.11655,51.53694],[-0.12242,51.53695],[-0.123,51.5384],[-0.12477,51.53966],[-0.12594,51.5434],[-0.13228,51.54292],[-0.13585,51.542],[-0.13579,51.54197],[-0.13544,51.5416],[-0.13573,51.54035],[-0.13515,51.53963],[-0.13406,51.53898],[-0.13311,51.53808],[-0.1326,51.53552],[-0.1389,51.5346],[-0.13934,51.5325],[-0.13868,51.53033],[-0.13863,51.52852],[-0.14433,51.52849],[-0.1441,51.5245],[-0.14226,51.52407],[-0.13709,51.52526]]]},"centre":[-0.1314,51.53162],"bounds":[[-0.14433,51.52407],[-0.1158,51.5434]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":82,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":7,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":3,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":5,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"shopping","name":"Shopping","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"outdoors","name":"Outdoors & Nature","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"breakfast","name":"Breakfast & Brunch","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"beer","name":"Beer","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"politics","name":"Power & Politics","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"sacred","name":"Sacred London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"architecture","name":"Architecture","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"classic-british-shops","name":"Classic British Shops","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"science","name":"Science & Engineering","count":6,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"secrets","name":"Secrets & Espionage","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":4,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":3,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"harry-potter","name":"Harry Potter","count":2,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"Agatha Christie: A World of Mystery","slug":"agatha-christie-a-world-of-mystery","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/british-library/agatha-christie-a-world-of-mystery/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-30","to":"2027-06-20"},"lat":51.530002,"lng":-0.127709,"verdict":"Her 1937 Remington, her pharmacy exam notes and an Orient Express carriage to walk through."},{"name":"Alfredo Rodriguez and Pedrito Martinez","slug":"alfredo-rodriguez-and-pedrito-martinez","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/alfredo-rodriguez-and-pedrito-martinez/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-15","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"Two Havana musicians who left for the States and came back to each other, piano against congas."},{"name":"Ambrose Akinmusire Quartet","slug":"ambrose-akinmusire-quartet","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/ambrose-akinmusire-quartet/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-15","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"A trumpeter who writes for string quartets and dance companies, back with his own band."},{"name":"American Revolution: 250 Years from the Declaration of Independence","slug":"american-revolution-250-years-from-the-declaration-of-independence","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/british-library/american-revolution-250-years-from-the-declaration-of-independence/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-29","to":"2027-01-17"},"lat":51.530002,"lng":-0.127709,"verdict":"The Library's 1776 material, free in the Treasures Gallery."},{"name":"An evening with Peter Donohoe","slug":"an-evening-with-peter-donohoe","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/an-evening-with-peter-donohoe/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-30","to":"2026-10-30"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"Late Schubert and the Rachmaninov Chopin Variations, then the pianist explains himself."},{"name":"Ancient DNA Lates","slug":"ancient-dna-lates","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/francis-crick-institute/ancient-dna-lates/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-14","to":"2026-10-14"},"lat":51.531669,"lng":-0.127968,"verdict":"An evening with the lab that reads DNA out of prehistoric bone."},{"name":"Audrey Amiss: The Surviving Exhibitions","slug":"audrey-amiss-the-surviving-exhibitions","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/wellcome-collection/audrey-amiss-the-surviving-exhibitions/","runs":{"from":"2026-07-10","to":"2027-02-07"},"lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"Fifty thousand sketchbook pages by an artist who fought the mental health system with them."},{"name":"Aurora Orchestra: Meet the Instruments","slug":"aurora-orchestra-meet-the-instruments","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/aurora-orchestra-meet-the-instruments/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-17","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"A street party for very small children, with an orchestra on it."},{"name":"Bach, the Universe and Everything: Astronomical Instruments","slug":"bach-the-universe-and-everything-astronomical-instruments","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/bach-the-universe-and-everything-astronomical-instruments/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-04","to":"2026-10-04"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"A Bach cantata and a scientist, on a Sunday morning."},{"name":"Banda El Recodo","slug":"banda-el-recodo","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/banda-el-recodo/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-20","to":"2026-09-20"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"The most famous banda in Mexico, playing Camden."},{"name":"Being Human","slug":"being-human","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/wellcome-collection/being-human/","lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"Fifty objects on what it is to be a person now, including a jukebox of epidemics."},{"name":"Beyond Category and Jeru the Damaja: Honouring Duke Ellington","slug":"beyond-category-and-jeru-the-damaja-honouring-duke-ellington","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/beyond-category-and-jeru-the-damaja-honouring-duke-ellington/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-14","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"A new London jazz group and a Brooklyn rapper, both working from Ellington."},{"name":"Boyce Avenue","slug":"boyce-avenue","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/boyce-avenue/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-15","to":"2026-09-15"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Three brothers from Florida who built an audience on YouTube covers."},{"name":"Brigitte Calls Me Baby","slug":"brigitte-calls-me-baby","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/brigitte-calls-me-baby/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-15","to":"2026-09-15"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"Chicago five-piece with a singer who sounds like Roy Orbison and dresses like it."},{"name":"British Library Treasures Tour","slug":"british-library-treasures-tour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/british-library/british-library-treasures-tour/","lat":51.530002,"lng":-0.127709,"verdict":"Magna Carta, George III's library and the world's second-largest atlas, with a member of staff."},{"name":"Brodsky Quartet: Memories","slug":"brodsky-quartet-memories","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/brodsky-quartet-memories/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"Bart\u00f3k's last quartet, written as he was leaving Hungary for good."},{"name":"CHXRRY","slug":"chxrry","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/chxrry/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Toronto R&B, signed to the Weeknd's label."},{"name":"Chameleons","slug":"chameleons","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/chameleons/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-23","to":"2026-10-23"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"The Middleton post-punk band whose records everyone else borrowed from."},{"name":"Chrissy Chlapecka","slug":"chrissy-chlapecka","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/chrissy-chlapecka/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"The bimbo-theory internet performer, live with songs."},{"name":"City of London Sinfonia: Bright Fear","slug":"city-of-london-sinfonia-bright-fear","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/city-of-london-sinfonia-bright-fear/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-07","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"A new score for orchestra and Chinese instruments, built on Mary Jean Chan's poems."},{"name":"Classically Black","slug":"classically-black","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/classically-black/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-10","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"A whole day put on by Black Lives in Music, from workshops to a live podcast."},{"name":"Cloud Chamber: Caroline Dale and Gavin Greenaway","slug":"cloud-chamber-caroline-dale-and-gavin-greenaway","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/cloud-chamber-caroline-dale-and-gavin-greenaway/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-12","to":"2026-10-12"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"Cello and piano, launching an album of quiet music by two people who usually work on films."},{"name":"Club Antichrist's Vampire Ball","slug":"club-antichrists-vampire-ball","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/club-antichrists-vampire-ball/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"A long-running fetish and alternative club night, with a dress code."},{"name":"Conquest: The Making of Norman England","slug":"conquest-the-making-of-norman-england","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/british-library/conquest-the-making-of-norman-england/","runs":{"from":"2027-10-01","to":"2028-02-27"},"lat":51.530002,"lng":-0.127709,"verdict":"The Norman Conquest read from the documents, a thousand years after William was born."},{"name":"Constantinople: ESTUARY","slug":"constantinople-estuary","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/constantinople-estuary/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-15","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"Persian setar, West African kora and a pair of hands on a drum, at lunchtime."},{"name":"Conversations about Death","slug":"conversations-about-death","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/wellcome-collection/conversations-about-death/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"A session for talking about the thing nobody talks about."},{"name":"DREAMSCAPES","slug":"dreamscapes","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/dreamscapes/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-13","to":"2026-11-13"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"London improvisers playing in the round, recording as they go."},{"name":"Divisions and Visions: George Benjamin and Messiaen","slug":"divisions-and-visions-george-benjamin-and-messiaen","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/divisions-and-visions-george-benjamin-and-messiaen/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-29","to":"2026-10-29"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"Benjamin talks about his teacher, then Visions de l'Amen for two pianos."},{"name":"Duo Safar: Imed Alibi and Zied Zouari with Justin Adams","slug":"duo-safar-imed-alibi-and-zied-zouari-with-justin-adams","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/duo-safar-imed-alibi-and-zied-zouari-with-justin-adams/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-15","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"Two Tunisian musicians, a violin and a drum, with a guitarist from Robert Plant's band."},{"name":"Electric Shuffle","slug":"electric-shuffle","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/electric-shuffle/","lat":51.538166,"lng":-0.125602,"verdict":"Shuffleboard with cameras in the table doing the scoring."},{"name":"Emma Rawicz's Cloudwalker with Philip Dizack","slug":"emma-rawiczs-cloudwalker-with-philip-dizack","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/emma-rawiczs-cloudwalker-with-philip-dizack/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-21","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"A young British saxophonist's international quartet, improvising with very little written down."},{"name":"Ezra Collective & Friends","slug":"ezra-collective-friends","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/ezra-collective-friends/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-24"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"The Mercury-winning quintet, with guests, in a room the size they left behind."},{"name":"Fergus McCreadie","slug":"fergus-mccreadie","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/fergus-mccreadie/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-13","to":"2026-11-13"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"The premiere of a piano-trio commission from the Scottish pianist who writes jazz that sounds like a reel."},{"name":"GBSR Duo perform Sarah Davachi","slug":"gbsr-duo-perform-sarah-davachi","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/gbsr-duo-perform-sarah-davachi/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"A new Sarah Davachi piece, first performance, in a hall wired to move the sound around you."},{"name":"Gulsin Onay plays Chopin","slug":"gulsin-onay-plays-chopin","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/gulsin-onay-plays-chopin/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-31","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"An hour of Chopin ending on the B minor sonata."},{"name":"Hidden London: Euston \u2014 the lost tunnels","slug":"hidden-london-euston-the-lost-tunnels","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-euston-the-lost-tunnels/","lat":51.528047,"lng":-0.133525,"verdict":"Time-capsule passages left behind when Euston was rebuilt."},{"name":"Holy Fuck + The Itch","slug":"holy-fuck-the-itch","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/holy-fuck-the-itch/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-24"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Toronto four-piece who make electronic music without any of it being programmed."},{"name":"I Fagiolini: Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers","slug":"i-fagiolini-monteverdis-1610-vespers","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/i-fagiolini-monteverdis-1610-vespers/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"The 1610 Vespers with cornetts and sackbuts, launching the recording."},{"name":"Jack Harlow","slug":"jack-harlow","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/jack-harlow/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-13","to":"2026-10-13"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"The Louisville rapper in a fourteen-hundred-capacity room."},{"name":"Jazz Re:fest","slug":"jazz-re-fest","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/jazz-re-fest/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-09-13"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"A day of British jazz in a Victorian theatre, run by Jazz re:freshed."},{"name":"Jewish Book Week","slug":"jewish-book-week","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/jewish-book-week/","runs":{"from":"2026-02-28","to":"2026-03-08","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.534963,"lng":-0.121768,"verdict":"London's longest-running literary festival: nine days of talks and debates at Kings Place each spring."},{"name":"Jonny Mansfield Quartet with Emmanuel Michael","slug":"jonny-mansfield-quartet-with-emmanuel-michael","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/jonny-mansfield-quartet-with-emmanuel-michael/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-22","to":"2026-11-22"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"A vibraphone-led quartet launching a record, with a guitarist added for the night."},{"name":"Kaidi Akinnibi and Mackwood","slug":"kaidi-akinnibi-and-mackwood","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/kaidi-akinnibi-and-mackwood/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-21","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"A double headline from two of the south London players the rest of the scene watches."},{"name":"Lawrence Power's V10LA Day","slug":"lawrence-powers-v10la-day","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/lawrence-powers-v10la-day/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-18","to":"2026-10-18"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"A day given over entirely to the viola, ending on six first performances."},{"name":"Lightroom","slug":"lightroom","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/lightroom/","lat":51.53743,"lng":-0.126007,"verdict":"A four-storey room in King's Cross given over to one artist at a time."},{"name":"London Brass at forty","slug":"london-brass-at-forty","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/london-brass-at-forty/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-16","to":"2026-10-16"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"Ten players, four decades, and new pieces written for them."},{"name":"London Piano Festival","slug":"london-piano-festival","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/london-piano-festival/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-29","to":"2026-11-01","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"Four days of pianists, in conversation and at the keyboard."},{"name":"London Podcast Festival","slug":"london-podcast-festival","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/london-podcast-festival/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-03","to":"2026-09-13","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"Eleven days of podcasts recorded in front of an audience."},{"name":"Martha + Trust Fund","slug":"martha-trust-fund","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/martha-trust-fund/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"County Durham punk with tunes, and a band who have kept the same four members throughout."},{"name":"Memotone and Shell Company","slug":"memotone-and-shell-company","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/memotone-and-shell-company/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-21","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"An ambient matinee, built for sitting still."},{"name":"Mozart Piano Gala","slug":"mozart-piano-gala","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/mozart-piano-gala/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-31","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"Five pianists, two instruments, and everything Mozart wrote for four hands."},{"name":"PJ Morton","slug":"pj-morton","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/pj-morton/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-12","to":"2026-10-12"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"Maroon 5's keyboard player, who is a much better soul singer than that suggests."},{"name":"Pale Waves","slug":"pale-waves","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/pale-waves/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"Manchester four-piece, goth in look and pure pop underneath."},{"name":"Phaedra Ensemble: the music of Meredith Monk","slug":"phaedra-ensemble-the-music-of-meredith-monk","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/phaedra-ensemble-the-music-of-meredith-monk/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-17"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"Monk's instrumental music, played complete, by the group that has just recorded it."},{"name":"Philatelic Gallery","slug":"philatelic-gallery","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/british-library/philatelic-gallery/","lat":51.530002,"lng":-0.127709,"verdict":"One of the world's great stamp collections, eighty thousand items of it on show and free."},{"name":"RNS Moves: Caroline Shaw, Part and Philip Glass","slug":"rns-moves-caroline-shaw-part-and-philip-glass","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/rns-moves-caroline-shaw-part-and-philip-glass/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-27","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"Four centuries in an afternoon, from Purcell to Glass, played standing up."},{"name":"Reggaeton Latino: Bad Bunny Casita Edition","slug":"reggaeton-latino-bad-bunny-casita-edition","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/reggaeton-latino-bad-bunny-casita-edition/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"A reggaeton night built around one artist's record."},{"name":"Roopa Panesar, sitar","slug":"roopa-panesar-sitar","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/roopa-panesar-sitar/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-21","to":"2026-10-21"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"One of Britain's finest sitar players, with tabla and guitar."},{"name":"Royal Northern Sinfonia: Vivaldi's Four Seasons","slug":"royal-northern-sinfonia-vivaldis-four-seasons","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/royal-northern-sinfonia-vivaldis-four-seasons/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-25","to":"2026-10-25"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"The Four Seasons from Gateshead, on the orchestra's first visit to Kings Place."},{"name":"Rudy Loewe: Intimacies of Care","slug":"rudy-loewe-intimacies-of-care","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/wellcome-collection/rudy-loewe-intimacies-of-care/","runs":{"from":"2026-07-10","to":"2027-02-07"},"lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"Sculpture, painting and sound on Black mental healthcare in Britain, made with the people who use it."},{"name":"Samer Rashed: Strings of the Levant","slug":"samer-rashed-strings-of-the-levant","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/samer-rashed-strings-of-the-levant/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-15","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"A Palestinian violist writing for maqam, Saharan rhythm and a jazz rhythm section."},{"name":"Shine: Jess Gillam and her seven-piece band","slug":"shine-jess-gillam-and-her-seven-piece-band","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/shine-jess-gillam-and-her-seven-piece-band/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-10","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"The saxophonist who made the instrument respectable in a concert hall, with a band."},{"name":"Shit Kid + Clutter","slug":"shit-kid-clutter","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/shit-kid-clutter/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-17"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Swedish lo-fi pop, deliberately rough."},{"name":"Shri: Red Doors","slug":"shri-red-doors","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/shri-red-doors/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-19","to":"2026-11-19"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"Indian classical violin, contrabass flute and tabla-inflected bass, over Norwegian electronics."},{"name":"Sound Gallery","slug":"sound-gallery","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/british-library/sound-gallery/","lat":51.530002,"lng":-0.127709,"verdict":"Seven million recordings in the archive, and a curated handful you can stand and listen to."},{"name":"Strawberry Guy + Malena Zavala","slug":"strawberry-guy-malena-zavala","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/strawberry-guy-malena-zavala/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-20","to":"2026-09-20"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Liverpool dream pop, played on a lot of keyboards."},{"name":"Take Five Showcase: Olivia Cuttill Quintet and un.procedure","slug":"take-five-showcase-olivia-cuttill-quintet-and-un-procedure","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/take-five-showcase-olivia-cuttill-quintet-and-un-procedure/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-22","to":"2026-11-22"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"New Orleans-shaped songwriting, then something considerably stranger."},{"name":"Tenderness and Rage","slug":"tenderness-and-rage","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/wellcome-collection/tenderness-and-rage/","runs":{"from":"2026-05-29","to":"2027-05-30"},"lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"HIV and AIDS from the 1980s wards to today's activists, and a placard-making table."},{"name":"The Coming of Age","slug":"the-coming-of-age","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/wellcome-collection/the-coming-of-age/","runs":{"from":"2026-03-26","to":"2026-11-29"},"lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"150 works on getting older, from Paula Rego to a Japanese restaurant staffed by people with dementia."},{"name":"The Coral","slug":"the-coral","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/the-coral/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-16","to":"2026-10-16"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"Twenty-five years of Merseyside psychedelia."},{"name":"The Tubs","slug":"the-tubs","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/the-tubs/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-30","to":"2026-09-30"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Welsh jangle and misery, from the people who were Joanna Gruesome."},{"name":"The Wanted 2.0","slug":"the-wanted-2-0","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/scala/the-wanted-2-0/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-06","to":"2026-10-06"},"lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"The boy band's return, without Tom Parker."},{"name":"Trans Is Human","slug":"trans-is-human","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/queer-britain/trans-is-human/","runs":{"from":"2026-08-05","to":"2026-11-29"},"lat":51.535697,"lng":-0.123905,"verdict":"Thirteen portraits by Mariano Vivanco of trans people from across the UK."},{"name":"Treasures of the British Library","slug":"treasures-of-the-british-library","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/british-library/treasures-of-the-british-library/","lat":51.530002,"lng":-0.127709,"verdict":"Two thousand years of writing in one room, and it costs nothing."},{"name":"VOCES8 and Jack Liebeck: Flight of the Soul","slug":"voces8-and-jack-liebeck-flight-of-the-soul","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/voces8-and-jack-liebeck-flight-of-the-soul/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-24"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"Bach's D minor Partita broken up and threaded through eight voices."},{"name":"Vanessa Paradis","slug":"vanessa-paradis","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/vanessa-paradis/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"The French singer and actress, on a rare London night."},{"name":"Vital Spark: the music of Kenny Wheeler","slug":"vital-spark-the-music-of-kenny-wheeler","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/kings-place/vital-spark-the-music-of-kenny-wheeler/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-22","to":"2026-11-22"},"lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"Kenny Wheeler's last compositions, brought to performance by the people he sent them to."},{"name":"WILLOW","slug":"willow","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/willow/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"The pop-punk turn, played live by the person who made it."},{"name":"Wellcome Collection Lates: The Friendship Effect","slug":"wellcome-collection-lates-the-friendship-effect","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/wellcome-collection/wellcome-collection-lates-the-friendship-effect/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-24"},"lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"A free Thursday night on friendship: philosophers, jewellers, dancers and a Care Caf\u00e9."},{"name":"Wellcome Collection daily tours","slug":"wellcome-collection-daily-tours","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/wellcome-collection/wellcome-collection-daily-tours/","lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"Free half-hour drop-in tours and discussions, three times a day, Tuesday to Sunday."},{"name":"Young The Giant","slug":"young-the-giant","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/koko/young-the-giant/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-08","to":"2026-10-08"},"lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"Californian indie rock with fifteen years of festival choruses behind it."},{"name":"clueQuest","slug":"cluequest","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/cluequest/","lat":51.53648,"lng":-0.11686,"verdict":"Five escape rooms with a running plot about a mad scientist."},{"name":"British Library","slug":"british-library","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/british-library/","lat":51.530002,"lng":-0.127709,"verdict":"The national library, 200 million items behind Colin St John Wilson's red-brick ship at St Pancras, and one free room of its treasures, Magna Carta among them.","thumb":"/img/british-library-480.jpg?v=3ccc78a5","img":"/img/british-library.jpg","w":1024,"h":426},{"name":"Lethaby Gallery","slug":"lethaby-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/lethaby-gallery/","deep":true,"lat":51.535556,"lng":-0.125,"verdict":"Located at Granary Square, art gallery of Central Saint Martins, features contemporary and historic works from its collections of art and design."},{"name":"London Canal Museum","slug":"london-canal-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/london-canal-museum/","lat":51.534219,"lng":-0.120207,"verdict":"Canal life in a Victorian ice warehouse, above two enormous ice wells.","thumb":"/img/london-canal-museum-480.jpg?v=95fc698a","img":"/img/london-canal-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Magic Circle Museum","slug":"magic-circle-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/magic-circle-museum/","lat":51.526389,"lng":-0.135556,"verdict":"The Magic Circle's own collection of two centuries of stage magic, in its Euston headquarters, seen only on booked evenings."},{"name":"Queer Britain","slug":"queer-britain","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/queer-britain/","lat":51.535697,"lng":-0.123905,"verdict":"The UK's first national LGBTQ+ museum, free, in three rooms on Granary Square.","thumb":"/img/queer-britain-480.jpg?v=f8075d94","img":"/img/queer-britain.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Royal College of Physicians Museum","slug":"royal-college-of-physicians-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/royal-college-of-physicians-museum/","deep":true,"lat":51.525778,"lng":-0.144788,"verdict":"Portraits, silver, medical instruments and artefacts."},{"name":"Wellcome Collection","slug":"wellcome-collection","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/wellcome-collection/","lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"Medicine, art and the human body, free, and consistently the most interesting free show in London.","thumb":"/img/wellcome-collection-480.jpg?v=49c3f5a3","img":"/img/wellcome-collection.jpg","w":1024,"h":556},{"name":"Lethaby Gallery","slug":"lethaby-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/lethaby-gallery/","lat":51.535556,"lng":-0.125,"verdict":"Central Saint Martins' public gallery in the Granary Building at King's Cross, showing the college's collections and its students' best work."},{"name":"Newton after Blake","slug":"newton-after-blake","cat":"art","url":"/art/newton-after-blake/","lat":51.529037,"lng":-0.127576,"verdict":"Eduardo Paolozzi's giant Newton, bent over his compasses in the British Library piazza.","thumb":"/img/newton-after-blake-480.jpg?v=bcb6e27b","img":"/img/newton-after-blake.jpg","w":1024,"h":691},{"name":"Piscator","slug":"piscator","cat":"art","url":"/art/piscator/","lat":51.528219,"lng":-0.132405,"verdict":"Paolozzi's block of bronze machinery outside Euston station, named for a theatre director."},{"name":"KOKO","slug":"koko","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/koko/","lat":51.534743,"lng":-0.138172,"verdict":"A 1900 theatre with three tiers of gilt balcony, rebuilt after a fire and reopened in 2022."},{"name":"Kings Place","slug":"kings-place","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/kings-place/","lat":51.534973,"lng":-0.12167,"verdict":"Two halls in an office building behind King's Cross, and the one concert room in London built inside a single tree.","thumb":"/img/kings-place-480.jpg?v=83c823b8","img":"/img/kings-place.jpg","w":1024,"h":936},{"name":"Lafayette","slug":"lafayette","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/lafayette/","lat":51.534189,"lng":-0.12584,"verdict":"Six hundred people in a new brick room behind the gasholders."},{"name":"Scala","slug":"scala","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/scala/","lat":51.530611,"lng":-0.120662,"verdict":"Four floors of a 1920 cinema, stacked so you can hear the band from the stairs."},{"name":"The Place","slug":"the-place","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/the-place/","lat":51.527437,"lng":-0.128733,"verdict":"A Victorian drill hall behind Euston where British contemporary dance was invented."},{"name":"Coal Drops Yard","slug":"coal-drops-yard","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/coal-drops-yard/","lat":51.5352,"lng":-0.1262,"verdict":"Victorian coal sheds at King's Cross, a curved roof over the shops that took them."},{"name":"Camley Street Natural Park","slug":"camley-street-natural-park","cat":"outdoors","url":"/outdoors/camley-street-natural-park/","lat":51.534627,"lng":-0.127487,"verdict":"Two acres of woodland and pond on a coal yard, behind St Pancras."},{"name":"Notes","slug":"notes","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/notes/","lat":51.53311,"lng":-0.125119,"verdict":"The Pancras Square room, which turns into a wine bar after dark."},{"name":"Origin Coffee","slug":"origin-euston-road","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/origin-euston-road/","lat":51.529177,"lng":-0.126613,"verdict":"Cornwall's best-known roaster, on the Euston Road."},{"name":"Aux Merveilleux de Fred St Pancras","slug":"aux-merveilleux-de-fred-st-pancras","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/aux-merveilleux-de-fred-st-pancras/","lat":51.530397,"lng":-0.125589,"verdict":"Meringue and cream built in front of you, on the St Pancras concourse."},{"name":"Ruby Violet","slug":"ruby-violet","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/ruby-violet/","lat":51.535772,"lng":-0.123392,"verdict":"Small-batch ice cream by Regent's Quarter, from a rotation of a hundred and sixty flavours."},{"name":"Caravan King's Cross","slug":"caravan-kings-cross","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/caravan-kings-cross/","lat":51.535724,"lng":-0.125305,"verdict":"A Victorian granary on the canal basin."},{"name":"Dishoom","slug":"dishoom","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/dishoom/","lat":51.536116,"lng":-0.125516,"verdict":"The bacon naan roll, and a Bombay caf\u00e9 rebuilt in a goods yard."},{"name":"The Euston Tap","slug":"the-euston-tap","cat":"beer","url":"/beer/the-euston-tap/","lat":51.526975,"lng":-0.132562,"verdict":"A stone lodge of the lost Euston Arch, full of Czech lager."},{"name":"British Library","slug":"british-library","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/british-library/","lat":51.530002,"lng":-0.127709,"verdict":"Two of the four surviving originals of Magna Carta, in a dark room off the entrance hall.","thumb":"/img/british-library-480.jpg?v=3ccc78a5","img":"/img/british-library.jpg","w":1024,"h":426},{"name":"St Pancras Old Church","slug":"st-pancras-old-church","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/st-pancras-old-church/","lat":51.534945,"lng":-0.130156,"verdict":"Mary Wollstonecraft's grave, where her daughter met Shelley, in the churchyard of the Hardy Tree.","thumb":"/img/st-pancras-old-church-480.jpg?v=60bffd46","img":"/img/st-pancras-old-church.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Carreras Cigarette Factory","slug":"carreras-cigarette-factory","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/carreras-cigarette-factory/","lat":51.5335,"lng":-0.1398,"verdict":"Five hundred and fifty feet of Egyptian temple on Hampstead Road, with two black cats at the door.","thumb":"/img/carreras-cigarette-factory-480.jpg?v=d3a7bcb1","img":"/img/carreras-cigarette-factory.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"St Pancras","slug":"st-pancras","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/st-pancras/","lat":51.529877,"lng":-0.125502,"verdict":"The largest enclosed space in the world in 1868, with a Gothic hotel bolted across the front of it.","thumb":"/img/st-pancras-480.jpg?v=7f1fdb82","img":"/img/st-pancras.jpg","w":1024,"h":863},{"name":"Blackhorse Lane Ateliers","slug":"blackhorse-lane-ateliers","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/blackhorse-lane-ateliers/","lat":51.536288,"lng":-0.126602,"verdict":"Jeans cut and sewn in London, sold with a promise to repair them for as long as you keep them."},{"name":"Francis Crick Institute","slug":"francis-crick-institute","cat":"science","url":"/science/francis-crick-institute/","lat":51.531669,"lng":-0.127968,"verdict":"Europe's largest biomedical laboratory, behind St Pancras, with a free exhibition gallery on the ground floor about the research going on above it.","thumb":"/img/francis-crick-institute-480.jpg?v=e55cdd77","img":"/img/francis-crick-institute.jpg","w":1024,"h":576},{"name":"Gasholder Park","slug":"gasholder-park","cat":"science","url":"/science/gasholder-park/","lat":51.537012,"lng":-0.128146,"verdict":"The 1850s iron frame of Gasholder No. 8, taken down, restored in Yorkshire and put back up as a circular park on the canal at King's Cross.","thumb":"/img/gasholder-park-480.jpg?v=1e61b591","img":"/img/gasholder-park.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Newton after Blake","slug":"newton-after-blake","cat":"science","url":"/science/newton-after-blake/","lat":51.529037,"lng":-0.127576,"verdict":"Eduardo Paolozzi's giant Newton, bent over his compasses in the British Library piazza.","thumb":"/img/newton-after-blake-480.jpg?v=bcb6e27b","img":"/img/newton-after-blake.jpg","w":1024,"h":691},{"name":"Royal College of Physicians Museum","slug":"royal-college-of-physicians-museum","cat":"science","url":"/science/royal-college-of-physicians-museum/","lat":51.525778,"lng":-0.144788,"verdict":"Five centuries of the physicians' college - portraits, silver, instruments and the strange world of early medicine - in Lasdun's modernist building on Regent's Park, with a garden of the plants in the old pharmacopoeia."},{"name":"St Pancras train shed","slug":"st-pancras-train-shed","cat":"science","url":"/science/st-pancras-train-shed/","lat":51.531976,"lng":-0.126594,"verdict":"William Barlow's roof of 1868, a single iron arch two hundred and forty feet across, the widest in the world when it went up.","thumb":"/img/own-st-pancras-shed-480.jpg?v=2770d2ea","img":"/img/own-st-pancras-shed.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Wellcome Collection","slug":"wellcome-collection","cat":"science","url":"/science/wellcome-collection/","lat":51.525974,"lng":-0.13402,"verdict":"Medicine, art and the human body, free, and consistently the most interesting free show in London.","thumb":"/img/wellcome-collection-480.jpg?v=49c3f5a3","img":"/img/wellcome-collection.jpg","w":1024,"h":556},{"name":"Magic Circle Museum","slug":"magic-circle-museum","cat":"secrets","url":"/secrets/magic-circle-museum/","lat":51.526389,"lng":-0.135556,"verdict":"Behind a discreet door near Euston, the headquarters of the society of magicians, whose members swear to keep the secrets and who let you in on tour nights."},{"name":"British Library","slug":"british-library","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/british-library/","lat":51.530002,"lng":-0.127709,"verdict":"The Treasures gallery: Beowulf, Magna Carta, Shakespeare's First Folio and Alice's manuscript in one room.","thumb":"/img/british-library-480.jpg?v=3ccc78a5","img":"/img/british-library.jpg","w":1024,"h":426},{"name":"Jewish Book Week","slug":"jewish-book-week","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/jewish-book-week/","lat":51.534963,"lng":-0.121768,"verdict":"London's longest-running literary festival: nine days of talks and debates at Kings Place each spring."},{"name":"St Pancras Old Church","slug":"st-pancras-old-church","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/st-pancras-old-church/","lat":51.534945,"lng":-0.130156,"verdict":"Mary Wollstonecraft's grave, where her daughter met Shelley, in the churchyard of the Hardy Tree.","thumb":"/img/st-pancras-old-church-480.jpg?v=60bffd46","img":"/img/st-pancras-old-church.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Word on the Water","slug":"word-on-the-water","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/word-on-the-water/","lat":51.535412,"lng":-0.123463,"verdict":"A bookshop in a 1920s Dutch barge on the Regent's Canal, with a wood stove below and a stage on the roof.","thumb":"/img/word-on-the-water-480.jpg?v=ad9dcd84","img":"/img/word-on-the-water.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"George Padmore","slug":"george-padmore","cat":"world","url":"/world/george-padmore/","lat":51.533208,"lng":-0.13467,"verdict":"The flat where the leaders of independent Africa met before any of them was a leader.","thumb":"/img/george-padmore-480.jpg?v=c377ccab","img":"/img/george-padmore.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Lenin in Percy Circus","slug":"lenin-in-percy-circus","cat":"world","url":"/world/lenin-in-percy-circus/","lat":51.52921,"lng":-0.114742,"verdict":"Where Lenin lodged during the 1905 congress, on a circus of houses in Clerkenwell.","thumb":"/img/lenin-in-percy-circus-480.jpg?v=c92f3c14","img":"/img/lenin-in-percy-circus.jpg","w":800,"h":600},{"name":"Rimbaud and Verlaine","slug":"rimbaud-and-verlaine","cat":"world","url":"/world/rimbaud-and-verlaine/","lat":51.53776,"lng":-0.1343,"verdict":"The Camden house where two French poets lived together for two months, before the shooting.","thumb":"/img/rimbaud-and-verlaine-480.jpg?v=e013b548","img":"/img/rimbaud-and-verlaine.jpg","w":480,"h":640},{"name":"Platform 9\u00be, King's Cross","slug":"platform-934-kings-cross","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/platform-934-kings-cross/","lat":51.532187,"lng":-0.123914,"verdict":"The trolley half through the wall at King's Cross, with the shop done up as Diagon Alley beside it.","thumb":"/img/platform-934-kings-cross-480.jpg?v=b9e25f3d","img":"/img/platform-934-kings-cross.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"St Pancras Renaissance Hotel","slug":"st-pancras-renaissance-hotel","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/st-pancras-renaissance-hotel/","lat":51.529877,"lng":-0.125502,"verdict":"The Gothic hotel that played the outside of King's Cross in Chamber of Secrets, when the Ford Anglia took off.","thumb":"/img/st-pancras-renaissance-hotel-480.jpg?v=7f1fdb82","img":"/img/st-pancras-renaissance-hotel.jpg","w":1024,"h":863}]},{"slug":"knightsbridge","name":"Knightsbridge","verdict":"The great shops, the barracks and the embassies, on the road along the bottom of Hyde Park.","note":"A bridge gave it the name: a crossing over the Westbourne, the river now dammed to make the Serpentine, on the road west out of London. It was open country with a bad reputation for robbery, and it became a place to shop by accident.\n\nHarrods began as a small grocer's in 1849 and grew until it filled a whole block in terracotta, with more than three hundred departments and a food hall of tiled Edwardian ceilings that is worth going in for even if you buy nothing. Harvey Nichols at the top of Sloane Street took the fashion trade, and Sloane Street itself became a run of luxury shops with hardly a break in it.\n\nTwo other things share the district. The Household Cavalry live in Hyde Park Barracks behind a 33-storey tower by Basil Spence, and their horses come out onto the park in the early morning, which is the best free spectacle in this part of London. And the embassies are here in numbers, because the grand houses were the right size and nobody else could keep them up.\n\nIt is also the sharp end of London's property market: the flats at One Hyde Park have sold for over a hundred million pounds, and fourteen of the two hundred most expensive streets in Britain are within a few minutes' walk of the tube.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-knightsbridge.jpg?v=6b9357c1","thumb":"/img/area-knightsbridge-480.jpg?v=8c50317b","width":1024,"height":576,"thumb_width":500,"alt":"Harrods lit up at night under its Christmas decorations","caption":"Harrods, lit for Christmas.","credit":"Photo by Editor5807, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harrods_Knightsbridge_exterior_Christmas_decorations_in_November_2022.jpg"},"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-knightsbridge-lead2.jpg?v=f6fc8fd8","thumb":"/img/area-knightsbridge-lead2-480.jpg?v=0573b7d4","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The terracotta front of Harrods on Brompton Road, with its dome and rows of arched windows","caption":"Harrods, on Brompton Road.","credit":"Photo by user: Sokkk y, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harrods_(London).jpg"}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Sloane Street","Draycott Avenue","Brompton Road"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.15991,51.50052],[-0.15807,51.49389],[-0.15814,51.49242],[-0.16011,51.49273],[-0.16247,51.49148],[-0.16596,51.49299],[-0.16757,51.4935],[-0.16975,51.49345],[-0.16872,51.49452],[-0.16934,51.49587],[-0.16904,51.49662],[-0.16303,51.5],[-0.16153,51.50158],[-0.16135,51.50177],[-0.16002,51.50196],[-0.15991,51.50052]]]},"centre":[-0.16336,51.49557],"bounds":[[-0.16975,51.49148],[-0.15807,51.50196]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":35,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":2,"group":"Things to 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chamber group that has been doing this for thirty years."},{"name":"Andy Sheppard Trio with Norma Winstone and Kit Downes","slug":"andy-sheppard-trio-with-norma-winstone-and-kit-downes","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/andy-sheppard-trio-with-norma-winstone-and-kit-downes/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-18","to":"2026-11-18"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Two sets from four of the people who built the sound of British and European jazz."},{"name":"Charpentier: David and Jonathan","slug":"charpentier-david-and-jonathan","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/charpentier-david-and-jonathan/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-20","to":"2026-10-20"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"A 1688 French baroque tragedy about two men who loved each other, staged in English."},{"name":"Chelsea Arts Festival","slug":"chelsea-arts-festival","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/chelsea-arts-festival/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-09-20","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Five days of Chelsea given over to writers, dancers and jazz."},{"name":"Classical Kate Bush","slug":"classical-kate-bush","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/classical-kate-bush/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-06","to":"2026-11-06"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Cloudbusting and forty players from the West London Sinfonia, on the orchestral arrangements."},{"name":"Comedy at Cadogan Hall: David O'Doherty","slug":"comedy-at-cadogan-hall-david-odoherty","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/comedy-at-cadogan-hall-david-odoherty/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Five stand-ups in a concert hall, headlined by the man with the tiny keyboard."},{"name":"Faure's Requiem with the RPO and Brighton Festival Chorus","slug":"faures-requiem-with-the-rpo-and-brighton-festival-chorus","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/faures-requiem-with-the-rpo-and-brighton-festival-chorus/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-11","to":"2026-10-11"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"The gentlest of all requiems, on a Sunday afternoon."},{"name":"Flanders Symphony Orchestra with Alexandra Soumm","slug":"flanders-symphony-orchestra-with-alexandra-soumm","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/flanders-symphony-orchestra-with-alexandra-soumm/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-03","to":"2026-11-03"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"The Lark Ascending and Mozart's Fifth Concerto, from a Belgian orchestra on tour."},{"name":"Frankenstein with the RPO playing live","slug":"frankenstein-with-the-rpo-playing-live","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/frankenstein-with-the-rpo-playing-live/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-25","to":"2026-10-25"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"The 1931 film with an orchestra in the room, which it never had in 1931."},{"name":"Gerald Clayton Trio","slug":"gerald-clayton-trio","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/gerald-clayton-trio/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-21","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"A pianist with six Grammy nominations, playing without anywhere to hide."},{"name":"John Simpson: Leaders and Lunatics","slug":"john-simpson-leaders-and-lunatics","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/john-simpson-leaders-and-lunatics/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-04","to":"2026-11-04"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Sixty years of interviewing the people in charge, and telling one kind from the other."},{"name":"L'Antidote and Naissam Jalal with Roberto Negro","slug":"lantidote-and-naissam-jalal-with-roberto-negro","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/lantidote-and-naissam-jalal-with-roberto-negro/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-14","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Persian percussion, an Albanian cello and a Lebanese piano, then a flute and piano duo."},{"name":"Lizz Wright with Kenny Banks Sr and Rian Peters","slug":"lizz-wright-with-kenny-banks-sr-and-rian-peters","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/lizz-wright-with-kenny-banks-sr-and-rian-peters/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-15","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"A contralto from Georgia who sings gospel, blues and Americana as if they were one thing."},{"name":"London Gay Symphony Orchestra at thirty","slug":"london-gay-symphony-orchestra-at-thirty","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/london-gay-symphony-orchestra-at-thirty/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-18","to":"2026-10-18"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Rachmaninov's Third and a world premiere, thirty years on from the first rehearsal."},{"name":"London Metropolitan Orchestra: a Schnell premiere","slug":"london-metropolitan-orchestra-a-schnell-premiere","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/london-metropolitan-orchestra-a-schnell-premiere/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-09-13"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"A whole evening of one living composer, ending on a concerto nobody has heard."},{"name":"Lucy Worsley: My Royal Life","slug":"lucy-worsley-my-royal-life","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/lucy-worsley-my-royal-life/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-26","to":"2026-10-26"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Twenty years as chief curator of the royal palaces, and what she found in them."},{"name":"Magic Mountains: Berg and Strauss in 1915","slug":"magic-mountains-berg-and-strauss-in-1915","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/magic-mountains-berg-and-strauss-in-1915/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-22","to":"2026-09-22"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Juliet Stevenson reads Thomas Mann between two enormous scores written in the same wartime year."},{"name":"Mary Beard: More Secret Histories of Ancient Rome","slug":"mary-beard-more-secret-histories-of-ancient-rome","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/mary-beard-more-secret-histories-of-ancient-rome/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-06","to":"2026-10-06"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Rome from the people the histories leave out, with questions from the floor."},{"name":"NDR Radio Philharmonic with Nikolai Lugansky","slug":"ndr-radio-philharmonic-with-nikolai-lugansky","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/ndr-radio-philharmonic-with-nikolai-lugansky/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-15","to":"2026-10-15"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Rachmaninov's First Concerto - the one he rewrote twenty-six years later - with Lugansky."},{"name":"National Symphony Orchestra: Enigma Variations","slug":"national-symphony-orchestra-enigma-variations","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/national-symphony-orchestra-enigma-variations/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-08","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Elgar's portraits of his friends, and Mathilde Milwidsky in the Mendelssohn."},{"name":"Peter and the Wolf at 90","slug":"peter-and-the-wolf-at-90","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/peter-and-the-wolf-at-90/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-15","to":"2026-09-15"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Hugh Bonneville narrating, and the composer's grandson conducting."},{"name":"Polish Jazz Festival","slug":"polish-jazz-festival","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/polish-jazz-festival/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-26","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"A fortnight of Polish jazz at Cadogan Hall, from the legends to the new wave."},{"name":"Roberto Fonseca and Vincent Segal","slug":"roberto-fonseca-and-vincent-segal","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/roberto-fonseca-and-vincent-segal/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-17","to":"2026-11-17"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"A Cuban pianist out of the Buena Vista Social Club and a French cellist, as a duo."},{"name":"Royal Philharmonic Orchestra 2026-27","slug":"royal-philharmonic-orchestra-2026-27","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/royal-philharmonic-orchestra-2026-27/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2027-06-24"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"The RPO's own season at its London home, October to June."},{"name":"Royal Philharmonic Orchestra: Brahms 1","slug":"royal-philharmonic-orchestra-brahms-1","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/royal-philharmonic-orchestra-brahms-1/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-21","to":"2026-10-21"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Brahms's first symphony, twenty-one years in the writing, after a new nocturne for cello."},{"name":"Royal Philharmonic Orchestra: Mozart Revealed","slug":"royal-philharmonic-orchestra-mozart-revealed","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/royal-philharmonic-orchestra-mozart-revealed/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"An hour on the Jupiter symphony: taken apart, then played whole."},{"name":"Royal Philharmonic Orchestra: Sibelius Violin Concerto","slug":"royal-philharmonic-orchestra-sibelius-violin-concerto","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/royal-philharmonic-orchestra-sibelius-violin-concerto/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-08","to":"2026-10-08"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Liya Petrova in the Sibelius, and Vaughan Williams's wartime vision of peace after it."},{"name":"Solemn Latin Mass with the Oratory choir","slug":"solemn-latin-mass-with-the-oratory-choir","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/brompton-oratory/solemn-latin-mass-with-the-oratory-choir/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.497142,"lng":-0.169643,"verdict":"Renaissance polyphony sung every Sunday at eleven by a professional choir, and you walk in."},{"name":"Swingin' with Strings: Ella and Louis sing Gershwin","slug":"swingin-with-strings-ella-and-louis-sing-gershwin","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/swingin-with-strings-ella-and-louis-sing-gershwin/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-22","to":"2026-11-22"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"Porgy and Bess as Fitzgerald and Armstrong recorded it, with a fifty-piece orchestra."},{"name":"Tania Giannouli and Nils Petter Molvaer, with Elliot Galvin and Laura Jurd","slug":"tania-giannouli-and-nils-petter-molvaer-with-elliot-galvin-and-laura-jurd","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/tania-giannouli-and-nils-petter-molvaer-with-elliot-galvin-and-laura-jurd/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-20","to":"2026-11-20"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"A Norwegian trumpet and a Greek piano, then two British improvisers, on one bill."},{"name":"The Hanover Band: Haydn's trumpet concerto on gut 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Hamlet, with the mad scene that made Ophelie famous, sung in concert."},{"name":"Will Guidara and Rory Sutherland on hospitality","slug":"will-guidara-and-rory-sutherland-on-hospitality","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/will-guidara-and-rory-sutherland-on-hospitality/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-24"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"The restaurateur behind Eleven Madison Park, in conversation with an advertising man who studies why people behave as they do."},{"name":"Young Musicians Symphony Orchestra: Wagner","slug":"young-musicians-symphony-orchestra-wagner","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/young-musicians-symphony-orchestra-wagner/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-14","to":"2026-10-14"},"lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"A Wagner night from the orchestra that has been giving young players a full-size score since 1955."},{"name":"Brompton Oratory","slug":"brompton-oratory","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/brompton-oratory/","lat":51.497142,"lng":-0.169643,"verdict":"Full-blown Italian baroque in South Kensington, with a choir and orchestra performing Mass settings as liturgy.","thumb":"/img/brompton-oratory-480.jpg?v=d9c6f753","img":"/img/brompton-oratory.jpg","w":1024,"h":856},{"name":"Cadogan Hall","slug":"cadogan-hall","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/cadogan-hall/","lat":51.493797,"lng":-0.157241,"verdict":"A Byzantine-looking Christian Science church of 1907, emptied of its congregation and turned into a 950-seat hall.","thumb":"/img/cadogan-hall-480.jpg?v=be6ba700","img":"/img/cadogan-hall.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Brompton Road","slug":"brompton-road","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/brompton-road/","lat":51.498838,"lng":-0.165199,"verdict":"Harrods, Harvey Nichols round the corner, and the shops that gather near them."},{"name":"Harrods","slug":"harrods","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/harrods/","lat":51.499245,"lng":-0.163007,"verdict":"Three hundred departments behind a terracotta front, and food halls tiled like a cathedral.","thumb":"/img/harrods-480.jpg?v=70832cbb","img":"/img/harrods.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Harvey Nichols","slug":"harvey-nichols","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/harvey-nichols/","lat":51.501623,"lng":-0.159717,"verdict":"Eight floors of fashion and beauty, with a food market and a dining room on the fifth.","thumb":"/img/harvey-nichols-480.jpg?v=235baeb0","img":"/img/harvey-nichols.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Peter Jones","slug":"peter-jones","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/peter-jones/","lat":51.492255,"lng":-0.158938,"verdict":"A wall of glass curving round Sloane Square, and one of the first modern buildings in Britain.","thumb":"/img/peter-jones-480.jpg?v=03f86300","img":"/img/peter-jones.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Sloane Street","slug":"sloane-street","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/sloane-street/","lat":51.497238,"lng":-0.158998,"verdict":"The fashion houses' other row, from Knightsbridge to Sloane Square."},{"name":"Bread Ahead","slug":"bread-ahead-hans-town","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/bread-ahead-hans-town/","lat":51.493402,"lng":-0.158679,"verdict":"Pavilion Road, which is Chelsea pretending to be a village."},{"name":"Harrods Food Hall","slug":"harrods-food-hall","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/harrods-food-hall/","lat":51.499245,"lng":-0.163007,"verdict":"Edwardian tiled halls, extraordinary produce, and prices to match.","thumb":"/img/harrods-food-hall-480.jpg?v=853ea803","img":"/img/harrods-food-hall.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Brompton Oratory","slug":"brompton-oratory","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/brompton-oratory/","lat":51.497142,"lng":-0.169643,"verdict":"Italian Baroque in South Kensington, with marble apostles that stood in Siena Cathedral for two centuries.","thumb":"/img/brompton-oratory-480.jpg?v=d9c6f753","img":"/img/brompton-oratory.jpg","w":1024,"h":856},{"name":"Pavilion Road","slug":"pavilion-road","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/pavilion-road/","lat":51.493526,"lng":-0.158815,"verdict":"A back lane of stables turned into a street of food shops, one trade to a door.","thumb":"/img/street-pavilion-road-480.jpg?v=5fa2380f","img":"/img/street-pavilion-road.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Michelin House","slug":"michelin-house","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/michelin-house/","lat":51.493072,"lng":-0.16847,"verdict":"A tyre depot of 1911 with Bibendum in stained glass and the walls tiled like a swimming bath.","thumb":"/img/michelin-house-480.jpg?v=4fd8b21c","img":"/img/michelin-house.jpg","w":640,"h":439},{"name":"David Mellor","slug":"david-mellor","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/david-mellor/","lat":51.492908,"lng":-0.158738,"verdict":"The shop of the cutler who designed Britain's traffic lights, selling kitchen equipment chosen with the same eye.","thumb":"/img/david-mellor-480.jpg?v=90ddfc74","img":"/img/david-mellor.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"John Sandoe Books","slug":"john-sandoe-books","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/john-sandoe-books/","lat":51.491374,"lng":-0.160931,"verdict":"Chelsea's independent bookshop since 1957, three small Georgian houses packed to the ceilings.","thumb":"/img/john-sandoe-books-480.jpg?v=797938f0","img":"/img/john-sandoe-books.jpg","w":1024,"h":626},{"name":"Frederick Douglass","slug":"frederick-douglass","cat":"world","url":"/world/frederick-douglass/","lat":51.492311,"lng":-0.164974,"verdict":"Where an escaped slave lodged as a free man's guest, and left Britain owning himself.","thumb":"/img/frederick-douglass-480.jpg?v=f2ae2a78","img":"/img/frederick-douglass.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Percy Grainger","slug":"percy-grainger","cat":"world","url":"/world/percy-grainger/","lat":51.491757,"lng":-0.159217,"verdict":"The Chelsea flat of the Australian pianist who went out with a phonograph and saved English folk song.","thumb":"/img/percy-grainger-480.jpg?v=3748caad","img":"/img/percy-grainger.jpg","w":768,"h":1024}]},{"slug":"marylebone","name":"Marylebone","verdict":"A village high street in the middle of London, with a concert hall, a great collection and Sherlock Holmes's address.","note":"The name is a contraction of St Mary by the bourne, the church by the stream, which the villagers preferred to the older name of the place because it had been Tyburn, and Tyburn meant the gallows. The stream still runs underground along the crooked line of Marylebone Lane, which is why one street in this grid of straight ones bends.\n\nTwo estates built it, the Portman and the Howard de Walden, and both still own most of it, which is why the high street has small shops and not chains: a single landlord can choose its tenants. Marylebone High Street is the result, and it is the closest thing central London has to a village street.\n\nThe district's other trade is medicine. Harley Street has been the address for private consultants since the nineteenth century, and the brass plates run for half a mile.\n\nFor a visitor there are three unmissable rooms. The Wallace Collection, in a house on Manchester Square, holds Frans Hals's Laughing Cavalier and a hall of armour, and costs nothing. Wigmore Hall, opened in 1901 behind a piano showroom, has the best acoustics for chamber music in the country. And at the top of Baker Street, at a number that did not exist when Conan Doyle chose it, there is a museum to a man who never lived.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-marylebone-lead2.jpg?v=86a389cc","thumb":"/img/area-marylebone-lead2-480.jpg?v=dcaa76fd","width":1024,"height":685,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The old shopfront of James Taylor & Son, bootmakers, with its gilt lettering on Marylebone High Street","caption":"James Taylor & Son, bootmakers, on the High Street.","credit":"Photo by Maggie Jones, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:4_Marylebone_High_Street_shoe_shop.jpg"},"figures":[],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Marylebone Road","Great Portland Street","Oxford Street","Edgware Road"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.16503,51.52093],[-0.15255,51.52307],[-0.14895,51.52336],[-0.14617,51.52385],[-0.1441,51.5245],[-0.14406,51.52333],[-0.14062,51.51554],[-0.14198,51.51534],[-0.14663,51.51468],[-0.15655,51.51365],[-0.1588,51.5132],[-0.16088,51.5138],[-0.16159,51.5142],[-0.16992,51.51979],[-0.16503,51.52093]]]},"centre":[-0.15115,51.51867],"bounds":[[-0.16992,51.5132],[-0.14062,51.5245]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":88,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":4,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":3,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":3,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"shopping","name":"Shopping","count":5,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":5,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":3,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"breakfast","name":"Breakfast & Brunch","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"cocktails","name":"Cocktails","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"royal","name":"Royal London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"beautiful-streets","name":"Beautiful Streets","count":4,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"monuments","name":"Monuments & Ruins","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"classic-british-shops","name":"Classic British Shops","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"science","name":"Science & Engineering","count":5,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"secrets","name":"Secrets & Espionage","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":3,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":4,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"50th Anniversary of Benjamin Britten's Death","slug":"50th-anniversary-of-benjamin-brittens-death","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/50th-anniversary-of-benjamin-brittens-death/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2027-03-16"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"A dozen concerts marking fifty years since Britten died, mostly the songs he wrote for one voice."},{"name":"A Kabuki Winterreise: Spring Snow","slug":"a-kabuki-winterreise-spring-snow","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/a-kabuki-winterreise-spring-snow/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-11","to":"2026-10-11"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"Schubert's winter journey staged with a kabuki dancer and a shamisen."},{"name":"Academy Symphonic Brass: a John Wallace celebration","slug":"academy-symphonic-brass-a-john-wallace-celebration","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-academy-of-music/academy-symphonic-brass-a-john-wallace-celebration/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-06","to":"2026-11-06"},"lat":51.523522,"lng":-0.151883,"verdict":"Five brass choirs playing Gabrieli around the hall, the way St Mark's did it."},{"name":"Alexander Gavrylyuk","slug":"alexander-gavrylyuk","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/alexander-gavrylyuk/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-01","to":"2026-11-01"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"A pianist who plays the big Russian repertoire and means it."},{"name":"Alexander McCall Smith","slug":"alexander-mccall-smith","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/daunt-books-marylebone/alexander-mccall-smith/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-12","to":"2026-10-12"},"lat":51.520423,"lng":-0.152248,"verdict":"Mma Ramotswe's author, who also writes three other series and used to teach medical law."},{"name":"Alexandra Shulman in conversation with Katy Hessel","slug":"alexandra-shulman-in-conversation-with-katy-hessel","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/daunt-books-marylebone/alexandra-shulman-in-conversation-with-katy-hessel/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-29","to":"2026-09-29"},"lat":51.520423,"lng":-0.152248,"verdict":"Vogue's longest-serving editor, questioned by the woman who rewrote the story of art without men."},{"name":"Alice Coote: Tchaikovsky and Mahler songs","slug":"alice-coote-tchaikovsky-and-mahler-songs","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/alice-coote-tchaikovsky-and-mahler-songs/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-14","to":"2026-09-14"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"An hour of Tchaikovsky and Mahler at lunchtime, for eighteen pounds."},{"name":"Allan Clayton and Christine Rice: Britten and Schumann","slug":"allan-clayton-and-christine-rice-britten-and-schumann","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/allan-clayton-and-christine-rice-britten-and-schumann/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"Britten's Michelangelo sonnets, and the cabaret songs he wrote for a nightclub."},{"name":"Angela Hewitt and the Dunedin Consort","slug":"angela-hewitt-and-the-dunedin-consort","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/angela-hewitt-and-the-dunedin-consort/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-09-16"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"Hewitt on the fortepiano, with a symphony by a composer Mozart's Vienna knew and we do not."},{"name":"Arcangelo: An English Baroque Journey","slug":"arcangelo-an-english-baroque-journey","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/arcangelo-an-english-baroque-journey/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-30","to":"2026-10-30"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"Jonathan Cohen's band on English baroque, with a free talk beforehand."},{"name":"Avi Avital with harp, guitar, theorbo and harpsichord","slug":"avi-avital-with-harp-guitar-theorbo-and-harpsichord","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/avi-avital-with-harp-guitar-theorbo-and-harpsichord/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-26","to":"2026-10-26"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"A mandolin at the front of a plucked-string band."},{"name":"Belcea Quartet Beethoven Cycle","slug":"belcea-quartet-beethoven-cycle","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/belcea-quartet-beethoven-cycle/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2027-01-25"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"The Belcea play their way through the Beethoven quartets, a year early for the anniversary."},{"name":"Belcea Quartet: Beethoven, Op. 18 No. 1 and the Grosse Fuge","slug":"belcea-quartet-beethoven-op-18-no-1-and-the-grosse-fuge","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/belcea-quartet-beethoven-op-18-no-1-and-the-grosse-fuge/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"Beethoven's Op. 130 with the fugue he was talked out of, two hundred years on."},{"name":"Belcea Quartet: Beethoven, early, middle and late","slug":"belcea-quartet-beethoven-early-middle-and-late","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/belcea-quartet-beethoven-early-middle-and-late/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-27","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"Three Beethoven quartets, one from each end of his life and one from the middle."},{"name":"Benjamin Appl with the Jerusalem Quartet","slug":"benjamin-appl-with-the-jerusalem-quartet","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/benjamin-appl-with-the-jerusalem-quartet/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-08","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"Baritone and string quartet, which is an unusual thing to hear."},{"name":"Chamayou, Frang and the Eredics brothers","slug":"chamayou-frang-and-the-eredics-brothers","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/chamayou-frang-and-the-eredics-brothers/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-09","to":"2026-10-09"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"Bart\u00f3k and Kurt\u00e1g, played beside the folk music they came out of."},{"name":"Chamber Tots","slug":"chamber-tots","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/chamber-tots/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-28","to":"2026-10-28"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"Live chamber music for children under five, in the hall itself."},{"name":"Chess Club Records","slug":"chess-club-records","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-social/chess-club-records/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.517319,"lng":-0.140818,"verdict":"A label night from the people who signed Mumford & Sons and Wolf Alice early."},{"name":"Colin Thubron in conversation","slug":"colin-thubron-in-conversation","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/daunt-books-marylebone/colin-thubron-in-conversation/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-14","to":"2026-10-14"},"lat":51.520423,"lng":-0.152248,"verdict":"Sixty years of travel writing, from Damascus to the Amur."},{"name":"Dame Sarah Connolly and Joseph Middleton","slug":"dame-sarah-connolly-and-joseph-middleton","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/dame-sarah-connolly-and-joseph-middleton/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-27","to":"2026-10-27"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"Song from a mezzo who has sung most of the great roles and keeps coming back to this."},{"name":"David McCloskey in conversation with Clarissa Ward","slug":"david-mccloskey-in-conversation-with-clarissa-ward","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/daunt-books-marylebone/david-mccloskey-in-conversation-with-clarissa-ward/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-05","to":"2026-10-05"},"lat":51.520423,"lng":-0.152248,"verdict":"A former CIA analyst who writes spy novels, questioned by a war correspondent."},{"name":"David and Yuko Juda Art Foundation Award","slug":"david-and-yuko-juda-art-foundation-award","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/annely-juda-fine-art/david-and-yuko-juda-art-foundation-award/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.514424,"lng":-0.144599,"verdict":"Seven artists shortlisted for a \u00a350,000 grant, shown together for ten days."},{"name":"Edward Chisholm","slug":"edward-chisholm","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/daunt-books-marylebone/edward-chisholm/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.520423,"lng":-0.152248,"verdict":"The Englishman who waited tables in Paris and wrote it down."},{"name":"Elias String Quartet","slug":"elias-string-quartet","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/elias-string-quartet/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-05","to":"2026-11-05"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"A British quartet named after a Mendelssohn oratorio, on twenty-eight years together."},{"name":"Elisabeth Leonskaja: Schubert","slug":"elisabeth-leonskaja-schubert","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/elisabeth-leonskaja-schubert/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-22","to":"2026-09-22"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"A recital of Schubert from the pianist whose complete set is the one to own."},{"name":"Ema Nikolovska and Jonathan Biss: Schubert","slug":"ema-nikolovska-and-jonathan-biss-schubert","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/ema-nikolovska-and-jonathan-biss-schubert/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-17"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"An evening of nothing but Schubert songs, ending on Der Doppelg\u00e4nger."},{"name":"Fleur Barron and Mauro Peter","slug":"fleur-barron-and-mauro-peter","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/fleur-barron-and-mauro-peter/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-31","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"Mezzo and tenor together, which almost never happens in a song recital."},{"name":"Fracas","slug":"fracas","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-social/fracas/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.517319,"lng":-0.140818,"verdict":"#STDrums, Polyop, Dead Wells and Camberwell Group."},{"name":"Frameless","slug":"frameless","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/frameless/","lat":51.51353,"lng":-0.16015,"verdict":"Four galleries of paintings projected floor to ceiling, moving."},{"name":"Fretwork at forty","slug":"fretwork-at-forty","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/fretwork-at-forty/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"Eight viols, forty years on, conducted by George Benjamin."},{"name":"Gy\u00f6rgy Kurt\u00e1g Focus","slug":"gyorgy-kurtag-focus","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/gyorgy-kurtag-focus/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"Three days on the composer who builds whole worlds out of a few notes and the silence after them."},{"name":"Hidden London: Baker Street \u2014 the world's first Underground","slug":"hidden-london-baker-street-the-worlds-first-underground","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-baker-street-the-worlds-first-underground/","lat":51.522585,"lng":-0.156743,"verdict":"Passenger corridors sealed for seventy-five years, under the oldest Tube station of all."},{"name":"IMS Prussia Cove","slug":"ims-prussia-cove","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/ims-prussia-cove/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-07","to":"2026-10-07"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"The Cornish masterclass that decamps to London once a year, playing as one band."},{"name":"Ian Bostridge and Vadym Kholodenko","slug":"ian-bostridge-and-vadym-kholodenko","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/ian-bostridge-and-vadym-kholodenko/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-22","to":"2026-10-22"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"The tenor who has written a book about Winterreise, singing song at Wigmore."},{"name":"Iestyn Davies and Oliver Wass: a Viennese evening","slug":"iestyn-davies-and-oliver-wass-a-viennese-evening","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/iestyn-davies-and-oliver-wass-a-viennese-evening/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-08","to":"2026-10-08"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"Countertenor and harp, tracing the Viennese song from Gluck to Schumann."},{"name":"International Music Day at the Academy","slug":"international-music-day-at-the-academy","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-academy-of-music/international-music-day-at-the-academy/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.523522,"lng":-0.151883,"verdict":"An afternoon of lectures, playing and tours in the Academy's museum, free."},{"name":"Jakub Hrusa conducts Janacek and Bartok","slug":"jakub-hrusa-conducts-janacek-and-bartok","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-academy-of-music/jakub-hrusa-conducts-janacek-and-bartok/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-16","to":"2026-10-16"},"lat":51.523522,"lng":-0.151883,"verdict":"The Royal Opera's music director with a student orchestra, at lunchtime, for sixteen pounds."},{"name":"Jason Moran","slug":"jason-moran","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/jason-moran/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-30","to":"2026-09-30"},"lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"Solo piano from the man Rolling Stone called the most provocative thinker in jazz."},{"name":"Jean-Guihen 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Square."},{"name":"Wallace Collection","slug":"wallace-collection","cat":"art","url":"/art/wallace-collection/","lat":51.517509,"lng":-0.153066,"verdict":"Four generations of a family's buying, the Laughing Cavalier, Fragonard's Swing and one of Europe's great armouries, free in a Marylebone townhouse that nothing may ever leave."},{"name":"Winged Figure","slug":"winged-figure","cat":"art","url":"/art/winged-figure/","lat":51.515132,"lng":-0.144486,"verdict":"Barbara Hepworth's aluminium and steel wing on the side of John Lewis, Oxford Street, since 1963.","thumb":"/img/winged-figure-480.jpg?v=5fedf148","img":"/img/winged-figure.jpg","w":576,"h":1024},{"name":"Royal Academy of Music","slug":"royal-academy-of-music","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/royal-academy-of-music/","lat":51.523522,"lng":-0.151883,"verdict":"Britain's oldest music college, with a small free museum of instruments and student concerts most days of term.","thumb":"/img/royal-academy-of-music-480.jpg?v=b5db4b32","img":"/img/royal-academy-of-music.jpg","w":1024,"h":662},{"name":"The Social","slug":"the-social","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/the-social/","lat":51.517319,"lng":-0.140818,"verdict":"A record label's basement bar off Oxford Street, open since 1999."},{"name":"Wigmore Hall","slug":"wigmore-hall","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/wigmore-hall/","lat":51.516834,"lng":-0.148307,"verdict":"Five hundred and fifty-two seats, an Arts and Crafts cupola over the stage, and the chamber acoustic every other hall in London is measured against.","thumb":"/img/wigmore-hall-480.jpg?v=92a8905d","img":"/img/wigmore-hall.jpg","w":621,"h":1024},{"name":"Daunt Books Marylebone","slug":"daunt-books-marylebone","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/daunt-books-marylebone/","lat":51.520423,"lng":-0.152248,"verdict":"An Edwardian bookshop with oak galleries and a stained-glass window, arranged by country rather than by subject.","thumb":"/img/own-daunt-books-marylebone-480.jpg?v=6559ec88","img":"/img/own-daunt-books-marylebone.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"John Lewis Oxford Street","slug":"john-lewis-oxford-street","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/john-lewis-oxford-street/","lat":51.515425,"lng":-0.145208,"verdict":"The flagship of a shop owned by the people who work in it.","thumb":"/img/john-lewis-oxford-street-480.jpg?v=d1dd6f61","img":"/img/john-lewis-oxford-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Marylebone High Street","slug":"marylebone-high-street","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/marylebone-high-street/","lat":51.521942,"lng":-0.151593,"verdict":"A village street in the West End, Daunt Books at its heart."},{"name":"Oxford Street","slug":"oxford-street","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/oxford-street/","lat":51.514694,"lng":-0.146528,"verdict":"Selfridges, John Lewis and the high street at its densest."},{"name":"Selfridges","slug":"selfridges","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/selfridges/","lat":51.514691,"lng":-0.152808,"verdict":"The store that invented the shop window as entertainment, at the end of Oxford Street nobody wanted.","thumb":"/img/selfridges-480.jpg?v=985f0a15","img":"/img/selfridges.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Attendant","slug":"attendant-mayfair","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/attendant-mayfair/","lat":51.513759,"lng":-0.151024,"verdict":"Duke Street, and a flat white worth the Mayfair mark-up."},{"name":"Hagen Marylebone","slug":"hagen-marylebone","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/hagen-marylebone/","lat":51.520552,"lng":-0.152029,"verdict":"Marylebone High Street, open seven to six, and busy throughout."},{"name":"Kiss the Hippo","slug":"kiss-the-hippo","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/kiss-the-hippo/","lat":51.516483,"lng":-0.14162,"verdict":"Margaret Street, two minutes from Oxford Circus and a world calmer."},{"name":"Notes","slug":"notes-mayfair","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/notes-mayfair/","lat":51.514036,"lng":-0.149337,"verdict":"Coffee by day, wine by night, on the wrong end of Oxford Street."},{"name":"Workshop Coffee Co","slug":"workshop-coffee-co","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/workshop-coffee-co/","lat":51.515204,"lng":-0.149984,"verdict":"Workshop's Barrett Street counter, and a seasonal single origin on filter."},{"name":"Arome Bakery","slug":"arome-bakery-marylebone","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/arome-bakery-marylebone/","lat":51.515368,"lng":-0.151819,"verdict":"The Duke Street counter for French technique and Asian flavours."},{"name":"Fred Bakery","slug":"fred-bakery-oxford-circus","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/fred-bakery-oxford-circus/","lat":51.516497,"lng":-0.141519,"verdict":"A split-level room two minutes from Oxford Circus, and the same pistachio roll."},{"name":"Badiani Mayfair","slug":"badiani-mayfair","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/badiani-mayfair/","lat":51.513152,"lng":-0.152879,"verdict":"Gelato in a deconsecrated Mayfair church."},{"name":"Pierre Marcolini","slug":"pierre-marcolini","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/pierre-marcolini/","lat":51.520717,"lng":-0.15175,"verdict":"The Belgian who stopped buying his chocolate and went back to the bean."},{"name":"Rococo Chocolates","slug":"rococo-chocolates","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/rococo-chocolates/","lat":51.519756,"lng":-0.152218,"verdict":"The chocolatier that made bean-to-bar respectable in London, on the best food street in Marylebone."},{"name":"Fischer's","slug":"fischers","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/fischers/","lat":51.5216,"lng":-0.151673,"verdict":"A Viennese caf\u00e9 on Marylebone High Street."},{"name":"Market Halls Oxford Street","slug":"market-halls-oxford-street","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/market-halls-oxford-street/","lat":51.515554,"lng":-0.144395,"verdict":"Somewhere decent to eat a minute off Oxford Street, which is rarer than it should be."},{"name":"Selfridges Food Hall","slug":"selfridges-food-hall","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/selfridges-food-hall/","lat":51.514691,"lng":-0.152808,"verdict":"A department store food hall that behaves like a market.","thumb":"/img/selfridges-food-hall-480.jpg?v=3eecce05","img":"/img/selfridges-food-hall.jpg","w":962,"h":1024},{"name":"Artesian","slug":"artesian","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/artesian/","lat":51.517658,"lng":-0.143566,"verdict":"The Langham's pink-and-gilt room, four times the world's best bar."},{"name":"The Social","slug":"the-social","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/the-social/","lat":51.517319,"lng":-0.140818,"verdict":"A record-label bar with a jukebox and a basement stage."},{"name":"Marble Arch","slug":"marble-arch","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/marble-arch/","lat":51.513184,"lng":-0.158905,"verdict":"Buckingham Palace's original front gate, moved to the corner of Hyde Park in 1851 when the palace grew around it.","thumb":"/img/marble-arch-480.jpg?v=a18babf8","img":"/img/marble-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Chiltern Street","slug":"chiltern-street","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/chiltern-street/","lat":51.521486,"lng":-0.156126,"verdict":"Victorian red brick, a Gothic fire station turned hotel, and shops that each sell one thing.","thumb":"/img/chiltern-street-480.jpg?v=23c8d8fa","img":"/img/chiltern-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Marylebone Lane","slug":"marylebone-lane","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/marylebone-lane/","lat":51.514983,"lng":-0.148384,"verdict":"A street that bends because it follows a buried river, past small shops the whole way.","thumb":"/img/street-marylebone-lane-480.jpg?v=ee76e5a7","img":"/img/street-marylebone-lane.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"St Christopher's Place","slug":"st-christophers-place","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/st-christophers-place/","lat":51.515616,"lng":-0.150292,"verdict":"A flagstone lane of restaurants and small shops, entered through a gap in Oxford Street you would miss.","thumb":"/img/street-st-christophers-place-480.jpg?v=5b468ca2","img":"/img/street-st-christophers-place.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Wyndham Place","slug":"wyndham-place","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/wyndham-place/","lat":51.518807,"lng":-0.161439,"verdict":"A short Georgian street closed at the end by a church with a round portico.","thumb":"/img/street-wyndham-place-480.jpg?v=2f87a2de","img":"/img/street-wyndham-place.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Marble Arch","slug":"marble-arch","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/marble-arch/","lat":51.513184,"lng":-0.158905,"verdict":"Nash's gateway to Buckingham Palace, moved to a traffic island where nobody may drive through it.","thumb":"/img/marble-arch-480.jpg?v=a18babf8","img":"/img/marble-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Daunt Books Marylebone","slug":"daunt-books-marylebone","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/daunt-books-marylebone/","lat":51.520423,"lng":-0.152248,"verdict":"An Edwardian bookshop with oak galleries and a stained-glass window, arranged by country rather than by subject.","thumb":"/img/own-daunt-books-marylebone-480.jpg?v=6559ec88","img":"/img/own-daunt-books-marylebone.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Grays Antiques","slug":"grays-antiques","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/grays-antiques/","lat":51.513592,"lng":-0.148443,"verdict":"Two hundred dealers under one roof, with a lost London river running through the basement.","thumb":"/img/grays-antiques-480.jpg?v=fc8748f5","img":"/img/grays-antiques.jpg","w":616,"h":1024},{"name":"Anaesthesia Heritage Centre","slug":"anaesthesia-heritage-centre","cat":"science","url":"/science/anaesthesia-heritage-centre/","lat":51.519431,"lng":-0.145066,"verdict":"Two centuries of putting people to sleep for surgery, from Morton's ether inhaler to the machines of today, free in the Association of Anaesthetists' basement."},{"name":"Broadcasting House","slug":"broadcasting-house","cat":"science","url":"/science/broadcasting-house/","lat":51.518782,"lng":-0.143416,"verdict":"The BBC's first purpose-built home, shaped like a ship because the site was shaped like a prow.","thumb":"/img/own-broadcasting-house-480.jpg?v=01316d53","img":"/img/own-broadcasting-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Charles Babbage's house, 1 Dorset Street","slug":"charles-babbages-house-1-dorset-street","cat":"science","url":"/science/charles-babbages-house-1-dorset-street/","lat":51.5199,"lng":-0.1547,"verdict":"Where the Difference Engine was designed and the Analytical Engine dreamed up, over forty years of soirees, and where Babbage fought the organ-grinders."},{"name":"Hidden London: Baker Street \u2014 the world's first Underground","slug":"hidden-london-baker-street-the-worlds-first-underground","cat":"science","url":"/science/hidden-london-baker-street-the-worlds-first-underground/","lat":51.522585,"lng":-0.156743,"verdict":"A tour into the sealed parts of the first underground railway in the world, the Metropolitan of 1863, under Baker Street."},{"name":"Joseph Lister's house, 12 Park Crescent","slug":"joseph-listers-house-12-park-crescent","cat":"science","url":"/science/joseph-listers-house-12-park-crescent/","lat":51.5236,"lng":-0.1445,"verdict":"The house of the surgeon who made operations survivable, on Nash's crescent at the top of Portland Place."},{"name":"64 Baker Street: SOE headquarters","slug":"64-baker-street-soe-headquarters","cat":"secrets","url":"/secrets/64-baker-street-soe-headquarters/","lat":51.519159,"lng":-0.155918,"verdict":"The Baker Street Irregulars: headquarters of the Special Operations Executive, which ran resistance and sabotage across occupied Europe from an ordinary office block.","thumb":"/img/64-baker-street-soe-headquarters-480.jpg?v=12b27f00","img":"/img/64-baker-street-soe-headquarters.jpg","w":576,"h":1024},{"name":"Daunt Books Marylebone","slug":"daunt-books-marylebone","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/daunt-books-marylebone/","lat":51.520423,"lng":-0.152248,"verdict":"An Edwardian bookshop of oak galleries and a stained-glass window, with the world arranged by country.","thumb":"/img/own-daunt-books-marylebone-480.jpg?v=6559ec88","img":"/img/own-daunt-books-marylebone.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"George Orwell statue, Broadcasting House","slug":"george-orwell-statue-broadcasting-house","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/george-orwell-statue-broadcasting-house/","lat":51.518775,"lng":-0.142953,"verdict":"Orwell outside the BBC he worked for and disliked, with his line about liberty cut into the wall behind him.","thumb":"/img/george-orwell-statue-broadcasting-house-480.jpg?v=ebd24154","img":"/img/george-orwell-statue-broadcasting-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":1024},{"name":"Sherlock Holmes statue","slug":"sherlock-holmes-statue","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/sherlock-holmes-statue/","lat":51.5225,"lng":-0.156588,"verdict":"Holmes in deerstalker and cape outside Baker Street station, three metres of bronze.","thumb":"/img/sherlock-holmes-statue-480.jpg?v=cb75097e","img":"/img/sherlock-holmes-statue.jpg","w":832,"h":1024},{"name":"Carl Maria von Weber","slug":"carl-maria-von-weber","cat":"world","url":"/world/carl-maria-von-weber/","lat":51.519516,"lng":-0.142567,"verdict":"The house where the composer of Der Freisch\u00fctz died, having come to London to conduct his last opera.","thumb":"/img/carl-maria-von-weber-480.jpg?v=11fc2e62","img":"/img/carl-maria-von-weber.jpg","w":1024,"h":1024},{"name":"Hector Berlioz","slug":"hector-berlioz","cat":"world","url":"/world/hector-berlioz/","lat":51.517789,"lng":-0.149098,"verdict":"The lodging of a composer who came to judge musical instruments and stayed to conquer London.","thumb":"/img/hector-berlioz-480.jpg?v=657554c4","img":"/img/hector-berlioz.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Sim\u00f3n Bol\u00edvar","slug":"simon-bolivar","cat":"world","url":"/world/simon-bolivar/","lat":51.516087,"lng":-0.152451,"verdict":"The Liberator's London lodging: a Marylebone house where a 27-year-old came for guns and left with a mentor.","thumb":"/img/simon-bolivar-480.jpg?v=b32db490","img":"/img/simon-bolivar.jpg","w":1024,"h":975},{"name":"Stefan Zweig","slug":"stefan-zweig","cat":"world","url":"/world/stefan-zweig/","lat":51.520554,"lng":-0.143924,"verdict":"The Marylebone flat of the most translated writer in the world, who had just lost his country.","thumb":"/img/stefan-zweig-480.jpg?v=c11bba96","img":"/img/stefan-zweig.jpg","w":768,"h":1024}]},{"slug":"mayfair","name":"Mayfair","verdict":"Grand squares turned into offices, the tailors and galleries between them, and two composers' houses next door to one another.","note":"Named after a fair. The May Fair was held every spring from 1686 in the fields where Shepherd Market is now, and it was suppressed in 1764 for being disreputable, by which time the ground around it was being covered in the most valuable housing in London.\n\nThat was the Grosvenor family's doing. Sir Thomas Grosvenor married a twelve-year-old heiress in 1677 and with her got five hundred acres of Mayfair and Belgravia; his descendants laid out the grid in the 1720s with Grosvenor Square as its centrepiece and are the Dukes of Westminster today. Berkeley Square went up in the 1730s, and its plane trees, planted in 1789, are among the oldest in London.\n\nThe aristocracy could not keep the houses up after the First World War, and the district turned commercial: hedge funds and headquarters behind the doorcases, with the shops that served the old residents still there. Savile Row has cut suits since 1803, Bond Street sells art and jewellery, and the Burlington Arcade of 1819 still employs beadles in top hats to stop you whistling in it.\n\nTwo houses at 23 and 25 Brook Street make the neatest fact in London. Handel lived in one from 1723 and wrote Messiah there; Jimi Hendrix lived in the other in 1968. They are now a single museum, and you can walk from one man's harpsichord to the other man's bedroom in about ten seconds.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-mayfair.jpg?v=381e4e75","thumb":"/img/area-mayfair-480.jpg?v=1f19414b","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":500,"alt":"Red brick and pink terracotta on Mount Street, Mayfair","caption":"Mount Street's terracotta.","credit":"Photo by No Swan So Fine, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:109-113,_Mount_Street,_Mayfair,_January_2022.jpg"},"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-mayfair-lead2.jpg?v=a173f938","thumb":"/img/area-mayfair-lead2-480.jpg?v=50e463a5","width":1024,"height":761,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Burlington Arcade under its glass roof, hung with Christmas lights and red baubles above the shopfronts","caption":"Burlington Arcade, dressed for Christmas.","credit":"Photo by VirtuallyLondonBecky, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Burlington_Arcade_at_Christmas.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-mayfair-3.jpg?v=836bd9f3","thumb":"/img/area-mayfair-3-480.jpg?v=abee9c6e","width":1024,"height":575,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A cobbled Georgian mews in Mayfair, with painted garage doors and window boxes","caption":"A Mayfair mews.","credit":"Photo by maggie jones., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Georgian_mews.jpg"}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Oxford Street","Regent Street","Piccadilly","Park Lane"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.14153,51.51418],[-0.13824,51.51054],[-0.13694,51.50997],[-0.13464,51.51009],[-0.13624,51.50928],[-0.13874,51.50848],[-0.14232,51.50701],[-0.14982,51.50337],[-0.1522,51.5031],[-0.15109,51.50406],[-0.15091,51.50495],[-0.15112,51.5056],[-0.1548,51.50894],[-0.15653,51.51023],[-0.1576,51.51203],[-0.1588,51.5132],[-0.15655,51.51365],[-0.14663,51.51468],[-0.14198,51.51534],[-0.14153,51.51418]]]},"centre":[-0.1471,51.51018],"bounds":[[-0.1588,51.5031],[-0.13464,51.51534]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":65,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":6,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":39,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":3,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"shopping","name":"Shopping","count":16,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"outdoors","name":"Outdoors & Nature","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":6,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":3,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"breakfast","name":"Breakfast & Brunch","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":5,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"beer","name":"Beer","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"cocktails","name":"Cocktails","count":9,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"wine","name":"Wine","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"royal","name":"Royal London","count":4,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"sacred","name":"Sacred London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"beautiful-streets","name":"Beautiful Streets","count":6,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"monuments","name":"Monuments & Ruins","count":6,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"classic-british-shops","name":"Classic British Shops","count":31,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"science","name":"Science & Engineering","count":3,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":6,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"harry-potter","name":"Harry Potter","count":1,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"A Cabinet of Curiosities: Decorative Papers and Natural History","slug":"a-cabinet-of-curiosities-decorative-papers-and-natural-history","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/linnean-society/a-cabinet-of-curiosities-decorative-papers-and-natural-history/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-17","to":"2026-11-17"},"lat":51.5088,"lng":-0.1395,"verdict":"Make marbled paper the eighteenth-century way, then a cabinet to line with it."},{"name":"An Evening of Unnecessary Detail at the Royal Institution","slug":"an-evening-of-unnecessary-detail-at-the-royal-institution","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/faraday-museum/an-evening-of-unnecessary-detail-at-the-royal-institution/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-24","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.509702,"lng":-0.142279,"verdict":"Science comedy in the lecture theatre where Faraday gave the Christmas Lectures."},{"name":"An Evening with the Sunbirds of the World","slug":"an-evening-with-the-sunbirds-of-the-world","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/linnean-society/an-evening-with-the-sunbirds-of-the-world/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-22","to":"2026-10-22"},"lat":51.5088,"lng":-0.1395,"verdict":"The Old World's answer to the hummingbird, which it is not related to."},{"name":"Astonished By Beauty: The Essential Practice of Natural History","slug":"astonished-by-beauty-the-essential-practice-of-natural-history","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/linnean-society/astonished-by-beauty-the-essential-practice-of-natural-history/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-03","to":"2026-11-03"},"lat":51.5088,"lng":-0.1395,"verdict":"A defence of looking at things closely as a serious method."},{"name":"Bedtime Stories","slug":"bedtime-stories","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/charles-ede/bedtime-stories/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-14","to":"2026-10-28"},"lat":51.511973,"lng":-0.148474,"verdict":"Antiquities shown against contemporary design, during Frieze and PAD week."},{"name":"Cady Noland","slug":"cady-noland","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/gagosian-davies-street/cady-noland/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-12","to":"2026-12-19"},"lat":51.511094,"lng":-0.147732,"verdict":"The most withholding artist in America, showing in a single room off Berkeley Square."},{"name":"Catherine Murphy: Recent Work","slug":"catherine-murphy-recent-work","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/sadie-coles-hq/catherine-murphy-recent-work/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.511308,"lng":-0.140414,"verdict":"An American realist who spends a year on a painting and makes you look at a stair carpet."},{"name":"Cindy Sherman","slug":"cindy-sherman","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/hauser-wirth/cindy-sherman/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-13","to":"2026-12-23"},"lat":51.51195,"lng":-0.141221,"verdict":"Sherman photographs herself again, this time nearly buried in drapery."},{"name":"Corinthian Chamber Orchestra: Kodaly, Saint-Saens, Mendelssohn","slug":"corinthian-chamber-orchestra-kodaly-saint-saens-mendelssohn","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/corinthian-chamber-orchestra-kodaly-saint-saens-mendelssohn/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-10-02"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"Bruno Philippe plays the Saint-Saens cello concerto to open the season."},{"name":"Curator talk: Painting the French Riviera","slug":"curator-talk-painting-the-french-riviera","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/royal-academy-of-arts/curator-talk-painting-the-french-riviera/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-09","to":"2026-10-09"},"lat":51.509264,"lng":-0.139698,"verdict":"How a malarial coastline became the light every painter wanted."},{"name":"Curator talk: Richard Dadd","slug":"curator-talk-richard-dadd","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/royal-academy-of-arts/curator-talk-richard-dadd/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.509264,"lng":-0.139698,"verdict":"The curator on the painter who killed his father and worked forty years in asylums."},{"name":"David and Yuko Juda Art Foundation Award","slug":"david-and-yuko-juda-art-foundation-award","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/annely-juda-fine-art/david-and-yuko-juda-art-foundation-award/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.514424,"lng":-0.144599,"verdict":"Seven artists shortlisted for a \u00a350,000 grant, shown together for ten days."},{"name":"Eva Victoria Schockmel plays Barrios and Buxtehude","slug":"eva-victoria-schockmel-plays-barrios-and-buxtehude","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/eva-victoria-schockmel-plays-barrios-and-buxtehude/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"A Luxembourgish guitarist's hour, ending on a Hungarian fantasy."},{"name":"Friday night life drawing: bathers by the sea","slug":"friday-night-life-drawing-bathers-by-the-sea","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/royal-academy-of-arts/friday-night-life-drawing-bathers-by-the-sea/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-23","to":"2026-10-23"},"lat":51.509264,"lng":-0.139698,"verdict":"Draw from a life model in the Academy after hours, with a drink."},{"name":"Georg Baselitz: The Heroes 1965-66","slug":"georg-baselitz-the-heroes-1965-66","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/thaddaeus-ropac/georg-baselitz-the-heroes-1965-66/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-13","to":"2026-12-18"},"lat":51.508455,"lng":-0.142624,"verdict":"The paintings that made Baselitz notorious, in a Mayfair townhouse."},{"name":"Graham Little","slug":"graham-little","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/alison-jacques/graham-little/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-09","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.51028,"lng":-0.141435,"verdict":"Gouache paintings of women in interiors, made slowly and looking like fashion plates that have gone wrong."},{"name":"Hayal Pozanti: A Dream That Rhymed With Mine","slug":"hayal-pozanti-a-dream-that-rhymed-with-mine","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/timothy-taylor/hayal-pozanti-a-dream-that-rhymed-with-mine/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.507295,"lng":-0.144411,"verdict":"Abstract shapes from an alphabet the artist invented for herself."},{"name":"Henry Moore: The Female Form","slug":"henry-moore-the-female-form","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/richard-green/henry-moore-the-female-form/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.511321,"lng":-0.143882,"verdict":"Fourteen small Moore bronzes on New Bond Street, free to walk in and look at."},{"name":"Herbarium: Plants in a New Light","slug":"herbarium-plants-in-a-new-light","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/linnean-society/herbarium-plants-in-a-new-light/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-21","to":"2026-09-21"},"lat":51.5088,"lng":-0.1395,"verdict":"Linnaeus's own pressed plants, photographed from behind with the light coming through."},{"name":"Hidden London: Dover Street \u2014 alight here for Green Park","slug":"hidden-london-dover-street-alight-here-for-green-park","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-dover-street-alight-here-for-green-park/","lat":51.506624,"lng":-0.142944,"verdict":"A station inside a station, shut to passengers since 1933."},{"name":"Hidden London: Down Street \u2014 Churchill's secret station","slug":"hidden-london-down-street-churchills-secret-station","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-down-street-churchills-secret-station/","lat":51.50475,"lng":-0.14757,"verdict":"The disused Mayfair station where the railways were run from, and Churchill slept, through the Blitz.","thumb":"/img/own-down-street-480.jpg?v=20c64caa","img":"/img/own-down-street.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Hidden London: Piccadilly Circus \u2014 the heart of London","slug":"hidden-london-piccadilly-circus-the-heart-of-london","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-piccadilly-circus-the-heart-of-london/","lat":51.509819,"lng":-0.134548,"verdict":"Edwardian tunnels sealed in 1929, under the busiest circus in London."},{"name":"Hyun-Sook Song","slug":"hyun-sook-song","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/spruth-magers/hyun-sook-song/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-01","to":"2026-12-19"},"lat":51.509966,"lng":-0.143845,"verdict":"A Korean painter's first UK show, forty years in the making."},{"name":"Ian Davenport: Reflections","slug":"ian-davenport-reflections","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/waddington-custot/ian-davenport-reflections/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-21","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.510092,"lng":-0.141413,"verdict":"Forty years of poured paint, from the man who let gravity do the composition."},{"name":"Jane Colden's Plants","slug":"jane-coldens-plants","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/linnean-society/jane-coldens-plants/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-19","to":"2026-10-19"},"lat":51.5088,"lng":-0.1395,"verdict":"The first woman to describe American plants, working in colonial New York."},{"name":"Kamilla Arku: Emahoy, Bonis, Ellington and Bonds","slug":"kamilla-arku-emahoy-bonis-ellington-and-bonds","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/kamilla-arku-emahoy-bonis-ellington-and-bonds/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-09","to":"2026-10-09"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"An hour of piano music by composers the recital circuit mostly skips."},{"name":"Krzysztof Grzybacz: Haruspex","slug":"krzysztof-grzybacz-haruspex","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/pace/krzysztof-grzybacz-haruspex/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.513848,"lng":-0.142915,"verdict":"Oil on linen from a young Polish painter, in Pace's Hanover Square rooms."},{"name":"Layla Wang and Yihan Jin: Coleridge-Taylor to The Butterfly Lovers","slug":"layla-wang-and-yihan-jin-coleridge-taylor-to-the-butterfly-lovers","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/layla-wang-and-yihan-jin-coleridge-taylor-to-the-butterfly-lovers/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-14","to":"2026-10-14"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"Four African Dances and a Chinese violin concerto in one lunch hour."},{"name":"London Oyster Championships","slug":"london-oyster-championships","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/london-oyster-championships/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.509726,"lng":-0.137736,"verdict":"England's fastest shuckers, on a Piccadilly terrace, judged by Stanley Tucci."},{"name":"Lorna Simpson: Previous & Ongoing","slug":"lorna-simpson-previous-ongoing","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/hauser-wirth/lorna-simpson-previous-ongoing/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-13","to":"2026-12-23"},"lat":51.51195,"lng":-0.141221,"verdict":"The conceptual photographer who turned to painting, and stayed."},{"name":"Louis Fratino: Prose","slug":"louis-fratino-prose","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/david-zwirner/louis-fratino-prose/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.509456,"lng":-0.142949,"verdict":"Intimate paintings of gay domestic life that borrow openly from Picasso and Hartley."},{"name":"Lucy Dodd: The good, the true and the beautiful","slug":"lucy-dodd-the-good-the-true-and-the-beautiful","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/spruth-magers/lucy-dodd-the-good-the-true-and-the-beautiful/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.509966,"lng":-0.143845,"verdict":"Paintings made with earth, ash and plant matter carted down from a Scottish studio."},{"name":"Mary Ramsden: The Feeling of What Happens","slug":"mary-ramsden-the-feeling-of-what-happens","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/pilar-corrias/mary-ramsden-the-feeling-of-what-happens/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.512146,"lng":-0.141799,"verdict":"A painter who works at the point where a gesture stops being one."},{"name":"Nicole Eisenman","slug":"nicole-eisenman","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/royal-academy-of-arts/nicole-eisenman/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-22","to":"2027-02-05"},"lat":51.509264,"lng":-0.139698,"verdict":"A free display of the American painter's work at Burlington House."},{"name":"Nights of Al-Andalus: Algerian songs of memory and heritage","slug":"nights-of-al-andalus-algerian-songs-of-memory-and-heritage","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/nights-of-al-andalus-algerian-songs-of-memory-and-heritage/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-10","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"Nouba, the Andalusian classical music that left Spain in 1492 and stayed in Algeria."},{"name":"Open House at the Linnean Society","slug":"open-house-at-the-linnean-society","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/linnean-society/open-house-at-the-linnean-society/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.5088,"lng":-0.1395,"verdict":"The rooms where Darwin and Wallace were first read out, open with no booking."},{"name":"Oscar Murillo: Unfinished thinking","slug":"oscar-murillo-unfinished-thinking","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/david-zwirner/oscar-murillo-unfinished-thinking/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-19","to":"2026-11-28"},"lat":51.509456,"lng":-0.142949,"verdict":"Paintings and social maps from the Colombian-British artist who shared the Turner Prize."},{"name":"Outsider Animals: Cherishing Shunned Creatures","slug":"outsider-animals-cherishing-shunned-creatures","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/linnean-society/outsider-animals-cherishing-shunned-creatures/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-15","to":"2026-10-15"},"lat":51.5088,"lng":-0.1395,"verdict":"What the rat, the raccoon and the gull know that the chimpanzee does not."},{"name":"PAD London","slug":"pad-london","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/pad-london/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-13","to":"2026-10-18","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.5098,"lng":-0.1454,"verdict":"Design and decorative art from the world's dealers, in a tent on Berkeley Square."},{"name":"Painting the French Riviera","slug":"painting-the-french-riviera","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/royal-academy-of-arts/painting-the-french-riviera/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2027-01-31"},"lat":51.509264,"lng":-0.139698,"verdict":"Monet, Matisse, Picasso, C\u00e9zanne and Klein on the C\u00f4te d'Azur, in 160 works."},{"name":"Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector","slug":"peggy-guggenheim-in-london-the-making-of-a-collector","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/royal-academy-of-arts/peggy-guggenheim-in-london-the-making-of-a-collector/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-21","to":"2027-03-14"},"lat":51.509264,"lng":-0.139698,"verdict":"The Cork Street gallery that scandalised 1938 London, reassembled round the corner."},{"name":"Peter Howson: Salvation","slug":"peter-howson-salvation","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/flowers-gallery/peter-howson-salvation/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.510133,"lng":-0.141127,"verdict":"The Scottish painter who was an official war artist in Bosnia, and never got over it."},{"name":"Propstore music memorabilia: the free exhibition","slug":"propstore-music-memorabilia-the-free-exhibition","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/propstore-music-memorabilia-the-free-exhibition/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.513887,"lng":-0.158531,"verdict":"Freddie Mercury's stage clothes and John Lennon's glasses, on show for four days before they are sold."},{"name":"Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam","slug":"richard-dadd-beyond-bedlam","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/royal-academy-of-arts/richard-dadd-beyond-bedlam/","runs":{"from":"2026-07-25","to":"2026-10-25"},"lat":51.509264,"lng":-0.139698,"verdict":"The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke and a hundred other works painted inside the asylum."},{"name":"Richard Tuttle: Small Sculptures of the 1970s","slug":"richard-tuttle-small-sculptures-of-the-1970s","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/modern-art/richard-tuttle-small-sculptures-of-the-1970s/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.507056,"lng":-0.140402,"verdict":"Very small things made of wire, cloth and plywood, by an artist who spent a career refusing scale."},{"name":"Romanesque","slug":"romanesque","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/sam-fogg/romanesque/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-10-22"},"lat":51.510736,"lng":-0.142014,"verdict":"Twelfth-century carving and metalwork in a Clifford Street gallery, free."},{"name":"Sadra Mahshidfar plays his own preludes and Bortkiewicz","slug":"sadra-mahshidfar-plays-his-own-preludes-and-bortkiewicz","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/sadra-mahshidfar-plays-his-own-preludes-and-bortkiewicz/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"A pianist playing his own music alongside a Russian romantic almost nobody programmes."},{"name":"Sarah Schlesinger: Sight Line","slug":"sarah-schlesinger-sight-line","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/huxley-parlour/sarah-schlesinger-sight-line/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.509214,"lng":-0.137434,"verdict":"New work at the Swallow Street gallery, off Regent Street."},{"name":"Shani Rhys James: The Afternoon House","slug":"shani-rhys-james-the-afternoon-house","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/connaught-brown/shani-rhys-james-the-afternoon-house/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-10-02"},"lat":51.508103,"lng":-0.140771,"verdict":"Forty years of women in rooms, and the rooms keep closing in."},{"name":"St Luke's Senior Choir, Argentina","slug":"st-lukes-senior-choir-argentina","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/st-lukes-senior-choir-argentina/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"Sixteen-year-olds from Buenos Aires singing Latin America and Europe in the same hour."},{"name":"Surface Tension: British Painting in the 1990s","slug":"surface-tension-british-painting-in-the-1990s","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/ben-brown-fine-arts/surface-tension-british-painting-in-the-1990s/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-10-30"},"lat":51.512471,"lng":-0.145904,"verdict":"The painters who kept painting while the Young British Artists took all the attention."},{"name":"Talks at the Royal Institution","slug":"talks-at-the-royal-institution","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/faraday-museum/talks-at-the-royal-institution/","lat":51.509702,"lng":-0.142279,"verdict":"Scientists talking in the lecture theatre where Faraday demonstrated electricity and the Christmas Lectures are filmed."},{"name":"Tcha Limberger Quartet","slug":"tcha-limberger-quartet","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/crazy-coqs/tcha-limberger-quartet/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-22","to":"2026-09-22"},"lat":51.510623,"lng":-0.135584,"verdict":"A blind Belgian violinist who plays Hungarian village music, Gypsy jazz and Flemish song."},{"name":"The Black Cat Cabaret: Salon des Artistes","slug":"the-black-cat-cabaret-salon-des-artistes","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/crazy-coqs/the-black-cat-cabaret-salon-des-artistes/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.510623,"lng":-0.135584,"verdict":"Late-night circus, burlesque and variety in an art deco basement off Piccadilly."},{"name":"The Hallelujah House: Inside Handel's HQ","slug":"the-hallelujah-house-inside-handels-hq","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/handel-hendrix-house/the-hallelujah-house-inside-handels-hq/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2027-03-14"},"lat":51.512942,"lng":-0.145884,"verdict":"The house where Messiah was written, treated as the composer's head office."},{"name":"The John Madejski Fine Rooms","slug":"the-john-madejski-fine-rooms","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/royal-academy-of-arts/the-john-madejski-fine-rooms/","runs":{"from":"2025-12-16","to":"2027-01-29"},"lat":51.509264,"lng":-0.139698,"verdict":"The Academy's own collection, free, in the rooms most visitors walk straight past."},{"name":"The Sixteen: music for All Saints and All Souls","slug":"the-sixteen-music-for-all-saints-and-all-souls","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/the-sixteen-music-for-all-saints-and-all-souls/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-27","to":"2026-10-27"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"Harry Christophers's choir on Portuguese requiem polyphony and English Renaissance sacred music."},{"name":"This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte","slug":"this-is-still-not-a-pipe-the-afterlife-of-magritte","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/gagosian-grosvenor-hill/this-is-still-not-a-pipe-the-afterlife-of-magritte/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-12-12"},"lat":51.510918,"lng":-0.146685,"verdict":"Magritte across every period, and the artists who never got over him."},{"name":"Thomas Houseago: Death's Sacred Mirror","slug":"thomas-houseago-deaths-sacred-mirror","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/levy-gorvy-dayan/thomas-houseago-deaths-sacred-mirror/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-04","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.50943,"lng":-0.140945,"verdict":"New sculptures set among Aztec artefacts, a Beuys and a Bourgeois, all chosen by the sculptor."},{"name":"Underdog: The Other Other Bronte","slug":"underdog-the-other-other-bronte","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/criterion-theatre/underdog-the-other-other-bronte/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.509617,"lng":-0.133988,"verdict":"Anne Bronte, who wrote two novels and got forgotten, tells you what she thinks of that."},{"name":"Vivaldi by candlelight at St James's Piccadilly","slug":"vivaldi-candlelight-st-jamess-september","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/vivaldi-candlelight-st-jamess-september/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"The Four Seasons in a Wren church lit by candles."},{"name":"Vivaldi by candlelight at St James's Piccadilly: October","slug":"vivaldi-candlelight-st-jamess-october","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/vivaldi-candlelight-st-jamess-october/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-24","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"The candlelit Four Seasons again, this time with Jenny Sacha."},{"name":"White Cube x RA","slug":"white-cube-x-ra","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/royal-academy-of-arts/white-cube-x-ra/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-22","to":"2027-03-07"},"lat":51.509264,"lng":-0.139698,"verdict":"A commercial gallery's artists hung in the Academy, and everything is for sale."},{"name":"William Crozier: Dance of the Living 1961-1974","slug":"william-crozier-dance-of-the-living-1961-1974","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/flowers-gallery/william-crozier-dance-of-the-living-1961-1974/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-14","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.510133,"lng":-0.141127,"verdict":"Thirteen years of a Scottish-Irish painter's most abrasive work."},{"name":"Xue Ruozhe: One Table, Two Chairs","slug":"xue-ruozhe-one-table-two-chairs","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/massimo-de-carlo/xue-ruozhe-one-table-two-chairs/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-03","to":"2026-10-07"},"lat":51.510804,"lng":-0.141546,"verdict":"Paintings built on the bare stage of Chinese opera, where a table and two chairs make a palace."},{"name":"Apsley House","slug":"apsley-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/apsley-house/","lat":51.503488,"lng":-0.151712,"verdict":"Number One London: the Duke of Wellington's house at Hyde Park Corner, still full of what Europe gave him, with Napoleon naked in the stairwell.","thumb":"/img/apsley-house-480.jpg?v=8f66f6bc","img":"/img/apsley-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":738},{"name":"Faraday Museum","slug":"faraday-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/faraday-museum/","lat":51.509702,"lng":-0.142279,"verdict":"Faraday's basement laboratory, where electricity was tamed, under the Royal Institution's lecture theatre, free."},{"name":"Handel Hendrix House","slug":"handel-hendrix-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/handel-hendrix-house/","lat":51.512942,"lng":-0.145884,"verdict":"Handel's house and Jimi Hendrix's flat, next door to each other on Brook Street, with a wall and two hundred years between them.","thumb":"/img/handel-hendrix-house-480.jpg?v=0a0f1673","img":"/img/handel-hendrix-house.jpg","w":728,"h":1024},{"name":"Kennel Club Dog Art Gallery","slug":"kennel-club-dog-art-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/kennel-club-dog-art-gallery/","deep":true,"lat":51.5068,"lng":-0.1448,"verdict":"Exhibits and collection of dog paintings, open by appointment."},{"name":"Royal Academy of Arts","slug":"royal-academy-of-arts","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/royal-academy-of-arts/","lat":51.509264,"lng":-0.139698,"verdict":"Artists have run this place since 1768: loan exhibitions most of the year, rooms of their own work, and the Summer Exhibition every year without a break.","thumb":"/img/own-royal-academy-of-arts-480.jpg?v=3112e0b5","img":"/img/own-royal-academy-of-arts.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Wellington Arch","slug":"wellington-arch","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/wellington-arch/","lat":51.502536,"lng":-0.150818,"verdict":"Decimus Burton's arch at Hyde Park Corner, with the largest bronze sculpture in Europe on top and balconies inside to climb to.","thumb":"/img/wellington-arch-480.jpg?v=3fc925e4","img":"/img/wellington-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":669},{"name":"Alison Jacques","slug":"alison-jacques","cat":"art","url":"/art/alison-jacques/","deep":true,"lat":51.51028,"lng":-0.141435,"verdict":"The gallery that revived Dorothea Tanning, Lenore Tawney and Sheila Hicks, on Cork Street."},{"name":"Almine Rech","slug":"almine-rech","cat":"art","url":"/art/almine-rech/","deep":true,"lat":51.512398,"lng":-0.143217,"verdict":"The Paris gallery of James Turrell, Jeff Koons's editions and a wide list of painters, on St George Street."},{"name":"Annely Juda Fine Art","slug":"annely-juda-fine-art","cat":"art","url":"/art/annely-juda-fine-art/","deep":true,"lat":51.514424,"lng":-0.144599,"verdict":"The gallery of the Russian avant-garde and British abstraction since 1968, now on Hanover Square."},{"name":"Ben Brown Fine Arts","slug":"ben-brown-fine-arts","cat":"art","url":"/art/ben-brown-fine-arts/","deep":true,"lat":51.512471,"lng":-0.145904,"verdict":"A Mayfair mews gallery for Lucio Fontana, Alighiero Boetti and the photographs of Candida H\u00f6fer."},{"name":"Bonhams","slug":"bonhams","cat":"art","url":"/art/bonhams/","lat":51.513627,"lng":-0.146674,"verdict":"The New Bond Street salerooms of the third of the London houses, with viewings of everything from Old Masters to motorcars.","thumb":"/img/bonhams-480.jpg?v=a183de1e","img":"/img/bonhams.jpg","w":576,"h":1024},{"name":"Charles Ede","slug":"charles-ede","cat":"art","url":"/art/charles-ede/","deep":true,"lat":51.511973,"lng":-0.148474,"verdict":"Antiquities dealers since 1971, Greek vases and Roman marbles in a Mayfair mews."},{"name":"Connaught Brown","slug":"connaught-brown","cat":"art","url":"/art/connaught-brown/","deep":true,"lat":51.508103,"lng":-0.140771,"verdict":"Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modern British pictures on Albemarle Street."},{"name":"Daniel Katz Gallery","slug":"daniel-katz-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/daniel-katz-gallery/","deep":true,"lat":51.509311,"lng":-0.147761,"verdict":"European sculpture from the medieval to the nineteenth century, in a Mayfair townhouse."},{"name":"David Zwirner","slug":"david-zwirner","cat":"art","url":"/art/david-zwirner/","deep":true,"lat":51.509456,"lng":-0.142949,"verdict":"Zwirner's Mayfair townhouse, five floors of the gallery that represents Yayoi Kusama, Luc Tuymans and the Judd and Flavin estates."},{"name":"Dickinson","slug":"dickinson","cat":"art","url":"/art/dickinson/","deep":true,"lat":51.507903,"lng":-0.138225,"verdict":"Simon Dickinson's Jermyn Street rooms, where museum-quality Old Masters and Impressionists pass through on their way between collections."},{"name":"Flowers Gallery","slug":"flowers-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/flowers-gallery/","deep":true,"lat":51.510133,"lng":-0.141127,"verdict":"Angela Flowers's gallery, going since 1970, with British painters and a strong photography programme on Cork Street."},{"name":"Gagosian Davies Street","slug":"gagosian-davies-street","cat":"art","url":"/art/gagosian-davies-street/","deep":true,"lat":51.511094,"lng":-0.147732,"verdict":"The small Gagosian on Davies Street, a single room for one work or one idea."},{"name":"Gagosian Grosvenor Hill","slug":"gagosian-grosvenor-hill","cat":"art","url":"/art/gagosian-grosvenor-hill/","deep":true,"lat":51.510918,"lng":-0.146685,"verdict":"Gagosian's main London room, museum-scale shows of the biggest names in a Mayfair mews."},{"name":"Hauser & Wirth","slug":"hauser-wirth","cat":"art","url":"/art/hauser-wirth/","deep":true,"lat":51.51195,"lng":-0.141221,"verdict":"The Savile Row galleries of the Swiss dealers, two floors of museum-grade shows behind a tailor's street."},{"name":"Horse and Rider","slug":"horse-and-rider","cat":"art","url":"/art/horse-and-rider/","lat":51.509639,"lng":-0.141491,"verdict":"Elisabeth Frink's horse and rider at the corner of Dover Street and Piccadilly, 1975.","thumb":"/img/horse-and-rider-480.jpg?v=be874de1","img":"/img/horse-and-rider.jpg","w":1024,"h":712},{"name":"Huxley-Parlour","slug":"huxley-parlour","cat":"art","url":"/art/huxley-parlour/","deep":true,"lat":51.509214,"lng":-0.137434,"verdict":"Photography and painting in two Mayfair galleries, with a line in the twentieth-century masters."},{"name":"L\u00e9vy Gorvy Dayan","slug":"levy-gorvy-dayan","cat":"art","url":"/art/levy-gorvy-dayan/","deep":true,"lat":51.50943,"lng":-0.140945,"verdict":"Old Bond Street rooms for the twentieth century: Yves Klein, Pierre Soulages, G\u00fcnther Uecker and Zao Wou-Ki."},{"name":"Massimo De Carlo","slug":"massimo-de-carlo","cat":"art","url":"/art/massimo-de-carlo/","deep":true,"lat":51.510804,"lng":-0.141546,"verdict":"The Milan gallery of Maurizio Cattelan and Rudolf Stingel, in a Mayfair townhouse on Clifford Street."},{"name":"Modern Art","slug":"modern-art","cat":"art","url":"/art/modern-art/","deep":true,"lat":51.507056,"lng":-0.140402,"verdict":"Stuart Shave's gallery, now on Bennet Street in St James's, with a list from Barry McGee to Yngve Holen."},{"name":"Osborne Samuel","slug":"osborne-samuel","cat":"art","url":"/art/osborne-samuel/","deep":true,"lat":51.510133,"lng":-0.141127,"verdict":"Modern British sculpture and prints on Cork Street: Moore, Hepworth, Lynn Chadwick and the Grosvenor School."},{"name":"Pace","slug":"pace","cat":"art","url":"/art/pace/","deep":true,"lat":51.513848,"lng":-0.142915,"verdict":"The New York gallery's London home on Hanover Square, with Rothko, Calder and Agnes Martin behind it and Loie Hollowell and Adam Pendleton in front."},{"name":"Phillips","slug":"phillips","cat":"art","url":"/art/phillips/","lat":51.510499,"lng":-0.14695,"verdict":"Berkeley Square's auction house, given over to twentieth-century and contemporary art, design and photographs."},{"name":"Pilar Corrias","slug":"pilar-corrias","cat":"art","url":"/art/pilar-corrias/","deep":true,"lat":51.512146,"lng":-0.141799,"verdict":"Two Mayfair galleries for a list that leans to painting and film: Christina Quarles, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno."},{"name":"Richard Green","slug":"richard-green","cat":"art","url":"/art/richard-green/","deep":true,"lat":51.511321,"lng":-0.143882,"verdict":"New Bond Street's Old Master and Impressionist dealer, with Dutch still lifes and French landscapes in the window."},{"name":"Robilant+Voena","slug":"robilant-voena","cat":"art","url":"/art/robilant-voena/","deep":true,"lat":51.508404,"lng":-0.142445,"verdict":"Italian Old Masters and the Italian twentieth century, from Milan and Turin to Dover Street."},{"name":"Royal Academy of Arts","slug":"royal-academy-of-arts","cat":"art","url":"/art/royal-academy-of-arts/","lat":51.509264,"lng":-0.139698,"verdict":"Artists have run this place since 1768: loan exhibitions most of the year, rooms of their own work, and the Summer Exhibition every year without a break.","thumb":"/img/own-royal-academy-of-arts-480.jpg?v=3112e0b5","img":"/img/own-royal-academy-of-arts.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Sadie Coles HQ","slug":"sadie-coles-hq","cat":"art","url":"/art/sadie-coles-hq/","deep":true,"lat":51.511308,"lng":-0.140414,"verdict":"The gallery of Sarah Lucas, Urs Fischer and Helen Marten, now headquartered on Savile Row."},{"name":"Sam Fogg","slug":"sam-fogg","cat":"art","url":"/art/sam-fogg/","deep":true,"lat":51.510736,"lng":-0.142014,"verdict":"Medieval art - manuscripts, sculpture, stained glass - in first-floor rooms on Clifford Street."},{"name":"Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain","slug":"shaftesbury-memorial-fountain","cat":"art","url":"/art/shaftesbury-memorial-fountain/","lat":51.509896,"lng":-0.134486,"verdict":"Eros, who is not Eros, on the fountain at Piccadilly Circus.","thumb":"/img/shaftesbury-memorial-fountain-480.jpg?v=ed5db40b","img":"/img/shaftesbury-memorial-fountain.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Sotheby's","slug":"sothebys","cat":"art","url":"/art/sothebys/","lat":51.511901,"lng":-0.14332,"verdict":"The New Bond Street salerooms, where the week's best pictures hang for a few days, free, before they are sold.","thumb":"/img/sothebys-480.jpg?v=78da679d","img":"/img/sothebys.jpg","w":739,"h":1024},{"name":"Spr\u00fcth Magers","slug":"spruth-magers","cat":"art","url":"/art/spruth-magers/","deep":true,"lat":51.509966,"lng":-0.143845,"verdict":"The Berlin and Cologne gallery of Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Rosemarie Trockel, on Grafton Street."},{"name":"Stephen Friedman Gallery","slug":"stephen-friedman-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/stephen-friedman-gallery/","deep":true,"lat":51.510385,"lng":-0.141873,"verdict":"The Cork Street gallery of Yinka Shonibare, Kehinde Wiley and Mamma Andersson."},{"name":"Thaddaeus Ropac","slug":"thaddaeus-ropac","cat":"art","url":"/art/thaddaeus-ropac/","deep":true,"lat":51.508455,"lng":-0.142624,"verdict":"The Austrian dealer's London house: Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer and Robert Rauschenberg's estate in an eighteenth-century mansion."},{"name":"The Weiss Gallery","slug":"the-weiss-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/the-weiss-gallery/","deep":true,"lat":51.507903,"lng":-0.138225,"verdict":"Tudor and Stuart portraits, the best in the trade, on Jermyn Street."},{"name":"Timothy Taylor","slug":"timothy-taylor","cat":"art","url":"/art/timothy-taylor/","deep":true,"lat":51.507295,"lng":-0.144411,"verdict":"Painting first, in a Mayfair gallery: Sean Scully, Alex Katz, Kiki Smith and the Antoni Tapies estate."},{"name":"Trinity Fine Art","slug":"trinity-fine-art","cat":"art","url":"/art/trinity-fine-art/","deep":true,"lat":51.508992,"lng":-0.140587,"verdict":"Old Master paintings, sculpture and works of art in Old Bond Street rooms, with a scholar's approach."},{"name":"Waddington Custot","slug":"waddington-custot","cat":"art","url":"/art/waddington-custot/","deep":true,"lat":51.510092,"lng":-0.141413,"verdict":"The Cork Street gallery of the twentieth-century masters: Mir\u00f3, Dubuffet, Peter Blake, Bill Woodrow."},{"name":"Wellington Arch","slug":"wellington-arch","cat":"art","url":"/art/wellington-arch/","lat":51.502536,"lng":-0.150818,"verdict":"Decimus Burton's arch at Hyde Park Corner, with the largest bronze sculpture in Europe on top and balconies inside to climb to.","thumb":"/img/wellington-arch-480.jpg?v=3fc925e4","img":"/img/wellington-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":669},{"name":"Winged Figure","slug":"winged-figure","cat":"art","url":"/art/winged-figure/","lat":51.515132,"lng":-0.144486,"verdict":"Barbara Hepworth's aluminium and steel wing on the side of John Lewis, Oxford Street, since 1963.","thumb":"/img/winged-figure-480.jpg?v=5fedf148","img":"/img/winged-figure.jpg","w":576,"h":1024},{"name":"Crazy Coqs","slug":"crazy-coqs","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/crazy-coqs/","lat":51.510623,"lng":-0.135584,"verdict":"An intact art deco cabaret room in the basement of a Piccadilly hotel, doing songbook, jazz singers and cabaret.","thumb":"/img/crazy-coqs-480.jpg?v=ee96c4ba","img":"/img/crazy-coqs.jpg","w":1024,"h":683},{"name":"Criterion Theatre","slug":"criterion-theatre","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/criterion-theatre/","lat":51.509617,"lng":-0.133988,"verdict":"A Victorian theatre thirty feet under Piccadilly Circus, reached by going down."},{"name":"St James's Piccadilly","slug":"st-jamess-piccadilly","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/","lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"Wren's own favourite of his churches, with free lunchtime recitals three days a week.","thumb":"/img/own-st-jamess-piccadilly-480.jpg?v=723f7264","img":"/img/own-st-jamess-piccadilly.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Bond Street","slug":"bond-street","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/bond-street/","lat":51.510134,"lng":-0.14218,"verdict":"The jewellers at the bottom, the fashion houses at the top, and the auction rooms in between."},{"name":"Burlington Arcade","slug":"burlington-arcade","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/burlington-arcade/","lat":51.50901,"lng":-0.140192,"verdict":"The first shopping arcade in Britain, still patrolled by beadles in top hats who will stop you whistling.","thumb":"/img/street-burlington-arcade-480.jpg?v=5489ffe9","img":"/img/street-burlington-arcade.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Floris London","slug":"floris-london","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/floris-london/","lat":51.508142,"lng":-0.137214,"verdict":"A perfumer on the same Jermyn Street site since 1730, still run by the founder's family nine generations on.","thumb":"/img/floris-london-480.jpg?v=f30aac58","img":"/img/floris-london.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Fortnum & Mason","slug":"fortnum-mason","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/fortnum-mason/","lat":51.508236,"lng":-0.13817,"verdict":"The Piccadilly grocer since 1707, and still the most reliable place in London to buy something British to take home.","thumb":"/img/fortnum-mason-480.jpg?v=9e0e4d11","img":"/img/fortnum-mason.jpg","w":989,"h":1024},{"name":"Hamleys","slug":"hamleys","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/hamleys/","lat":51.51291,"lng":-0.139942,"verdict":"Seven floors of toys with somebody demonstrating one on every landing.","thumb":"/img/hamleys-480.jpg?v=22d80275","img":"/img/hamleys.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Hatchards","slug":"hatchards","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/hatchards/","lat":51.508475,"lng":-0.138049,"verdict":"London's oldest bookshop, opened in 1797 and still selling books over five floors of Piccadilly.","thumb":"/img/hatchards-480.jpg?v=7c738126","img":"/img/hatchards.jpg","w":688,"h":1024},{"name":"Jermyn Street","slug":"jermyn-street","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/jermyn-street/","lat":51.50848,"lng":-0.136445,"verdict":"Shirtmakers, shoemakers, a cheesemonger and a perfumer, most of them here for a century or more.","thumb":"/img/jermyn-street-480.jpg?v=cf6b7a88","img":"/img/jermyn-street.jpg","w":836,"h":1024},{"name":"John Lewis Oxford Street","slug":"john-lewis-oxford-street","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/john-lewis-oxford-street/","lat":51.515425,"lng":-0.145208,"verdict":"The flagship of a shop owned by the people who work in it.","thumb":"/img/john-lewis-oxford-street-480.jpg?v=d1dd6f61","img":"/img/john-lewis-oxford-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Liberty London","slug":"liberty-london","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/liberty-london/","lat":51.513835,"lng":-0.140075,"verdict":"A mock-Tudor department store built from two warships, and the printed fabrics that carry its name worldwide.","thumb":"/img/liberty-london-480.jpg?v=8466f8dd","img":"/img/liberty-london.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Oxford Street","slug":"oxford-street","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/oxford-street/","lat":51.514694,"lng":-0.146528,"verdict":"Selfridges, John Lewis and the high street at its densest."},{"name":"Paxton & Whitfield","slug":"paxton-whitfield","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/paxton-whitfield/","lat":51.508272,"lng":-0.136902,"verdict":"Cheesemonger to Jermyn Street since 1797, with a counter of British farmhouse cheese cut to order.","thumb":"/img/paxton-whitfield-480.jpg?v=f69078a0","img":"/img/paxton-whitfield.jpg","w":1024,"h":604},{"name":"Regent Street","slug":"regent-street","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/regent-street/","lat":51.512013,"lng":-0.139742,"verdict":"The big names' flagships under one curved Regency facade."},{"name":"Savile Row","slug":"savile-row","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/savile-row/","lat":51.511239,"lng":-0.140734,"verdict":"The tailors' street, where a suit is cut for you and takes months."},{"name":"Selfridges","slug":"selfridges","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/selfridges/","lat":51.514691,"lng":-0.152808,"verdict":"The store that invented the shop window as entertainment, at the end of Oxford Street nobody wanted.","thumb":"/img/selfridges-480.jpg?v=985f0a15","img":"/img/selfridges.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Turnbull & Asser","slug":"turnbull-asser","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/turnbull-asser/","lat":51.507482,"lng":-0.139247,"verdict":"The Jermyn Street shirtmaker, cutting bespoke on the premises since 1885 and holding a royal warrant for most of a century.","thumb":"/img/turnbull-asser-480.jpg?v=4acee55e","img":"/img/turnbull-asser.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Waterstones Piccadilly","slug":"waterstones-piccadilly","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/waterstones-piccadilly/","lat":51.50899,"lng":-0.135875,"verdict":"The largest bookshop in Europe, eight miles of shelves in the modernist Simpson's building on Piccadilly.","thumb":"/img/waterstones-piccadilly-480.jpg?v=d07eaeed","img":"/img/waterstones-piccadilly.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Grosvenor Square","slug":"grosvenor-square","cat":"outdoors","url":"/outdoors/grosvenor-square/","lat":51.51151,"lng":-0.151441,"verdict":"London's second largest garden square, dug up for a year and replanted as a wood.","thumb":"/img/grosvenor-square-480.jpg?v=10b55968","img":"/img/grosvenor-square.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Mount Street Gardens","slug":"mount-street-gardens","cat":"outdoors","url":"/outdoors/mount-street-gardens/","lat":51.509313,"lng":-0.150297,"verdict":"A walled garden behind Mount Street, sheltered enough for palms and mimosa, and lined with benches.","thumb":"/img/mount-street-gardens-480.jpg?v=05575f17","img":"/img/mount-street-gardens.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Attendant","slug":"attendant-mayfair","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/attendant-mayfair/","lat":51.513759,"lng":-0.151024,"verdict":"Duke Street, and a flat white worth the Mayfair mark-up."},{"name":"Guillam Mayfair","slug":"guillam-mayfair","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/guillam-mayfair/","lat":51.50767,"lng":-0.144894,"verdict":"Curzon Street, and coffee from seven on a weekday."},{"name":"Notes","slug":"notes-mayfair","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/notes-mayfair/","lat":51.514036,"lng":-0.149337,"verdict":"Coffee by day, wine by night, on the wrong end of Oxford Street."},{"name":"Redemption Roasters","slug":"redemption-roasters-st-james-s","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/redemption-roasters-st-james-s/","lat":51.508468,"lng":-0.136869,"verdict":"Jermyn Street, which is a pointed address for this business."},{"name":"WatchHouse Hanover","slug":"watchhouse-hanover","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/watchhouse-hanover/","lat":51.513708,"lng":-0.145077,"verdict":"WatchHouse in a Mayfair courtyard, doing the same thing more quietly."},{"name":"Workshop Coffee Co","slug":"workshop-coffee-co","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/workshop-coffee-co/","lat":51.515204,"lng":-0.149984,"verdict":"Workshop's Barrett Street counter, and a seasonal single origin on filter."},{"name":"Bread Ahead","slug":"bread-ahead-soho","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/bread-ahead-soho/","lat":51.512172,"lng":-0.138227,"verdict":"Beak Street, and the doughnut that made the name."},{"name":"Le Caf\u00e9 Robuchon","slug":"le-cafe-robuchon","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/le-cafe-robuchon/","lat":51.50648,"lng":-0.14376,"verdict":"Robuchon on Piccadilly, and a pain au chocolat that earns the address."},{"name":"Le Caf\u00e9 by Nicolas Rouzaud","slug":"le-cafe-by-nicolas-rouzaud","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/le-cafe-by-nicolas-rouzaud/","lat":51.509019,"lng":-0.140208,"verdict":"Burlington Arcade, and the most expensive croissant you will consider buying."},{"name":"Badiani Mayfair","slug":"badiani-mayfair","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/badiani-mayfair/","lat":51.513152,"lng":-0.152879,"verdict":"Gelato in a deconsecrated Mayfair church."},{"name":"Charbonnel et Walker","slug":"charbonnel-et-walker","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/charbonnel-et-walker/","lat":51.509128,"lng":-0.141274,"verdict":"Chocolates made in Britain since 1875, in a glass-roofed Victorian arcade off Old Bond Street.","thumb":"/img/charbonnel-et-walker-480.jpg?v=96997dd1","img":"/img/charbonnel-et-walker.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Guillam Mayfair","slug":"guillam-mayfair","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/guillam-mayfair/","lat":51.50767,"lng":-0.144894,"verdict":"Curzon Street, and coffee from seven on a weekday."},{"name":"The Wolseley","slug":"the-wolseley","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/the-wolseley/","lat":51.507395,"lng":-0.140908,"verdict":"The grand caf\u00e9 breakfast, in a former car showroom.","thumb":"/img/the-wolseley-480.jpg?v=88b136c7","img":"/img/the-wolseley.jpg","w":765,"h":1024},{"name":"Fortnum & Mason Food Halls","slug":"fortnum-mason-food-halls","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/fortnum-mason-food-halls/","lat":51.508236,"lng":-0.13817,"verdict":"Three centuries of provisions, and the Scotch egg it claims to have invented.","thumb":"/img/fortnum-mason-food-halls-480.jpg?v=9e0e4d11","img":"/img/fortnum-mason-food-halls.jpg","w":989,"h":1024},{"name":"Kingly Court","slug":"kingly-court","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/kingly-court/","lat":51.512323,"lng":-0.138439,"verdict":"Three galleried tiers of restaurants in a Soho courtyard.","thumb":"/img/kingly-court-480.jpg?v=464b5112","img":"/img/kingly-court.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Market Halls Oxford Street","slug":"market-halls-oxford-street","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/market-halls-oxford-street/","lat":51.515554,"lng":-0.144395,"verdict":"Somewhere decent to eat a minute off Oxford Street, which is rarer than it should be."},{"name":"Mercato Mayfair","slug":"mercato-mayfair","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/mercato-mayfair/","lat":51.513079,"lng":-0.153247,"verdict":"A historically protected church turned food hall, crypt bar included.","thumb":"/img/mercato-mayfair-480.jpg?v=d4c394d3","img":"/img/mercato-mayfair.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Selfridges Food Hall","slug":"selfridges-food-hall","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/selfridges-food-hall/","lat":51.514691,"lng":-0.152808,"verdict":"A department store food hall that behaves like a market.","thumb":"/img/selfridges-food-hall-480.jpg?v=3eecce05","img":"/img/selfridges-food-hall.jpg","w":962,"h":1024},{"name":"German Kraft Mayfair","slug":"german-kraft-mayfair","cat":"beer","url":"/beer/german-kraft-mayfair/","lat":51.513079,"lng":-0.153247,"verdict":"The same tank-fresh German beer, served at the altar of a historically protected church."},{"name":"Bar Am\u00e9ricain","slug":"bar-americain","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/bar-americain/","lat":51.510628,"lng":-0.1356,"verdict":"An Art Deco room off Piccadilly, at sensible prices."},{"name":"Cahoots","slug":"cahoots","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/cahoots/","lat":51.512436,"lng":-0.138523,"verdict":"A 1940s Tube carriage, played for laughs."},{"name":"Coburg Bar","slug":"coburg-bar","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/coburg-bar/","lat":51.510083,"lng":-0.149594,"verdict":"The Connaught's quieter bar, and easier to get into."},{"name":"Connaught Bar","slug":"connaught-bar","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/connaught-bar/","lat":51.510083,"lng":-0.149595,"verdict":"The martini trolley, and sixth-best bar in the world."},{"name":"Disrepute","slug":"disrepute","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/disrepute/","lat":51.512215,"lng":-0.138396,"verdict":"A basement off Kingly Court, done in green velvet."},{"name":"Fumoir","slug":"fumoir","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/fumoir/","lat":51.512519,"lng":-0.147526,"verdict":"Twenty-odd seats behind a curtain at Claridge's."},{"name":"Rivoli Bar","slug":"rivoli-bar","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/rivoli-bar/","lat":51.507191,"lng":-0.141425,"verdict":"A jewel box in camphor wood and gold leaf, with a dress code."},{"name":"The Bar at The Dorchester","slug":"the-bar-at-the-dorchester","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/the-bar-at-the-dorchester/","lat":51.507296,"lng":-0.152363,"verdict":"Park Lane grandeur, with live music most evenings."},{"name":"The Painter's Room","slug":"the-painters-room","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/the-painters-room/","lat":51.512519,"lng":-0.147526,"verdict":"Claridge's onyx-and-gold jewel box, built around aperitifs."},{"name":"Hedonism Wines","slug":"hedonism-wines","cat":"wine","url":"/wine/hedonism-wines/","lat":51.510745,"lng":-0.147667,"verdict":"Six thousand wines in Mayfair, from \u00a310 to the price of a car."},{"name":"Noble Rot Mayfair","slug":"noble-rot-mayfair","cat":"wine","url":"/wine/noble-rot-mayfair/","lat":51.506456,"lng":-0.14722,"verdict":"The Shepherd Market one, and the only Noble Rot with a terrace you can walk into."},{"name":"17 Bruton Street: Birthplace of Elizabeth II","slug":"17-bruton-street","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/17-bruton-street/","lat":51.5101,"lng":-0.1448,"verdict":"Born here on 21 April 1926, in her grandparents' house - pulled down in 1937, so a plaque on an office block is all there is.","thumb":"/img/17-bruton-street-480.jpg?v=24ea546c","img":"/img/17-bruton-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":854},{"name":"Marble Arch","slug":"marble-arch","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/marble-arch/","lat":51.513184,"lng":-0.158905,"verdict":"Buckingham Palace's original front gate, moved to the corner of Hyde Park in 1851 when the palace grew around it.","thumb":"/img/marble-arch-480.jpg?v=a18babf8","img":"/img/marble-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Queen Elizabeth Gate","slug":"queen-elizabeth-gate","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/queen-elizabeth-gate/","lat":51.504106,"lng":-0.152375,"verdict":"The gates into Hyde Park put up for the Queen Mother's ninetieth birthday, a lion and a unicorn in painted steel and bronze.","thumb":"/img/queen-elizabeth-gate-480.jpg?v=91ba76e8","img":"/img/queen-elizabeth-gate.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Wellington Arch","slug":"wellington-arch","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/wellington-arch/","lat":51.502536,"lng":-0.150818,"verdict":"The arch at Hyde Park Corner where the Queen's coffin left the gun carriage for the hearse in September 2022, and the walk to Windsor began.","thumb":"/img/wellington-arch-480.jpg?v=3fc925e4","img":"/img/wellington-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":669},{"name":"St James's Piccadilly","slug":"st-jamess-piccadilly","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/st-jamess-piccadilly/","lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"The only church Wren built on a new site of his own choosing, and the one he thought worked best.","thumb":"/img/own-st-jamess-piccadilly-480.jpg?v=723f7264","img":"/img/own-st-jamess-piccadilly.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Burlington Arcade","slug":"burlington-arcade","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/burlington-arcade/","lat":51.50901,"lng":-0.140192,"verdict":"The Regency shopping arcade off Piccadilly, still patrolled by beadles in top hats.","thumb":"/img/street-burlington-arcade-480.jpg?v=5489ffe9","img":"/img/street-burlington-arcade.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Ganton Street","slug":"ganton-street","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/ganton-street/","lat":51.512941,"lng":-0.139117,"verdict":"A cobbled cut-through behind Carnaby Street with the lights strung overhead.","thumb":"/img/street-ganton-street-480.jpg?v=854c2fb5","img":"/img/street-ganton-street.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Marylebone Lane","slug":"marylebone-lane","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/marylebone-lane/","lat":51.514983,"lng":-0.148384,"verdict":"A street that bends because it follows a buried river, past small shops the whole way.","thumb":"/img/street-marylebone-lane-480.jpg?v=ee76e5a7","img":"/img/street-marylebone-lane.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Mount Street","slug":"mount-street","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/mount-street/","lat":51.509547,"lng":-0.151865,"verdict":"A street of pink terracotta in Mayfair, rebuilt in the 1880s to one idea and kept that way.","thumb":"/img/mount-street-480.jpg?v=f6db908d","img":"/img/mount-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":1024},{"name":"New Bond Street","slug":"new-bond-street","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/new-bond-street/","lat":51.511862,"lng":-0.144012,"verdict":"The luxury spine of Mayfair, and the Christmas lights people come across London to stand under.","thumb":"/img/street-new-bond-street-main-480.jpg?v=cb0156cd","img":"/img/street-new-bond-street-main.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Regent Street","slug":"regent-street","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/regent-street/","lat":51.512505,"lng":-0.140036,"verdict":"One long curve of Portland stone, put up as a boundary and rebuilt as a single building.","thumb":"/img/street-regent-street-480.jpg?v=d9d658fb","img":"/img/street-regent-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Animals in War Memorial","slug":"animals-in-war-memorial","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/animals-in-war-memorial/","lat":51.511038,"lng":-0.157502,"verdict":"Two bronze mules carrying a gun through a gap in a wall, and a horse and a dog already on the other side.","thumb":"/img/animals-in-war-memorial-480.jpg?v=c151f30f","img":"/img/animals-in-war-memorial.jpg","w":1024,"h":341},{"name":"Marble Arch","slug":"marble-arch","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/marble-arch/","lat":51.513184,"lng":-0.158905,"verdict":"Nash's gateway to Buckingham Palace, moved to a traffic island where nobody may drive through it.","thumb":"/img/marble-arch-480.jpg?v=a18babf8","img":"/img/marble-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Royal Artillery Memorial","slug":"royal-artillery-memorial","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/royal-artillery-memorial/","lat":51.502566,"lng":-0.151953,"verdict":"A stone howitzer and four bronze gunners, one of them dead under his greatcoat: the most honest war memorial in London.","thumb":"/img/royal-artillery-memorial-480.jpg?v=660ad31d","img":"/img/royal-artillery-memorial.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Sekhmet at Sotheby's","slug":"sekhmet-at-sothebys","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/sekhmet-at-sothebys/","lat":51.511901,"lng":-0.14332,"verdict":"A lion-headed Egyptian goddess over an auction house door, and the oldest outdoor statue in London."},{"name":"Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain","slug":"shaftesbury-memorial-fountain","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/shaftesbury-memorial-fountain/","lat":51.509896,"lng":-0.134486,"verdict":"Eros, who is not Eros, on the fountain at Piccadilly Circus.","thumb":"/img/shaftesbury-memorial-fountain-480.jpg?v=ed5db40b","img":"/img/shaftesbury-memorial-fountain.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Wellington Arch","slug":"wellington-arch","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/wellington-arch/","lat":51.502536,"lng":-0.150818,"verdict":"Decimus Burton's arch at Hyde Park Corner, with the largest bronze sculpture in Europe on top and balconies inside to climb to.","thumb":"/img/wellington-arch-480.jpg?v=3fc925e4","img":"/img/wellington-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":669},{"name":"Anderson & Sheppard","slug":"anderson-sheppard","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/anderson-sheppard/","lat":51.510189,"lng":-0.140595,"verdict":"The soft, unpadded house style that made the Row's reputation for comfort rather than armour."},{"name":"Asprey","slug":"asprey","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/asprey/","lat":51.511097,"lng":-0.144176,"verdict":"Silver, jewellery and leather from a house that has been making for royalty since 1781."},{"name":"Bentley & Skinner","slug":"bentley-skinner","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/bentley-skinner/","lat":51.508283,"lng":-0.139825,"verdict":"Antique and period jewellery at the level museums buy at, in a shop window people stop dead in front of.","thumb":"/img/bentley-skinner-480.jpg?v=3729bb98","img":"/img/bentley-skinner.jpg","w":1024,"h":583},{"name":"Burlington Arcade","slug":"burlington-arcade","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/burlington-arcade/","lat":51.50901,"lng":-0.140192,"verdict":"The first shopping arcade in Britain, still patrolled by beadles in top hats who will stop you whistling.","thumb":"/img/street-burlington-arcade-480.jpg?v=5489ffe9","img":"/img/street-burlington-arcade.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Charbonnel et Walker","slug":"charbonnel-et-walker","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/charbonnel-et-walker/","lat":51.509128,"lng":-0.141274,"verdict":"Bond Street chocolatier since 1875, in the Royal Arcade, still hand-filling its rose and violet creams.","thumb":"/img/charbonnel-et-walker-480.jpg?v=96997dd1","img":"/img/charbonnel-et-walker.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Crockett & Jones","slug":"crockett-jones","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/crockett-jones/","lat":51.508231,"lng":-0.136996,"verdict":"The most-bought serious English shoe, made in Northampton since 1879 and still family-owned.","thumb":"/img/crockett-jones-480.jpg?v=a0b30e2c","img":"/img/crockett-jones.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Davies & Son","slug":"davies-son","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/davies-son/","lat":51.510677,"lng":-0.140324,"verdict":"The oldest independent tailor on the Row, trading since 1803 and absorbing several older houses along the way."},{"name":"Dege & Skinner","slug":"dege-skinner","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/dege-skinner/","lat":51.510829,"lng":-0.140115,"verdict":"One of the last family-owned houses on the Row, and the one to go to for a bespoke shirt as well as a suit.","thumb":"/img/dege-skinner-480.jpg?v=2a1d4354","img":"/img/dege-skinner.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Drake's","slug":"drakes","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/drakes/","lat":51.510766,"lng":-0.140051,"verdict":"The modern end of the Row: handmade ties, soft tailoring and shirts, made with the old methods and worn with none of the formality."},{"name":"E.B. Meyrowitz","slug":"e-b-meyrowitz","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/e-b-meyrowitz/","lat":51.509027,"lng":-0.141555,"verdict":"Bespoke spectacles made the slow way, in a Royal Arcade shop that has been fitting frames since the nineteenth century."},{"name":"Edward Green","slug":"edward-green","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/edward-green/","lat":51.507641,"lng":-0.138744,"verdict":"Northampton welted shoes at the top of the ready-to-wear range, with a finish most bespoke work does not match.","thumb":"/img/edward-green-480.jpg?v=38c39488","img":"/img/edward-green.jpg","w":1024,"h":641},{"name":"Floris London","slug":"floris-london","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/floris-london/","lat":51.508142,"lng":-0.137214,"verdict":"A perfumer on the same Jermyn Street site since 1730, still run by the founder's family nine generations on.","thumb":"/img/floris-london-480.jpg?v=f30aac58","img":"/img/floris-london.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Fortnum & Mason","slug":"fortnum-mason","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/fortnum-mason/","lat":51.508236,"lng":-0.13817,"verdict":"The Piccadilly grocer since 1707, and still the most reliable place in London to buy something British to take home.","thumb":"/img/fortnum-mason-480.jpg?v=9e0e4d11","img":"/img/fortnum-mason.jpg","w":989,"h":1024},{"name":"Gaziano & Girling","slug":"gaziano-girling","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/gaziano-girling/","lat":51.510628,"lng":-0.140275,"verdict":"The modern English shoemaker, founded by two men who left the old firms to cut a sharper last."},{"name":"Geo. F. Trumper","slug":"geo-f-trumper","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/geo-f-trumper/","lat":51.508354,"lng":-0.136467,"verdict":"A Victorian gentleman's barber with the mahogany cubicles still in place, and its own colognes made to nineteenth-century formulas.","thumb":"/img/geo-f-trumper-480.jpg?v=7bdbbed6","img":"/img/geo-f-trumper.jpg","w":1024,"h":739},{"name":"Gieves & Hawkes","slug":"gieves-hawkes","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/gieves-hawkes/","lat":51.510226,"lng":-0.139521,"verdict":"Number One Savile Row, and the tailor that dressed the Royal Navy for two centuries.","thumb":"/img/gieves-hawkes-480.jpg?v=55f2f517","img":"/img/gieves-hawkes.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Grays Antiques","slug":"grays-antiques","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/grays-antiques/","lat":51.513592,"lng":-0.148443,"verdict":"Two hundred dealers under one roof, with a lost London river running through the basement.","thumb":"/img/grays-antiques-480.jpg?v=fc8748f5","img":"/img/grays-antiques.jpg","w":616,"h":1024},{"name":"Hatchards","slug":"hatchards","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/hatchards/","lat":51.508475,"lng":-0.138049,"verdict":"London's oldest bookshop, opened in 1797 and still selling books over five floors of Piccadilly.","thumb":"/img/hatchards-480.jpg?v=7c738126","img":"/img/hatchards.jpg","w":688,"h":1024},{"name":"Henry Poole & Co","slug":"henry-poole-co","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/henry-poole-co/","lat":51.511147,"lng":-0.140434,"verdict":"The founding house of Savile Row, and the tailor generally credited with cutting the first dinner jacket.","thumb":"/img/henry-poole-co-480.jpg?v=a3ddf0f6","img":"/img/henry-poole-co.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Huntsman","slug":"huntsman","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/huntsman/","lat":51.510883,"lng":-0.140166,"verdict":"The one-button coat, a structured shoulder, and a shop front that has been used as a film set more than once.","thumb":"/img/huntsman-480.jpg?v=92236b56","img":"/img/huntsman.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"James Purdey & Sons","slug":"james-purdey-sons","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/james-purdey-sons/","lat":51.509303,"lng":-0.151979,"verdict":"A gunmaker's showroom of 1882 that is worth entering for the engraving and the room, whatever you think of guns.","thumb":"/img/james-purdey-sons-480.jpg?v=3962d00a","img":"/img/james-purdey-sons.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Jermyn Street","slug":"jermyn-street","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/jermyn-street/","lat":51.507892,"lng":-0.138221,"verdict":"Two hundred yards holding more shirtmakers, perfumers, cheesemongers and shoemakers than the rest of Britain put together.","thumb":"/img/jermyn-street-480.jpg?v=cf6b7a88","img":"/img/jermyn-street.jpg","w":836,"h":1024},{"name":"John Lobb","slug":"john-lobb","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/john-lobb/","lat":51.508136,"lng":-0.137276,"verdict":"Bespoke shoemaking at its most complete: a wooden last carved for your foot and kept for life.","thumb":"/img/john-lobb-480.jpg?v=485bff6e","img":"/img/john-lobb.jpg","w":738,"h":1024},{"name":"Liberty London","slug":"liberty-london","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/liberty-london/","lat":51.513835,"lng":-0.140075,"verdict":"A mock-Tudor department store built from two warships, and the printed fabrics that carry its name worldwide.","thumb":"/img/liberty-london-480.jpg?v=8466f8dd","img":"/img/liberty-london.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Paxton & Whitfield","slug":"paxton-whitfield","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/paxton-whitfield/","lat":51.508272,"lng":-0.136902,"verdict":"Cheesemonger to Jermyn Street since 1797, with a counter of British farmhouse cheese cut to order.","thumb":"/img/paxton-whitfield-480.jpg?v=f69078a0","img":"/img/paxton-whitfield.jpg","w":1024,"h":604},{"name":"Penhaligon's","slug":"penhaligons","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/penhaligons/","lat":51.508923,"lng":-0.140165,"verdict":"The Victorian perfumer that started in a barber's shop opposite a Turkish bath and built its scents around it.","thumb":"/img/penhaligons-480.jpg?v=d488ba92","img":"/img/penhaligons.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Peter Harrington","slug":"peter-harrington","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/peter-harrington/","lat":51.508016,"lng":-0.141916,"verdict":"London's leading rare book dealer, where first editions are laid out to be handled rather than locked away.","thumb":"/img/peter-harrington-480.jpg?v=e73740a0","img":"/img/peter-harrington.jpg","w":1024,"h":759},{"name":"Prestat","slug":"prestat","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/prestat/","lat":51.508349,"lng":-0.137591,"verdict":"The chocolate shop that invented the chocolate truffle in Britain, in a pink-and-gold arcade shop."},{"name":"Savile Row","slug":"savile-row","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/savile-row/","lat":51.511929,"lng":-0.141432,"verdict":"The street bespoke tailoring is named after, where a suit still takes three fittings and about fifty hours of hand work."},{"name":"Swaine","slug":"swaine","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/swaine/","lat":51.508064,"lng":-0.139045,"verdict":"Whips, umbrellas and bridle-leather cases from a firm that has held a royal warrant continuously since 1798."},{"name":"Turnbull & Asser","slug":"turnbull-asser","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/turnbull-asser/","lat":51.507482,"lng":-0.139247,"verdict":"The Jermyn Street shirtmaker, cutting bespoke on the premises since 1885 and holding a royal warrant for most of a century.","thumb":"/img/turnbull-asser-480.jpg?v=4acee55e","img":"/img/turnbull-asser.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Faraday Museum","slug":"faraday-museum","cat":"science","url":"/science/faraday-museum/","lat":51.509702,"lng":-0.142279,"verdict":"Faraday's basement laboratory, where electricity was tamed, under the Royal Institution's lecture theatre, free."},{"name":"Isaac Newton's house, 87 Jermyn Street","slug":"isaac-newtons-house-87-jermyn-street","cat":"science","url":"/science/isaac-newtons-house-87-jermyn-street/","lat":51.50808,"lng":-0.13737,"verdict":"Where Newton lived for thirteen years as Master of the Mint and President of the Royal Society, marked by a plaque above a shirt shop.","thumb":"/img/isaac-newtons-house-87-jermyn-street-480.jpg?v=789e7110","img":"/img/isaac-newtons-house-87-jermyn-street.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Linnean Society","slug":"linnean-society","cat":"science","url":"/science/linnean-society/","lat":51.5088,"lng":-0.1395,"verdict":"The room where evolution was announced: Darwin and Wallace's papers were read here on 1 July 1858, and Linnaeus's own collections are in the vault."},{"name":"Hatchards","slug":"hatchards","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/hatchards/","lat":51.508475,"lng":-0.138049,"verdict":"London's oldest bookshop, trading on Piccadilly since 1797, with three royal warrants over the door.","thumb":"/img/hatchards-480.jpg?v=7c738126","img":"/img/hatchards.jpg","w":688,"h":1024},{"name":"Waterstones Piccadilly","slug":"waterstones-piccadilly","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/waterstones-piccadilly/","lat":51.50899,"lng":-0.135875,"verdict":"The largest bookshop in Europe, eight miles of shelves in the modernist Simpson's building on Piccadilly.","thumb":"/img/waterstones-piccadilly-480.jpg?v=d07eaeed","img":"/img/waterstones-piccadilly.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Alexander Korda","slug":"alexander-korda","cat":"world","url":"/world/alexander-korda/","lat":51.511854,"lng":-0.147035,"verdict":"The office where a Hungarian \u00e9migr\u00e9 built the British film industry, and won it its first Oscar.","thumb":"/img/alexander-korda-480.jpg?v=96a62907","img":"/img/alexander-korda.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Charles X","slug":"charles-x","cat":"world","url":"/world/charles-x/","lat":51.508275,"lng":-0.151316,"verdict":"A king of France in exile before he was king, on a Mayfair street for nine years.","thumb":"/img/charles-x-480.jpg?v=5b64c29c","img":"/img/charles-x.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"George Frideric Handel","slug":"handel-hendrix-house","cat":"world","url":"/world/handel-hendrix-house/","lat":51.512942,"lng":-0.145884,"verdict":"The house Handel chose as a young immigrant and never left, where Messiah was written in three weeks.","thumb":"/img/handel-hendrix-house-480.jpg?v=0a0f1673","img":"/img/handel-hendrix-house.jpg","w":728,"h":1024},{"name":"Jimi Hendrix","slug":"jimi-hendrix","cat":"world","url":"/world/jimi-hendrix/","lat":51.513073,"lng":-0.145894,"verdict":"The flat where Hendrix lived as a star, next door to the house where Handel lived as one.","thumb":"/img/jimi-hendrix-480.jpg?v=e788b2e5","img":"/img/jimi-hendrix.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"John Adams","slug":"john-adams","cat":"world","url":"/world/john-adams/","lat":51.512566,"lng":-0.150394,"verdict":"The house of America's first minister to Britain, who was also the second President.","thumb":"/img/john-adams-480.jpg?v=ebbf2797","img":"/img/john-adams.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Talleyrand","slug":"talleyrand","cat":"world","url":"/world/talleyrand/","lat":51.513553,"lng":-0.144261,"verdict":"The embassy of the man who had served every French regime for forty years and outlived them all.","thumb":"/img/talleyrand-480.jpg?v=438b8b17","img":"/img/talleyrand.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Piccadilly Circus","slug":"piccadilly-circus","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/piccadilly-circus/","lat":51.509898,"lng":-0.134382,"verdict":"Where Harry, Ron and Hermione land after apparating out of the wedding in Deathly Hallows Part 1.","thumb":"/img/piccadilly-circus-480.jpg?v=69fea33d","img":"/img/piccadilly-circus.jpg","w":1024,"h":768}]},{"slug":"notting-hill-holland-park","name":"Notting Hill & Holland Park","verdict":"Painted stucco crescents, the longest street market in London, and the carnival that closes it all in August.","note":"Two neighbourhoods with one story between them. The land was clay, dug for bricks and tiles, and there were piggeries on the slope where pig-keepers pushed out of Marble Arch had settled; a racecourse called the Hippodrome ran round the hill from 1837 and closed four years later, defeated by mud and by a public footpath nobody could close. James Weller Ladbroke then laid the hill out from the 1820s in the crescents you see now, with communal gardens behind the terraces rather than in front of them.\n\nBy the 1950s the big houses had been carved into rooms and let, often by Peter Rachman, whose name became a word for exploiting tenants. West Indian families settled here because they were among the few places that would take them, and in 1958 white gangs attacked their homes for the better part of a week. What grew out of that is the Notting Hill Carnival, held since 1965 over the August bank holiday, and now a street festival of over a million people.\n\nPortobello Road runs almost the length of the district and holds the market: antiques on Saturday, fruit and vegetables the rest of the week, everything else in between.\n\nHolland Park at the southern end is the quiet counterweight: woodland, peacocks, a Japanese garden, and the ruin of a Jacobean house bombed in 1940, where opera is staged each summer.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-notting-hill-holland-park-lead2.jpg?v=a2df3054","thumb":"/img/area-notting-hill-holland-park-lead2-480.jpg?v=1ea2765d","width":1024,"height":841,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Pastel-painted terraced houses along Portobello Road in Notting Hill, in pink, blue and yellow","caption":"Portobello Road's painted houses.","credit":"Photo by Maggie Jones from London, England, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portobello_Road_W11_(3229762678).jpg"},"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-notting-hill-holland-park-2.jpg?v=a037fa42","thumb":"/img/area-notting-hill-holland-park-2-480.jpg?v=6ef5e2b2","width":1024,"height":682,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A crowded shopfront on Portobello Road: a painted chef figure, a big tin fish, a white metal mask, a silver bowl with stag's-head handles and flowered china, stacked in front of a red-painted antiques shop.","caption":"Alice's, on Portobello Road.","credit":"Photo by David, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alice's_Antique_Shop,_Portobello_Road,_Notting_Hill,_London_2022-08-18.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-notting-hill-holland-park-4.jpg?v=277decd0","thumb":"/img/area-notting-hill-holland-park-4-480.jpg?v=fc0de2f5","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The Kyoto Garden in June: a still pond edged with rocks, a pink-flowering shrub in front, pines leaning over the water and tall trees under a blue sky with white clouds.","caption":"The Kyoto Garden in Holland Park, given by Kyoto in 1991.","credit":"Photo by Bex Walton, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kyoto_Garden,_Holland_Park_2025-06-01.jpg"}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Kensington Church Street","Ladbroke Grove","Holland Park Avenue","Holland Road","Kensington High Street"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.19702,51.50899],[-0.19738,51.50964],[-0.19772,51.51156],[-0.19719,51.5133],[-0.19627,51.51422],[-0.19504,51.51503],[-0.19917,51.51454],[-0.19991,51.51685],[-0.20077,51.518],[-0.20899,51.51601],[-0.20305,51.50788],[-0.20886,51.50628],[-0.2159,51.50466],[-0.216,51.50446],[-0.2158,51.50409],[-0.20584,51.49665],[-0.19291,51.50104],[-0.19092,51.50203],[-0.19221,51.50406],[-0.19325,51.50424],[-0.19362,51.50464],[-0.19431,51.50587],[-0.19524,51.50926],[-0.19702,51.50899]]]},"centre":[-0.20228,51.50299],"bounds":[[-0.216,51.49665],[-0.19092,51.518]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":21,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":3,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"shopping","name":"Shopping","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"outdoors","name":"Outdoors & Nature","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":5,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"breakfast","name":"Breakfast & Brunch","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"cocktails","name":"Cocktails","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"architecture","name":"Architecture","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"classic-british-shops","name":"Classic British Shops","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":6,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"Berliner Ensemble: De Profundis","slug":"berliner-ensemble-de-profundis","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/berliner-ensemble-de-profundis/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-10-07"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"Brecht's company performing Wilde's prison letter, in German."},{"name":"Boram Kim: Gwantong 18","slug":"boram-kim-gwantong-18","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/boram-kim-gwantong-18/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-22","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"Korean movement work, three nights."},{"name":"Chen Yi Studio: Current/y","slug":"chen-yi-studio-current-y","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/chen-yi-studio-current-y/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"Three nights of new movement work in a stripped Victorian theatre."},{"name":"D_Antidote: Non-Ordinary Services","slug":"d-antidote-non-ordinary-services","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/d-antidote-non-ordinary-services/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-28","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"Four nights of something the theatre files under neither play nor performance."},{"name":"D_Antidote: Palingenesis","slug":"d-antidote-palingenesis","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/d-antidote-palingenesis/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-29","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"The second half of D_Antidote's residency, overlapping the first."},{"name":"Designer Maker User","slug":"designer-maker-user","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/design-museum/designer-maker-user/","lat":51.499887,"lng":-0.200174,"verdict":"A thousand designed objects, sorted by who made them and who ended up using them."},{"name":"Det Norske Teatret: Skodespelet by Jon Fosse","slug":"det-norske-teatret-skodespelet-by-jon-fosse","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/det-norske-teatret-skodespelet-by-jon-fosse/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-26","to":"2026-11-29"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"Norway's Nynorsk national theatre performing the Nobel laureate, in Nynorsk."},{"name":"Es Devlin: Other Worlds","slug":"es-devlin-other-worlds","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/design-museum/es-devlin-other-worlds/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2027-04-04"},"lat":51.499887,"lng":-0.200174,"verdict":"Thirty years of Es Devlin's stages, from the Olympic closing ceremony to the Super Bowl."},{"name":"Made in Prague: Ballerinas","slug":"made-in-prague-ballerinas","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/made-in-prague-ballerinas/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-06","to":"2026-11-06"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"A Czech film for one night, part of the Made in Prague festival."},{"name":"Magic and Mess: The Artist's Studio Revealed","slug":"magic-and-mess-the-artists-studio-revealed","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/leighton-house-museum/magic-and-mess-the-artists-studio-revealed/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-31","to":"2027-03-21"},"lat":51.498613,"lng":-0.203077,"verdict":"Fifty-six pictures of painters' studios, C\u00e9zanne and Matisse among them, shown inside the grandest studio in London."},{"name":"Movana Chen: Questioning the Line","slug":"movana-chen-questioning-the-line","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/movana-chen-questioning-the-line/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-14","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"The Hong Kong artist who knits shredded books into cloth."},{"name":"NIGO: From Japan with Love","slug":"nigo-from-japan-with-love","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/design-museum/nigo-from-japan-with-love/","runs":{"from":"2026-05-01","to":"2026-10-04"},"lat":51.499887,"lng":-0.200174,"verdict":"Seven hundred objects from the man who founded A Bathing Ape and now runs KENZO."},{"name":"Opera Holland Park sings in Notting Hill","slug":"opera-holland-park-sings-in-notting-hill","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/opera-holland-park-sings-in-notting-hill/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.512716,"lng":-0.202683,"verdict":"Forty-five minutes of opera singing in a church, free, and built for people with dementia."},{"name":"Out of Chaos: paper from the floor of Francis Bacon's studio","slug":"out-of-chaos-paper-from-the-floor-of-francis-bacons-studio","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/michael-hoppen-gallery/out-of-chaos-paper-from-the-floor-of-francis-bacons-studio/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.507291,"lng":-0.207941,"verdict":"Photographs Bacon walked on, trod into the floor of the studio and painted from."},{"name":"PLATFORM: Simone Brewster","slug":"platform-simone-brewster","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/design-museum/platform-simone-brewster/","runs":{"from":"2026-02-13","to":"2027-01-31"},"lat":51.499887,"lng":-0.200174,"verdict":"Jewellery, stools, paintings and a bench called Negrita, in the museum's free annual display."},{"name":"Poetry Club: Anthony Joseph, Rachel Long and Roger Robinson","slug":"poetry-club-anthony-joseph-rachel-long-and-roger-robinson","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/poetry-club-anthony-joseph-rachel-long-and-roger-robinson/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"Three poets, two of them T. S. Eliot Prize winners, in one room."},{"name":"Poetry Club: November","slug":"poetry-club-november","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/poetry-club-november/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-19","to":"2026-11-19"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"The Coronet's poetry night returns."},{"name":"Tacit Group: Frankentacit","slug":"tacit-group-frankentacit","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/tacit-group-frankentacit/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-13","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"Korean audiovisual performance built from algorithms."},{"name":"The Coronet Theatre Jazz Festival: Friday","slug":"the-coronet-theatre-jazz-festival-friday","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/the-coronet-theatre-jazz-festival-friday/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-11","to":"2026-12-11"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"The first of two nights of jazz in the stripped auditorium."},{"name":"The Coronet Theatre Jazz Festival: Saturday","slug":"the-coronet-theatre-jazz-festival-saturday","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/the-coronet-theatre-jazz-festival-saturday/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-12","to":"2026-12-12"},"lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"The second night of the Coronet's own jazz festival."},{"name":"The Nue Black Aesthetic","slug":"the-nue-black-aesthetic","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/design-museum/the-nue-black-aesthetic/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-06","to":"2027-08-08"},"lat":51.499887,"lng":-0.200174,"verdict":"Sixteen contemporary Black designers across fashion, furniture and architecture."},{"name":"18 Stafford Terrace","slug":"18-stafford-terrace","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/18-stafford-terrace/","lat":51.500485,"lng":-0.196875,"verdict":"A Victorian household kept down to the wallpaper: the Punch cartoonist's house where the Victorian Society was founded.","thumb":"/img/18-stafford-terrace-480.jpg?v=9a386d5a","img":"/img/18-stafford-terrace.jpg","w":1024,"h":845},{"name":"Design Museum","slug":"design-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/design-museum/","lat":51.499887,"lng":-0.200174,"verdict":"The Commonwealth Institute's swooping 1960s roof, rebuilt around a museum of design, with a free permanent gallery beneath it.","thumb":"/img/design-museum-480.jpg?v=9e5bb992","img":"/img/design-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Leighton House Museum","slug":"leighton-house-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/leighton-house-museum/","lat":51.498613,"lng":-0.203077,"verdict":"The Victorian painter's house built around an Arab Hall of Damascus tiles, gold mosaic and a fountain, in Holland Park.","thumb":"/img/leighton-house-museum-480.jpg?v=19a86a66","img":"/img/leighton-house-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":576},{"name":"Leighton House Museum","slug":"leighton-house-museum","cat":"art","url":"/art/leighton-house-museum/","lat":51.498613,"lng":-0.203077,"verdict":"The Victorian painter's house built around an Arab Hall of Damascus tiles, gold mosaic and a fountain, in Holland Park.","thumb":"/img/leighton-house-museum-480.jpg?v=19a86a66","img":"/img/leighton-house-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":576},{"name":"Michael Hoppen Gallery","slug":"michael-hoppen-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/michael-hoppen-gallery/","deep":true,"lat":51.507291,"lng":-0.207941,"verdict":"London's leading photography dealer, from Daido Moriyama and Sarah Moon to the great mid-century names, now in Holland Park."},{"name":"Opera Holland Park","slug":"opera-holland-park","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/opera-holland-park/","lat":51.502304,"lng":-0.20214,"verdict":"A canopy raised in the park every summer, in front of the ruins of a Jacobean house, with peacocks interrupting.","thumb":"/img/opera-holland-park-480.jpg?v=b3c22efe","img":"/img/opera-holland-park.jpg","w":1024,"h":640},{"name":"The Coronet Theatre","slug":"the-coronet-theatre","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/the-coronet-theatre/","lat":51.508543,"lng":-0.198137,"verdict":"An 1898 theatre at Notting Hill Gate, worn back to the brick and left that way."},{"name":"Portobello Road","slug":"portobello-road","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/portobello-road/","lat":51.513461,"lng":-0.202987,"verdict":"The antiques stretch, at its fullest on a Saturday morning."},{"name":"Kyoto Garden, Holland Park","slug":"kyoto-garden-holland-park","cat":"outdoors","url":"/outdoors/kyoto-garden-holland-park/","lat":51.502122,"lng":-0.203281,"verdict":"A Japanese garden with a waterfall and koi, and peacocks that ignore you."},{"name":"Guillam Notting Hill","slug":"guillam-notting-hill","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/guillam-notting-hill/","lat":51.509591,"lng":-0.194284,"verdict":"Single-origin coffee on Notting Hill Gate."},{"name":"Hermanos Colombian Coffee Roasters","slug":"hermanos-portobello-road","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/hermanos-portobello-road/","lat":51.513939,"lng":-0.203819,"verdict":"The branch that was named London's independent coffee shop of the year."},{"name":"Aux Merveilleux de Fred Kensington","slug":"aux-merveilleux-de-fred-kensington","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/aux-merveilleux-de-fred-kensington/","lat":51.500713,"lng":-0.192374,"verdict":"Meringue-and-cream merveilleux from Lille, in an arcade off the Tube station."},{"name":"Fabrique Bakery","slug":"fabrique-bakery","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/fabrique-bakery/","lat":51.51668,"lng":-0.205419,"verdict":"Portobello Road, and the wood-fired oven doing the work."},{"name":"Badiani Notting Hill","slug":"badiani-notting-hill","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/badiani-notting-hill/","lat":51.509464,"lng":-0.194945,"verdict":"Florentine gelato on Notting Hill Gate, and the Buontalenti is the one to get."},{"name":"Darlish Notting Hill","slug":"darlish-notting-hill","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/darlish-notting-hill/","lat":51.5167,"lng":-0.20542,"verdict":"Persian ice cream on the Portobello Road corner, opposite the blue door."},{"name":"Knoops Kensington","slug":"knoops-kensington","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/knoops-kensington/","lat":51.501934,"lng":-0.191453,"verdict":"Hot chocolate ordered by cocoa percentage, open from half past six in the morning."},{"name":"Knoops Notting Hill","slug":"knoops-notting-hill","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/knoops-notting-hill/","lat":51.515971,"lng":-0.20516,"verdict":"Hot chocolate ordered by cocoa percentage, at the top of Portobello Road."},{"name":"Melt Chocolates","slug":"melt-chocolates","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/melt-chocolates/","lat":51.514142,"lng":-0.199227,"verdict":"Chocolates tempered and moulded in the room behind the counter."},{"name":"Granger & Co.","slug":"granger-co","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/granger-co/","lat":51.514621,"lng":-0.197777,"verdict":"Bill Granger's London room, and the ricotta hotcakes."},{"name":"Guillam Notting Hill","slug":"guillam-notting-hill","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/guillam-notting-hill/","lat":51.509591,"lng":-0.194284,"verdict":"Single-origin coffee on Notting Hill Gate."},{"name":"Portobello Road Market","slug":"portobello-road-market","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/portobello-road-market/","lat":51.516086,"lng":-0.205117,"verdict":"London's most crowded street market, and not one market but several.","thumb":"/img/portobello-road-market-480.jpg?v=be7c117a","img":"/img/portobello-road-market.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"The Distillery","slug":"the-distillery","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/the-distillery/","lat":51.51605,"lng":-0.2048,"verdict":"A working gin distillery on Portobello Road, with bars on three floors."},{"name":"Trailer Happiness","slug":"trailer-happiness","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/trailer-happiness/","lat":51.514999,"lng":-0.204627,"verdict":"A basement tiki den on Portobello Road, going since 2003."},{"name":"Debenham House","slug":"debenham-house","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/debenham-house/","lat":51.502449,"lng":-0.208743,"verdict":"A house in Holland Park glazed all over in peacock blue and green, like a bathroom turned outward.","thumb":"/img/debenham-house-480.jpg?v=1357a94d","img":"/img/debenham-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Leighton House Museum","slug":"leighton-house-museum","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/leighton-house-museum/","lat":51.498613,"lng":-0.203077,"verdict":"A painter's studio-house in Holland Park with a domed Arab Hall of Damascus tiles.","thumb":"/img/leighton-house-museum-480.jpg?v=19a86a66","img":"/img/leighton-house-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":576},{"name":"Portobello Road Market","slug":"portobello-road-market","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/portobello-road-market/","lat":51.516086,"lng":-0.205117,"verdict":"Behind the tourist stalls, the arcades hold serious dealers in silver, maps, ceramics and jewellery.","thumb":"/img/portobello-road-market-480.jpg?v=be7c117a","img":"/img/portobello-road-market.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Cetshwayo kaMpande","slug":"cetshwayo","cat":"world","url":"/world/cetshwayo/","lat":51.499249,"lng":-0.202202,"verdict":"The Holland Park house where the King of the Zulus stayed while petitioning the Queen for his kingdom back.","thumb":"/img/cetshwayo-480.jpg?v=a7d4f083","img":"/img/cetshwayo.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Chaim Weizmann","slug":"chaim-weizmann","cat":"world","url":"/world/chaim-weizmann/","lat":51.500342,"lng":-0.208435,"verdict":"The house of the chemist whose acetone process helped win a war and whose lobbying won a declaration.","thumb":"/img/chaim-weizmann-480.jpg?v=b308b685","img":"/img/chaim-weizmann.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Ezra Pound","slug":"ezra-pound","cat":"world","url":"/world/ezra-pound/","lat":51.502436,"lng":-0.192961,"verdict":"One room in a Kensington lane where Pound ran modern poetry for five years.","thumb":"/img/ezra-pound-480.jpg?v=691bea39","img":"/img/ezra-pound.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Jawaharlal Nehru","slug":"jawaharlal-nehru","cat":"world","url":"/world/jawaharlal-nehru/","lat":51.514122,"lng":-0.208482,"verdict":"The Notting Hill house where the future first prime minister of India lived as a law student.","thumb":"/img/jawaharlal-nehru-480.jpg?v=e78f3612","img":"/img/jawaharlal-nehru.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Lajos Kossuth","slug":"lajos-kossuth","cat":"world","url":"/world/lajos-kossuth/","lat":51.512154,"lng":-0.201321,"verdict":"Where Hungary's revolutionary leader stayed on a visit that brought out the crowds and rattled the Foreign Office.","thumb":"/img/lajos-kossuth-480.jpg?v=7c65a98e","img":"/img/lajos-kossuth.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Muhammad Ali Jinnah","slug":"muhammad-ali-jinnah","cat":"world","url":"/world/muhammad-ali-jinnah/","lat":51.498744,"lng":-0.209987,"verdict":"The Kensington house where the founder of Pakistan stayed as the youngest barrister in India's history.","thumb":"/img/muhammad-ali-jinnah-480.jpg?v=43014c6c","img":"/img/muhammad-ali-jinnah.jpg","w":768,"h":1024}]},{"slug":"pimlico","name":"Pimlico","verdict":"Belgravia's quieter cousin: white terraces on reclaimed marsh, a post-war estate that made its own heat, and Tate Britain at the end.","note":"Pimlico is what Thomas Cubitt built next. Having finished Belgravia for the Grosvenors, he took the marshy ground south of it from 1825, raised the level with earth dug out of St Katharine Docks, and laid a grid of white stucco terraces across it. The houses are the same idea as Belgravia's and a size smaller, which is exactly how they were sold: a newspaper in 1877 described the residents as people not rich enough to luxuriate in Belgravia proper.\n\nThat has kept it pleasantly ordinary. There are three garden squares, St George's, Warwick and Eccleston; there are pubs on corners; and there are more small hotels than anywhere else in central London, so a good part of the population is only here for three nights.\n\nTwo twentieth-century blocks stand out. Dolphin Square, finished in 1937, put 1,250 flats round a garden and filled them with members of parliament. Churchill Gardens, built between 1946 and 1962 to replace bombed streets, was heated for fifty years by hot water piped under the river from Battersea Power Station, and the glass accumulator tower that held it still stands on the embankment.\n\nAt the eastern edge, on the site of the Millbank penitentiary from which convicts were shipped to Australia, is Tate Britain, which holds the national collection of British art and the largest gathering of Turners anywhere.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-pimlico.jpg?v=59828ed4","thumb":"/img/area-pimlico-480.jpg?v=a8ef0515","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":500,"alt":"White stucco terraces along St George's Square, Pimlico","caption":"St George's Square.","credit":"Photo by No Swan So Fine, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:27-33_St_George%27s_Square,_Pimlico,_October_2022.jpg"},"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-pimlico-lead2.jpg?v=4e84b787","thumb":"/img/area-pimlico-lead2-480.jpg?v=2b14d876","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Belgrave Road in Pimlico: a long run of white and cream stucco terraces with columned porches, under plane trees","caption":"Belgrave Road, Pimlico's white terraces.","credit":"Photo by DonJay at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Belgrave.jpg"}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Buckingham Palace Road","Vauxhall Bridge Road","River Thames"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.14386,51.49807],[-0.1421,51.49759],[-0.14185,51.49658],[-0.14231,51.49652],[-0.1418,51.49525],[-0.14039,51.49399],[-0.13311,51.49051],[-0.1297,51.4886],[-0.1275,51.4869],[-0.12971,51.48578],[-0.13286,51.48468],[-0.13756,51.48386],[-0.14039,51.48386],[-0.14624,51.48462],[-0.14983,51.48454],[-0.15011,51.48577],[-0.15094,51.48658],[-0.15174,51.48708],[-0.15033,51.48907],[-0.14984,51.49076],[-0.14787,51.49265],[-0.14538,51.49601],[-0.14386,51.49807]]]},"centre":[-0.14227,51.48897],"bounds":[[-0.15174,51.48386],[-0.1275,51.49807]],"cats":[{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"beer","name":"Beer","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"royal","name":"Royal London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":3,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"harry-potter","name":"Harry Potter","count":1,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"Royal Mews","slug":"royal-mews","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/royal-mews/","lat":51.498919,"lng":-0.14425,"verdict":"The working stables of Buckingham Palace, with the four-tonne Gold State Coach that has carried every monarch to their coronation since 1831.","thumb":"/img/royal-mews-480.jpg?v=7f438ebf","img":"/img/royal-mews.jpg","w":771,"h":1024},{"name":"Coffee Geek and Friends","slug":"coffee-geek-and-friends","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/coffee-geek-and-friends/","lat":51.497712,"lng":-0.141453,"verdict":"Cathedral Walk, and considerably better than Victoria deserves."},{"name":"Hermanos Colombian Coffee Roasters","slug":"hermanos-colombian-coffee-roasters","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/hermanos-colombian-coffee-roasters/","lat":51.496267,"lng":-0.143481,"verdict":"Terminus Place, a minute from the concourse, open six till seven."},{"name":"Badiani Victoria","slug":"badiani-victoria","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/badiani-victoria/","lat":51.496405,"lng":-0.144259,"verdict":"A cone on the Victoria Street walk to the station."},{"name":"Market Halls Victoria","slug":"market-halls-victoria","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/market-halls-victoria/","lat":51.496341,"lng":-0.143967,"verdict":"Nine kitchens over three floors, and a roof terrace above Victoria station.","thumb":"/img/market-halls-victoria-480.jpg?v=60d21578","img":"/img/market-halls-victoria.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"CASK Pub and Kitchen","slug":"cask-pub-and-kitchen","cat":"beer","url":"/beer/cask-pub-and-kitchen/","lat":51.491093,"lng":-0.137322,"verdict":"The pub that started London's craft beer habit, still going."},{"name":"Royal Mews","slug":"royal-mews","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/royal-mews/","lat":51.498919,"lng":-0.14425,"verdict":"The Gold State Coach of two coronations, the Glass Coach that took Diana to St Paul's, and the horses that pull them.","thumb":"/img/royal-mews-480.jpg?v=7f438ebf","img":"/img/royal-mews.jpg","w":771,"h":1024},{"name":"Jomo Kenyatta","slug":"jomo-kenyatta","cat":"world","url":"/world/jomo-kenyatta/","lat":51.489906,"lng":-0.143056,"verdict":"The Pimlico house where Kenya's first president lived as a student and wrote the book that explained his people.","thumb":"/img/jomo-kenyatta-480.jpg?v=c30fb38a","img":"/img/jomo-kenyatta.jpg","w":1024,"h":1024},{"name":"Joseph Conrad","slug":"joseph-conrad","cat":"world","url":"/world/joseph-conrad/","lat":51.493866,"lng":-0.141372,"verdict":"The Pimlico lodging where a Polish sea captain wrote his first novel between voyages.","thumb":"/img/joseph-conrad-480.jpg?v=14e06238","img":"/img/joseph-conrad.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Swami Vivekananda","slug":"swami-vivekananda","cat":"world","url":"/world/swami-vivekananda/","lat":51.489556,"lng":-0.141437,"verdict":"The Pimlico house where the monk who took Hinduism to the West held his London classes.","thumb":"/img/swami-vivekananda-480.jpg?v=b8a00794","img":"/img/swami-vivekananda.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Georgian House Hotel: the Wizard Chambers","slug":"georgian-house-hotel-the-wizard-chambers","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/georgian-house-hotel-the-wizard-chambers/","lat":51.490605,"lng":-0.143836,"verdict":"A Pimlico hotel with wizard rooms behind a bookcase, and a wizard afternoon tea and potion-making that anyone can book."}]},{"slug":"shoreditch-old-street","name":"Shoreditch & Old Street","verdict":"Where English theatre started, then furniture, then artists, then start-ups: a district that keeps being reinvented.","note":"The first purpose-built playhouse in England went up here in 1576, outside the City walls where the authorities could not close it. It was called simply the Theatre, and Shakespeare acted in it; when the lease ran out in 1598 the company dismantled it overnight, carried the timbers across the river and used them to build the Globe. The Curtain stood a few streets away, and Romeo and Juliet was probably first performed in it.\n\nAfterwards Shoreditch made things. Huguenot silk weavers worked here, then furniture makers in the nineteenth century, so many of them that the trade has its own museum on Kingsland Road, in almshouses of 1714.\n\nThe bombing and the collapse of manufacturing emptied it, and cheap space brought artists in the 1990s: Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the rest were showing in warehouses here before the galleries wanted them. The technology companies followed to the roundabout at Old Street, which acquired the nickname Silicon Roundabout, and the bars and restaurants followed the salaries.\n\nWhat that leaves is a district with layers you can see in an hour's walk: St Leonard's, the church of the actors, with a Victorian town hall opposite; Redchurch Street's shops; Boxpark's stacked shipping containers; and, on almost every gable end, some of the best painted walls in Europe.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-shoreditch-old-street.jpg?v=dac23537","thumb":"/img/area-shoreditch-old-street-480.jpg?v=521395d4","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A brick warehouse with tall iron-framed windows against a clear sky","caption":"Warehouse windows off Old Street, from its manufacturing days."},"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-shoreditch-old-street-lead2.jpg?v=a71f7301","thumb":"/img/area-shoreditch-old-street-lead2-480.jpg?v=ca256e11","width":1024,"height":461,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A Stik figure painted on the corner of a brick building in Rivington Street, Shoreditch","caption":"Rivington Street, with a Stik on the corner.","credit":"Photo by Nizzan Cohen, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stik_Rivington_street_London_01.jpg"}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Goswell Road","Regent's Canal","Bethnal Green Road","the City line"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.10411,51.53144],[-0.09538,51.52919],[-0.0951,51.5301],[-0.097,51.53285],[-0.09709,51.53288],[-0.09499,51.53355],[-0.09285,51.53446],[-0.08731,51.53703],[-0.08454,51.53748],[-0.07654,51.53644],[-0.07019,51.53587],[-0.06965,51.53102],[-0.06599,51.53127],[-0.06496,51.52836],[-0.06409,51.52851],[-0.06368,51.52656],[-0.06461,51.52643],[-0.06968,51.52569],[-0.07456,51.52375],[-0.07725,51.5237],[-0.07856,51.5215],[-0.07855,51.52151],[-0.08105,51.52195],[-0.08176,51.52076],[-0.08333,51.51981],[-0.08526,51.52035],[-0.08623,51.51881],[-0.08998,51.51997],[-0.08979,51.52072],[-0.09239,51.52103],[-0.09252,51.52147],[-0.09333,51.52133],[-0.09357,51.52159],[-0.09434,51.52148],[-0.09512,51.52311],[-0.09644,51.52283],[-0.09678,51.52331],[-0.09803,51.52285],[-0.09899,51.52383],[-0.10128,51.52893],[-0.10456,51.53114],[-0.1056,51.5322],[-0.10411,51.53144]]]},"centre":[-0.08399,51.5296],"bounds":[[-0.1056,51.51881],[-0.06368,51.53748]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":56,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":6,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":5,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":6,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"shopping","name":"Shopping","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":8,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":3,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":3,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"breakfast","name":"Breakfast & Brunch","count":5,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":3,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"beer","name":"Beer","count":3,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"cocktails","name":"Cocktails","count":9,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"wine","name":"Wine","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"sacred","name":"Sacred London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"beautiful-streets","name":"Beautiful Streets","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"architecture","name":"Architecture","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"classic-british-shops","name":"Classic British Shops","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":5,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"A Slow Jams Day Party","slug":"a-slow-jams-day-party","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/a-slow-jams-day-party/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"Neo-soul and R&B in the afternoon, because summer is over."},{"name":"AKRIILA","slug":"akriila","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/akriila/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"Chilean pop twisted through drum and bass and urban production."},{"name":"Ady Suleiman","slug":"ady-suleiman","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/ady-suleiman/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"Nottingham soul, back on the road."},{"name":"Aigul Akhmetshina: Love Without Borders","slug":"aigul-akhmetshina-love-without-borders","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/milton-court-concert-hall/aigul-akhmetshina-love-without-borders/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-30","to":"2026-09-30"},"lat":51.520094,"lng":-0.090409,"verdict":"The Carmen of the moment, singing art song, jazz standards and Latin American music in a small hall."},{"name":"Alcotraz","slug":"alcotraz","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/alcotraz/","lat":51.530066,"lng":-0.074558,"verdict":"Smuggle your own spirit past the guards, in a jumpsuit."},{"name":"Atsuko's Kitchen","slug":"atsukos-kitchen","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/atsukos-kitchen/","lat":51.529358,"lng":-0.069357,"verdict":"Small Japanese cookery classes above a Columbia Road shopfront."},{"name":"Attacca Quartet with Caroline Shaw: Sing On","slug":"attacca-quartet-with-caroline-shaw-sing-on","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/milton-court-concert-hall/attacca-quartet-with-caroline-shaw-sing-on/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-08","to":"2026-10-08"},"lat":51.520094,"lng":-0.090409,"verdict":"The composer who won the Pulitzer at thirty, singing and playing her own music."},{"name":"Bernard Piffaretti: Painting & Caption","slug":"bernard-piffaretti-painting-caption","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/kate-macgarry/bernard-piffaretti-painting-caption/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.524751,"lng":-0.075795,"verdict":"A French painter who has divided every canvas down the middle since 1986 and copied one half onto the other."},{"name":"Beyond 30: Judge Jules","slug":"beyond-30-judge-jules","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/xoyo/beyond-30-judge-jules/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.525479,"lng":-0.085833,"verdict":"A daytime rave with a lower age limit of thirty."},{"name":"Big Squeeze Soul","slug":"big-squeeze-soul","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/big-squeeze-soul/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"A party built for dancing rather than standing still."},{"name":"Capital Crime","slug":"capital-crime","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/capital-crime/","runs":{"from":"2027-05-28","to":"2027-05-30","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.52057,"lng":-0.091233,"verdict":"Three days of crime and thriller writers at the Brewery on Chiswell Street."},{"name":"Central: Youandewan b2b Liquid Earth, Laurine and Ron Obvious","slug":"central-youandewan-b2b-liquid-earth-laurine-and-ron-obvious","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/central-youandewan-b2b-liquid-earth-laurine-and-ron-obvious/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"Three years of a deep house night, marked with a back-to-back."},{"name":"Ceramics in the City 2026","slug":"ceramics-in-the-city-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/museum-of-the-home/ceramics-in-the-city-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-04","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.531508,"lng":-0.076444,"verdict":"Forty potters selling direct in the Museum of the Home's Hive, free, with a clay table for children."},{"name":"Columbia Road Flower Market","slug":"columbia-road-flower-market","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/columbia-road-flower-market/","lat":51.528881,"lng":-0.070149,"verdict":"A Victorian street packed shoulder to shoulder with flowers, one morning a week."},{"name":"Dankie Room presents QUE DJ","slug":"dankie-room-presents-que-dj","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/dankie-room-presents-que-dj/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"Amapiano and Afro house until five in the morning."},{"name":"David Onac: Atlantic Requiem","slug":"david-onac-atlantic-requiem","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/lso-st-lukes/david-onac-atlantic-requiem/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-11","to":"2026-10-11"},"lat":51.525216,"lng":-0.094003,"verdict":"A new requiem for the Africans trafficked across the Atlantic, built partly from insurance records."},{"name":"Dead Calm","slug":"dead-calm","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/dead-calm/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"A FORM Presents night in the brick hall."},{"name":"Dennis Quin, Ellia Jaya, Wildish and BTAY","slug":"dennis-quin-ellia-jaya-wildish-and-btay","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/xoyo/dennis-quin-ellia-jaya-wildish-and-btay/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.525479,"lng":-0.085833,"verdict":"Four DJs in the basement."},{"name":"Drake Music Artist Showcase","slug":"drake-music-artist-showcase","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/lso-st-lukes/drake-music-artist-showcase/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-24","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.525216,"lng":-0.094003,"verdict":"Five disabled musicians at the start of their careers, in the LSO's own hall."},{"name":"Ecca Vandal","slug":"ecca-vandal","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/ecca-vandal/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-15","to":"2026-09-15"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"A performer who cites Nina Simone and Fugazi and sounds like both."},{"name":"Edele Andaya: All-Dayer 2","slug":"edele-andaya-all-dayer-2","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/xoyo/edele-andaya-all-dayer-2/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.525479,"lng":-0.085833,"verdict":"A second all-day party from the same host."},{"name":"Escape Plan","slug":"escape-plan","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/escape-plan/","lat":51.524402,"lng":-0.073346,"verdict":"Second World War missions rather than another generic puzzle room."},{"name":"Euchar Gravina: Once upon a place","slug":"euchar-gravina-once-upon-a-place","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/lso-st-lukes/euchar-gravina-once-upon-a-place/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.525216,"lng":-0.094003,"verdict":"New chamber music about memory and the places it attaches to."},{"name":"FIGURE: My Heart Swims in Blood","slug":"figure-my-heart-swims-in-blood","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/lso-st-lukes/figure-my-heart-swims-in-blood/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-04","to":"2026-11-04"},"lat":51.525216,"lng":-0.094003,"verdict":"Baroque instruments and a contemporary mezzo, on one of Bach's strangest cantatas."},{"name":"Float Hub","slug":"float-hub","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/float-hub/","lat":51.526725,"lng":-0.080969,"verdict":"An hour in a private pod of body-temperature salt water, floating."},{"name":"Fractured Light: Joel Munday and Julian Trevelyon","slug":"fractured-light-joel-munday-and-julian-trevelyon","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/lso-st-lukes/fractured-light-joel-munday-and-julian-trevelyon/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-17"},"lat":51.525216,"lng":-0.094003,"verdict":"Violin and piano on four composers who wrote through the worst of the century."},{"name":"Free Friday Lunchtime Concert","slug":"free-friday-lunchtime-concert","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/lso-st-lukes/free-friday-lunchtime-concert/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.525216,"lng":-0.094003,"verdict":"Half an hour of chamber music at 12:30, for free, in a Hawksmoor church."},{"name":"Free Friday Lunchtime Concert: Gareth Davies, flute","slug":"free-friday-lunchtime-concert-gareth-davies-flute","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/lso-st-lukes/free-friday-lunchtime-concert-gareth-davies-flute/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-09","to":"2026-10-09"},"lat":51.525216,"lng":-0.094003,"verdict":"The LSO's principal flute, free, at lunchtime."},{"name":"Free Friday Lunchtime Concert: solo piano","slug":"free-friday-lunchtime-concert-solo-piano","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/lso-st-lukes/free-friday-lunchtime-concert-solo-piano/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.525216,"lng":-0.094003,"verdict":"A short piano recital at 12:30 on a Friday, for free."},{"name":"Free concerts at the Guildhall School","slug":"free-concerts-at-the-guildhall-school","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/milton-court-concert-hall/free-concerts-at-the-guildhall-school/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.520094,"lng":-0.090409,"verdict":"Hundreds of public performances a year at Milton Court and on Silk Street, most of them free."},{"name":"Frog and Middleman","slug":"frog-and-middleman","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/frog-and-middleman/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"Queens indie rock about American places the writer has never been."},{"name":"Gresham College: Why Is There Music?","slug":"gresham-college-why-is-there-music","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/lso-st-lukes/gresham-college-why-is-there-music/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-21","to":"2026-10-21"},"lat":51.525216,"lng":-0.094003,"verdict":"A free hour on why humans bother with music at all."},{"name":"Guildhall Symphony Orchestra and Chorus: Mahler 4","slug":"guildhall-symphony-orchestra-and-chorus-mahler-4","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/milton-court-concert-hall/guildhall-symphony-orchestra-and-chorus-mahler-4/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.520094,"lng":-0.090409,"verdict":"Two hundred students, Mahler's Fourth, twenty pounds."},{"name":"Halloween with Jamie Fielding","slug":"halloween-with-jamie-fielding","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/xoyo/halloween-with-jamie-fielding/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-31","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.525479,"lng":-0.085833,"verdict":"Hallowe'en night in the XOYO basement."},{"name":"Hernan Bas: TIME TO SHINE! (the salesmen)","slug":"hernan-bas-time-to-shine-the-salesmen","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/victoria-miro/hernan-bas-time-to-shine-the-salesmen/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.530417,"lng":-0.095107,"verdict":"Paintings about the people on the wrong side of a transaction."},{"name":"Hijingo","slug":"hijingo","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hijingo/","lat":51.521891,"lng":-0.081178,"verdict":"Bingo staged as a game show, with lasers."},{"name":"Jaga Jazzist","slug":"jaga-jazzist","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/milton-court-concert-hall/jaga-jazzist/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-19","to":"2026-11-19"},"lat":51.520094,"lng":-0.090409,"verdict":"Eight Norwegians, thirty years of refusing to settle on a genre."},{"name":"Khalif Tahir Thompson: Send in the Clowns","slug":"khalif-tahir-thompson-send-in-the-clowns","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/victoria-miro/khalif-tahir-thompson-send-in-the-clowns/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-08","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.530417,"lng":-0.095107,"verdict":"Brooklyn interiors, remembered and rebuilt in paint and collage."},{"name":"Le Boom + AE MAK","slug":"le-boom-ae-mak","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/le-boom-ae-mak/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-15","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"Two Irish acts in a Shoreditch railway shed, both closer to a house party than a gig."},{"name":"London Textile Month at the Museum of the Home","slug":"london-textile-month-at-the-museum-of-the-home","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/museum-of-the-home/london-textile-month-at-the-museum-of-the-home/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-01","to":"2026-09-30"},"lat":51.531508,"lng":-0.076444,"verdict":"A month of stitching, weaving and quilting in the period rooms, with Selvedge magazine."},{"name":"Maarja Nuut and Shards: Combing Hair Into Sand","slug":"maarja-nuut-and-shards-combing-hair-into-sand","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/milton-court-concert-hall/maarja-nuut-and-shards-combing-hair-into-sand/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-17","to":"2026-11-17"},"lat":51.520094,"lng":-0.090409,"verdict":"An Estonian song cycle for voices, violin, percussion and electronics."},{"name":"Margins United Festival 2026","slug":"margins-united-festival-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/margins-united-festival-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"Sixteen artists across two venues, celebrating alternative East and South-East Asian culture."},{"name":"Mi Casa","slug":"mi-casa","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/mi-casa/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-24"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"South African house, played live by the trio who made it popular."},{"name":"Morton Feldman: Unsettled Memory","slug":"morton-feldman-unsettled-memory","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/lso-st-lukes/morton-feldman-unsettled-memory/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.525216,"lng":-0.094003,"verdict":"Feldman, whose music asks you to sit still longer than you meant to."},{"name":"Mulaa Joans","slug":"mulaa-joans","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/mulaa-joans/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-14","to":"2026-09-14"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"A nineteen-year-old songwriter with a voice that sounds older than that."},{"name":"NOVAMONDO","slug":"novamondo","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/xoyo/novamondo/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.525479,"lng":-0.085833,"verdict":"Ejeca, Alex Culross, Ryan Nicholls, BTAY and Ryan Arnold."},{"name":"Nhu Xuan Hua: Of Walking on Fire","slug":"nhu-xuan-hua-of-walking-on-fire","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/rivington-place/nhu-xuan-hua-of-walking-on-fire/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.526451,"lng":-0.0794,"verdict":"A French-Vietnamese photographer at Autograph, whose whole subject is who gets photographed."},{"name":"Philly Blunt","slug":"philly-blunt","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/xoyo/philly-blunt/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.525479,"lng":-0.085833,"verdict":"A daytime party at XOYO, before the night one."},{"name":"Prokofiev and Shostakovich cello sonatas","slug":"prokofiev-and-shostakovich-cello-sonatas","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/lso-st-lukes/prokofiev-and-shostakovich-cello-sonatas/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-05","to":"2026-11-05"},"lat":51.525216,"lng":-0.094003,"verdict":"Two Soviet cello sonatas at lunchtime, live on Radio 3."},{"name":"Roomful of Teeth with Gabriel Kahane","slug":"roomful-of-teeth-with-gabriel-kahane","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/lso-st-lukes/roomful-of-teeth-with-gabriel-kahane/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-22","to":"2026-09-22"},"lat":51.525216,"lng":-0.094003,"verdict":"The vocal group that sings in every technique it can find, with Gabriel Kahane."},{"name":"Rooms Through Time","slug":"rooms-through-time","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/museum-of-the-home/rooms-through-time/","lat":51.531508,"lng":-0.076444,"verdict":"Eleven London living rooms, 1630 to 2049, each dressed as if somebody just left it."},{"name":"Scottish Ensemble: Bach and Blood","slug":"scottish-ensemble-bach-and-blood","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/milton-court-concert-hall/scottish-ensemble-bach-and-blood/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-10-02"},"lat":51.520094,"lng":-0.090409,"verdict":"Bach's Chaconne with the chorales hidden inside it sung aloud."},{"name":"Siesta: Summer Closing Party","slug":"siesta-summer-closing-party","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/xoyo/siesta-summer-closing-party/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.525479,"lng":-0.085833,"verdict":"The end of the season in a Shoreditch basement."},{"name":"Sorry Paaji","slug":"sorry-paaji","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/xoyo/sorry-paaji/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-17","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.525479,"lng":-0.085833,"verdict":"An all-women Punjabi party, in the daytime."},{"name":"Vundabar and Yot Club","slug":"vundabar-and-yot-club","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/vundabar-and-yot-club/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-09-16"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"Boston indie rock with a rhythm section that will not sit still."},{"name":"Yasuaki Shimizu","slug":"yasuaki-shimizu","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/milton-court-concert-hall/yasuaki-shimizu/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-15","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.520094,"lng":-0.090409,"verdict":"The Japanese saxophonist who recorded the Bach cello suites on a tenor, in a fifty-year sweep."},{"name":"British Red Cross Museum and Archives","slug":"british-red-cross-museum-and-archives","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/british-red-cross-museum-and-archives/","deep":true,"lat":51.519238,"lng":-0.088524,"verdict":"History and memorabilia of the British Red Cross."},{"name":"Dennis Severs' House","slug":"dennis-severs-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/dennis-severs-house/","lat":51.520943,"lng":-0.07779,"verdict":"Ten candlelit rooms left as if a family of Huguenot silk weavers had just walked out of them, which they never did, because Dennis Severs invented them.","thumb":"/img/dennis-severs-house-480.jpg?v=6ff10bd4","img":"/img/dennis-severs-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":681},{"name":"Honourable Artillery Company Museum","slug":"honourable-artillery-company-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/honourable-artillery-company-museum/","deep":true,"lat":51.523015,"lng":-0.088397,"verdict":"Regimental artefacts and memorabilia (by appointment only).","thumb":"/img/honourable-artillery-company-museum-480.jpg?v=223ec1d5","img":"/img/honourable-artillery-company-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Museum of the Home","slug":"museum-of-the-home","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/museum-of-the-home/","lat":51.531508,"lng":-0.076444,"verdict":"Rooms staged decade by decade, free, in Hoxton almshouses.","thumb":"/img/museum-of-the-home-480.jpg?v=ae46db73","img":"/img/museum-of-the-home.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Rivington Place","slug":"rivington-place","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/rivington-place/","deep":true,"lat":51.526451,"lng":-0.0794,"verdict":"International visual arts centre, home to InIVA and Autograph ABP.","thumb":"/img/rivington-place-480.jpg?v=ed4fd05f","img":"/img/rivington-place.jpg","w":708,"h":712},{"name":"Wesley's Chapel, Museum of Methodism and John Wesley's House","slug":"wesleys-chapel-museum-of-methodism-and-john-wesleys-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/wesleys-chapel-museum-of-methodism-and-john-wesleys-house/","lat":51.523745,"lng":-0.086575,"verdict":"Where John Wesley lived, preached and died, with the museum of the movement he began in the crypt.","thumb":"/img/own-wesleys-chapel-480.jpg?v=ef7d0189","img":"/img/own-wesleys-chapel.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Autograph, Rivington Place","slug":"rivington-place","cat":"art","url":"/art/rivington-place/","lat":51.526451,"lng":-0.0794,"verdict":"Autograph's gallery of photography and film in David Adjaye's black-brick building in Shoreditch.","thumb":"/img/rivington-place-480.jpg?v=ed4fd05f","img":"/img/rivington-place.jpg","w":708,"h":712},{"name":"Kate MacGarry","slug":"kate-macgarry","cat":"art","url":"/art/kate-macgarry/","deep":true,"lat":51.524751,"lng":-0.075795,"verdict":"A Shoreditch gallery of painters and makers - Francis Upritchard, Goshka Macuga, Peter McDonald - on Old Nichol Street."},{"name":"Rush Hour","slug":"rush-hour","cat":"art","url":"/art/rush-hour/","lat":51.519286,"lng":-0.084674,"verdict":"George Segal's six bronze commuters walking nowhere, outside Broadgate's offices.","thumb":"/img/rush-hour-480.jpg?v=e354a031","img":"/img/rush-hour.jpg","w":1024,"h":706},{"name":"Shoreditch street art","slug":"shoreditch-street-art","cat":"art","url":"/art/shoreditch-street-art/","lat":51.524751,"lng":-0.075795,"verdict":"The streets around Brick Lane, where London's street art has been made and painted over for twenty years.","thumb":"/img/shoreditch-street-art-480.jpg?v=20502f54","img":"/img/shoreditch-street-art.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Victoria Miro","slug":"victoria-miro","cat":"art","url":"/art/victoria-miro/","deep":true,"lat":51.530417,"lng":-0.095107,"verdict":"A former furniture factory on the Regent's Canal, with a garden, that shows Yayoi Kusama, Grayson Perry and Chris Ofili.","thumb":"/img/victoria-miro-480.jpg?v=fcc6b905","img":"/img/victoria-miro.jpg","w":1024,"h":681},{"name":"Bethnal Green Working Men's Club","slug":"bethnal-green-working-mens-club","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/bethnal-green-working-mens-club/","lat":51.528053,"lng":-0.063776,"verdict":"A real working men's club, still with its members, hired out for cabaret six nights a week."},{"name":"LSO St Luke's","slug":"lso-st-lukes","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/lso-st-lukes/","lat":51.525216,"lng":-0.094003,"verdict":"A Hawksmoor church that stood roofless for thirty years, rebuilt by the London Symphony Orchestra as its rehearsal and concert hall.","thumb":"/img/lso-st-lukes-480.jpg?v=bc1c006c","img":"/img/lso-st-lukes.jpg","w":480,"h":640},{"name":"Milton Court Concert Hall","slug":"milton-court-concert-hall","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/milton-court-concert-hall/","lat":51.520094,"lng":-0.090409,"verdict":"The Guildhall School's own hall, where the players are conservatoire students and the seats cost a few pounds."},{"name":"Rich Mix","slug":"rich-mix","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/rich-mix/","lat":51.524398,"lng":-0.07313,"verdict":"A former garment factory on Bethnal Green Road with three cinema screens and a stage."},{"name":"Village Underground","slug":"village-underground","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/village-underground/","lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"Three hollowed-out Jubilee line carriages on the roof, and a Victorian warehouse under them."},{"name":"XOYO","slug":"xoyo","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/xoyo/","lat":51.525479,"lng":-0.085833,"verdict":"A Shoreditch basement that gives a DJ thirteen weeks and lets them programme it."},{"name":"Columbia Road","slug":"columbia-road","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/columbia-road/","lat":51.528618,"lng":-0.070734,"verdict":"The flower market on Sunday mornings, and the small shops behind the stalls."},{"name":"Alchemy Coffee","slug":"alchemy-coffee","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/alchemy-coffee/","lat":51.523682,"lng":-0.084145,"verdict":"The Paul Street bar from a roaster based out in Wimbledon."},{"name":"Allpress Espresso","slug":"allpress-redchurch","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/allpress-redchurch/","lat":51.524423,"lng":-0.074244,"verdict":"The Kiwi espresso bar the rest of Redchurch Street grew up around."},{"name":"Attendant","slug":"attendant","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/attendant/","lat":51.52127,"lng":-0.078922,"verdict":"The Folgate Street room, from the people who put a caf\u00e9 in a Victorian gents."},{"name":"Dark Arts Coffee","slug":"dark-arts-coffee-shoreditch","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/dark-arts-coffee-shoreditch/","lat":51.52386,"lng":-0.077815,"verdict":"Holywell Lane, and shut by three."},{"name":"Hermanos Colombian Coffee Roasters","slug":"hermanos-colombian-coffee-roasters-shoreditch","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/hermanos-colombian-coffee-roasters-shoreditch/","lat":51.529105,"lng":-0.069653,"verdict":"Colombian single origins on Columbia Road, and a crush every Sunday."},{"name":"Origin Coffee","slug":"origin-shoreditch","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/origin-shoreditch/","lat":51.526348,"lng":-0.08115,"verdict":"Cornish roaster, London room, exacting about both."},{"name":"Ozone Coffee Roasters","slug":"ozone-leonard","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/ozone-leonard/","lat":51.524704,"lng":-0.086738,"verdict":"A New Zealand roastery on Leonard Street, and brunch worth queueing for."},{"name":"Redemption Roasters","slug":"redemption-roasters-broadgate","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/redemption-roasters-broadgate/","lat":51.51912,"lng":-0.083923,"verdict":"A Broadgate counter funding a barista academy for prison leavers."},{"name":"Beigel Bake","slug":"beigel-bake","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/beigel-bake/","lat":51.524512,"lng":-0.071752,"verdict":"Twenty-four hours a day on Brick Lane, and it has earned every one of them.","thumb":"/img/beigel-bake-480.jpg?v=f638d197","img":"/img/beigel-bake.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Jolene Redchurch Street","slug":"jolene-redchurch-street","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/jolene-redchurch-street/","lat":51.524571,"lng":-0.07431,"verdict":"Jolene on Redchurch Street, milling its own flour."},{"name":"Pavilion Bakery","slug":"pavilion-bakery","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/pavilion-bakery/","lat":51.529198,"lng":-0.0695,"verdict":"Columbia Road, which on a Sunday is a different proposition entirely."},{"name":"Crosstown","slug":"crosstown","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/crosstown/","lat":51.52445,"lng":-0.071814,"verdict":"Sourdough doughnuts, wedged between the two beigel shops at the top of Brick Lane."},{"name":"Dark Sugars Chocolates","slug":"dark-sugars-chocolates","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/dark-sugars-chocolates/","lat":51.523951,"lng":-0.071637,"verdict":"Ghanaian cocoa, and a hot chocolate with a hedge of chocolate shavings on top."},{"name":"Lily Vanilli","slug":"lily-vanilli","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/lily-vanilli/","lat":51.529389,"lng":-0.069673,"verdict":"Cakes worth queueing for, in a courtyard off the flower market, two days a week."},{"name":"Dishoom Shoreditch","slug":"dishoom-shoreditch","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/dishoom-shoreditch/","lat":51.524521,"lng":-0.07683,"verdict":"Bacon naan on Boundary Street, with the Permit Room below."},{"name":"E. Pellicci","slug":"e-pellicci","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/e-pellicci/","lat":51.526496,"lng":-0.063379,"verdict":"A caff on Bethnal Green Road with a historically protected interior, same family since 1900."},{"name":"Jolene Redchurch Street","slug":"jolene-redchurch-street","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/jolene-redchurch-street/","lat":51.524571,"lng":-0.07431,"verdict":"Own-milled flour, in a narrow Shoreditch shopfront."},{"name":"Lantana Shoreditch","slug":"lantana-shoreditch","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/lantana-shoreditch/","lat":51.524353,"lng":-0.087292,"verdict":"Antipodean all-day cooking, in a City Road courtyard."},{"name":"Ozone Coffee Roasters","slug":"ozone-leonard","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/ozone-leonard/","lat":51.524704,"lng":-0.086738,"verdict":"A New Zealand roastery with a proper kitchen above it."},{"name":"BOXPARK Shoreditch","slug":"boxpark-shoreditch","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/boxpark-shoreditch/","lat":51.523486,"lng":-0.076266,"verdict":"Fifty vendors in shipping containers, and the upper deck is all food.","thumb":"/img/boxpark-shoreditch-480.jpg?v=f220e543","img":"/img/boxpark-shoreditch.jpg","w":1024,"h":576},{"name":"Brick Lane Market","slug":"brick-lane-market","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/brick-lane-market/","lat":51.524274,"lng":-0.071561,"verdict":"East London's Sunday market, and still a sliver of the original underneath.","thumb":"/img/brick-lane-market-480.jpg?v=5593071f","img":"/img/brick-lane-market.jpg","w":694,"h":1024},{"name":"Whitecross Street Market","slug":"whitecross-street-market","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/whitecross-street-market/","lat":51.523546,"lng":-0.093296,"verdict":"A lunchtime street market trading since 1680, and still about a fiver."},{"name":"Mikkeller Bar London","slug":"mikkeller-bar-london","cat":"beer","url":"/beer/mikkeller-bar-london/","lat":51.527326,"lng":-0.076946,"verdict":"The Danish gypsy brewers' London corner pub, eighteen of their own on tap."},{"name":"Signature Brew Haggerston","slug":"signature-brew-haggerston","cat":"beer","url":"/beer/signature-brew-haggerston/","lat":51.536876,"lng":-0.075927,"verdict":"The smaller Signature arch, a minute from Haggerston station."},{"name":"Wenlock Arms","slug":"wenlock-arms","cat":"beer","url":"/beer/wenlock-arms/","lat":51.531425,"lng":-0.093946,"verdict":"Ten cask ales in a 19th-century ale house off the City Road."},{"name":"A Bar with Shapes for a Name","slug":"a-bar-with-shapes-for-a-name","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/a-bar-with-shapes-for-a-name/","lat":51.535614,"lng":-0.076719,"verdict":"Bauhaus design principles, applied to a drinks list."},{"name":"Equal Parts","slug":"equal-parts","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/equal-parts/","lat":51.531174,"lng":-0.069491,"verdict":"A neighbourhood bar on Hackney Road with a short, sharp list."},{"name":"Nightjar","slug":"nightjar","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/nightjar/","lat":51.526485,"lng":-0.087753,"verdict":"Basement jazz and theatrical drinks, fifteen years in."},{"name":"Queen of Hoxton","slug":"queen-of-hoxton","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/queen-of-hoxton/","lat":51.522151,"lng":-0.081134,"verdict":"A rooftop that gets a new theme every season, over a Shoreditch basement."},{"name":"Sager + Wilde","slug":"sager-wilde","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/sager-wilde/","lat":51.53099,"lng":-0.072129,"verdict":"A wine bar that takes its cocktails just as seriously."},{"name":"Seed Library","slug":"seed-library","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/seed-library/","lat":51.525816,"lng":-0.077423,"verdict":"Ryan Chetiyawardana's basement, with drinks under a fiver's worth of fuss."},{"name":"Tay\u0113r + Elementary","slug":"tayer-elementary","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/tayer-elementary/","lat":51.525019,"lng":-0.091505,"verdict":"Fifth-best bar in the world, and two rooms in one."},{"name":"Tramps Bar","slug":"tramps-bar","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/tramps-bar/","lat":51.530085,"lng":-0.094964,"verdict":"A small Hoxton bar with no interest in impressing you."},{"name":"Umbrella Workshop","slug":"umbrella-workshop","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/umbrella-workshop/","lat":51.526088,"lng":-0.077157,"verdict":"A Boundary Street bar in a former umbrella factory."},{"name":"Passione Vino","slug":"passione-vino","cat":"wine","url":"/wine/passione-vino/","lat":51.524774,"lng":-0.08241,"verdict":"Italian wine only, in a Shoreditch cellar, since 2003."},{"name":"Sager + Wilde","slug":"sager-wilde","cat":"wine","url":"/wine/sager-wilde/","lat":51.530644,"lng":-0.072824,"verdict":"The bar that taught east London to drink good wine by the glass."},{"name":"Wesley's Chapel, Museum of Methodism and John Wesley's House","slug":"wesleys-chapel-museum-of-methodism-and-john-wesleys-house","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/wesleys-chapel-museum-of-methodism-and-john-wesleys-house/","lat":51.523745,"lng":-0.086575,"verdict":"Where John Wesley lived, preached and died, with the museum of the movement he began in the crypt.","thumb":"/img/own-wesleys-chapel-480.jpg?v=ef7d0189","img":"/img/own-wesleys-chapel.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Columbia Road","slug":"columbia-road","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/columbia-road/","lat":51.528881,"lng":-0.070149,"verdict":"Two facing Victorian terraces that fill with flowers every Sunday morning.","thumb":"/img/street-columbia-road-480.jpg?v=d4abd7bf","img":"/img/street-columbia-road.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Duncan Terrace","slug":"duncan-terrace","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/duncan-terrace/","lat":51.53252,"lng":-0.103973,"verdict":"A Georgian terrace facing a long ribbon of garden, with a church spire closing the view.","thumb":"/img/street-duncan-terrace-480.jpg?v=db99b200","img":"/img/street-duncan-terrace.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Golden Lane Estate","slug":"golden-lane-estate","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/golden-lane-estate/","lat":51.522466,"lng":-0.096075,"verdict":"The council estate that won Chamberlin, Powell and Bon the Barbican: 1950s flats around courts, a yellow tower with a curled roof, and a swimming pool, still lived in.","thumb":"/img/golden-lane-estate-480.jpg?v=4de31a36","img":"/img/golden-lane-estate.jpg","w":480,"h":640},{"name":"Labour and Wait","slug":"labour-and-wait","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/labour-and-wait/","lat":51.524686,"lng":-0.073321,"verdict":"Household tools chosen for how long they will last, in a tiled former pub off Brick Lane.","thumb":"/img/labour-and-wait-480.jpg?v=0a222695","img":"/img/labour-and-wait.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Bunhill Fields","slug":"bunhill-fields","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/bunhill-fields/","lat":51.523507,"lng":-0.088715,"verdict":"The Nonconformist burial ground where Blake, Defoe and Bunyan lie within a few yards of each other.","thumb":"/img/bunhill-fields-480.jpg?v=9a3776dd","img":"/img/bunhill-fields.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Capital Crime","slug":"capital-crime","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/capital-crime/","lat":51.52057,"lng":-0.091233,"verdict":"Three days of crime and thriller writers at the Brewery on Chiswell Street."},{"name":"The Curtain","slug":"the-curtain","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/the-curtain/","lat":51.524564,"lng":-0.080182,"verdict":"Shoreditch's second Elizabethan playhouse, where Romeo and Juliet and Henry V were first seen."},{"name":"The Theatre, Shoreditch","slug":"the-theatre-shoreditch","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/the-theatre-shoreditch/","lat":51.524522,"lng":-0.079747,"verdict":"The site of James Burbage's Theatre of 1576, London's first purpose-built playhouse.","thumb":"/img/the-theatre-shoreditch-480.jpg?v=98dc3c96","img":"/img/the-theatre-shoreditch.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"bookartbookshop","slug":"bookartbookshop","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/bookartbookshop/","lat":51.5268,"lng":-0.0838,"verdict":"A cupboard-sized shop in Hoxton for artists' books, where the book is the artwork."}]},{"slug":"soho","name":"Soho","verdict":"A square mile of restaurants, small theatres and jazz clubs that has been London's least respectable district for three centuries.","note":"The name is a hunting cry, first used for this ground around 1636, when it was open fields. What stopped it becoming a fashionable estate like Mayfair was immigration: Huguenot refugees settled here in numbers from the 1680s, and Soho has been the district where new arrivals set up in business ever since. Every wave has left restaurants behind, which is why you can eat almost anything within these few streets.\n\nIt has been the disreputable quarter for as long as it has been built. In the 1970s there were more than fifty sex shops and forty cinema clubs; almost all of them have gone. The music arrived in the 1950s, when the 2i's coffee bar on Old Compton Street put British rock and roll on a stage the size of a table, and Ronnie Scott opened his jazz club in 1959. It is still running, three doors from where the Marquee had the Rolling Stones and the Who.\n\nOne street corner here changed medicine. In 1854 John Snow mapped a cholera outbreak in Broad Street, traced it to a single water pump, and had the handle taken off; a replica pump marks the spot.\n\nChinatown came in the 1950s and settled on Gerrard Street. Berwick Street still has a fruit and vegetable market, Soho Square still has its gardeners' hut, and the theatres are all within a few minutes' walk.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-soho-4.jpg?v=c00987a1","thumb":"/img/area-soho-4-480.jpg?v=3a72e13b","width":1024,"height":822,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The upper floors of Comptons on Old Compton Street: red brick and cream stone with carved swags and a relief over the middle window, two Union flags flying from the bay windows, gilt lettering on a black fascia and a rainbow flag over the door.","caption":"Comptons, on Old Compton Street.","credit":"Photo by Ricardalovesmonuments, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:51-53_Old_Comptons_Street_London_(2).jpg"},"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-soho.jpg?v=68460a23","thumb":"/img/area-soho-480.jpg?v=b939e2a7","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Soho Square in early spring, bare plane trees over the garden and red brick behind","caption":"Soho Square in April, before the trees come into leaf."},{"src":"/img/area-soho-2.jpg?v=93d2f2ca","thumb":"/img/area-soho-2-480.jpg?v=639024f1","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A Soho street filled with England supporters in flags and shirts during a European Championship match","caption":"England supporters filling a Soho street during the Euros."},{"src":"/img/area-soho-3.jpg?v=8bf8612d","thumb":"/img/area-soho-3-480.jpg?v=23f2a577","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A narrow unlit alley behind Chinatown at night, lanterns strung overhead and bins along the wall","caption":"The back of Chinatown at night, lanterns and bins."},{"src":"/img/area-soho-5.jpg?v=dc22a145","thumb":"/img/area-soho-5-480.jpg?v=29de3520","width":1024,"height":683,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Red paper lanterns strung across a Chinatown street at dusk","caption":"Chinatown's lanterns, on the south edge of Soho.","credit":"Photo by Boris Stefanik bstefanik, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paper_lanterns_in_Chinatown_(Unsplash).jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-soho-6.jpg?v=52f7cadc","thumb":"/img/area-soho-6-480.jpg?v=be84b7dc","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A pale blue Georgian terrace with red awnings over its ground-floor restaurant, a neon 'Quo Vadis' sign on the corner, a Union flag and a rainbow flag, and people at pavement tables in summer sun.","caption":"Quo Vadis on Dean Street. Karl Marx lodged upstairs at number 28.","credit":"Photo by No Swan So Fine, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Quo_Vadis,_26-28_Dean_Street,_Soho,_June_2023.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-soho-7.jpg?v=de75cf1a","thumb":"/img/area-soho-7-480.jpg?v=fcee27fc","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Carnaby Street at night under its Christmas lights: glowing planets, neon stars and blue foil discs strung across the street, with 'Carnaby celebrates' in lit letters over the shops.","caption":"Carnaby Street's Christmas lights, 2022.","credit":"Photo by The wub, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christmas_lights_in_Carnaby_Street,_London,_2022.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-soho-8.jpg?v=681a8769","thumb":"/img/area-soho-8-480.jpg?v=325312c5","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Frith Street at night: motorbikes and a red bubble car parked down the middle of the road, a crowd of riders and drinkers on both pavements, the neon clock of Bar Italia on the left and the Delhi Brasserie's lit front on the right.","caption":"A bikers' meetup on Frith Street, outside longstanding Bar Italia."}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Oxford Street","Charing Cross Road","Haymarket","Regent Street"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.13483,51.51603],[-0.13037,51.51642],[-0.12952,51.514],[-0.12844,51.51211],[-0.12822,51.51034],[-0.12744,51.50949],[-0.12718,51.50857],[-0.12549,51.50863],[-0.12735,51.5074],[-0.1286,51.50754],[-0.13104,51.50778],[-0.13274,51.50958],[-0.13464,51.51009],[-0.13694,51.50997],[-0.13824,51.51054],[-0.14153,51.51418],[-0.14198,51.51534],[-0.13483,51.51603]]]},"centre":[-0.13399,51.51318],"bounds":[[-0.14198,51.5074],[-0.12549,51.51642]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":164,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":5,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":11,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":11,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"shopping","name":"Shopping","count":7,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":6,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":7,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":10,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"breakfast","name":"Breakfast & Brunch","count":4,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"cocktails","name":"Cocktails","count":10,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"wine","name":"Wine","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"royal","name":"Royal London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"politics","name":"Power & Politics","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"sacred","name":"Sacred London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"beautiful-streets","name":"Beautiful Streets","count":7,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"architecture","name":"Architecture","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"monuments","name":"Monuments & Ruins","count":7,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"classic-british-shops","name":"Classic British Shops","count":9,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"science","name":"Science & Engineering","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"secrets","name":"Secrets & Espionage","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":5,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":5,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"harry-potter","name":"Harry Potter","count":5,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"1 Irishman: Reece Kidd","slug":"1-irishman-reece-kidd","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/1-irishman-reece-kidd/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-28","to":"2026-10-28"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"Crowd work and walk-and-talk stories, two hundred million views\u2019 worth."},{"name":"6T's Northern Soul All-Nighter","slug":"6ts-northern-soul-all-nighter","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/100-club/6ts-northern-soul-all-nighter/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-31","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.516108,"lng":-0.135357,"verdict":"Eleven at night until six in the morning, records only, since 1979."},{"name":"A National Portrait for the National Portrait Gallery","slug":"a-national-portrait-for-the-national-portrait-gallery","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-portrait-gallery/a-national-portrait-for-the-national-portrait-gallery/","runs":{"from":"2026-05-14","to":"2026-10-26"},"lat":51.509304,"lng":-0.128212,"verdict":"Sit for Es Devlin's collective digital portrait of the nation."},{"name":"Academy of St Martin in the Fields with Stella Chen","slug":"academy-of-st-martin-in-the-fields-with-stella-chen","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/academy-of-st-martin-in-the-fields-with-stella-chen/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"The orchestra named after this church, playing in it."},{"name":"Ahir Shah: Golden","slug":"ahir-shah-golden","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/ahir-shah-golden/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-05","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Six weeks of a comedian who can hold an argument for an hour and still land the jokes."},{"name":"Alex Garnett's London Supersax Project","slug":"alex-garnetts-london-supersax-project","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/alex-garnetts-london-supersax-project/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-30","to":"2026-09-30"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"Five saxophones playing Charlie Parker's improvised solos in harmony."},{"name":"Allegri's Miserere by Candlelight","slug":"allegris-miserere-by-candlelight","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/allegris-miserere-by-candlelight/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-03","to":"2026-11-03"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"The Miserere, whose top C the Vatican tried to keep to itself."},{"name":"Anthony Joseph","slug":"anthony-joseph","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/anthony-joseph/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-24"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"The Trinidadian poet who won the Ivor Novello for an album of jazz and spoken word."},{"name":"Balladeste","slug":"balladeste","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/balladeste/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-05","to":"2026-11-05"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"Violin and oud together, with an opening set from Gabriel Prokofiev."},{"name":"Baroque Classics by Candlelight","slug":"baroque-classics-by-candlelight","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/baroque-classics-by-candlelight/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Bach and Handel by candlelight, sung by the church's own voices."},{"name":"Beginner's Showcase","slug":"beginners-showcase","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/beginners-showcase/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-11","to":"2026-10-11"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"The graduates of the Store\u2019s own course, doing five minutes each on the stage they trained for."},{"name":"Bella Hull: Mad Cow Disease","slug":"bella-hull-mad-cow-disease","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/bella-hull-mad-cow-disease/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-16","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"A good professional year and a putrid personal one, told in that order."},{"name":"Berlin to Broadway: Kurt Weill songs","slug":"berlin-to-broadway-kurt-weill-songs","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/berlin-to-broadway-kurt-weill-songs/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Weill from the Berlin cabarets to Broadway, and fish and chips in the crypt after."},{"name":"Big Love Big Laughs","slug":"big-love-big-laughs","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/big-love-big-laughs/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-01","to":"2026-12-01"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"Jo Caulfield and Stephen K Amos host a bill of television names for two hospices."},{"name":"Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It","slug":"bigfoot-ripped-my-dog-in-half-i-saw-it","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/bigfoot-ripped-my-dog-in-half-i-saw-it/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Xhloe and Natasha's two-hander, written and performed by both of them."},{"name":"Bokani Dyer Trio","slug":"bokani-dyer-trio","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/bokani-dyer-trio/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-06","to":"2026-10-06"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"South African piano jazz that carries the church and the township with it."},{"name":"Brad Upton","slug":"brad-upton","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/brad-upton/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-07","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"A thirty-seven-year veteran of American clubs having a very late run of luck."},{"name":"Carice Singers at fifteen: Symphony of Psalms","slug":"carice-singers-at-fifteen-symphony-of-psalms","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/carice-singers-at-fifteen-symphony-of-psalms/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-24"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, which he wrote to the glory of God and for the Boston orchestra."},{"name":"Catharina van Hemessen: Signature Works","slug":"catharina-van-hemessen-signature-works","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-gallery/catharina-van-hemessen-signature-works/","runs":{"from":"2027-03-04","to":"2027-05-30"},"lat":51.508889,"lng":-0.128752,"verdict":"The first painter of either sex known to have signed a self-portrait at an easel."},{"name":"Catherine Bohart: Borrowing Trouble","slug":"catherine-bohart-borrowing-trouble","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/catherine-bohart-borrowing-trouble/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-21","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Two weeks of the Irish comedian, downstairs."},{"name":"Catherine Murphy: Recent Work","slug":"catherine-murphy-recent-work","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/sadie-coles-hq/catherine-murphy-recent-work/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.511308,"lng":-0.140414,"verdict":"An American realist who spends a year on a painting and makes you look at a stair carpet."},{"name":"Choral Classics","slug":"choral-classics","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/choral-classics/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-12-20"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Half an hour of choral music on a Sunday afternoon, free, no ticket."},{"name":"Chris Cantrill: Rewilding","slug":"chris-cantrill-rewilding","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/chris-cantrill-rewilding/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-23","to":"2026-12-05"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"A village, an act of vandalism, and the incomer determined to make it about himself."},{"name":"Christian McBride and Ursa Major","slug":"christian-mcbride-and-ursa-major","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/christian-mcbride-and-ursa-major/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-02"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"Eleven Grammys, and a bassist who has played with everyone from Freddie Hubbard to Herbie Hancock."},{"name":"Christmas Best in Stand Up","slug":"christmas-best-in-stand-up","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/christmas-best-in-stand-up/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-03","to":"2026-12-29"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"The Store\u2019s five-act bill, in its Christmas run."},{"name":"Claire Martin with the Martin Sjostedt Trio","slug":"claire-martin-with-the-martin-sjostedt-trio","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/claire-martin-with-the-martin-sjostedt-trio/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"Thirty-odd years of British jazz singing, in the club she has played more than any other."},{"name":"Colin Self: Unseen","slug":"colin-self-unseen","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/frith-street-gallery/colin-self-unseen/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.511447,"lng":-0.136959,"verdict":"The first London retrospective for a British Pop artist who never behaved like one."},{"name":"Come and Sing: Mozart's Requiem","slug":"come-and-sing-mozarts-requiem","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/come-and-sing-mozarts-requiem/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-31","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"An afternoon actually singing the Requiem, rather than listening to it."},{"name":"Crybabies: The Scaring","slug":"crybabies-the-scaring","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/crybabies-the-scaring/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Sketch comedy, in the dark, deliberately silly about horror."},{"name":"Crypt Close-Up: Rachel Podger and Lucie Horsch","slug":"crypt-close-up-rachel-podger-and-lucie-horsch","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/crypt-close-up-rachel-podger-and-lucie-horsch/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-28","to":"2026-10-28"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Baroque violin and recorder in the crypt, on showpieces and folk songs."},{"name":"Crypt Close-Up: Ruby Hughes and Jonas Nordberg","slug":"crypt-close-up-ruby-hughes-and-jonas-nordberg","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/crypt-close-up-ruby-hughes-and-jonas-nordberg/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-13","to":"2026-10-13"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Lute songs at eight in the evening, in the crypt under the church."},{"name":"Darbar: Carnatic music at lunchtime","slug":"darbar-carnatic-music-at-lunchtime","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/darbar-carnatic-music-at-lunchtime/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-10-02"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"South Indian classical music in a Georgian church, for an hour at 12:00."},{"name":"David Elms Describes A Room","slug":"david-elms-describes-a-room","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/david-elms-describes-a-room/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"The cult hit returns: a man, a room, and a description that will not stop."},{"name":"Dina Martina: Halloweena!","slug":"dina-martina-halloweena","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/dina-martina-halloweena/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-19","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Soho\u2019s favourite funny ghoul, back in the Dean Street basement for October."},{"name":"Diwali on the Square","slug":"diwali-on-the-square","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/diwali-on-the-square/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-25","to":"2026-10-25","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.508,"lng":-0.1281,"verdict":"Two hundred dancers open the Mayor's Diwali on Trafalgar Square, free, no ticket."},{"name":"Dom McGovern: Prize Hog","slug":"dom-mcgovern-prize-hog","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/dom-mcgovern-prize-hog/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-12","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"One man\u2019s vanity meets Catholicism, and neither gives way."},{"name":"Don Toberman: Ping-Pong Champ","slug":"don-toberman-ping-pong-champ","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/don-toberman-ping-pong-champ/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"A Gaulier-trained clown plays the entire audience at table tennis, and loses badly."},{"name":"Douglas Lim: Vital Stats","slug":"douglas-lim-vital-stats","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/douglas-lim-vital-stats/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-10-05"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Malaysia's best-known stand-up, on politics, food and everything else at home."},{"name":"Ecstasy of the Virtues","slug":"ecstasy-of-the-virtues","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/ecstasy-of-the-virtues/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"A new mystery opera under the chapel dome."},{"name":"Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius","slug":"elgar-the-dream-of-gerontius","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/elgar-the-dream-of-gerontius/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-17","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Gerontius by candlelight, for the church's three hundredth year."},{"name":"Erik Truffaz and Antonio Lizana: New Sketches of Spain","slug":"erik-truffaz-and-antonio-lizana-new-sketches-of-spain","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/erik-truffaz-and-antonio-lizana-new-sketches-of-spain/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-17","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain rebuilt by a French trumpeter and a flamenco singer."},{"name":"Ex Cathedra: Spem in Alium in forty parts","slug":"ex-cathedra-spem-in-alium-in-forty-parts","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/ex-cathedra-spem-in-alium-in-forty-parts/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-22","to":"2026-10-22"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Forty separate voice parts at once, and new pieces written to match."},{"name":"Family Classics: A Space Exploration","slug":"family-classics-a-space-exploration","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/family-classics-a-space-exploration/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-24","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Forty-five minutes of orchestral music about space, for any age."},{"name":"Faris Ishaq","slug":"faris-ishaq","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/faris-ishaq/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-14","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"A Palestinian nay player treating a five-thousand-year-old flute as a modern instrument."},{"name":"Fifty years of punk: X, Generation X and Stinky Toys","slug":"fifty-years-of-punk-x-generation-x-and-stinky-toys","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/100-club/fifty-years-of-punk-x-generation-x-and-stinky-toys/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.516108,"lng":-0.135357,"verdict":"The room the 1976 punk festival happened in, marking fifty years of it."},{"name":"Fireworks Music by Candlelight","slug":"fireworks-music-by-candlelight","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/fireworks-music-by-candlelight/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-05","to":"2026-11-05"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Handel's Royal Fireworks music on Bonfire Night, indoors, by candle."},{"name":"Florian Arbenz, Chris Cheek and Arno Krijger","slug":"florian-arbenz-chris-cheek-and-arno-krijger","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/pizza-express-live-dean-street/florian-arbenz-chris-cheek-and-arno-krijger/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-15","to":"2026-09-15"},"lat":51.515054,"lng":-0.133318,"verdict":"A Swiss drummer, an American saxophonist and a Dutch organist, on a Tuesday."},{"name":"Frankie McNair: Huge Ass Mindset","slug":"frankie-mcnair-huge-ass-mindset","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/frankie-mcnair-huge-ass-mindset/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"The Australian comedian's hour, four nights only."},{"name":"Frankie Thompson: Horrible Things","slug":"frankie-thompson-horrible-things","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/frankie-thompson-horrible-things/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-09","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"A clown who has been collecting horrible things, and has brought them all with her."},{"name":"Freddie Meredith: Need a Light?","slug":"freddie-meredith-need-a-light","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/freddie-meredith-need-a-light/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-21","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"A self-appointed thought leader holding forth in a smoking area, at length."},{"name":"Funny Women Glitter Challenge","slug":"funny-women-glitter-challenge","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/funny-women-glitter-challenge/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-30","to":"2026-09-30"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"Eight women who took a summer comedy challenge, doing it for real on the Store\u2019s stage."},{"name":"Garefowl","slug":"garefowl","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/garefowl/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-31","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"Hallowe'en night in a deconsecrated chapel, which is the right room for it."},{"name":"German Expressionism: Modern Painting 1900\u20131918","slug":"german-expressionism-modern-painting-19001918","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-gallery/german-expressionism-modern-painting-19001918/","runs":{"from":"2027-03-20","to":"2027-08-01"},"lat":51.508889,"lng":-0.128752,"verdict":"Br\u00fccke and Blaue Reiter, from the years before the war swallowed them."},{"name":"Gillian Wearing: Spiritual Family","slug":"gillian-wearing-spiritual-family","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-portrait-gallery/gillian-wearing-spiritual-family/","runs":{"from":"2026-01-09","to":"2027-01-10"},"lat":51.509304,"lng":-0.128212,"verdict":"Four self-portraits in which Wearing becomes the artists she counts as family."},{"name":"Ginger Johnson: Show Pony","slug":"ginger-johnson-show-pony","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/ginger-johnson-show-pony/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-02","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"The Drag Race UK winner's own show, a week downstairs."},{"name":"Great Sacred Music","slug":"great-sacred-music","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/great-sacred-music/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-12-17"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Thirty-five minutes of choral music and commentary, every Thursday at one, free."},{"name":"HAM","slug":"ham","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/ham/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-29","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Hamlet hijacked, with meat, madness and shame doing the work of the ghost."},{"name":"Harriet Richardson: Creep","slug":"harriet-richardson-creep","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/harriet-richardson-creep/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-27","to":"2026-12-05"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Obsession, shame, and the fatal magnetism of a man off the television."},{"name":"Harry Potter and the Cursed Child","slug":"harry-potter-and-the-cursed-child","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/palace-theatre/harry-potter-and-the-cursed-child/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2027-09-08"},"lat":51.5131,"lng":-0.129788,"verdict":"Nineteen years after the last book, in two parts or one long day."},{"name":"Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award 2026","slug":"herbert-smith-freehills-kramer-portrait-award-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-portrait-gallery/herbert-smith-freehills-kramer-portrait-award-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-25","to":"2026-10-07"},"lat":51.509304,"lng":-0.128212,"verdict":"The year's painted portraits, free on Floor 2, with a vote for your favourite."},{"name":"Hidden London: Charing Cross tour & afternoon tea","slug":"hidden-london-charing-cross-tour-afternoon-tea","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-charing-cross-tour-afternoon-tea/","lat":51.507966,"lng":-0.126394,"verdict":"The same secret platforms, then scones upstairs at the Clermont."},{"name":"Hidden London: Charing Cross \u2014 behind the Silver Screen","slug":"hidden-london-charing-cross-behind-the-silver-screen","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-charing-cross-behind-the-silver-screen/","lat":51.507966,"lng":-0.126394,"verdict":"Disused platforms under Trafalgar Square that keep turning up in films."},{"name":"Hidden London: Piccadilly Circus \u2014 the heart of London","slug":"hidden-london-piccadilly-circus-the-heart-of-london","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-piccadilly-circus-the-heart-of-london/","lat":51.509819,"lng":-0.134548,"verdict":"Edwardian tunnels sealed in 1929, under the busiest circus in London."},{"name":"Honeypot Comedy Night","slug":"honeypot-comedy-night","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/honeypot-comedy-night/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-09-16"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"Milton Jones, Ian Stone, Sikisa and Felicity Ward on one bill, for a children\u2019s charity."},{"name":"Ian Stone: Looking for the Wow","slug":"ian-stone-looking-for-the-wow","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/ian-stone-looking-for-the-wow/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-23","to":"2026-11-23"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"An argument that life should not just be the humdrum and then the decline."},{"name":"Ivo Graham: Orange Crush","slug":"ivo-graham-orange-crush","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/ivo-graham-orange-crush/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-12","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"An hour on the best orange thing in the world, considered exhaustively."},{"name":"James Morton's Groove Den","slug":"james-mortons-groove-den","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/pizza-express-live-dean-street/james-mortons-groove-den/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-17"},"lat":51.515054,"lng":-0.133318,"verdict":"Bristol funk saxophone, in a basement built for it."},{"name":"Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now","slug":"japanese-women-photographers-from-1950s-to-now","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/the-photographers-gallery/japanese-women-photographers-from-1950s-to-now/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-24","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.514926,"lng":-0.139018,"verdict":"Twenty-seven photographers, two hundred works, and a history of Japanese photography retold."},{"name":"Jazz every night under the pizza restaurant","slug":"jazz-every-night-under-the-pizza-restaurant","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/pizza-express-live-dean-street/jazz-every-night-under-the-pizza-restaurant/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.515054,"lng":-0.133318,"verdict":"A basement on Dean Street that has booked jazz nightly for half a century, under a branch of PizzaExpress."},{"name":"Joel Ross Quartet","slug":"joel-ross-quartet","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/joel-ross-quartet/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-27","to":"2026-10-27"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"The vibraphone player who has changed what the instrument is for."},{"name":"John Etheridge: three nights, three bands","slug":"john-etheridge-three-nights-three-bands","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/pizza-express-live-dean-street/john-etheridge-three-nights-three-bands/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.515054,"lng":-0.133318,"verdict":"Soft Machine on the Thursday, Frank Zappa on the Friday, Indian song on the Saturday."},{"name":"Jordan Brookes: The Part of You That's Always Screaming","slug":"jordan-brookes-the-part-of-you-thats-always-screaming","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/jordan-brookes-the-part-of-you-thats-always-screaming/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-05","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"The 2019 Edinburgh Comedy Award winner, still working the gates of hell."},{"name":"Joseph Morpurgo: Highlander 70","slug":"joseph-morpurgo-highlander-70","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/joseph-morpurgo-highlander-70/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-29","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"His first new show in nine years, from a comedian who has never done the same thing twice."},{"name":"Kane Brown: Crowd Work King","slug":"kane-brown-crowd-work-king","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/kane-brown-crowd-work-king/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-04","to":"2026-11-18"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"A show with no script, built out of whoever turns up."},{"name":"Kate Dehnert: Echo","slug":"kate-dehnert-echo","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/kate-dehnert-echo/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-14","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"A third play, a third stand-up, a third rave, made out of a year that went wrong."},{"name":"Katie Norris: Mother Succubus","slug":"katie-norris-mother-succubus","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/katie-norris-mother-succubus/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-14","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Character comedy from half of Norris & Parker."},{"name":"Kemah Bob: Love Child","slug":"kemah-bob-love-child","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/kemah-bob-love-child/","runs":{"from":"2027-03-01","to":"2027-03-06"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"The end of an extended adolescence, announced from the stage."},{"name":"Kirsty Mann: Corpse","slug":"kirsty-mann-corpse","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/kirsty-mann-corpse/","runs":{"from":"2027-02-02","to":"2027-02-13"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"She bought a derelict house where somebody had died, and did not believe in ghosts."},{"name":"Kyle Eastwood","slug":"kyle-eastwood","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/kyle-eastwood/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-13","to":"2026-10-14"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"Bassist, bandleader, and a writer of film scores who plays them live."},{"name":"La Serenissima: Baroque Energy","slug":"la-serenissima-baroque-energy","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/la-serenissima-baroque-energy/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Vivaldi, Corelli and the contemporaries nobody has heard of, played fast."},{"name":"Laughter is the Best Medicine","slug":"laughter-is-the-best-medicine","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/laughter-is-the-best-medicine/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-19","to":"2026-10-19"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"International comics on the Store\u2019s stage, with the takings going to medical charities in Gaza and the West Bank."},{"name":"Li Jin Hao: Falling From a Moon","slug":"li-jin-hao-falling-from-a-moon","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/li-jin-hao-falling-from-a-moon/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-28","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Edinburgh\u2019s Best Newcomer on wanting to go back in time, but not as far as Pangaea."},{"name":"London Mozart Players and Sean Shibe","slug":"london-mozart-players-and-sean-shibe","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/london-mozart-players-and-sean-shibe/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Baroque concertos rearranged for guitar, and Scottish tunes after them."},{"name":"London Mozart Players: Mozart with Roderick Williams and Sophie Bevan","slug":"london-mozart-players-mozart-with-roderick-williams-and-sophie-bevan","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/london-mozart-players-mozart-with-roderick-williams-and-sophie-bevan/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-29","to":"2026-10-29"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Late Mozart, symphonic and operatic, with two of the best British singers."},{"name":"London Oyster Championships","slug":"london-oyster-championships","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/london-oyster-championships/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.509726,"lng":-0.137736,"verdict":"England's fastest shuckers, on a Piccadilly terrace, judged by Stanley Tucci."},{"name":"London Voices: Video Games Go Choral","slug":"london-voices-video-games-go-choral","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/london-voices-video-games-go-choral/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-08","to":"2026-10-08"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Halo and BioShock next to Howells and Part, sung by the choir that recorded them."},{"name":"MOURN","slug":"mourn","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/mourn/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-08","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"Three nights from FIGURE and Alkanna Graeca."},{"name":"Makoto Ozone Trio","slug":"makoto-ozone-trio","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/makoto-ozone-trio/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-08","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"The Japanese pianist Gary Burton took on tour at twenty-two, still at it."},{"name":"Manu Delago and Max ZT","slug":"manu-delago-and-max-zt","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/manu-delago-and-max-zt/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-15","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"A handpan and a hammered dulcimer, played by two people who have made careers out of odd instruments."},{"name":"Mark Lettieri Group","slug":"mark-lettieri-group","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/mark-lettieri-group/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-30","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"The Snarky Puppy guitarist with his own band, two nights."},{"name":"Marty Gleeson: Dog Ear","slug":"marty-gleeson-dog-ear","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/marty-gleeson-dog-ear/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-05","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"An Irish comedian takes you by the hand and then loses an eye."},{"name":"Mary Cassatt: Radical Impressionist","slug":"mary-cassatt-radical-impressionist","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-portrait-gallery/mary-cassatt-radical-impressionist/","runs":{"from":"2027-03-11","to":"2027-06-13"},"lat":51.509304,"lng":-0.128212,"verdict":"The first UK retrospective of the American Impressionist, a century after her death."},{"name":"Matthew Holness: Work in Progress","slug":"matthew-holness-work-in-progress","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/matthew-holness-work-in-progress/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-16","to":"2026-11-16"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"The creator of Garth Marenghi, doing live music and readings from a fictional pulp novelist."},{"name":"Max Olesker: Making the Cut","slug":"max-olesker-making-the-cut","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/max-olesker-making-the-cut/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-03","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"To marry her he had to convert to Orthodox Judaism, which was awkward, as he was already Jewish."},{"name":"Maya Ricote: Ay Am!","slug":"maya-ricote-ay-am","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/maya-ricote-ay-am/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"A debut clown show by a Latina character freshly defrosted from cryogenic storage."},{"name":"Mingus Big Band","slug":"mingus-big-band","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/mingus-big-band/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-19","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"Six nights of Charles Mingus's music played by the band that exists to play it."},{"name":"Monet and Renoir: Painting Side by Side","slug":"monet-and-renoir-painting-side-by-side","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-gallery/monet-and-renoir-painting-side-by-side/","runs":{"from":"2026-07-27","to":"2026-09-15"},"lat":51.508889,"lng":-0.128752,"verdict":"Two friends painting the same river bank, hung side by side for the first time."},{"name":"Mozart's Requiem by Candlelight","slug":"mozarts-requiem-by-candlelight","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/mozarts-requiem-by-candlelight/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-07","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"The Requiem by candle, with Whitacre before it."},{"name":"Muireann Bradley","slug":"muireann-bradley","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/muireann-bradley/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-13","to":"2026-11-13"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"An eighteen-year-old from Donegal playing pre-war American country blues, note for note and then some."},{"name":"NINAGAWA Mika: Captive Blooms","slug":"ninagawa-mika-captive-blooms","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/the-photographers-gallery/ninagawa-mika-captive-blooms/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-19","to":"2027-06-01"},"lat":51.514926,"lng":-0.139018,"verdict":"Goldfish, cherry blossom and saturated flowers on the walls of Ramillies Street, free, for a year."},{"name":"New Year's Eve at the Comedy Store","slug":"new-years-eve-at-the-comedy-store","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/new-years-eve-at-the-comedy-store/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-31","to":"2026-12-31"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"Four comics, a band and a party that runs past midnight."},{"name":"Omar Badawy: Guided Detour","slug":"omar-badawy-guided-detour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/omar-badawy-guided-detour/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-07","to":"2026-12-12"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"He walked into a far-right march by accident, and that was not the worst of the day."},{"name":"Outernet","slug":"outernet","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/outernet/","lat":51.515643,"lng":-0.129796,"verdict":"Four storeys of wraparound screen by Tottenham Court Road, free to walk into."},{"name":"Paul Foot: The Future","slug":"paul-foot-the-future","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/paul-foot-the-future/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-23","to":"2026-12-05"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Whatever happened to jetpacks, friendly robots and solar-powered bidets."},{"name":"Peter Bernstein Quartet","slug":"peter-bernstein-quartet","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/peter-bernstein-quartet/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-09-16"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"One of the great living jazz guitarists, playing straight down the middle and doing it perfectly."},{"name":"Pierre Novellie: Okay, One More Then Bedtime","slug":"pierre-novellie-okay-one-more-then-bedtime","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/pierre-novellie-okay-one-more-then-bedtime/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-21","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Observational nerd comedy, one last time before bed."},{"name":"Portraits for Guitar","slug":"portraits-for-guitar","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/portraits-for-guitar/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-23","to":"2026-10-23"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"Ahmed Dickinson plays Cuban and Trinidadian composers for classical guitar."},{"name":"REVOLVER","slug":"revolver","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/revolver/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-24","to":"2026-12-05"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Three women across sixty years, and the Beatles album that runs underneath them."},{"name":"ROLEPLAY","slug":"roleplay","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/roleplay/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-22","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Hannah Reilly's new play, a month in the main house."},{"name":"Ray Gelato and the Giants","slug":"ray-gelato-and-the-giants","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/100-club/ray-gelato-and-the-giants/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.516108,"lng":-0.135357,"verdict":"Jump blues and swing in the basement, played straight and loud."},{"name":"Renoir and Love","slug":"renoir-and-love","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-gallery/renoir-and-love/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2027-01-31"},"lat":51.508889,"lng":-0.128752,"verdict":"Renoir's dancers and lovers, and the paintings he built a career on."},{"name":"Rhapsody in Blue by Candlelight","slug":"rhapsody-in-blue-by-candlelight","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/rhapsody-in-blue-by-candlelight/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-10","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Gershwin by candle, with Florence Price and Shostakovich either side."},{"name":"Rob Auton: Jupiter","slug":"rob-auton-jupiter","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/rob-auton-jupiter/","runs":{"from":"2027-05-17","to":"2027-05-29"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"His thirteenth hour, about the time he was an estate agent on Jupiter. It is fiction."},{"name":"Ronnie Scott's Jazz Jam","slug":"ronnie-scotts-jazz-jam","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/ronnie-scotts-jazz-jam/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-14","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"Monday nights, the house trio, and whoever gets up."},{"name":"Rupi Kaur: Uncut","slug":"rupi-kaur-uncut","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/rupi-kaur-uncut/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-05","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"The poet works out new material in a small room, with nothing finished."},{"name":"SANSARA: Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet","slug":"sansara-jesus-blood-never-failed-me-yet","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/sansara-jesus-blood-never-failed-me-yet/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-09","to":"2026-10-09"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Gavin Bryars's piece built on a homeless man singing, on the eve of World Homeless Day."},{"name":"Salty Brine: How Strange It Is","slug":"salty-brine-how-strange-it-is","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/salty-brine-how-strange-it-is/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"A cabaret performer taking Neutral Milk Hotel's album apart on stage."},{"name":"Sam Eley is Basil Crumbwick: Soul Sewage","slug":"sam-eley-is-basil-crumbwick-soul-sewage","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/sam-eley-is-basil-crumbwick-soul-sewage/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-08","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Late-night villainy from a comic alter ego that won everything going in 2026."},{"name":"Sarah Schlesinger: Sight Line","slug":"sarah-schlesinger-sight-line","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/huxley-parlour/sarah-schlesinger-sight-line/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.509214,"lng":-0.137434,"verdict":"New work at the Swallow Street gallery, off Regent Street."},{"name":"Shreeja Chaturvedi","slug":"shreeja-chaturvedi","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/shreeja-chaturvedi/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-05","to":"2026-10-05"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"One of India\u2019s sharpest stand-ups, on her first proper run at Europe."},{"name":"Shuteen Erdenebaatar Quartet","slug":"shuteen-erdenebaatar-quartet","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/shuteen-erdenebaatar-quartet/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-04","to":"2026-11-04"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"A Mongolian pianist who arrived in European jazz almost fully formed."},{"name":"Sofie Hagen: I Think Some of This Is My Fault","slug":"sofie-hagen-i-think-some-of-this-is-my-fault","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/sofie-hagen-i-think-some-of-this-is-my-fault/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-09","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Best Newcomer in 2015, and she thinks everybody stopped mentioning it too soon."},{"name":"Soho Hidden Jazz Club","slug":"soho-hidden-jazz-club","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/soho-hidden-jazz-club/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-10-02"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"A jazz night in a former nightclub in a former chapel."},{"name":"Sophie Duker: Hot Beef Injection","slug":"sophie-duker-hot-beef-injection","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/sophie-duker-hot-beef-injection/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-26","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Two weeks of Sophie Duker downstairs."},{"name":"Spencer Jones: Dogs","slug":"spencer-jones-dogs","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/spencer-jones-dogs/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-07","to":"2026-12-23"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"New characters, stupid songs and visual comedy, for people who like dogs and people who do not."},{"name":"St Martin's Baroque Classics","slug":"st-martins-baroque-classics","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/st-martins-baroque-classics/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-15","to":"2026-10-15"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"The music this church heard when it was new, for its three hundredth birthday."},{"name":"Sullivan Fortner Trio","slug":"sullivan-fortner-trio","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/sullivan-fortner-trio/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-28","to":"2026-10-28"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"A pianist who can play anything and mostly chooses to surprise you."},{"name":"Sunday lunch at Ronnie's","slug":"sunday-lunch-at-ronnies","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/sunday-lunch-at-ronnies/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"Jazz at lunchtime on a Sunday, in a room built for 00:00."},{"name":"Tcha Limberger Quartet","slug":"tcha-limberger-quartet","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/crazy-coqs/tcha-limberger-quartet/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-22","to":"2026-09-22"},"lat":51.510623,"lng":-0.135584,"verdict":"A blind Belgian violinist who plays Hungarian village music, Gypsy jazz and Flemish song."},{"name":"Temi Wilkey: Lover Girl","slug":"temi-wilkey-lover-girl","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/temi-wilkey-lover-girl/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-02","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"A self-described lover girl, somehow always single, who has built herself another one."},{"name":"The 12 Ensemble and James McVinnie: Poulenc Organ Concerto","slug":"the-12-ensemble-and-james-mcvinnie-poulenc-organ-concerto","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/the-12-ensemble-and-james-mcvinnie-poulenc-organ-concerto/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-23","to":"2026-10-23"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Poulenc's concerto for organ, strings and timpani, which he called half-monastery, half-music hall."},{"name":"The 5.6.7.8's","slug":"the-5-6-7-8s","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/100-club/the-5-6-7-8s/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-18","to":"2026-10-18"},"lat":51.516108,"lng":-0.135357,"verdict":"The Japanese garage trio from the Kill Bill teahouse scene."},{"name":"The Black Cat Cabaret: Salon des Artistes","slug":"the-black-cat-cabaret-salon-des-artistes","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/crazy-coqs/the-black-cat-cabaret-salon-des-artistes/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.510623,"lng":-0.135584,"verdict":"Late-night circus, burlesque and variety in an art deco basement off Piccadilly."},{"name":"The Blind Boys of Alabama","slug":"the-blind-boys-of-alabama","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/the-blind-boys-of-alabama/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-10","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"A gospel group that started singing in 1939 and has never stopped."},{"name":"The Clap: Comedy for Parents In Need","slug":"the-clap-comedy-for-parents-in-need","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/the-clap-comedy-for-parents-in-need/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"Stephen Mangan, Julian Rhind-Tutt and Bobby Davro among a bill raising money for parents."},{"name":"The Crystal Maze LIVE Experience","slug":"the-crystal-maze-live-experience","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/the-crystal-maze-live-experience/","lat":51.510926,"lng":-0.133553,"verdict":"Aztec, Industrial, Futuristic, Medieval - and the Dome at the end."},{"name":"The English Concert: Handel's Scipione","slug":"the-english-concert-handels-scipione","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/the-english-concert-handels-scipione/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-16","to":"2026-10-16"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"A Handel opera that had its hit run in the Haymarket in 1726 and then vanished."},{"name":"The Journey: twenty-five years of Tenebrae","slug":"the-journey-twenty-five-years-of-tenebrae","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/the-journey-twenty-five-years-of-tenebrae/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-17"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Nigel Short's choir at twenty-five, singing the pieces that got them there."},{"name":"The King's Singers: Finding Harmony","slug":"the-kings-singers-finding-harmony","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/the-kings-singers-finding-harmony/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-30","to":"2026-10-30"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Six voices, no instruments, and the range they have made their own since 1968."},{"name":"The Late Late Show","slug":"the-late-late-show","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/the-late-late-show/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2026-12-09"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"Twelve pounds gets you into Ronnie's at quarter past eleven, every night of the week."},{"name":"The National Gallery's permanent galleries","slug":"the-national-gallerys-permanent-galleries","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/national-gallery/the-national-gallerys-permanent-galleries/","lat":51.508889,"lng":-0.128752,"verdict":"Van Eyck, Leonardo, Vel\u00e1zquez, Turner and the Sunflowers, free, off Trafalgar Square."},{"name":"The National Portrait Gallery's permanent galleries","slug":"the-national-portrait-gallerys-permanent-galleries","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/national-portrait-gallery/the-national-portrait-gallerys-permanent-galleries/","lat":51.509304,"lng":-0.128212,"verdict":"Seven hundred years of British faces, free, and best walked downwards."},{"name":"The Standard of Living","slug":"the-standard-of-living","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/theatre-royal-haymarket/the-standard-of-living/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-21","to":"2026-12-12"},"lat":51.508633,"lng":-0.131278,"verdict":"A limited season behind Nash's 1821 portico."},{"name":"Theo Croker","slug":"theo-croker","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/theo-croker/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-06","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"Trumpet, hip-hop production values, and a grandfather who played with Louis Armstrong."},{"name":"Those People","slug":"those-people","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/those-people/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Two best friends trying to make something profound and failing, on purpose."},{"name":"Tim Walker's Fairyland: Love and Legends","slug":"tim-walkers-fairyland-love-and-legends","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-portrait-gallery/tim-walkers-fairyland-love-and-legends/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-09","to":"2027-02-07"},"lat":51.509304,"lng":-0.128212,"verdict":"Five years of Tim Walker photographing queer trailblazers, in his fairytale style."},{"name":"Tom Towelling Teaches You to Knit","slug":"tom-towelling-teaches-you-to-knit","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/tom-towelling-teaches-you-to-knit/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-19","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Songs, dancing and the threads that tie us all together, from a Sean Lock Award winner."},{"name":"Tom Ward: Post-millennium Tension","slug":"tom-ward-post-millennium-tension","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/tom-ward-post-millennium-tension/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-14","to":"2026-10-14"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"A man who would rather live in 1993 giving the present one last go, for his son\u2019s sake."},{"name":"Tony Kofi and Denys Baptiste: Cannonball and Coltrane","slug":"tony-kofi-and-denys-baptiste-cannonball-and-coltrane","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/tony-kofi-and-denys-baptiste-cannonball-and-coltrane/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-16","to":"2026-10-16"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"Two British saxophonists on the two Americans who defined the instrument."},{"name":"Underdog: The Other Other Bronte","slug":"underdog-the-other-other-bronte","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/criterion-theatre/underdog-the-other-other-bronte/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.509617,"lng":-0.133988,"verdict":"Anne Bronte, who wrote two novels and got forgotten, tells you what she thinks of that."},{"name":"Underground Monk Show","slug":"underground-monk-show","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/underground-monk-show/","runs":{"from":"2027-01-11","to":"2027-01-23"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Monks find magic water, magic water grants wishes, monks lose their minds."},{"name":"Upstairs at Ronnie's","slug":"upstairs-at-ronnies","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/upstairs-at-ronnies/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"The second room above the club, with its own bill every night and its own door."},{"name":"Van Eyck: The Portraits","slug":"van-eyck-the-portraits","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-gallery/van-eyck-the-portraits/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-21","to":"2027-04-11"},"lat":51.508889,"lng":-0.128752,"verdict":"The portraits of the man who made oil paint do what it does."},{"name":"Victor Patrascan in London","slug":"victor-patrascan-in-london","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/victor-patrascan-in-london/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-18","to":"2026-10-21"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"A Romanian comic banned by one government for being, officially, too funny."},{"name":"Vivaldi's Four Seasons by Candlelight","slug":"vivaldis-four-seasons-by-candlelight","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/vivaldis-four-seasons-by-candlelight/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"The Four Seasons in a Georgian church lit by candles, on Trafalgar Square."},{"name":"Waldm\u00fcller: Landscapes","slug":"waldmuller-landscapes","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-gallery/waldmuller-landscapes/","runs":{"to":"2026-09-20"},"lat":51.508889,"lng":-0.128752,"verdict":"Alpine light from a painter who worked outdoors decades before the Impressionists."},{"name":"Wally Baram: My Snake's Quincea\u00f1era","slug":"wally-baram-my-snakes-quinceanera","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/wally-baram-my-snakes-quinceanera/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"The Overcompensating star's first UK stand-up dates, late on in Soho Downstairs."},{"name":"Wind Alone, Sand Alone: Make No Sound","slug":"wind-alone-sand-alone-make-no-sound","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/wind-alone-sand-alone-make-no-sound/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"Korean music at the K-Music Festival, in a stripped chapel."},{"name":"Windborne: Courageous Change","slug":"windborne-courageous-change","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/windborne-courageous-change/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"American four-part harmony singing, in the protest tradition it came from."},{"name":"Winston Taylor Photo Portrait Prize 2026","slug":"winston-taylor-photo-portrait-prize-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-portrait-gallery/winston-taylor-photo-portrait-prize-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-05","to":"2027-01-17"},"lat":51.509304,"lng":-0.128212,"verdict":"The photographic portrait prize formerly known as Taylor Wessing, in its new name."},{"name":"Yinka Shonibare and Thomas Gainsborough: A Conversation","slug":"yinka-shonibare-and-thomas-gainsborough-a-conversation","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/national-gallery/yinka-shonibare-and-thomas-gainsborough-a-conversation/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-15","to":"2027-02-07"},"lat":51.508889,"lng":-0.128752,"verdict":"A living artist answering an eighteenth-century portrait, in the same room as it."},{"name":"You're So Special","slug":"youre-so-special","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/youre-so-special/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"A new play upstairs at Soho, running three weeks."},{"name":"Zoe Wohlfeld: DOG FUNERAL","slug":"zoe-wohlfeld-dog-funeral","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/zoe-wohlfeld-dog-funeral/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Half past ten at night, three nights, upstairs."},{"name":"midori jaeger: (Re)planted","slug":"midori-jaeger-re-planted","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/stone-nest/midori-jaeger-re-planted/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-21","to":"2026-10-21"},"lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"A cellist and singer launching an EP under the dome."},{"name":"British Optical Association Museum","slug":"british-optical-association-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/british-optical-association-museum/","deep":true,"lat":51.507892,"lng":-0.125392,"verdict":"History of eye care (by appointment only)."},{"name":"Canada House Gallery","slug":"canada-house-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/canada-house-gallery/","deep":true,"lat":51.5079,"lng":-0.1294,"verdict":"Canadian historical and contemporary art and artefacts."},{"name":"National Gallery","slug":"national-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/national-gallery/","lat":51.508889,"lng":-0.128752,"verdict":"Western painting from Giotto to C\u00e9zanne, 2,300 pictures on one floor, free, on the north side of Trafalgar Square.","thumb":"/img/own-national-gallery-480.jpg?v=cad2479f","img":"/img/own-national-gallery.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"National Portrait Gallery","slug":"national-portrait-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/national-portrait-gallery/","lat":51.509304,"lng":-0.128212,"verdict":"British history told through faces, from the Chandos Shakespeare to last year's photographs, reopened in 2023 with far more room.","thumb":"/img/national-portrait-gallery-480.jpg?v=0636eea1","img":"/img/national-portrait-gallery.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"The Photographers' Gallery","slug":"the-photographers-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/the-photographers-gallery/","lat":51.514926,"lng":-0.139018,"verdict":"Britain's first public gallery for photography alone, since 1971, on several floors behind Oxford Street.","thumb":"/img/the-photographers-gallery-480.jpg?v=02468dbb","img":"/img/the-photographers-gallery.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Canada Gallery","slug":"canada-house-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/canada-house-gallery/","lat":51.5079,"lng":-0.1294,"verdict":"Canada's art collection on show in its High Commission on Trafalgar Square, free and largely unvisited."},{"name":"Canaletto in Beak Street","slug":"canaletto-in-beak-street","cat":"art","url":"/art/canaletto-in-beak-street/","lat":51.51245,"lng":-0.137517,"verdict":"A plaque on a Soho shopfront for the painter who spent nine years making Venice out of London.","thumb":"/img/own-canaletto-house-480.jpg?v=a04bcbb3","img":"/img/own-canaletto-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Charles I at Charing Cross","slug":"charles-i-at-charing-cross","cat":"art","url":"/art/charles-i-at-charing-cross/","lat":51.507334,"lng":-0.127655,"verdict":"The oldest bronze equestrian statue in England, and the point from which every distance to London is measured.","thumb":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross-480.jpg?v=db81f3c1","img":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Frith Street Gallery","slug":"frith-street-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/frith-street-gallery/","deep":true,"lat":51.511447,"lng":-0.136959,"verdict":"Jane Hamlyn's gallery in Soho, thirty-five years of Tacita Dean, Cornelia Parker, Fiona Tan and Callum Innes."},{"name":"Huxley-Parlour","slug":"huxley-parlour","cat":"art","url":"/art/huxley-parlour/","deep":true,"lat":51.509214,"lng":-0.137434,"verdict":"Photography and painting in two Mayfair galleries, with a line in the twentieth-century masters."},{"name":"National Gallery","slug":"national-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/national-gallery/","lat":51.508889,"lng":-0.128752,"verdict":"Western painting from Giotto to C\u00e9zanne, 2,300 pictures on one floor, free, on the north side of Trafalgar Square.","thumb":"/img/own-national-gallery-480.jpg?v=cad2479f","img":"/img/own-national-gallery.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"National Portrait Gallery","slug":"national-portrait-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/national-portrait-gallery/","lat":51.509304,"lng":-0.128212,"verdict":"British history told through faces, from the Chandos Shakespeare to last year's photographs, reopened in 2023 with far more room.","thumb":"/img/national-portrait-gallery-480.jpg?v=0636eea1","img":"/img/national-portrait-gallery.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Sadie Coles HQ","slug":"sadie-coles-hq","cat":"art","url":"/art/sadie-coles-hq/","deep":true,"lat":51.511308,"lng":-0.140414,"verdict":"The gallery of Sarah Lucas, Urs Fischer and Helen Marten, now headquartered on Savile Row."},{"name":"Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain","slug":"shaftesbury-memorial-fountain","cat":"art","url":"/art/shaftesbury-memorial-fountain/","lat":51.509896,"lng":-0.134486,"verdict":"Eros, who is not Eros, on the fountain at Piccadilly Circus.","thumb":"/img/shaftesbury-memorial-fountain-480.jpg?v=ed5db40b","img":"/img/shaftesbury-memorial-fountain.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"The Photographers' Gallery","slug":"the-photographers-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/the-photographers-gallery/","lat":51.514926,"lng":-0.139018,"verdict":"Britain's first public gallery for photography alone, since 1971, on several floors behind Oxford Street.","thumb":"/img/the-photographers-gallery-480.jpg?v=02468dbb","img":"/img/the-photographers-gallery.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Trafalgar Square & Nelson's Column","slug":"nelsons-column","cat":"art","url":"/art/nelsons-column/","lat":51.507759,"lng":-0.12793,"verdict":"The symbolic heart of London: Barry's square with Nelson fifty-two metres above it, and Landseer's lions to climb on.","thumb":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2-480.jpg?v=b27c88fb","img":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"100 Club","slug":"100-club","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/100-club/","lat":51.516108,"lng":-0.135357,"verdict":"The oldest independent music venue in the world, a basement under Oxford Street where jazz started in 1942 and punk in 1976.","thumb":"/img/100-club-480.jpg?v=d208d7ef","img":"/img/100-club.jpg","w":619,"h":1024},{"name":"Crazy Coqs","slug":"crazy-coqs","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/crazy-coqs/","lat":51.510623,"lng":-0.135584,"verdict":"An intact art deco cabaret room in the basement of a Piccadilly hotel, doing songbook, jazz singers and cabaret.","thumb":"/img/crazy-coqs-480.jpg?v=ee96c4ba","img":"/img/crazy-coqs.jpg","w":1024,"h":683},{"name":"Criterion Theatre","slug":"criterion-theatre","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/criterion-theatre/","lat":51.509617,"lng":-0.133988,"verdict":"A Victorian theatre thirty feet under Piccadilly Circus, reached by going down."},{"name":"Palace Theatre","slug":"palace-theatre","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/palace-theatre/","lat":51.5131,"lng":-0.129788,"verdict":"Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, in the theatre it has filled since 2016.","thumb":"/img/palace-theatre-480.jpg?v=272da0fe","img":"/img/palace-theatre.jpg","w":1024,"h":800},{"name":"Pizza Express Live Dean Street","slug":"pizza-express-live-dean-street","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/pizza-express-live-dean-street/","lat":51.515054,"lng":-0.133318,"verdict":"The best-known jazz room in Britain to sit underneath a pizza restaurant, and a serious booking policy despite it.","thumb":"/img/pizza-express-live-dean-street-480.jpg?v=a4f4f55e","img":"/img/pizza-express-live-dean-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Ronnie Scott's","slug":"ronnie-scotts","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/ronnie-scotts/","lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.131571,"verdict":"London's jazz club since 1959, with three bills a night and a house band that plays until the small hours.","thumb":"/img/own-ronnie-scotts-480.jpg?v=03d46f14","img":"/img/own-ronnie-scotts.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Soho Theatre","slug":"soho-theatre","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/soho-theatre/","lat":51.514412,"lng":-0.132793,"verdict":"Three stages on Dean Street, and the room most British comedians play before anyone has heard of them."},{"name":"St Martin-in-the-Fields","slug":"st-martin-in-the-fields","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/st-martin-in-the-fields/","lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"Free lunchtime recitals under Gibbs's ceiling, and candlelit concerts by night, in the church on the corner of Trafalgar Square.","thumb":"/img/st-martin-in-the-fields-480.jpg?v=f9f394b5","img":"/img/st-martin-in-the-fields.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Stone Nest","slug":"stone-nest","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/stone-nest/","lat":51.512952,"lng":-0.129324,"verdict":"A Welsh chapel of 1888 that became the Limelight, then a squat, and is now a theatre."},{"name":"The Comedy Store","slug":"the-comedy-store","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/","lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"The club that made British stand-up what it is, running since 1979."},{"name":"Theatre Royal Haymarket","slug":"theatre-royal-haymarket","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/theatre-royal-haymarket/","lat":51.508633,"lng":-0.131278,"verdict":"Nash's portico of 1821, put where it is to close the view down Charles Street."},{"name":"Carnaby Street","slug":"carnaby-street","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/carnaby-street/","lat":51.51303,"lng":-0.13865,"verdict":"Independent labels and the streets off it, sixty years after the boutiques made it famous.","thumb":"/img/carnaby-street-480.jpg?v=04ff387c","img":"/img/carnaby-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Cecil Court","slug":"cecil-court","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/cecil-court/","lat":51.510725,"lng":-0.127675,"verdict":"A pedestrian lane of antiquarian bookshops, maps and prints, the book trade's since the 1890s.","thumb":"/img/cecil-court-480.jpg?v=de6d1805","img":"/img/cecil-court.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Charing Cross Road","slug":"charing-cross-road","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/charing-cross-road/","lat":51.5129,"lng":-0.128892,"verdict":"The bookshop street, Foyles at the top of it.","thumb":"/img/charing-cross-road-480.jpg?v=07695816","img":"/img/charing-cross-road.jpg","w":1024,"h":790},{"name":"Foyles","slug":"foyles","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/foyles/","lat":51.514278,"lng":-0.130058,"verdict":"Four miles of shelving up an atrium, on the road that used to be nothing but bookshops.","thumb":"/img/foyles-480.jpg?v=ee329b23","img":"/img/foyles.jpg","w":1024,"h":771},{"name":"Hamleys","slug":"hamleys","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/hamleys/","lat":51.51291,"lng":-0.139942,"verdict":"Seven floors of toys with somebody demonstrating one on every landing.","thumb":"/img/hamleys-480.jpg?v=22d80275","img":"/img/hamleys.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Liberty London","slug":"liberty-london","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/liberty-london/","lat":51.513835,"lng":-0.140075,"verdict":"A mock-Tudor department store built from two warships, and the printed fabrics that carry its name worldwide.","thumb":"/img/liberty-london-480.jpg?v=8466f8dd","img":"/img/liberty-london.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Regent Street","slug":"regent-street","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/regent-street/","lat":51.512013,"lng":-0.139742,"verdict":"The big names' flagships under one curved Regency facade."},{"name":"Algerian Coffee Stores","slug":"algerian-coffee-stores","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/algerian-coffee-stores/","lat":51.512913,"lng":-0.132193,"verdict":"Espresso for about a pound and a half at the counter of an 1887 bean merchant, to take away - there is nowhere to sit and never has been.","thumb":"/img/algerian-coffee-stores-480.jpg?v=e2a09d68","img":"/img/algerian-coffee-stores.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Bija","slug":"bija","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/bija/","lat":51.508902,"lng":-0.133118,"verdict":"Indonesian single origins, and the best new coffee shop of 2025."},{"name":"Department Of Coffee And Social Affairs","slug":"department-of-coffee-and-social-affairs-st-james-s","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/department-of-coffee-and-social-affairs-st-james-s/","lat":51.510941,"lng":-0.135993,"verdict":"A Sherwood Street branch of a chain that varies."},{"name":"Department of Coffee and Social Affairs","slug":"department-of-coffee-and-social-affairs-soho","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/department-of-coffee-and-social-affairs-soho/","lat":51.513594,"lng":-0.139007,"verdict":"A Carnaby back-alley branch of a group that is not uniform."},{"name":"Fernandez & Wells","slug":"fernandez-wells","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/fernandez-wells/","lat":51.515339,"lng":-0.129027,"verdict":"Sandwiches with heft, and coffee roasted to their own spec."},{"name":"The Colombian Coffee Company","slug":"the-colombian-coffee-company-soho","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/the-colombian-coffee-company-soho/","lat":51.513759,"lng":-0.130487,"verdict":"Single-origin Colombian, served the way Colombians actually drink it."},{"name":"Bread Ahead","slug":"bread-ahead-soho","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/bread-ahead-soho/","lat":51.512172,"lng":-0.138227,"verdict":"Beak Street, and the doughnut that made the name."},{"name":"Donutelier Carnaby Street","slug":"donutelier-carnaby-street","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/donutelier-carnaby-street/","lat":51.51268,"lng":-0.13848,"verdict":"Nine or ten doughnuts at a time, each one decorated by hand, on Carnaby Street."},{"name":"Donutelier Charing Cross Road","slug":"donutelier-charing-cross-road","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/donutelier-charing-cross-road/","lat":51.511942,"lng":-0.12821,"verdict":"Doughnuts finished by hand behind a window, in a room lit by chandeliers shaped like piping bags."},{"name":"Donutelier Soho Place","slug":"donutelier-soho-place","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/donutelier-soho-place/","lat":51.515893,"lng":-0.130453,"verdict":"A doughnut counter run like a pastry kitchen, on the ground floor of Soho Place."},{"name":"Donutelier Strand","slug":"donutelier-strand","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/donutelier-strand/","lat":51.508858,"lng":-0.125296,"verdict":"Croissants and hand-decorated doughnuts at the Aldwych end of the Strand."},{"name":"Fabrique","slug":"fabrique-seven-dials","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/fabrique-seven-dials/","lat":51.513437,"lng":-0.12838,"verdict":"The Earlham Street branch, for the same cardamom bun in the middle of town."},{"name":"Happy Sky Japanese Bakery","slug":"happy-sky-japanese-bakery","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/happy-sky-japanese-bakery/","lat":51.516552,"lng":-0.132663,"verdict":"Japanese baking on Hanway Street, four days a week."},{"name":"Caf\u00e9 de Nata","slug":"cafe-de-nata","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/cafe-de-nata/","lat":51.513077,"lng":-0.131281,"verdict":"Past\u00e9is de nata baked through the day, in front of you, and eaten within the hour."},{"name":"Chin Chin","slug":"chin-chin","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/chin-chin/","lat":51.51433,"lng":-0.1312,"verdict":"Ice cream frozen to order in liquid nitrogen, in a cloud, while you watch."},{"name":"Cr\u00e8me","slug":"creme","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/creme/","lat":51.514864,"lng":-0.135513,"verdict":"Cookies baked to order and handed over still soft in the middle."},{"name":"Gelupo","slug":"gelupo","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/gelupo/","lat":51.511586,"lng":-0.1337,"verdict":"Jacob Kenedy's gelateria, across the alley from his own restaurant, and the reason people cross Soho after dinner."},{"name":"Italian Bear Chocolate Soho","slug":"italian-bear-chocolate-soho","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/italian-bear-chocolate-soho/","lat":51.513273,"lng":-0.136715,"verdict":"Thick Italian drinking chocolate on Broadwick Street."},{"name":"Kova Patisserie","slug":"kova-patisserie","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/kova-patisserie/","lat":51.514268,"lng":-0.134111,"verdict":"Japanese mille crepe cakes, layer by layer, down an alley between Wardour and Dean Street."},{"name":"Kova Patisserie Chinatown","slug":"kova-patisserie-chinatown","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/kova-patisserie-chinatown/","lat":51.511882,"lng":-0.128898,"verdict":"The Chinatown counter, open to eleven at weekends."},{"name":"Snowflake Luxury Gelato","slug":"snowflake-luxury-gelato","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/snowflake-luxury-gelato/","lat":51.513704,"lng":-0.133968,"verdict":"Gelato made with organic Jersey milk, and a Soho counter that runs to one in the morning at weekends."},{"name":"Venchi Great Marlborough Street","slug":"venchi-great-marlborough-street","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/venchi-great-marlborough-street/","lat":51.513862,"lng":-0.139304,"verdict":"Turin chocolate and gelato beside Liberty."},{"name":"Venchi Wardour Street","slug":"venchi-wardour-street","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/venchi-wardour-street/","lat":51.514113,"lng":-0.134633,"verdict":"Turin chocolate and gelato, with a wall of chocolate moving behind the shopfront."},{"name":"Jolene Bridle Lane","slug":"jolene-bridle-lane","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/jolene-bridle-lane/","lat":51.511595,"lng":-0.135995,"verdict":"A farm-to-bakery counter on a Soho corner."},{"name":"Milk Beach Soho","slug":"milk-beach-soho","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/milk-beach-soho/","lat":51.514581,"lng":-0.130326,"verdict":"Modern Australian cooking that treats breakfast as a service, not an afterthought."},{"name":"Scarlett Green","slug":"scarlett-green","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/scarlett-green/","lat":51.515248,"lng":-0.135795,"verdict":"Australian brunch off Berwick Street, loud and thoroughly green."},{"name":"The Breakfast Club","slug":"the-breakfast-club","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/the-breakfast-club/","lat":51.514709,"lng":-0.13533,"verdict":"The original of them, on D'Arblay Street since 2005."},{"name":"Arcade Food Hall","slug":"arcade-food-hall","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/arcade-food-hall/","lat":51.516278,"lng":-0.129543,"verdict":"JKS restaurants in a food hall, with a games room attached."},{"name":"Kingly Court","slug":"kingly-court","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/kingly-court/","lat":51.512323,"lng":-0.138439,"verdict":"Three galleried tiers of restaurants in a Soho courtyard.","thumb":"/img/kingly-court-480.jpg?v=464b5112","img":"/img/kingly-court.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Bar Am\u00e9ricain","slug":"bar-americain","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/bar-americain/","lat":51.510628,"lng":-0.1356,"verdict":"An Art Deco room off Piccadilly, at sensible prices."},{"name":"Bar Termini","slug":"bar-termini","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/bar-termini/","lat":51.513669,"lng":-0.129783,"verdict":"Thirty seats, an Italian aperitivo list, and very good coffee."},{"name":"Below Stone Nest","slug":"below-stone-nest","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/below-stone-nest/","lat":51.512958,"lng":-0.129358,"verdict":"Candlelit highballs in the cellar of an 1888 Welsh chapel.","thumb":"/img/own-below-stone-nest-480.jpg?v=c6d85303","img":"/img/own-below-stone-nest.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Cahoots","slug":"cahoots","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/cahoots/","lat":51.512436,"lng":-0.138523,"verdict":"A 1940s Tube carriage, played for laughs."},{"name":"Disrepute","slug":"disrepute","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/disrepute/","lat":51.512215,"lng":-0.138396,"verdict":"A basement off Kingly Court, done in green velvet."},{"name":"Experimental Cocktail Club","slug":"experimental-cocktail-club","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/experimental-cocktail-club/","lat":51.511924,"lng":-0.131033,"verdict":"Three floors behind an unmarked Chinatown door."},{"name":"Milroy's","slug":"milroys","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/milroys/","lat":51.51482,"lng":-0.13121,"verdict":"A whisky shop with a bar hidden behind the bookcase."},{"name":"Mr Fogg's","slug":"mr-foggs","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/mr-foggs/","lat":51.515498,"lng":-0.134457,"verdict":"Victorian-explorer theatre, played entirely straight."},{"name":"Swift","slug":"swift","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/swift/","lat":51.513737,"lng":-0.129991,"verdict":"A quick one upstairs, a long one in the basement."},{"name":"The Punch Room","slug":"the-punch-room","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/the-punch-room/","lat":51.516779,"lng":-0.136055,"verdict":"Oak panelling, low light, and punch served by the bowl."},{"name":"Antidote Wine Bar","slug":"antidote-wine-bar","cat":"wine","url":"/wine/antidote-wine-bar/","lat":51.513556,"lng":-0.138654,"verdict":"A narrow Newburgh Street bar, low-intervention list, upstairs dining room."},{"name":"Noble Rot Soho","slug":"noble-rot-soho","cat":"wine","url":"/wine/noble-rot-soho/","lat":51.514861,"lng":-0.131242,"verdict":"The Soho Noble Rot, in the old Gay Hussar \u2014 and the one you cannot drop into for a glass."},{"name":"Admiralty Arch","slug":"admiralty-arch","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/admiralty-arch/","lat":51.506738,"lng":-0.128576,"verdict":"The gateway at the Trafalgar Square end of the processional route, built by Edward VII in memory of his mother.","thumb":"/img/admiralty-arch-480.jpg?v=5c965b9a","img":"/img/admiralty-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":501},{"name":"Charles I at Charing Cross","slug":"charles-i-at-charing-cross","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/charles-i-at-charing-cross/","lat":51.507334,"lng":-0.127655,"verdict":"The king Parliament executed, put back on his horse and pointed at the place where it happened.","thumb":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross-480.jpg?v=db81f3c1","img":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Trafalgar Square & Nelson's Column","slug":"nelsons-column","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/nelsons-column/","lat":51.507759,"lng":-0.12793,"verdict":"Built to celebrate a naval victory; used ever since by crowds arguing with the government behind it.","thumb":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2-480.jpg?v=b27c88fb","img":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"St Martin-in-the-Fields","slug":"st-martin-in-the-fields","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/st-martin-in-the-fields/","lat":51.508831,"lng":-0.126677,"verdict":"The church on Trafalgar Square, with concerts by candlelight upstairs and a caf\u00e9 in the crypt.","thumb":"/img/st-martin-in-the-fields-480.jpg?v=f9f394b5","img":"/img/st-martin-in-the-fields.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Carnaby Street","slug":"carnaby-street","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/carnaby-street/","lat":51.51303,"lng":-0.138649,"verdict":"The street the sixties happened on, pedestrian since 1973 and still selling clothes.","thumb":"/img/carnaby-street-480.jpg?v=04ff387c","img":"/img/carnaby-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Cecil Court","slug":"cecil-court","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/cecil-court/","lat":51.510727,"lng":-0.127657,"verdict":"A Victorian shopping street of antiquarian booksellers, unchanged shopfronts end to end.","thumb":"/img/street-cecil-court-480.jpg?v=19347ed8","img":"/img/street-cecil-court.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Ganton Street","slug":"ganton-street","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/ganton-street/","lat":51.512941,"lng":-0.139117,"verdict":"A cobbled cut-through behind Carnaby Street with the lights strung overhead.","thumb":"/img/street-ganton-street-480.jpg?v=854c2fb5","img":"/img/street-ganton-street.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Gerrard Street","slug":"gerrard-street","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/gerrard-street/","lat":51.511781,"lng":-0.131093,"verdict":"The spine of Chinatown, under several thousand red lanterns.","thumb":"/img/street-gerrard-street-480.jpg?v=8dfe8cf0","img":"/img/street-gerrard-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Newburgh Street","slug":"newburgh-street","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/newburgh-street/","lat":51.513554,"lng":-0.138655,"verdict":"The quiet cobbled street behind Carnaby, independent shops on both sides.","thumb":"/img/street-newburgh-street-480.jpg?v=df6098d0","img":"/img/street-newburgh-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Old Compton Street","slug":"old-compton-street","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/old-compton-street/","lat":51.513204,"lng":-0.131228,"verdict":"Soho's main street, and the one it has been most itself on for a century.","thumb":"/img/street-old-compton-street-480.jpg?v=16d9761a","img":"/img/street-old-compton-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Regent Street","slug":"regent-street","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/regent-street/","lat":51.512505,"lng":-0.140036,"verdict":"One long curve of Portland stone, put up as a boundary and rebuilt as a single building.","thumb":"/img/street-regent-street-480.jpg?v=d9d658fb","img":"/img/street-regent-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Centre Point","slug":"centre-point","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/centre-point/","lat":51.516185,"lng":-0.129736,"verdict":"A precast concrete lattice of 1966 that stood completely empty for nine years.","thumb":"/img/centre-point-480.jpg?v=7bbba464","img":"/img/centre-point.jpg","w":617,"h":1024},{"name":"Admiralty Arch","slug":"admiralty-arch","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/admiralty-arch/","lat":51.506738,"lng":-0.128576,"verdict":"The gate from Trafalgar Square to the Mall, built as a memorial to Queen Victoria, with a nose on the inside.","thumb":"/img/admiralty-arch-480.jpg?v=5c965b9a","img":"/img/admiralty-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":501},{"name":"Broad Street Pump and John Snow Memorial","slug":"broad-street-pump-and-john-snow-memorial","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/broad-street-pump-and-john-snow-memorial/","lat":51.513318,"lng":-0.136682,"verdict":"A pump with no handle, on the spot where the science of epidemiology began.","thumb":"/img/broad-street-pump-and-john-snow-memorial-480.jpg?v=c7b2d901","img":"/img/broad-street-pump-and-john-snow-memorial.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Charles I at Charing Cross","slug":"charles-i-at-charing-cross","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/charles-i-at-charing-cross/","lat":51.507334,"lng":-0.127655,"verdict":"The oldest bronze equestrian statue in England, and the point from which every distance to London is measured.","thumb":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross-480.jpg?v=db81f3c1","img":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Edith Cavell Memorial","slug":"edith-cavell-memorial","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/edith-cavell-memorial/","lat":51.509375,"lng":-0.127167,"verdict":"Frampton's white memorial to the nurse the Germans shot in 1915, outside the National Portrait Gallery, with her last words cut into it.","thumb":"/img/edith-cavell-memorial-480.jpg?v=0e516382","img":"/img/edith-cavell-memorial.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Eleanor Cross","slug":"eleanor-cross","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/eleanor-cross/","lat":51.50844,"lng":-0.125294,"verdict":"A Victorian Gothic cross in front of the station, standing in for the medieval one that gave the place its name.","thumb":"/img/eleanor-cross-480.jpg?v=ca6a2773","img":"/img/eleanor-cross.jpg","w":526,"h":1024},{"name":"Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain","slug":"shaftesbury-memorial-fountain","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/shaftesbury-memorial-fountain/","lat":51.509896,"lng":-0.134486,"verdict":"Eros, who is not Eros, on the fountain at Piccadilly Circus.","thumb":"/img/shaftesbury-memorial-fountain-480.jpg?v=ed5db40b","img":"/img/shaftesbury-memorial-fountain.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Trafalgar Square & Nelson's Column","slug":"nelsons-column","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/nelsons-column/","lat":51.507759,"lng":-0.12793,"verdict":"The symbolic heart of London: Barry's square with Nelson fifty-two metres above it, and Landseer's lions to climb on.","thumb":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2-480.jpg?v=b27c88fb","img":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Algerian Coffee Stores","slug":"algerian-coffee-stores","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/algerian-coffee-stores/","lat":51.512913,"lng":-0.132193,"verdict":"A Soho coffee shop of 1887 that never modernised, selling beans by weight from tins behind the counter.","thumb":"/img/algerian-coffee-stores-480.jpg?v=e2a09d68","img":"/img/algerian-coffee-stores.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Cecil Court","slug":"cecil-court","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/cecil-court/","lat":51.510727,"lng":-0.127657,"verdict":"A Victorian passage of antiquarian booksellers and print dealers, unchanged shopfront by shopfront.","thumb":"/img/cecil-court-480.jpg?v=de6d1805","img":"/img/cecil-court.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Dege & Skinner","slug":"dege-skinner","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/dege-skinner/","lat":51.510829,"lng":-0.140115,"verdict":"One of the last family-owned houses on the Row, and the one to go to for a bespoke shirt as well as a suit.","thumb":"/img/dege-skinner-480.jpg?v=2a1d4354","img":"/img/dege-skinner.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Drake's","slug":"drakes","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/drakes/","lat":51.510766,"lng":-0.140051,"verdict":"The modern end of the Row: handmade ties, soft tailoring and shirts, made with the old methods and worn with none of the formality."},{"name":"Gieves & Hawkes","slug":"gieves-hawkes","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/gieves-hawkes/","lat":51.510226,"lng":-0.139521,"verdict":"Number One Savile Row, and the tailor that dressed the Royal Navy for two centuries.","thumb":"/img/gieves-hawkes-480.jpg?v=55f2f517","img":"/img/gieves-hawkes.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Henry Poole & Co","slug":"henry-poole-co","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/henry-poole-co/","lat":51.511147,"lng":-0.140434,"verdict":"The founding house of Savile Row, and the tailor generally credited with cutting the first dinner jacket.","thumb":"/img/henry-poole-co-480.jpg?v=a3ddf0f6","img":"/img/henry-poole-co.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Huntsman","slug":"huntsman","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/huntsman/","lat":51.510883,"lng":-0.140166,"verdict":"The one-button coat, a structured shoulder, and a shop front that has been used as a film set more than once.","thumb":"/img/huntsman-480.jpg?v=92236b56","img":"/img/huntsman.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Liberty London","slug":"liberty-london","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/liberty-london/","lat":51.513835,"lng":-0.140075,"verdict":"A mock-Tudor department store built from two warships, and the printed fabrics that carry its name worldwide.","thumb":"/img/liberty-london-480.jpg?v=8466f8dd","img":"/img/liberty-london.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Sotheran's","slug":"sotherans","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/sotherans/","lat":51.51077,"lng":-0.12751,"verdict":"Antiquarian booksellers since 1761, now in Cecil Court with the rare material round the corner.","thumb":"/img/sotherans-480.jpg?v=5fc4b690","img":"/img/sotherans.jpg","w":775,"h":1024},{"name":"Broad Street Pump and John Snow Memorial","slug":"broad-street-pump-and-john-snow-memorial","cat":"science","url":"/science/broad-street-pump-and-john-snow-memorial/","lat":51.513318,"lng":-0.136682,"verdict":"A pump with no handle, on the spot where the science of epidemiology began.","thumb":"/img/broad-street-pump-and-john-snow-memorial-480.jpg?v=c7b2d901","img":"/img/broad-street-pump-and-john-snow-memorial.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"John Logie Baird's first television, 22 Frith Street","slug":"john-logie-bairds-first-television-22-frith-street","cat":"science","url":"/science/john-logie-bairds-first-television-22-frith-street/","lat":51.513393,"lng":-0.131263,"verdict":"The upstairs room in Soho where television was first shown to the public, in January 1926; Bar Italia is downstairs."},{"name":"Cambridge Circus: le Carr\u00e9's Circus","slug":"cambridge-circus-le-carres-circus","cat":"secrets","url":"/secrets/cambridge-circus-le-carres-circus/","lat":51.513254,"lng":-0.129123,"verdict":"The junction that gave John le Carr\u00e9's Secret Service its name: the Circus, headquarters of Smiley's people, in a building that was never there.","thumb":"/img/cambridge-circus-le-carres-circus-480.jpg?v=5e653934","img":"/img/cambridge-circus-le-carres-circus.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"84 Charing Cross Road","slug":"84-charing-cross-road","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/84-charing-cross-road/","lat":51.51326,"lng":-0.12849,"verdict":"Where Marks & Co stood, the antiquarian bookshop of Helene Hanff's twenty-year correspondence."},{"name":"A Conversation with Oscar Wilde","slug":"a-conversation-with-oscar-wilde","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/a-conversation-with-oscar-wilde/","lat":51.508719,"lng":-0.125857,"verdict":"Maggi Hambling's Wilde rising out of a granite coffin behind St Martin-in-the-Fields, inviting you to sit and talk.","thumb":"/img/a-conversation-with-oscar-wilde-480.jpg?v=25cbdd10","img":"/img/a-conversation-with-oscar-wilde.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Agatha Christie memorial","slug":"agatha-christie-memorial","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/agatha-christie-memorial/","lat":51.511779,"lng":-0.127366,"verdict":"A bronze book with Christie's face in it, on the corner where The Mousetrap has run since 1952.","thumb":"/img/agatha-christie-memorial-480.jpg?v=4c0f7f16","img":"/img/agatha-christie-memorial.jpg","w":706,"h":1024},{"name":"Cecil Court","slug":"cecil-court","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/cecil-court/","lat":51.510727,"lng":-0.127657,"verdict":"Booksellers' Row: a Victorian pedestrian alley of antiquarian and specialist bookshops off Charing Cross Road.","thumb":"/img/cecil-court-480.jpg?v=de6d1805","img":"/img/cecil-court.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Shakespeare statue, Leicester Square","slug":"shakespeare-statue-leicester-square","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/shakespeare-statue-leicester-square/","lat":51.510377,"lng":-0.130089,"verdict":"The marble Shakespeare at the centre of Leicester Square, leaning on a stack of books.","thumb":"/img/shakespeare-statue-leicester-square-480.jpg?v=15e005dd","img":"/img/shakespeare-statue-leicester-square.jpg","w":575,"h":1024},{"name":"Canaletto","slug":"canaletto-in-beak-street","cat":"world","url":"/world/canaletto-in-beak-street/","lat":51.51245,"lng":-0.137517,"verdict":"The Soho lodging where Canaletto had to prove he was Canaletto.","thumb":"/img/own-canaletto-house-480.jpg?v=a04bcbb3","img":"/img/own-canaletto-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Ho Chi Minh","slug":"ho-chi-minh","cat":"world","url":"/world/ho-chi-minh/","lat":51.507842,"lng":-0.131716,"verdict":"The site of the hotel kitchen where the future president of Vietnam trained under Escoffier.","thumb":"/img/ho-chi-minh-480.jpg?v=a00afb24","img":"/img/ho-chi-minh.jpg","w":480,"h":640},{"name":"Joseph Haydn","slug":"joseph-haydn","cat":"world","url":"/world/joseph-haydn/","lat":51.512642,"lng":-0.13632,"verdict":"Haydn's Soho lodging on his first visit, the one that made him rich and gave the world the London symphonies.","thumb":"/img/joseph-haydn-480.jpg?v=05eb867e","img":"/img/joseph-haydn.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Karl Marx","slug":"karl-marx","cat":"world","url":"/world/karl-marx/","lat":51.514002,"lng":-0.132649,"verdict":"Two rooms over a Soho restaurant where Marx lived in poverty, buried three children and began Capital.","thumb":"/img/karl-marx-480.jpg?v=d4d861f8","img":"/img/karl-marx.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Mary Seacole","slug":"mary-seacole","cat":"world","url":"/world/mary-seacole/","lat":51.5158,"lng":-0.132192,"verdict":"Where the nurse of the Crimea wrote her memoir, bankrupt and famous, in the year after the war.","thumb":"/img/mary-seacole-480.jpg?v=dcdae6a3","img":"/img/mary-seacole.jpg","w":1024,"h":890},{"name":"Charing Cross Road","slug":"charing-cross-road","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/charing-cross-road/","lat":51.51236,"lng":-0.12844,"verdict":"The Leaky Cauldron of the books is on Charing Cross Road, between a bookshop and a record shop.","thumb":"/img/charing-cross-road-480.jpg?v=07695816","img":"/img/charing-cross-road.jpg","w":1024,"h":790},{"name":"Harry Potter statue, Leicester Square","slug":"harry-potter-statue-leicester-square","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/harry-potter-statue-leicester-square/","lat":51.510653,"lng":-0.130366,"verdict":"Harry on his Nimbus 2000 in bronze, in the square where Philosopher's Stone had its world premiere in 2001.","thumb":"/img/harry-potter-statue-leicester-square-480.jpg?v=6ca82c85","img":"/img/harry-potter-statue-leicester-square.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"House of MinaLima","slug":"house-of-minalima","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/house-of-minalima/","lat":51.514459,"lng":-0.134835,"verdict":"The graphic designers of the films' Daily Prophets, Marauder's Maps and sweet wrappers, with their work over four floors.","thumb":"/img/house-of-minalima-480.jpg?v=b4bcabd6","img":"/img/house-of-minalima.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Palace Theatre","slug":"palace-theatre","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/palace-theatre/","lat":51.5131,"lng":-0.129788,"verdict":"Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, in the theatre it has filled since 2016.","thumb":"/img/palace-theatre-480.jpg?v=272da0fe","img":"/img/palace-theatre.jpg","w":1024,"h":800},{"name":"Piccadilly Circus","slug":"piccadilly-circus","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/piccadilly-circus/","lat":51.509898,"lng":-0.134382,"verdict":"Where Harry, Ron and Hermione land after apparating out of the wedding in Deathly Hallows Part 1.","thumb":"/img/piccadilly-circus-480.jpg?v=69fea33d","img":"/img/piccadilly-circus.jpg","w":1024,"h":768}]},{"slug":"south-bank","name":"South Bank","verdict":"A mile of riverside built for a festival in 1951, with concert halls, the National Theatre and a skate spot underneath.","note":"This was Lambeth Marsh: flooded ground, then pleasure gardens, then a hundred years of wharves and factories. What made it what it is now was one summer. The Festival of Britain in 1951 was staged here to cheer the country up after the war, and it left behind the Royal Festival Hall, the walk along the water, and the idea that the south bank was a place to go.\n\nThe rest arrived over the next thirty years in unapologetic concrete: the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Hayward Gallery, and Denys Lasdun's National Theatre, which the Prince of Wales compared to a nuclear power station and which is now protected as one of the finest buildings of its date in the country. The BFI shows films underneath Waterloo Bridge, and a secondhand book market runs on the pavement outside it every day of the year.\n\nUnder the Queen Elizabeth Hall is the undercroft, skated since the early 1970s and defended by its skaters against redevelopment; it is reckoned the oldest skate spot in the world still in use.\n\nAt the western end the London Eye went up for the millennium and never came down, and County Hall behind it, the seat of London's government until 1986, is now an aquarium and two hotels. The whole length of it is a walk, and the walk is the point.","figure":{"src":"/img/own-south-bank-book-market.jpg?v=011a8ea0","thumb":"/img/own-south-bank-book-market-480.jpg?v=de8accc1","width":1024,"height":616,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Book tables under Waterloo Bridge in low winter sun, browsers in silhouette","caption":"Under Waterloo Bridge, in the last of the winter sun."},"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-south-bank-lead4.jpg?v=33b763ff","thumb":"/img/area-south-bank-lead4-480.jpg?v=cfc6e1a5","width":1024,"height":683,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"People walking along the Queen's Walk on the South Bank, with trees and the river beside them","caption":"The Queen's Walk along the South Bank.","credit":"Photo by Clem Onojeghuo clemono2, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:South_Bank,_London,_United_Kingdom_(Unsplash_8wQ9Z5Ecqa8).jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-south-bank-3.jpg?v=9477ee64","thumb":"/img/area-south-bank-3-480.jpg?v=4d4896d7","width":1024,"height":621,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A skateboarder in the air in the Undercroft beneath the Southbank Centre, graffiti behind","caption":"The Undercroft skate spot under the Southbank Centre.","credit":"Photo by Clem Onojeghuo clemono2, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Skateboard_Tricks_(Unsplash_akfW8Y6iXHo).jpg"}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["River Thames","Stamford Street","York Road"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.12182,51.50085],[-0.12122,51.50446],[-0.12076,51.50576],[-0.12012,51.50644],[-0.11958,51.507],[-0.11834,51.5081],[-0.11775,51.50835],[-0.11552,51.50912],[-0.11458,51.50939],[-0.11271,51.50962],[-0.10792,51.50987],[-0.10651,51.50991],[-0.10415,51.50986],[-0.10446,51.50849],[-0.10454,51.50712],[-0.10684,51.50715],[-0.10817,51.50692],[-0.11315,51.50495],[-0.11313,51.50464],[-0.11291,51.50442],[-0.11336,51.50448],[-0.1136,51.50449],[-0.11414,51.50447],[-0.1148,51.50402],[-0.11658,51.50222],[-0.11754,51.50074],[-0.12,51.5008],[-0.12182,51.50085]]]},"centre":[-0.11547,51.50661],"bounds":[[-0.12182,51.50074],[-0.10415,51.50991]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":92,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":3,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":4,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"cocktails","name":"Cocktails","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"politics","name":"Power & Politics","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"architecture","name":"Architecture","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"monuments","name":"Monuments & Ruins","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"science","name":"Science & Engineering","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":5,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"About Us! Artists' Scratch Showcase","slug":"about-us-artists-scratch-showcase","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/about-us-artists-scratch-showcase/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-04","to":"2026-10-04"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"Five artists trying new work out in public, free, hosted by Awate."},{"name":"Acrobalance with Mimbre","slug":"acrobalance-with-mimbre","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/acrobalance-with-mimbre/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"Free acrobatics with a professional company, relaxed session first."},{"name":"Algorave","slug":"algorave","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/algorave/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"Dance music written as live code, projected as it is typed. Free."},{"name":"Alice Sara Ott plays Beethoven's Fourth","slug":"alice-sara-ott-plays-beethovens-fourth","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/alice-sara-ott-plays-beethovens-fourth/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-06","to":"2026-11-06"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"The concerto that opens with the piano alone, quietly, before anything else happens."},{"name":"Amelia Dimoldenberg: The Future of Digital Media","slug":"amelia-dimoldenberg-the-future-of-digital-media","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/amelia-dimoldenberg-the-future-of-digital-media/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"The Chicken Shop Date host on where the internet is going."},{"name":"Andrius Arutiunian: They Tried to Count Us","slug":"andrius-arutiunian-they-tried-to-count-us","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/hayward-gallery/andrius-arutiunian-they-tried-to-count-us/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-24","to":"2027-03-07"},"lat":51.50617,"lng":-0.11549,"verdict":"A fragment of an Armenian radio telescope's anechoic chamber, rebuilt as a shrine to the cosmos."},{"name":"Anish Kapoor","slug":"anish-kapoor","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/hayward-gallery/anish-kapoor/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-16","to":"2026-10-18"},"lat":51.50617,"lng":-0.11549,"verdict":"Vantablack voids, warping steel mirrors and two new red installations, filling the whole Hayward."},{"name":"BUMPAH x Future Rhythms","slug":"bumpah-x-future-rhythms","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/bumpah-x-future-rhythms/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"A free night of DJs pushing at the edges."},{"name":"Ballroom Boogie x Toasty Tots XL","slug":"ballroom-boogie-x-toasty-tots-xl","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/ballroom-boogie-x-toasty-tots-xl/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"A free DJ set and dance for all ages, on the Festival Hall floor."},{"name":"Ben Folds","slug":"ben-folds","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/ben-folds/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-20","to":"2026-11-20"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"Piano-driven pop from a man who has spent twenty years also writing for symphony orchestras."},{"name":"Bits & Bobs: The Anatomy of Sex","slug":"bits-bobs-the-anatomy-of-sex","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/bits-bobs-the-anatomy-of-sex/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-03","to":"2026-11-03"},"lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"Eight activity stations on reproductive anatomy, run by the scientists who study it."},{"name":"Boris Lurie: Ever the Radical","slug":"boris-lurie-ever-the-radical","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/oxo-tower/boris-lurie-ever-the-radical/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-10-11"},"lat":51.508364,"lng":-0.108324,"verdict":"The artist who survived four camps and then spent his life refusing to make art anyone could hang."},{"name":"Britten's War Requiem","slug":"brittens-war-requiem","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/brittens-war-requiem/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"The LPO open their season with the Requiem Britten wrote for a rebuilt cathedral."},{"name":"Bruckner 4 with Esa-Pekka Salonen","slug":"bruckner-4-with-esa-pekka-salonen","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/bruckner-4-with-esa-pekka-salonen/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-04","to":"2026-10-04"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"The Romantic symphony, opening on a horn call over a string tremor."},{"name":"Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists","slug":"catarina-and-the-beauty-of-killing-fascists","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/national-theatre/catarina-and-the-beauty-of-killing-fascists/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.507028,"lng":-0.114005,"verdict":"A Portuguese play about a family that murders a fascist every year, for one week only."},{"name":"Cecile McLorin Salvant with the BBC Concert Orchestra","slug":"cecile-mclorin-salvant-with-the-bbc-concert-orchestra","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/cecile-mclorin-salvant-with-the-bbc-concert-orchestra/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-22","to":"2026-11-22"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"The singer who made jazz repertoire feel like theatre, with an orchestra behind her."},{"name":"Chineke! Orchestra: Arabic Symphony","slug":"chineke-orchestra-arabic-symphony","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/chineke-orchestra-arabic-symphony/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-11","to":"2026-10-11"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"The Ayoub Sisters close a Chineke! programme with music about Arabic landscape."},{"name":"Cloud 9","slug":"cloud-9","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/national-theatre/cloud-9/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-02","to":"2027-01-13"},"lat":51.507028,"lng":-0.114005,"verdict":"Caryl Churchill's 1979 play about empire and sex, where the actors swap age, race and gender between the acts."},{"name":"Council: Pekka Kuusisto and Gabriel Kahane","slug":"council-pekka-kuusisto-and-gabriel-kahane","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/council-pekka-kuusisto-and-gabriel-kahane/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-07","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"Two friends in the Purcell Room with songs, chamber music and folk tunes."},{"name":"Creative Intelligence Summit","slug":"creative-intelligence-summit","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/creative-intelligence-summit/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"A day for the people making culture with the new tools."},{"name":"Daughter of Bala: The Betsi Cadwaladr Story","slug":"daughter-of-bala-the-betsi-cadwaladr-story","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/daughter-of-bala-the-betsi-cadwaladr-story/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-30","to":"2026-09-30"},"lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"The Welsh nurse who went to Scutari in her sixties and fell out with Nightingale."},{"name":"Dvorak's violin concerto with James Ehnes","slug":"dvoraks-violin-concerto-with-james-ehnes","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/dvoraks-violin-concerto-with-james-ehnes/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-29","to":"2026-10-29"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"The concerto Joachim asked for, revised for years, and never played."},{"name":"Electra/Persona","slug":"electra-persona","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/national-theatre/electra-persona/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.507028,"lng":-0.114005,"verdict":"Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss in the Lyttelton, in one evening made of two things."},{"name":"Exploration Bazaar","slug":"exploration-bazaar","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/exploration-bazaar/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-13"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"A free weekend of arguing about creative AI, in the ballroom."},{"name":"Fire in My Mouth","slug":"fire-in-my-mouth","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/fire-in-my-mouth/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-22","to":"2026-09-22"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"A hundred and forty-six women sing for the hundred and forty-six who died in the Triangle fire."},{"name":"Florence Nightingale's London: Walking Tour","slug":"florence-nightingales-london-walking-tour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/florence-nightingales-london-walking-tour/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"Two hours through Mayfair and St James's, where she actually lived."},{"name":"Future Sounds: RAP Party x Out-Spoken","slug":"future-sounds-rap-party-x-out-spoken","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/future-sounds-rap-party-x-out-spoken/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"Ten writers, live literature and music, in one evening."},{"name":"Goldie: Dare to Dream","slug":"goldie-dare-to-dream","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/goldie-dare-to-dream/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-14","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"Drum and bass written out for an orchestra, by the man who made Timeless."},{"name":"Google Arts & Culture at the Southbank","slug":"google-arts-culture-at-the-southbank","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/google-arts-culture-at-the-southbank/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-13"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"Interactive projects to play with, free, in the Festival Hall."},{"name":"Healing Spaces","slug":"healing-spaces","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/healing-spaces/","runs":{"from":"2025-11-18","to":"2026-12-31"},"lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"Why hospital wards are shaped the way they are, and who decided."},{"name":"Heritage Open Day: free entry","slug":"heritage-open-day-free-entry","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/heritage-open-day-free-entry/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-14","to":"2026-09-14"},"lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"The whole museum free for a day, with three suffragette medals to handle."},{"name":"Holly Herndon: Listening Session","slug":"holly-herndon-listening-session","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/holly-herndon-listening-session/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"The composer who trained an AI on her own voice, playing and explaining."},{"name":"Imagine Children's Festival","slug":"imagine-childrens-festival","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/southbank-centre/imagine-childrens-festival/","runs":{"from":"2026-02-11","to":"2026-02-21","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.5057,"lng":-0.1167,"verdict":"The Southbank Centre's February half-term festival for children: authors, illustrators, music, circus, and much of it free."},{"name":"In Focus: Nurse Catherine Pine","slug":"in-focus-nurse-catherine-pine","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/in-focus-nurse-catherine-pine/","runs":{"from":"2026-03-06","to":"2026-10-04"},"lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"The nurse who took hunger-striking suffragettes into her own nursing home."},{"name":"Jack Thorne: Authorship in the Age of AI","slug":"jack-thorne-authorship-in-the-age-of-ai","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/jack-thorne-authorship-in-the-age-of-ai/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-09-13"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"The writer of His Dark Materials and the Cursed Child on who owns a story."},{"name":"Jean Rondeau plays the Goldberg Variations on the organ","slug":"jean-rondeau-plays-the-goldberg-variations-on-the-organ","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/jean-rondeau-plays-the-goldberg-variations-on-the-organ/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-27","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"The Goldbergs on the Festival Hall's neighbour's organ, not on a harpsichord."},{"name":"Jean Rondeau, Nicolas Altstaedt and Thomas Dunford","slug":"jean-rondeau-nicolas-altstaedt-and-thomas-dunford","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/jean-rondeau-nicolas-altstaedt-and-thomas-dunford/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-25","to":"2026-10-25"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"Harpsichord, cello and lute on French baroque music, from three players who tour together."},{"name":"Jeanette Winterson: Creativity, Artists, Us","slug":"jeanette-winterson-creativity-artists-us","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/jeanette-winterson-creativity-artists-us/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-09-13"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"Winterson on art, machines and what is coming."},{"name":"Julia Fischer plays Brahms","slug":"julia-fischer-plays-brahms","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/julia-fischer-plays-brahms/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-21","to":"2026-10-21"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"The Brahms concerto, then Tchaikovsky's Manfred, which he thought his best and then hated."},{"name":"Karina Canellakis conducts Beethoven's Fifth","slug":"karina-canellakis-conducts-beethovens-fifth","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/karina-canellakis-conducts-beethovens-fifth/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-04","to":"2026-11-04"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"The four notes, with Elgar and a Dai Fujikura piece around them."},{"name":"Karl Jenkins conducts The Armed Man","slug":"karl-jenkins-conducts-the-armed-man","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/karl-jenkins-conducts-the-armed-man/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"The composer conducts his own mass for peace, which almost never leaves the repertoire."},{"name":"Keyboard Music","slug":"keyboard-music","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/keyboard-music/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2027-01-03"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"Organ, harpsichord, fortepiano and grand, each piece on the instrument it was written for."},{"name":"Kian Soltani plays Dvorak","slug":"kian-soltani-plays-dvorak","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/kian-soltani-plays-dvorak/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-10-02"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"The Dvorak cello concerto, written in America by a composer who wanted to go home."},{"name":"Kronos Quartet","slug":"kronos-quartet","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/kronos-quartet/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-20","to":"2026-11-20"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"Fifty years of a string quartet, turned on Mahalia Jackson."},{"name":"London Eye","slug":"london-eye","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/london-eye/","lat":51.5033,"lng":-0.1196,"verdict":"Thirty minutes round the wheel, with Parliament directly opposite.","thumb":"/img/own-london-eye-480.jpg?v=abc1adf6","img":"/img/own-london-eye.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"London Literature Festival","slug":"london-literature-festival","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/southbank-centre/london-literature-festival/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-20","to":"2026-11-01","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.5057,"lng":-0.1167,"verdict":"Nearly two weeks of writers at the Southbank Centre, with Dua Lipa curating the 2026 festival."},{"name":"London Oratorio","slug":"london-oratorio","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/london-oratorio/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"Es Devlin's choral piece about London, sung by several choirs at once with Jacob Collier."},{"name":"Magic Lantern Show: Victorian Halloween","slug":"magic-lantern-show-victorian-halloween","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/magic-lantern-show-victorian-halloween/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-26","to":"2026-10-26"},"lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"A triple magic lantern, three projections at once, doing Victorian ghosts."},{"name":"Manchester Collective and Sidiki Dembele","slug":"manchester-collective-and-sidiki-dembele","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/manchester-collective-and-sidiki-dembele/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-04","to":"2026-10-04"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"West African percussion and a string band, on songs from Mali, Senegal and Cote d'Ivoire."},{"name":"Mariam Batsashvili: Bach and Liszt","slug":"mariam-batsashvili-bach-and-liszt","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/mariam-batsashvili-bach-and-liszt/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"A Georgian pianist on the two composers she is known for."},{"name":"Mariza","slug":"mariza","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/mariza/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-15","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"The best-known fado singer alive, in the hall she has filled before."},{"name":"Mendelssohn's violin concerto with Nicola Benedetti","slug":"mendelssohns-violin-concerto-with-nicola-benedetti","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/mendelssohns-violin-concerto-with-nicola-benedetti/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-01","to":"2026-11-01"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"The concerto that starts with the tune, before the orchestra gets a word in."},{"name":"Musquiqui Chihying: A Life of Navigation","slug":"musquiqui-chihying-a-life-of-navigation","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/hayward-gallery/musquiqui-chihying-a-life-of-navigation/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-04","to":"2026-10-18"},"lat":51.50617,"lng":-0.11549,"verdict":"Four wry video works on jogging, Toyotas, AI and gaming, free in the HENI Project Space."},{"name":"Nan Goldin: You Never Did Anything Wrong","slug":"nan-goldin-you-never-did-anything-wrong","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/hayward-gallery/nan-goldin-you-never-did-anything-wrong/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-24","to":"2027-03-14"},"lat":51.50617,"lng":-0.11549,"verdict":"Four Goldin films, one premiering, in her first UK institutional show since 2002."},{"name":"National Hygiene Week: \u00a35 entry","slug":"national-hygiene-week-5-entry","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/national-hygiene-week-5-entry/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-06","to":"2026-10-11"},"lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"Bring soap, get in for five pounds."},{"name":"ORII Presents feat. BXKS","slug":"orii-presents-feat-bxks","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/orii-presents-feat-bxks/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-10-02"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"A rapper from Luton and an ORII jam, in the Purcell Room."},{"name":"Olivia Belli","slug":"olivia-belli","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/olivia-belli/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-09-10"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"An Italian pianist's Southbank debut, in the small hall."},{"name":"Olly Alexander: The Future of Queer Storytelling","slug":"olly-alexander-the-future-of-queer-storytelling","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/olly-alexander-the-future-of-queer-storytelling/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"The Years and Years singer and It's a Sin lead, on telling those stories."},{"name":"Opening Gala: Jazz Voice","slug":"opening-gala-jazz-voice","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/opening-gala-jazz-voice/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-13","to":"2026-11-13"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"The festival opens with a hall-sized big band and a bill of singers."},{"name":"Oracle with the BBC Concert Orchestra","slug":"oracle-with-the-bbc-concert-orchestra","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/oracle-with-the-bbc-concert-orchestra/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"A new opera about prophecy, from a composer who mostly writes for film."},{"name":"Paul Smith: Threads","slug":"paul-smith-threads","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/paul-smith-threads/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-09-10"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"The designer who still goes into his shop, on how he got there."},{"name":"Pekka Kuusisto and Aurora Orchestra: Four Seasons","slug":"pekka-kuusisto-and-aurora-orchestra-four-seasons","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/pekka-kuusisto-and-aurora-orchestra-four-seasons/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"Vivaldi's seasons against Nordic folk, with a violinist who improvises."},{"name":"Rebecca F Kuang: The Future of Education","slug":"rebecca-f-kuang-the-future-of-education","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/rebecca-f-kuang-the-future-of-education/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"The author of Babel and Yellowface on what learning is for now."},{"name":"Rita Wilson","slug":"rita-wilson","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/rita-wilson/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-14","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"An album launch in the Purcell Room: soulful pop and Americana, sung by their author."},{"name":"Rug Rhymes: Autumn","slug":"rug-rhymes-autumn","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/rug-rhymes-autumn/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-10-16"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"Nursery rhymes for under-fives in the National Poetry Library."},{"name":"Samara Joy","slug":"samara-joy","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/samara-joy/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-22","to":"2026-11-22"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"Twenty-five years old, two Grammys, and a voice that arrived fully formed."},{"name":"Saturday and Sunday Talks Programme","slug":"saturday-and-sunday-talks-programme","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/saturday-and-sunday-talks-programme/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-13"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"Two free days of talks and performance lectures on art and machines."},{"name":"Season Opening Week","slug":"season-opening-week","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/season-opening-week/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-22","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"Six days that set out what the Southbank's classical year is going to be about."},{"name":"Shostakovich's Second Piano Concerto with Nobuyuki Tsujii","slug":"shostakovichs-second-piano-concerto-with-nobuyuki-tsujii","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/shostakovichs-second-piano-concerto-with-nobuyuki-tsujii/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-05","to":"2026-11-05"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"The concerto Shostakovich wrote for his son's nineteenth birthday, and called worthless."},{"name":"Simmer Down","slug":"simmer-down","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/simmer-down/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-12-11"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"A free monthly reggae dance in the afternoon, in the Festival Hall ballroom."},{"name":"Some Woman","slug":"some-woman","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/national-theatre/some-woman/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-07","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.507028,"lng":-0.114005,"verdict":"Anne-Marie Duff as a woman who will not be quiet."},{"name":"South Bank Book Market","slug":"south-bank-book-market","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/south-bank-book-market/","lat":51.507358,"lng":-0.115794,"verdict":"Second-hand books on trestle tables under Waterloo Bridge, every day.","thumb":"/img/own-south-bank-book-market-480.jpg?v=de8accc1","img":"/img/own-south-bank-book-market.jpg","w":1024,"h":616},{"name":"Steve Reich at 90","slug":"steve-reich-at-90","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/steve-reich-at-90/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-27","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"Reich's ninetieth, with Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood on the electric guitar parts."},{"name":"Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto with Seong-Jin Cho","slug":"tchaikovskys-first-piano-concerto-with-seong-jin-cho","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/tchaikovskys-first-piano-concerto-with-seong-jin-cho/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-22","to":"2026-10-22"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"The concerto Tchaikovsky's first pianist called worthless and unplayable."},{"name":"Thames Rockets","slug":"thames-rockets","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/thames-rockets/","lat":51.503282,"lng":-0.120432,"verdict":"A sightseeing tour that stops being one somewhere past Wapping."},{"name":"The Children's Bookshow with Katherine Rundell","slug":"the-childrens-bookshow-with-katherine-rundell","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/the-childrens-bookshow-with-katherine-rundell/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-21","to":"2026-10-21"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"The author of Impossible Creatures, for children, in half term."},{"name":"The Firebird","slug":"the-firebird","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/the-firebird/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-23","to":"2026-10-23"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"The score that made Stravinsky, at twenty-eight, the most talked-about composer in Paris."},{"name":"The Girl from Arles","slug":"the-girl-from-arles","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/the-girl-from-arles/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-09","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"Bizet's L'Arlesienne with the play it was written for, from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment."},{"name":"The Jungle Book","slug":"the-jungle-book","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/national-theatre/the-jungle-book/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-13","to":"2027-02-06"},"lat":51.507028,"lng":-0.114005,"verdict":"Kipling on the Olivier stage for the winter."},{"name":"The Moth Mainstage: Tightrope","slug":"the-moth-mainstage-tightrope","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/the-moth-mainstage-tightrope/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2026-09-09"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"True stories told live without notes, which is the whole rule of the Moth."},{"name":"The Nightingale Training School: A Talk by the Curator","slug":"the-nightingale-training-school-a-talk-by-the-curator","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/the-nightingale-training-school-a-talk-by-the-curator/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-17"},"lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"Starched caps, timetables and what it took to earn the Nightingale Badge."},{"name":"The Ringsmiths","slug":"the-ringsmiths","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/the-ringsmiths/","lat":51.50838,"lng":-0.108296,"verdict":"Forge your own silver ring in a workshop at Oxo Tower Wharf."},{"name":"The Smeds and the Smoos","slug":"the-smeds-and-the-smoos","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/the-smeds-and-the-smoos/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-28","to":"2026-11-01"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"Julia Donaldson's aliens, staged, for half term."},{"name":"The Story","slug":"the-story","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/national-theatre/the-story/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.507028,"lng":-0.114005,"verdict":"A newsroom thriller about a reporter who invents her sources, with Letitia Wright."},{"name":"Tine Thing Helseth and Friends: The Boulangerie","slug":"tine-thing-helseth-and-friends-the-boulangerie","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/tine-thing-helseth-and-friends-the-boulangerie/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-07","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"An afternoon around Nadia and Lili Boulanger, who between them taught half of twentieth-century music."},{"name":"Vadym Kholodenko: Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique for piano","slug":"vadym-kholodenko-berliozs-symphonie-fantastique-for-piano","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/vadym-kholodenko-berliozs-symphonie-fantastique-for-piano/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-17","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"Liszt's transcription of the whole symphony, played by one person."},{"name":"Vangelis: Albedo 0.39","slug":"vangelis-albedo-0-39","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/vangelis-albedo-0-39/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-21","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"The 1976 synthesiser album about the reflectivity of the Earth, rescored for orchestra and jazz quartet."},{"name":"Virtual Orchestra: Play Along","slug":"virtual-orchestra-play-along","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/virtual-orchestra-play-along/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-13"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"Pick up a virtual instrument and play with the Philharmonia. Free."},{"name":"WOW London Festival","slug":"wow-london-festival","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/wow-london-festival/","runs":{"from":"2027-03-05","to":"2027-03-07"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"The world's biggest festival about women, back at the Festival Hall for International Women's Day."},{"name":"WordPlay","slug":"wordplay","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/wordplay/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"Free songs and live music for under-fives in a squishy space."},{"name":"Zubin Kanga: Ghost in the Machine","slug":"zubin-kanga-ghost-in-the-machine","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/zubin-kanga-ghost-in-the-machine/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-17","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"A pianist wired to sensors, cameras and software, in the Purcell Room."},{"name":"futuretense: Teshay Makeda and NEONE The Wonderer","slug":"futuretense-teshay-makeda-and-neone-the-wonderer","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/futuretense-teshay-makeda-and-neone-the-wonderer/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2026-09-09"},"lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"Reggae, soul and alt hip-hop on a free double bill."},{"name":"Florence Nightingale Museum","slug":"florence-nightingale-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/florence-nightingale-museum/","lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"Nightingale's own lamp, her stuffed owl and her statistics, at the hospital where she founded modern nursing.","thumb":"/img/florence-nightingale-museum-480.jpg?v=c891c153","img":"/img/florence-nightingale-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":705},{"name":"Hayward Gallery","slug":"hayward-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/hayward-gallery/","lat":51.50617,"lng":-0.11549,"verdict":"The Southbank Centre's concrete gallery of 1968, big contemporary shows under sixty-six pyramid rooflights, with no collection to distract it.","thumb":"/img/hayward-gallery-480.jpg?v=12db8ba8","img":"/img/hayward-gallery.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Hayward Gallery","slug":"hayward-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/hayward-gallery/","lat":51.50617,"lng":-0.11549,"verdict":"The Southbank Centre's concrete gallery of 1968, big contemporary shows under sixty-six pyramid rooflights, with no collection to distract it.","thumb":"/img/hayward-gallery-480.jpg?v=12db8ba8","img":"/img/hayward-gallery.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Oxo Tower","slug":"oxo-tower","cat":"art","url":"/art/oxo-tower/","lat":51.508364,"lng":-0.108324,"verdict":"Advertising was banned on the skyline, so the name was built into the windows.","thumb":"/img/oxo-tower-480.jpg?v=55f48b4c","img":"/img/oxo-tower.jpg","w":640,"h":430},{"name":"South Bank Lion","slug":"south-bank-lion","cat":"art","url":"/art/south-bank-lion/","lat":51.50093,"lng":-0.119799,"verdict":"A thirteen-ton lion in artificial stone, which nobody can make any more, saved by a king.","thumb":"/img/south-bank-lion-480.jpg?v=dd27fea2","img":"/img/south-bank-lion.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"National Theatre","slug":"national-theatre","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/national-theatre/","lat":51.507028,"lng":-0.114005,"verdict":"Lasdun's stacked concrete terraces, hated on sight and now hard to imagine the river without.","thumb":"/img/national-theatre-480.jpg?v=7edb969c","img":"/img/national-theatre.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Queen Elizabeth Hall","slug":"queen-elizabeth-hall","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/queen-elizabeth-hall/","lat":51.506633,"lng":-0.116383,"verdict":"The Southbank's middle-sized hall, where the early music and the odder programming go."},{"name":"Royal Festival Hall","slug":"royal-festival-hall","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/royal-festival-hall/","lat":51.505822,"lng":-0.116784,"verdict":"The one building the Festival of Britain left behind, with the most generous free foyer in London under the auditorium.","thumb":"/img/royal-festival-hall-480.jpg?v=46b08cca","img":"/img/royal-festival-hall.jpg","w":1024,"h":650},{"name":"Southbank Centre","slug":"southbank-centre","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/southbank-centre/","lat":51.50563,"lng":-0.116478,"verdict":"Three concert halls, a gallery and a poetry library on one concrete raft, and the foyers are free."},{"name":"Southbank Centre Food Market","slug":"southbank-centre-food-market","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/southbank-centre-food-market/","lat":51.505456,"lng":-0.116079,"verdict":"Weekend street food behind the Royal Festival Hall."},{"name":"Lyaness","slug":"lyaness","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/lyaness/","lat":51.507974,"lng":-0.10684,"verdict":"River views at Sea Containers, and a menu built on house-made ingredients."},{"name":"National Covid Memorial Wall","slug":"national-covid-memorial-wall","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/national-covid-memorial-wall/","lat":51.499957,"lng":-0.120059,"verdict":"More than 250,000 hand-drawn hearts along the river, one for each person who died.","thumb":"/img/national-covid-memorial-wall-480.jpg?v=57f12699","img":"/img/national-covid-memorial-wall.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"National Theatre","slug":"national-theatre","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/national-theatre/","lat":51.507028,"lng":-0.114005,"verdict":"Lasdun's stacked concrete terraces, hated on sight and now hard to imagine the river without.","thumb":"/img/national-theatre-480.jpg?v=7edb969c","img":"/img/national-theatre.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"South Bank Lion","slug":"south-bank-lion","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/south-bank-lion/","lat":51.50093,"lng":-0.119799,"verdict":"A thirteen-ton lion in artificial stone, which nobody can make any more, saved by a king.","thumb":"/img/south-bank-lion-480.jpg?v=dd27fea2","img":"/img/south-bank-lion.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Florence Nightingale Museum","slug":"florence-nightingale-museum","cat":"science","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/","lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"Nightingale's own lamp, her stuffed owl and her statistics, at the hospital where she founded modern nursing.","thumb":"/img/florence-nightingale-museum-480.jpg?v=c891c153","img":"/img/florence-nightingale-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":705},{"name":"Imagine Children's Festival","slug":"imagine-childrens-festival","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/imagine-childrens-festival/","lat":51.5057,"lng":-0.1167,"verdict":"The Southbank Centre's February half-term festival for children: authors, illustrators, music, circus, and much of it free."},{"name":"London Literature Festival","slug":"london-literature-festival","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/london-literature-festival/","lat":51.5057,"lng":-0.1167,"verdict":"Nearly two weeks of writers at the Southbank Centre, with Dua Lipa curating the 2026 festival."},{"name":"National Poetry Library","slug":"national-poetry-library","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/national-poetry-library/","lat":51.5057,"lng":-0.1163,"verdict":"The largest public collection of modern poetry in the world, free to join, up on the fifth floor of the Royal Festival Hall.","thumb":"/img/national-poetry-library-480.jpg?v=e1d7adbc","img":"/img/national-poetry-library.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"South Bank Book Market","slug":"south-bank-book-market","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/south-bank-book-market/","lat":51.507358,"lng":-0.115794,"verdict":"Second-hand books on trestle tables under Waterloo Bridge, every day, in any weather.","thumb":"/img/own-south-bank-book-market-480.jpg?v=de8accc1","img":"/img/own-south-bank-book-market.jpg","w":1024,"h":616},{"name":"Westminster Bridge","slug":"westminster-bridge","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/westminster-bridge/","lat":51.500826,"lng":-0.12099,"verdict":"The bridge Wordsworth crossed at dawn in 1802, when Earth had not anything to show more fair.","thumb":"/img/westminster-bridge-480.jpg?v=2e18aeb2","img":"/img/westminster-bridge.jpg","w":1024,"h":682}]},{"slug":"south-kensington","name":"South Kensington","verdict":"Three of the world's great museums, a concert hall and a science university, all bought with the profits of one exhibition.","note":"An entire quarter built out of a single event. The Great Exhibition of 1851 made a profit of \u00a3186,000, and Prince Albert persuaded the commissioners to spend it on 87 acres of market gardens south of Hyde Park, to be filled with institutions for art and science. The nickname for what they built was Albertopolis, and most of it is still doing the job it was made for.\n\nThe Victoria and Albert Museum holds the national collection of art and design, from Raphael's cartoons to Alexander McQueen's dresses. The Natural History Museum, in Waterhouse's terracotta cathedral of 1881, has the blue whale hanging in the main hall. The Science Museum has the machines, including Stephenson's Rocket and the Apollo 10 command module. All three are free, and between them they take over ten million visits a year. The Royal Albert Hall, opened in 1871, holds the Proms every summer; Imperial College and the Royal College of Music are next door.\n\nThe Victorians even built a tunnel so that nobody had to cross the road: the subway from the station still runs most of the way to the museums.\n\nAbove ground it is also, unexpectedly, French. The lyc\u00e9e and the French Institute are here, and the cafes along Bute Street sell croissants to a queue of people speaking French, which has earned the district the nickname of Paris's twenty-first arrondissement.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-south-kensington.jpg?v=4169662f","thumb":"/img/area-south-kensington-480.jpg?v=9541a4cc","width":1024,"height":782,"thumb_width":500,"alt":"Exhibition Road, with the museums standing along it","caption":"Exhibition Road, the museums either side.","credit":"Photo by mattbuck ( category ), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London_MMB_%C2%BB2E2_Exhibition_Road.jpg"},"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-south-kensington-2.jpg?v=7c9cf616","thumb":"/img/area-south-kensington-2-480.jpg?v=40284ffc","width":682,"height":1024,"thumb_width":320,"alt":"A cobbled mews curving away between low houses: white-painted garages and brick fronts with iron balconies on the left, climbing greenery and pots of shrubs along both sides, and a bare tree overhead.","caption":"Kynance Mews, off Gloucester Road.","credit":"","source":"unsplash","photographer":"Bruno Martins","credit_url":"https://unsplash.com/photos/cobblestone-street-in-kynance-mews-london-GkZvxVsHYWw?utm_source=find.london&utm_medium=referral"}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Kensington Gore","Brompton Road","Old Brompton Road","Gloucester Road"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.17319,51.49386],[-0.17381,51.49387],[-0.17402,51.49366],[-0.17523,51.49356],[-0.18004,51.49128],[-0.18188,51.49338],[-0.18289,51.49519],[-0.18373,51.49758],[-0.18368,51.49957],[-0.18399,51.5],[-0.18403,51.5018],[-0.18185,51.50144],[-0.17077,51.50193],[-0.16153,51.50158],[-0.16303,51.5],[-0.16904,51.49662],[-0.16934,51.49587],[-0.16872,51.49452],[-0.16975,51.49345],[-0.17319,51.49386]]]},"centre":[-0.17665,51.49744],"bounds":[[-0.18403,51.49128],[-0.16153,51.50193]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":42,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":6,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"shopping","name":"Shopping","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":4,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"breakfast","name":"Breakfast & Brunch","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"royal","name":"Royal London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"sacred","name":"Sacred London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"architecture","name":"Architecture","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"monuments","name":"Monuments & Ruins","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"science","name":"Science & Engineering","count":3,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":1,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"American Photographs","slug":"american-photographs","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/american-photographs/","runs":{"to":"2027-05-16"},"lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"How photography made America, from the V&A's own collection."},{"name":"Astronights","slug":"astronights","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/science-museum/astronights/","lat":51.497397,"lng":-0.176231,"verdict":"Sleep under the rockets: the Science Museum's sleepover for seven-to-elevens."},{"name":"BBC Proms","slug":"bbc-proms","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/bbc-proms/","runs":{"from":"2026-07-17","to":"2026-09-13","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.501007,"lng":-0.177406,"verdict":"Eight weeks of orchestral concerts, and standing tickets for the price of a pint."},{"name":"Becoming America: How Science Shaped a Nation","slug":"becoming-america-how-science-shaped-a-nation","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/science-museum/becoming-america-how-science-shaped-a-nation/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-23","to":"2027-04-25"},"lat":51.497397,"lng":-0.176231,"verdict":"A 1776 print of the Declaration, George III's microscope, and the science behind a new nation."},{"name":"Beethoven's Ninth","slug":"beethovens-ninth","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/beethovens-ninth/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"The Choral Symphony, in the hall built for choirs this size."},{"name":"Bharti Kher at the V&A","slug":"bharti-kher-at-the-v-a","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/bharti-kher-at-the-v-a/","runs":{"to":"2027-01-24"},"lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"Sari-fabric, resin and bronze figures set among the V&A's historic sculpture."},{"name":"Bubble Explorers","slug":"bubble-explorers","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/science-museum/bubble-explorers/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.497397,"lng":-0.176231,"verdict":"A family show about bubbles, which is more science than it sounds."},{"name":"Chintz","slug":"chintz","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/chintz/","runs":{"from":"2027-09-18"},"lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"Four centuries of the South Indian cotton that Europe coveted, copied and banned."},{"name":"Classical Coffee Mornings","slug":"classical-coffee-mornings","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/classical-coffee-mornings/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-20","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"Chamber music at eleven on a Sunday in the Elgar Room, with a coffee and a pastry in the price."},{"name":"Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires","slug":"constantinople-to-istanbul-one-city-two-empires","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/constantinople-to-istanbul-one-city-two-empires/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"Sixteen hundred years of one city, Byzantine and Ottoman, in the V&A's first show on it."},{"name":"Digital Design Weekend 2026","slug":"digital-design-weekend-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/digital-design-weekend-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-20","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"Thirty installations, live coding and arcade games across the V&A, free, first come first served."},{"name":"Dimensions: Contemporary Chinese Studio Crafts","slug":"dimensions-contemporary-chinese-studio-crafts","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/dimensions-contemporary-chinese-studio-crafts/","runs":{"to":"2027-09-26"},"lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"How Chinese makers turned craft into art from the 1980s onward."},{"name":"Freddie Mercury | Splendid Things","slug":"freddie-mercury-splendid-things","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/freddie-mercury-splendid-things/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"A free display of what Freddie Mercury kept, from the Garden Lodge sale."},{"name":"Free daily tours of the V&A","slug":"free-daily-tours-of-the-v-a","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/free-daily-tours-of-the-v-a/","lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"Volunteer-led introductions to the collection, several times a day, no booking."},{"name":"Golden Threads: Dress from Saudi Arabia","slug":"golden-threads-dress-from-saudi-arabia","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/golden-threads-dress-from-saudi-arabia/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-04","to":"2027-05-30"},"lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"Gold-threaded thobes that King Abdulaziz gave to an ambassador's daughter in the 1940s."},{"name":"Horrible Science: Cosmic Chaos","slug":"horrible-science-cosmic-chaos","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/science-museum/horrible-science-cosmic-chaos/","runs":{"from":"2027-03-18","to":"2028-02-27"},"lat":51.497397,"lng":-0.176231,"verdict":"The Horrible Science TV series as a walk-through solar system, with a villain to defeat."},{"name":"Jurassic Oceans: Monsters of the Deep","slug":"jurassic-oceans-monsters-of-the-deep","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/natural-history-museum/jurassic-oceans-monsters-of-the-deep/","runs":{"from":"2026-05-22","to":"2027-01-03"},"lat":51.496455,"lng":-0.176022,"verdict":"Pliosaurs, ichthyosaurs and the mosasaur, and you get to touch a fossil poo."},{"name":"Lasting Impressions: Women Printmakers 1900 \u2013 Now","slug":"lasting-impressions-women-printmakers-1900-now","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/lasting-impressions-women-printmakers-1900-now/","runs":{"to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"Kollwitz, Faith Ringgold, Laura Knight and the Guerrilla Girls, in prints."},{"name":"Lost Music Venues","slug":"lost-music-venues","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/lost-music-venues/","runs":{"to":"2027-10-30"},"lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"Fifty vanished gig venues from the 1980s to the 2010s, in flyers, posters and merch."},{"name":"Melody Gardot","slug":"melody-gardot","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/melody-gardot/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-16","to":"2026-11-16"},"lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"One night with the London Philharmonic, a South African choir and Ibrahim Maalouf."},{"name":"Messiah from Scratch","slug":"messiah-from-scratch","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/messiah-from-scratch/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-08","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"You bring a score and sing it yourself, in the Albert Hall, having rehearsed that afternoon."},{"name":"Orchestral Qawwali Project","slug":"orchestral-qawwali-project","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/orchestral-qawwali-project/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-24","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"Sufi devotional singing scored for a western orchestra."},{"name":"Power Up evening sessions","slug":"power-up-evening-sessions","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/science-museum/power-up-evening-sessions/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-12-10"},"lat":51.497397,"lng":-0.176231,"verdict":"A hundred and sixty consoles, no children, and the games the daytime cannot show."},{"name":"Punk to Pop","slug":"punk-to-pop","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/punk-to-pop/","runs":{"from":"2027-03-13"},"lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"1972 to 1985: the do-it-yourself decade, in music and clothes."},{"name":"Rishab Rikhiram Sharma: Sitar for Mental Health","slug":"rishab-rikhiram-sharma-sitar-for-mental-health","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/rishab-rikhiram-sharma-sitar-for-mental-health/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"Ravi Shankar's last student, playing the hall he filled twice over."},{"name":"Rising Voices: Contemporary Art from Asia, Australia and the Pacific","slug":"rising-voices-contemporary-art-from-asia-australia-and-the-pacific","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/rising-voices-contemporary-art-from-asia-australia-and-the-pacific/","runs":{"to":"2027-01-10"},"lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"Forty artists from the Asia Pacific, in a partnership with Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art."},{"name":"Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at eighty","slug":"royal-philharmonic-orchestra-at-eighty","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/royal-philharmonic-orchestra-at-eighty/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"The orchestra Beecham founded in 1946, marking eighty years."},{"name":"Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art","slug":"schiaparelli-fashion-becomes-art","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/schiaparelli-fashion-becomes-art/","runs":{"to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"The Skeleton Dress, the Tears Dress, and a century of Schiaparelli in one room."},{"name":"Sculpture in Clay","slug":"sculpture-in-clay","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/sculpture-in-clay/","runs":{"from":"2027-05-29"},"lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"British artists who picked up clay to break the rules of ceramics."},{"name":"Smithsonian Starstruck: An Immersive Experience","slug":"smithsonian-starstruck-an-immersive-experience","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/science-museum/smithsonian-starstruck-an-immersive-experience/","lat":51.497397,"lng":-0.176231,"verdict":"Forty minutes in virtual reality among galaxies, black holes and supernovas."},{"name":"Solemn Latin Mass with the Oratory choir","slug":"solemn-latin-mass-with-the-oratory-choir","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/brompton-oratory/solemn-latin-mass-with-the-oratory-choir/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.497142,"lng":-0.169643,"verdict":"Renaissance polyphony sung every Sunday at eleven by a professional choir, and you walk in."},{"name":"Sun Artists: A Serial of Artistic Photography","slug":"sun-artists-a-serial-of-artistic-photography","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/sun-artists-a-serial-of-artistic-photography/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-04","to":"2027-05-09"},"lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"The eight issues of an 1889 journal that argued photography was art."},{"name":"Take Five Showcase: Juliette Lemoine, Emyr Penry Dance and Lucy-Anne Daniels","slug":"take-five-showcase-juliette-lemoine-emyr-penry-dance-and-lucy-anne-daniels","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/take-five-showcase-juliette-lemoine-emyr-penry-dance-and-lucy-anne-daniels/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-18","to":"2026-11-18"},"lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"Three alumni of the festival's artist scheme, one evening, in the Elgar Room."},{"name":"The Natural History Museum's permanent galleries","slug":"the-natural-history-museums-permanent-galleries","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/natural-history-museum/the-natural-history-museums-permanent-galleries/","lat":51.496455,"lng":-0.176022,"verdict":"A blue whale overhead, a roaring T. rex, and an earthquake you can stand in."},{"name":"The Planets","slug":"the-planets","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/the-planets/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"Holst's Planets in the round hall it suits, on a Saturday afternoon."},{"name":"The Science Museum's permanent galleries","slug":"the-science-museums-permanent-galleries","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/science-museum/the-science-museums-permanent-galleries/","lat":51.497397,"lng":-0.176231,"verdict":"Watt's workshop, the Apollo 10 capsule and a V-2 rocket, free on seven floors."},{"name":"The V&A's permanent galleries","slug":"the-v-as-permanent-galleries","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/the-v-as-permanent-galleries/","lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"Seven miles of galleries, from Trajan's Column in plaster to the first iPhone."},{"name":"Urushi Now: Contemporary Japanese Lacquer","slug":"urushi-now-contemporary-japanese-lacquer","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/urushi-now-contemporary-japanese-lacquer/","runs":{"to":"2027-04-30"},"lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"A 7,000-year-old Japanese craft, as practised by artists working now."},{"name":"V&A Illustration Awards 2026","slug":"v-a-illustration-awards-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/v-a-illustration-awards-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-04","to":"2026-10-04"},"lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"The year's best illustration, from picture books to advertising, free for a month."},{"name":"V&A x LDF: Awakenings","slug":"v-a-x-ldf-awakenings","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/v-a-x-ldf-awakenings/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-10-18"},"lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"The V&A's London Design Festival installations, scattered through the galleries."},{"name":"Visions of Nature","slug":"visions-of-nature","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/natural-history-museum/visions-of-nature/","lat":51.496455,"lng":-0.176022,"verdict":"A mixed-reality headset trip a hundred years into a hopeful future."},{"name":"Wildlife Photographer of the Year","slug":"wildlife-photographer-of-the-year","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/natural-history-museum/wildlife-photographer-of-the-year/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-16","to":"2027-07-11","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.496455,"lng":-0.176022,"verdict":"A hundred new photographs of the natural world, in a darkened, contemplative hang."},{"name":"Baden-Powell House Exhibition","slug":"baden-powell-house-exhibition","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/baden-powell-house-exhibition/","deep":true,"lat":51.49551,"lng":-0.179669,"verdict":"History of Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting.","thumb":"/img/baden-powell-house-exhibition-480.jpg?v=da1a052c","img":"/img/baden-powell-house-exhibition.jpg","w":724,"h":526},{"name":"Natural History Museum","slug":"natural-history-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/natural-history-museum/","lat":51.496455,"lng":-0.176022,"verdict":"A cathedral of terracotta animals with a blue whale diving through the nave, free, and the finest building in South Kensington.","thumb":"/img/own-natural-history-museum-480.jpg?v=2aba25a6","img":"/img/own-natural-history-museum.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum","slug":"polish-institute-and-sikorski-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/polish-institute-and-sikorski-museum/","deep":true,"lat":51.501436,"lng":-0.172863,"verdict":"Contributions of the Polish Armed Forces in the West in World War II.","thumb":"/img/polish-institute-and-sikorski-museum-480.jpg?v=e91c5ff8","img":"/img/polish-institute-and-sikorski-museum.jpg","w":892,"h":1024},{"name":"RCM Museum of Music","slug":"rcm-museum-of-music","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/rcm-museum-of-music/","deep":true,"lat":51.4997,"lng":-0.1769,"verdict":"Musical instruments, art, documents and accessories, part of the Royal College of Music."},{"name":"Science Museum","slug":"science-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/science-museum/","lat":51.497397,"lng":-0.176231,"verdict":"Watt's workshop, the Apollo 10 capsule and a hall of steam engines, in the museum that grew out of the Great Exhibition.","thumb":"/img/science-museum-480.jpg?v=f0966f44","img":"/img/science-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Victoria and Albert Museum","slug":"victoria-and-albert-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/victoria-and-albert-museum/","lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"The world's largest museum of art and design: 2.8 million objects, 145 galleries, and the Cast Courts with Trajan's Column in two halves.","thumb":"/img/victoria-and-albert-museum-480.jpg?v=1c1d9203","img":"/img/victoria-and-albert-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":988},{"name":"Albert Memorial","slug":"albert-memorial","cat":"art","url":"/art/albert-memorial/","lat":51.502384,"lng":-0.177674,"verdict":"The most extravagant thing the Victorians built, and worth walking round twice.","thumb":"/img/albert-memorial-480.jpg?v=be97b322","img":"/img/albert-memorial.jpg","w":992,"h":1024},{"name":"Victoria and Albert Museum","slug":"victoria-and-albert-museum","cat":"art","url":"/art/victoria-and-albert-museum/","lat":51.496911,"lng":-0.172115,"verdict":"The world's largest museum of art and design: 2.8 million objects, 145 galleries, and the Cast Courts with Trajan's Column in two halves.","thumb":"/img/victoria-and-albert-museum-480.jpg?v=1c1d9203","img":"/img/victoria-and-albert-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":988},{"name":"Brompton Oratory","slug":"brompton-oratory","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/brompton-oratory/","lat":51.497142,"lng":-0.169643,"verdict":"Full-blown Italian baroque in South Kensington, with a choir and orchestra performing Mass settings as liturgy.","thumb":"/img/brompton-oratory-480.jpg?v=d9c6f753","img":"/img/brompton-oratory.jpg","w":1024,"h":856},{"name":"Royal Albert Hall","slug":"royal-albert-hall","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/royal-albert-hall/","lat":51.501015,"lng":-0.17741,"verdict":"Victoria's memorial to her husband, built as an amphitheatre for five thousand, and the home of the Proms since the war.","thumb":"/img/royal-albert-hall-480.jpg?v=f03a4073","img":"/img/royal-albert-hall.jpg","w":1024,"h":520},{"name":"Brompton Road","slug":"brompton-road","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/brompton-road/","lat":51.498838,"lng":-0.165199,"verdict":"Harrods, Harvey Nichols round the corner, and the shops that gather near them."},{"name":"Harrods","slug":"harrods","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/harrods/","lat":51.499245,"lng":-0.163007,"verdict":"Three hundred departments behind a terracotta front, and food halls tiled like a cathedral.","thumb":"/img/harrods-480.jpg?v=70832cbb","img":"/img/harrods.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Guillam Gloucester Road","slug":"guillam-gloucester-road","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/guillam-gloucester-road/","lat":51.498989,"lng":-0.183861,"verdict":"Speciality coffee and tea, a minute from Gloucester Road station."},{"name":"Hagen","slug":"hagen","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/hagen/","lat":51.493507,"lng":-0.173999,"verdict":"A Danish espresso bar, and a firm no to laptops."},{"name":"Aux Merveilleux de Fred South Kensington","slug":"aux-merveilleux-de-fred-south-kensington","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/aux-merveilleux-de-fred-south-kensington/","lat":51.492568,"lng":-0.177646,"verdict":"A tea room in the French quarter, five minutes from the museums."},{"name":"Aux Merveilleux de Fred","slug":"aux-merveilleux-de-fred","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/aux-merveilleux-de-fred/","lat":51.492568,"lng":-0.177646,"verdict":"A Belgian meringue cake, rolled in chocolate shavings, assembled in the window."},{"name":"Ma\u00eetre Choux","slug":"maitre-choux","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/maitre-choux/","lat":51.49399,"lng":-0.175581,"verdict":"A patisserie that makes nothing but choux pastry."},{"name":"Oddono's Gelati","slug":"oddonos-gelati","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/oddonos-gelati/","lat":51.493625,"lng":-0.17622,"verdict":"The gelateria that started the good ones, still making it in a laboratory behind the shop."},{"name":"Venchi Exhibition Road","slug":"venchi-exhibition-road","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/venchi-exhibition-road/","lat":51.494949,"lng":-0.173694,"verdict":"Turin chocolate and gelato halfway along the museum walk."},{"name":"Guillam Gloucester Road","slug":"guillam-gloucester-road","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/guillam-gloucester-road/","lat":51.498989,"lng":-0.183861,"verdict":"Speciality coffee and tea, a minute from Gloucester Road station."},{"name":"Harrods Food Hall","slug":"harrods-food-hall","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/harrods-food-hall/","lat":51.499245,"lng":-0.163007,"verdict":"Edwardian tiled halls, extraordinary produce, and prices to match.","thumb":"/img/harrods-food-hall-480.jpg?v=853ea803","img":"/img/harrods-food-hall.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Albert Memorial","slug":"albert-memorial","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/albert-memorial/","lat":51.502384,"lng":-0.177674,"verdict":"Victoria's grief in gilt and marble, the most extravagant monument in London, facing the hall named for him.","thumb":"/img/albert-memorial-480.jpg?v=be97b322","img":"/img/albert-memorial.jpg","w":992,"h":1024},{"name":"Brompton Oratory","slug":"brompton-oratory","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/brompton-oratory/","lat":51.497142,"lng":-0.169643,"verdict":"Italian Baroque in South Kensington, with marble apostles that stood in Siena Cathedral for two centuries.","thumb":"/img/brompton-oratory-480.jpg?v=d9c6f753","img":"/img/brompton-oratory.jpg","w":1024,"h":856},{"name":"Michelin House","slug":"michelin-house","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/michelin-house/","lat":51.493072,"lng":-0.16847,"verdict":"A tyre depot of 1911 with Bibendum in stained glass and the walls tiled like a swimming bath.","thumb":"/img/michelin-house-480.jpg?v=4fd8b21c","img":"/img/michelin-house.jpg","w":640,"h":439},{"name":"Natural History Museum","slug":"natural-history-museum","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/natural-history-museum/","lat":51.496455,"lng":-0.176022,"verdict":"Waterhouse's terracotta cathedral, with the animals modelled into the walls and columns.","thumb":"/img/own-natural-history-museum-480.jpg?v=2aba25a6","img":"/img/own-natural-history-museum.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Albert Memorial","slug":"albert-memorial","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/albert-memorial/","lat":51.502384,"lng":-0.177674,"verdict":"The most extravagant thing the Victorians built, and worth walking round twice.","thumb":"/img/albert-memorial-480.jpg?v=be97b322","img":"/img/albert-memorial.jpg","w":992,"h":1024},{"name":"Natural History Museum","slug":"natural-history-museum","cat":"science","url":"/science/natural-history-museum/","lat":51.496455,"lng":-0.176022,"verdict":"A cathedral of terracotta animals with a blue whale diving through the nave, free, and the finest building in South Kensington.","thumb":"/img/own-natural-history-museum-480.jpg?v=2aba25a6","img":"/img/own-natural-history-museum.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Science Museum","slug":"science-museum","cat":"science","url":"/science/science-museum/","lat":51.497397,"lng":-0.176231,"verdict":"Watt's workshop, the Apollo 10 capsule and a hall of steam engines, in the museum that grew out of the Great Exhibition.","thumb":"/img/science-museum-480.jpg?v=f0966f44","img":"/img/science-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"The Clockmakers' Museum","slug":"the-clockmakers-museum","cat":"science","url":"/science/the-clockmakers-museum/","lat":51.497397,"lng":-0.176231,"verdict":"The oldest collection of clocks and watches in the world, six hundred watches and Harrison's H5 among them, in its own gallery on the Science Museum's second floor.","thumb":"/img/the-clockmakers-museum-480.jpg?v=403f3cb9","img":"/img/the-clockmakers-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":665},{"name":"22 Hyde Park Gate","slug":"22-hyde-park-gate","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/22-hyde-park-gate/","lat":51.499639,"lng":-0.181195,"verdict":"The tall dark house where Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell were born and grew up, and the Victorian childhood they spent the rest of their lives escaping."},{"name":"National Art Library","slug":"national-art-library","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/national-art-library/","lat":51.4966,"lng":-0.1722,"verdict":"The V&A's library, free to use, holding the manuscripts of Dickens's novels, Leonardo's notebooks and the Beatrix Potter archive.","thumb":"/img/national-art-library-480.jpg?v=92ab1d0e","img":"/img/national-art-library.jpg","w":1024,"h":461},{"name":"Henry James","slug":"henry-james","cat":"world","url":"/world/henry-james/","lat":51.500129,"lng":-0.185091,"verdict":"The flat where Henry James wrote his middle novels, opposite the house where Browning lived.","thumb":"/img/henry-james-480.jpg?v=65326af0","img":"/img/henry-james.jpg","w":768,"h":1024}]},{"slug":"southwark","name":"Southwark & Bankside","verdict":"The Elizabethan pleasure ground: theatres, a rebuilt Globe, a power station full of art, and the bridge to St Paul's.","note":"Bankside was outside the City's control, which is the whole explanation. Anything London would not permit within its walls happened on this strip of the south bank instead: bear-baiting, brothels licensed by the Bishop of Winchester, whose prison gave English the word clink, and above all theatres. The Rose opened in 1587, the Globe in 1599, and Shakespeare's company worked in both.\n\nWhen the Puritans closed the playhouses the ground went to industry, and by the twentieth century the riverside was warehouses and a power station. Both have been turned to other uses. Giles Gilbert Scott's Bankside power station, which stopped generating in 1981, reopened in 2000 as Tate Modern, with the turbine hall left as a room the size of a cathedral. The Millennium Bridge lands in front of it and points at St Paul's.\n\nThe Globe came back too, in oak and thatch, a few hundred yards from where the first one stood, and plays there in daylight to a standing crowd, as it did in 1599.\n\nBehind the river the streets are Victorian warehouses converted to flats and offices, with Southwark Cathedral, a church since at least the twelfth century, among them, and the Anchor and the George keeping the drinking end of the tradition going. The riverside walk between Blackfriars and London Bridge is the best mile of the Thames Path.","figure":{"src":"/img/own-shakespeares-globe.jpg?v=d1ca52cc","thumb":"/img/own-shakespeares-globe-480.jpg?v=309aba21","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Shakespeare's Globe on Bankside: a round theatre of white walls and black timbers under a thatched roof","caption":"The Globe, back on Bankside in oak and thatch."},"figures":[{"src":"/img/tate-modern.jpg?v=cadbf674","thumb":"/img/tate-modern-480.jpg?v=f017f793","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Tate Modern from across the Thames: the long brick power station and its single chimney","caption":"Tate Modern, in Giles Gilbert Scott's power station.","credit":"Photo by Acabashi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tate_Modern_-_Bankside_Power_Station.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-southwark.jpg?v=36d55cb9","thumb":"/img/area-southwark-480.jpg?v=7df2f702","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Southwark rooftops from above, Neo Bankside's braced blocks in front and the Shard behind","caption":"Bankside from above, the Shard beyond."},{"src":"/img/area-southwark-2.jpg?v=ba473a31","thumb":"/img/area-southwark-2-480.jpg?v=09d73035","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A curving street of yellow brick warehouses with iron-framed windows, converted to flats","caption":"Warehouse streets behind the river, now flats and offices."},{"src":"/img/area-southwark-3.jpg?v=e07d0fac","thumb":"/img/area-southwark-3-480.jpg?v=8b2bda62","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The front of Kirkaldy's Testing Works on Southwark Street, seen from the pavement: four storeys of yellow London brick with arched windows, the words Kirkaldy's Testing & Experimenting Works cut into a stone band across the second floor, white loading doors and an iron hoist on the right, under a blue sky with white clouds.","caption":"Kirkaldy's Testing Works on Southwark Street, where David Kirkaldy broke things to see how strong they were."}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["River Thames","Southwark Bridge Road","Borough Road","Blackfriars Road"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.09735,51.50254],[-0.09961,51.49995],[-0.09986,51.49905],[-0.1047,51.49875],[-0.10449,51.50712],[-0.10446,51.50849],[-0.10415,51.50986],[-0.10159,51.50981],[-0.09773,51.50953],[-0.09573,51.50928],[-0.09406,51.50888],[-0.09468,51.50782],[-0.09611,51.50297],[-0.09735,51.50254]]]},"centre":[-0.09988,51.50621],"bounds":[[-0.1047,51.49875],[-0.09406,51.50986]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":17,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":4,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":4,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"breakfast","name":"Breakfast & Brunch","count":6,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"cocktails","name":"Cocktails","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"architecture","name":"Architecture","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"monuments","name":"Monuments & Ruins","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"science","name":"Science & Engineering","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":3,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"harry-potter","name":"Harry Potter","count":1,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"Ana Mendieta","slug":"ana-mendieta","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tate-modern/ana-mendieta/","runs":{"from":"2026-07-14","to":"2027-01-17"},"lat":51.507429,"lng":-0.099386,"verdict":"The Silueta series and newly restored films, in the first UK retrospective for over a decade."},{"name":"As You Like It","slug":"as-you-like-it","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/shakespeares-globe/as-you-like-it/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-10-25"},"lat":51.508123,"lng":-0.097089,"verdict":"Rosalind flees a powdered court for a Forest of Arden the company paints on stage as you watch."},{"name":"Baya","slug":"baya","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tate-modern/baya/","runs":{"from":"2027-06-10","to":"2027-10-17"},"lat":51.507429,"lng":-0.099386,"verdict":"The Algerian painter who impressed Picasso and Breton, in her first UK solo show."},{"name":"Edvard Munch","slug":"edvard-munch","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tate-modern/edvard-munch/","runs":{"from":"2027-11-11","to":"2028-04-23"},"lat":51.507429,"lng":-0.099386,"verdict":"The Frieze of Life and Munch's soul paintings, seen through film."},{"name":"Frida: The Making of an Icon","slug":"frida-the-making-of-an-icon","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tate-modern/frida-the-making-of-an-icon/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-25","to":"2027-01-03"},"lat":51.507429,"lng":-0.099386,"verdict":"Thirty Kahlo paintings, her clothes and jewellery, and the two hundred objects that made her a brand."},{"name":"Gathering Ground","slug":"gathering-ground","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tate-modern/gathering-ground/","runs":{"to":"2027-03-07"},"lat":51.507429,"lng":-0.099386,"verdict":"Nine artists on the ecological crisis, free, in a former power station."},{"name":"Ink","slug":"ink","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tate-modern/ink/","runs":{"from":"2027-04-22","to":"2027-08-30"},"lat":51.507429,"lng":-0.099386,"verdict":"Eighty ink paintings from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan that modernised a tradition."},{"name":"Julio Le Parc: Light. Colour. Action.","slug":"julio-le-parc-light-colour-action","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tate-modern/julio-le-parc-light-colour-action/","runs":{"from":"2026-06-08","to":"2027-05-03"},"lat":51.507429,"lng":-0.099386,"verdict":"Seven decades of kinetic light works that only finish when you walk into them."},{"name":"Julius Caesar","slug":"julius-caesar","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/shakespeares-globe/julius-caesar/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-06","to":"2027-02-14"},"lat":51.508123,"lng":-0.097089,"verdict":"The assassination, by candlelight, in a room built from seventeenth-century drawings."},{"name":"LOOP 2026","slug":"loop-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/bankside-gallery/loop-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-09-13"},"lat":51.508191,"lng":-0.101143,"verdict":"Contemporary printmaking with the presses running in the gallery."},{"name":"Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography","slug":"light-and-magic-the-birth-of-art-photography","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tate-modern/light-and-magic-the-birth-of-art-photography/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-14","to":"2027-02-21"},"lat":51.507429,"lng":-0.099386,"verdict":"Two hundred rare prints by eighty pictorialists, from Seoul to Cape Town."},{"name":"Lynda Benglis","slug":"lynda-benglis","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tate-modern/lynda-benglis/","runs":{"from":"2027-09-30","to":"2028-03-05"},"lat":51.507429,"lng":-0.099386,"verdict":"The latex pours and Day-Glo floors that rewrote what sculpture could be."},{"name":"Monet: Painting Time","slug":"monet-painting-time","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tate-modern/monet-painting-time/","runs":{"from":"2027-02-25","to":"2027-06-27"},"lat":51.507429,"lng":-0.099386,"verdict":"Tate Modern's first Monet show, from the Gare Saint-Lazare to the water lilies."},{"name":"Much Ado About Nothing","slug":"much-ado-about-nothing","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/shakespeares-globe/much-ado-about-nothing/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.508123,"lng":-0.097089,"verdict":"The one where two people who cannot stand each other are tricked into love, outdoors."},{"name":"Nalini Malani","slug":"nalini-malani","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tate-modern/nalini-malani/","runs":{"from":"2027-07-01","to":"2028-01-09"},"lat":51.507429,"lng":-0.099386,"verdict":"Nearly two hundred works across six decades from the Mumbai artist of Partition."},{"name":"Shakespeare's Globe guided tour","slug":"shakespeares-globe-guided-tour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/shakespeares-globe-guided-tour/","lat":51.5081,"lng":-0.0972,"verdict":"Fifty minutes inside the reconstructed Globe, then the exhibition of costumes and props."},{"name":"Tate Modern's permanent galleries","slug":"tate-moderns-permanent-galleries","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/tate-modern/tate-moderns-permanent-galleries/","lat":51.507429,"lng":-0.099386,"verdict":"Matisse, Picasso and Rothko for free, in a power station the size of a cathedral."},{"name":"Bankside Gallery","slug":"bankside-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/bankside-gallery/","deep":true,"lat":51.508191,"lng":-0.101143,"verdict":"Educational charity, home to the Royal Watercolour Society and the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers.","thumb":"/img/bankside-gallery-480.jpg?v=d1a540c1","img":"/img/bankside-gallery.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Kirkaldy Testing Museum","slug":"kirkaldy-testing-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/kirkaldy-testing-museum/","lat":51.505966,"lng":-0.101544,"verdict":"One enormous Victorian testing machine, in the building David Kirkaldy put up around it, under the words FACTS NOT OPINIONS.","thumb":"/img/own-kirkaldy-testing-museum-480.jpg?v=8b2bda62","img":"/img/own-kirkaldy-testing-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Rose Theatre Exhibition","slug":"rose-theatre-exhibition","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/rose-theatre-exhibition/","deep":true,"lat":51.507215,"lng":-0.095469,"verdict":"Excavations of an Elizabethan theatre."},{"name":"Tate Modern","slug":"tate-modern","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/tate-modern/","lat":51.507429,"lng":-0.099386,"verdict":"The national collection of modern art in a power station on Bankside, free, and the most visited gallery in the country.","thumb":"/img/tate-modern-480.jpg?v=f017f793","img":"/img/tate-modern.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Bankside Gallery","slug":"bankside-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/bankside-gallery/","lat":51.508191,"lng":-0.101143,"verdict":"The home of the Royal Watercolour Society and the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, next door to Tate Modern.","thumb":"/img/bankside-gallery-480.jpg?v=d1a540c1","img":"/img/bankside-gallery.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Tate Modern","slug":"tate-modern","cat":"art","url":"/art/tate-modern/","lat":51.507429,"lng":-0.099386,"verdict":"The national collection of modern art in a power station on Bankside, free, and the most visited gallery in the country.","thumb":"/img/tate-modern-480.jpg?v=f017f793","img":"/img/tate-modern.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Omeara","slug":"omeara","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/omeara/","lat":51.504135,"lng":-0.094615,"verdict":"Three hundred and fifty people in a railway arch, built by a Mumford."},{"name":"Shakespeare's Globe","slug":"shakespeares-globe","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/shakespeares-globe/","lat":51.508123,"lng":-0.097089,"verdict":"A working copy of Shakespeare's playhouse, in oak and thatch, a few hundred yards from where the first one stood.","thumb":"/img/own-shakespeares-globe-480.jpg?v=309aba21","img":"/img/own-shakespeares-globe.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"FCB Coffee","slug":"fcb-coffee-bankside","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/fcb-coffee-bankside/","lat":51.508443,"lng":-0.102839,"verdict":"A station kiosk that takes it far more seriously than it needs to."},{"name":"Old Spike","slug":"old-spike-southwark","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/old-spike-southwark/","lat":51.50343,"lng":-0.101254,"verdict":"The roaster that trains people out of homelessness, newly on Great Suffolk Street."},{"name":"Origin Coffee","slug":"origin-scoresby","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/origin-scoresby/","lat":51.504235,"lng":-0.10361,"verdict":"A Network Rail arch behind Blackfriars, and the fourth Origin in London."},{"name":"The Colombian Coffee Company","slug":"the-colombian-coffee-company-flat-iron-square","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/the-colombian-coffee-company-flat-iron-square/","lat":51.50422,"lng":-0.0954,"verdict":"The roastery itself, under a railway arch at Flat Iron Square."},{"name":"Bala Baya","slug":"bala-baya","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/bala-baya/","lat":51.503193,"lng":-0.101775,"verdict":"Weekend brunch under the arches, cooked out of Tel Aviv."},{"name":"Caravan London Bridge","slug":"caravan-london-bridge","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/caravan-london-bridge/","lat":51.504554,"lng":-0.097176,"verdict":"A brick warehouse off Union Street, doing breakfast at scale."},{"name":"Lantana London Bridge","slug":"lantana-london-bridge","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/lantana-london-bridge/","lat":51.5049,"lng":-0.094277,"verdict":"All-day Australian cooking on Southwark Street."},{"name":"Terry's Cafe","slug":"terrys-cafe","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/terrys-cafe/","lat":51.500638,"lng":-0.098371,"verdict":"A fry-up assembled from named Bermondsey suppliers."},{"name":"The Table Cafe","slug":"the-table-cafe","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/the-table-cafe/","lat":51.505436,"lng":-0.099644,"verdict":"A tall, daylit room on Southwark Street, feeding the neighbourhood since before it was one."},{"name":"Where The Pancakes Are","slug":"where-the-pancakes-are","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/where-the-pancakes-are/","lat":51.504342,"lng":-0.095404,"verdict":"An all-day pancake kitchen in a railway arch."},{"name":"Flat Iron Square","slug":"flat-iron-square","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/flat-iron-square/","lat":51.504146,"lng":-0.095488,"verdict":"Seven railway arches, four food traders, and a gig most nights."},{"name":"Seabird","slug":"seabird","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/seabird/","lat":51.50584,"lng":-0.10476,"verdict":"The longest oyster list in London, fourteen floors up."},{"name":"Tate Modern","slug":"tate-modern","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/tate-modern/","lat":51.507429,"lng":-0.099386,"verdict":"Giles Gilbert Scott's power station, hollowed out and left as raw as they dared.","thumb":"/img/tate-modern-480.jpg?v=f017f793","img":"/img/tate-modern.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"The Obelisk at St George's Circus","slug":"the-obelisk-at-st-georges-circus","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/the-obelisk-at-st-georges-circus/","lat":51.498703,"lng":-0.104744,"verdict":"London's first purpose-built road junction still has its 1771 signpost, carved with the distances to Fleet Street, London Bridge and Westminster.","thumb":"/img/the-obelisk-at-st-georges-circus-480.jpg?v=20b46a2d","img":"/img/the-obelisk-at-st-georges-circus.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Kirkaldy Testing Museum","slug":"kirkaldy-testing-museum","cat":"science","url":"/science/kirkaldy-testing-museum/","lat":51.505966,"lng":-0.101544,"verdict":"One enormous Victorian testing machine, in the building David Kirkaldy put up around it, under the words FACTS NOT OPINIONS.","thumb":"/img/own-kirkaldy-testing-museum-480.jpg?v=8b2bda62","img":"/img/own-kirkaldy-testing-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Millennium Bridge","slug":"millennium-bridge","cat":"science","url":"/science/millennium-bridge/","lat":51.509765,"lng":-0.098523,"verdict":"Foster, Arup and Anthony Caro's blade of light across the Thames, and the sway on the opening weekend that shut it for twenty months.","thumb":"/img/own-millennium-bridge-480.jpg?v=16fe07d2","img":"/img/own-millennium-bridge.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Rose Theatre Exhibition","slug":"rose-theatre-exhibition","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/rose-theatre-exhibition/","lat":51.507215,"lng":-0.095469,"verdict":"The playhouse where Marlowe's plays were first staged, its footprint uncovered in 1989 and kept."},{"name":"Shakespeare's Globe","slug":"shakespeares-globe","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/shakespeares-globe/","lat":51.508123,"lng":-0.097089,"verdict":"A working copy of Shakespeare's playhouse, in oak and thatch, a few hundred yards from where the first one stood.","thumb":"/img/own-shakespeares-globe-480.jpg?v=309aba21","img":"/img/own-shakespeares-globe.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Site of the original Globe","slug":"site-of-the-original-globe","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/site-of-the-original-globe/","lat":51.506838,"lng":-0.094742,"verdict":"Where the first Globe stood, traced in dark stones across the pavement of Park Street."},{"name":"Millennium Bridge","slug":"millennium-bridge","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/millennium-bridge/","lat":51.509765,"lng":-0.098523,"verdict":"The footbridge the Death Eaters twist into the Thames at the start of Half-Blood Prince.","thumb":"/img/own-millennium-bridge-480.jpg?v=16fe07d2","img":"/img/own-millennium-bridge.jpg","w":1024,"h":768}]},{"slug":"spitalfields-brick-lane","name":"Spitalfields & Brick Lane","verdict":"Three hundred years of arrivals in one square mile: Huguenot weavers' houses, a market, and Brick Lane.","note":"The name comes from a hospital. St Mary Spital was founded in 1197 outside Bishopsgate and had 180 beds when Henry VIII closed it; the fields belonging to it kept the name. Being outside the City walls, this was where people settled who were not welcome inside them, and it has been receiving them ever since.\n\nThe Huguenots came first, French Protestants driven out in 1685, some 13,000 of them in London by 1687 and most of them here. They brought silk weaving with them, and the tall houses of Fournier Street and Princelet Street were built for it, with wide upper windows to give the looms light. Hawksmoor's Christ Church of 1729 was put up opposite the market partly to remind them whose country they had come to.\n\nJewish refugees from Russia and eastern Europe followed in the nineteenth century, turning the weaving lofts into tailoring workshops; then Bangladeshi families from Sylhet after the war, which is why the ward is called Spitalfields and Banglatown and why Brick Lane is lined with curry houses. The building on the corner of Fournier Street tells the whole story on its own: a Huguenot chapel of 1743, then a synagogue, and a mosque since 1976.\n\nSpitalfields Market has been trading since 1638 and still fills its Victorian iron hall, and the streets around it are as good a walk as the East End has.","reading_title":"Spitalfields: A Portrait","reading_deck":"A neighbourhood shaped by refuge, trade and reinvention \u2014 from Huguenot silk weavers and Jewish tailors to Bengali restaurateurs, market porters, preservationists, artists and the people who still call it home.","reading":"There may be no building in London that explains its neighbourhood better than the one standing at the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street.\n\nIt is an elegant Georgian chapel, completed in 1743 for French Protestant refugees. In the nineteenth century it became a centre of Jewish religious life and in 1897 was converted into the Spitalfields Great Synagogue. As the Jewish population moved away and a new Bangladeshi community established itself in the surrounding streets, the building changed again. Since 1976 it has been the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid.\n\nFrench church, synagogue, mosque: three centuries of migration contained within the same four walls. Hebrew memorial tablets still survive upstairs. Outside, an eighteenth-century sundial carries the Latin motto Umbra Sumus \u2014 \u201cwe are but shadow\u201d \u2014 while a gleaming modern minaret rises in front of it.\n\nIt is tempting to tell the whole history of Spitalfields this way, as a succession of peoples handing the neighbourhood from one to another. Huguenots are replaced by Jews, Jews by Bangladeshis, workshops by restaurants, market porters by artists and bankers.\n\nYet spend time in the extraordinary archive accumulated by Spitalfields Life and that version begins to seem too tidy. Communities overlap. Trades survive by changing hands. People leave but continue returning for decades. Buildings acquire new occupants while retaining traces of the old ones. Newcomers discover that someone from another continent lived an oddly similar life in the same house a century earlier.\n\nSpitalfields is less a series of replacements than a place continually being rewritten without quite erasing what came before.\n\nIts story begins with another institution of refuge. In 1197 a hospital and priory called St Mary Spital was founded just outside Bishopsgate. The word *Spitalfields* ultimately comes from the fields belonging to this medieval hospital. A market developed alongside it; the City of London traces today's Spitalfields Market back to a thirteenth-century market in the field beside St Mary Spital.\n\nThe location mattered. Spitalfields sat immediately outside the jurisdiction and restrictions of the City, close enough to sell goods to London but sufficiently beyond its walls to accommodate activities, people and trades that did not fit comfortably inside. That pattern would repeat itself for centuries.\n\nThe arrival that transformed the neighbourhood came after 1685, when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and intensified the persecution of Protestants in France. Thousands of Huguenot refugees crossed the Channel, including highly skilled silk workers from established weaving centres such as Lyon and Tours. Spitalfields became the largest concentration of Huguenots in England; by around 1700 French could be heard routinely in its streets.\n\nThey brought more than labour. They brought techniques for producing sophisticated silks \u2014 damasks, brocades, velvets and richly patterned fabrics \u2014 that helped turn Spitalfields into an internationally important centre of luxury manufacture. Raw silk arrived through the Port of London and emerged from workshops in the East End as expensive clothing and furnishings for wealthy customers.\n\nThe architecture still records the prosperity this created. Princelet Street, Wilkes Street and Fournier Street filled with handsome brick houses during the early eighteenth century. Master weavers and silk merchants occupied the lower rooms, while looms could be installed in workshops above, where large windows admitted the daylight required for intricate work.\n\nOne of these immigrants was Jean Rondeau, a serge weaver born in Paris in 1666. Fleeing religious persecution, he settled in Brick Lane, raised twelve children and became successful enough to build a substantial house at 4 Wilkes Street in 1723. His son John became a master silk weaver and commissioned patterns from Anna Maria Garthwaite, the remarkable textile designer who lived nearby and whose surviving designs are among the masterpieces of eighteenth-century English silk.\n\nThree centuries later, one of Jean's descendants, Stanley Rondeau, discovered the connection through genealogy and began volunteering at Christ Church Spitalfields, where John Rondeau had once served as caretaker. Stanley described himself, with some justification, as a piece of \u201cliving history.\u201d The family had left the trade and the district, yet Spitalfields had somehow drawn a Rondeau back.\n\nAbove these streets rose Nicholas Hawksmoor's Christ Church, completed in 1729. Its immense stone portico and extraordinary steeple remain visible from far beyond the neighbourhood, monumental in comparison with the narrow houses around it. Spitalfields in the eighteenth century was therefore not some impoverished fringe of London: parts of it were wealthy, architecturally ambitious and devoted to the manufacture of one of Europe's great luxury products.\n\nBut silk did not provide prosperity forever. Foreign competition, mechanisation and changing trade rules steadily weakened the industry. By the middle of the nineteenth century the great age of Spitalfields silk was effectively over, leaving behind houses whose generous upper rooms were remarkably adaptable to another textile economy.\n\nThis time many of the workers were Jewish.\n\nLarge numbers of Jews fleeing poverty, discrimination and pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe settled around Whitechapel and Spitalfields in the later nineteenth century. Former weaving rooms became tailoring workshops and sweatshops. Synagogues appeared in houses, back rooms and converted chapels. Yiddish joined the succession of languages heard in the streets.\n\nThe surviving memories are strikingly domestic. One account of Tenterground recalls three families sharing a house with the water tap and lavatory in the courtyard. On the ground floor, tailor Jack Lipschitz ran sewing machines in the front and back rooms with his wife, daughter and brother, moving the pressing outside in summer. Somehow the same rooms were also their home.\n\nThe grand houses of eighteenth-century silk masters had become factories for a new immigrant clothing trade.\n\nPetticoat Lane provided its commercial theatre. The market around Wentworth Street and Middlesex Street became one of the great institutions of the Jewish East End, particularly busy on Sundays when much of the rest of London was closed. In 1893 an official survey counted 335 stalls on Wentworth Street alone, sufficient to stop ordinary traffic altogether.\n\nSpitalfields Life preserves the people behind statistics like these. Laurie Allen grew up nearby in the post-war years and remembered an overwhelmingly Jewish Petticoat Lane whose barrow boys would shout to clear a path through the crowds. Fred, the chestnut seller, stood at Bell Lane and Wentworth Street every Sunday for more than half a century, roasting chestnuts over hot coals while the neighbourhood changed around him.\n\nPolitics was as much a part of this world as commerce. Historian Bill Fishman remembered platforms being erected near Brick Lane where Communists, Socialists and Labour activists addressed crowds of Jewish workers in Yiddish. The East End became a centre of trade unionism, socialism, anarchism and anti-fascist organisation, much of it generated within communities whose members worked punishing hours in tiny workshops only streets away.\n\nSandys Row Synagogue survives from this world. Built originally as a Huguenot chapel in 1766 and subsequently converted by Jewish immigrants, it became the home of a congregation whose members and descendants continued travelling back to Spitalfields long after most had moved to other neighbourhoods such as Golders Green, Redbridge and Pinner. Henry Freedman's father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all bar mitzvahed there. For him, the seats in the synagogue carried memories of the people who once occupied them.\n\n[[figure:sandys-row]]\n\nThis repeated pattern \u2014 people moving outward as circumstances improved while maintaining an emotional connection to the streets where their families began \u2014 would occur again.\n\nBy the middle of the twentieth century, men from Sylhet in what was then East Bengal were arriving in London, some after working as seamen in the British merchant navy. More followed after the partition of India and eventually the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. Many entered precisely the industry Spitalfields already possessed: clothing.\n\nGarment factories provide one of the threads connecting Jewish and Bengali Spitalfields. Delwar Hussain, writing about a night and day inside Brick Lane Mosque, recalled that his own father worked as a machinist in a leather-jacket factory opposite the beigel shop. When Hussain attended Harry Gosling School in the 1980s, it was predominantly Sylheti; photographer Bob Mazzer had attended the same school decades earlier when it was primarily Jewish.\n\nThe mosque itself makes the connection architectural. Children now learn the Quran in upstairs rooms where Torah lessons were once taught, and Hebrew inscriptions remain in a building filled with Arabic prayer. Rather than destroying the history of the previous community, its new use has inadvertently preserved pieces of it.\n\nBusinesses followed families. Taj Stores traces its Brick Lane history to the 1930s and expanded as the Bengali population grew. Sweet & Spicy opened in 1969, one of the earliest curry restaurants on Brick Lane, and became a local institution rather than the tourist-oriented curry house that the street would later make famous. Entrepreneurs such as Sanu Miah moved between factory work, restaurants and other businesses, constructing lives in much the same improvisational fashion as generations before them.\n\n[[figure:brick-lane-arch]]\n\nThis new life was not welcomed peacefully.\n\nOn 4 May 1978, Altab Ali, a twenty-five-year-old Bengali garment worker, was murdered in a racist attack near Whitechapel. His killing came during a period in which Bengali residents faced regular street violence and the National Front attempted to establish a visible presence around Brick Lane. The response became a defining episode in modern East End history. Thousands marched behind Ali's coffin from Whitechapel towards central London, and local youth organisations, anti-racist groups and residents organised against racist violence.\n\nThe photographs and oral histories collected by Spitalfields Life make this history feel immediate. Participants remember being frightened to walk alone after work and organising patrols to protect residents. They also remember the moment fear began to turn into organised resistance. The park where Altab Ali died now bears his name.\n\nThe neat idea that Spitalfields belongs successively to three communities breaks down even further when you look at the people who do not fit the sequence.\n\nAt 38 Princelet Street, for example, the Singh family established another long Spitalfields history. Suresh Singh grew up there in a Sikh household and remembers being sent to Sunday school at Christ Church because there was no Sikh temple locally. His family's presence complicates any attempt to reduce the district to a simple Huguenot-Jewish-Bengali progression.\n\nThe textile tradition is equally persistent. Walk down Wentworth Street in the twenty-first century and shops selling spectacular Nigerian and Ghanaian fabrics continue a clothing trade that has existed in one form or another for centuries. Franceskka Abimbola began by selling African fabric from the back of a car before establishing her own shop. The people changed, the fabrics changed and the customers changed, but Spitalfields remained a place where migrants turned cloth into enterprise.\n\nMeanwhile two enormous institutions supplied another kind of continuity.\n\nTruman's brewery operated around Brick Lane for more than three centuries. By the twentieth century it had become an industrial world of its own, employing generations of local families. Former master brewer Derek Prentice remembered it not simply as a factory but as a community of people who sometimes spent fifty years working there. It finally closed in 1989.\n\nBeside it was Spitalfields Market. Charles II granted a formal market charter in 1682, and in the nineteenth century former market porter Robert Horner created much of the great iron-and-glass market building that survives today. For generations, trade began while most Londoners were asleep. Porters hauled crates, greengrocers arrived to buy, cafes and pubs operated through the night and an entire economy existed around the movement of fruit and vegetables.\n\nJimmy Huddart began around the market as a boy and eventually became a licensed porter and union representative. Before forklifts, porters physically manoeuvred great loads on wooden barrows; gaining a coveted licence was itself a progression from the humble role of an \u201cempty boy\u201d collecting discarded boxes.\n\nPaul Gardner represented another lineage. His great-grandfather opened a business on Commercial Street in 1870 servicing market traders' scales. As shopping habits changed, subsequent generations moved into paper bags and market supplies. One family business adapted alongside the market for a century and a half.\n\nAnd then, remarkably quickly, the old economic geography disappeared.\n\nThe fruit and vegetable market moved to Leyton in 1991, two years after Truman's brewery closed. Photographer Phil Maxwell remembered the old market as an entire ecosystem populated not just by traders but cafes, homeless people, scavengers, sex workers and lorry drivers. Once the market moved, much of that supporting ecology vanished with it.\n\nAt almost the same moment, another Spitalfields was being rescued.\n\nBy the 1960s and seventies many Georgian houses were derelict and demolition appeared entirely plausible. Architectural historians and conservationists including Dan Cruickshank, Mark Girouard and members of the newly formed Spitalfields Trust occupied threatened buildings in Elder Street, confronted developers and campaigned for their restoration. [Cruickshank's photographs](https://spitalfieldslife.com/2023/08/03/dan-cruikshanks-spitalfields-photographs/) show just how much surrounding historic fabric was already being destroyed.\n\n[[figure:elder-street]]\n\nThe campaigns succeeded spectacularly. Fournier Street and Elder Street now contain some of London's most celebrated Georgian domestic architecture.\n\nThey also produced a paradox.\n\nThe historian Raphael Samuel identified it as early as 1988: historic houses might be lovingly preserved at precisely the same moment that the occupations, businesses and communities which gave the neighbourhood its social identity were being dispersed.\n\nThe strange figure of [Dennis Severs](https://spitalfieldslife.com/2022/07/08/remembering-dennis-severs/) captures something of this transition. An American who arrived in Spitalfields when few outsiders wanted to live there, Severs transformed 18 Folgate Street into an extraordinary imaginative reconstruction of a Huguenot household. Friends remember him collecting discarded walnuts and vegetables from the gutters of the wholesale market and incorporating the neighbourhood's debris into the historical world he was creating inside his house.\n\nArtists, architects, writers and preservationists helped save Spitalfields physically. Their success also made the Georgian houses desirable. The derelict district became fashionable; the fashionable district became expensive.\n\nArtist Adam Dant, who moved to the area in the 1990s, has observed an almost perfect inversion. When he arrived, spaces stood empty because the neighbourhood was derelict and nobody wanted them. More recently, he suggested, spaces can stand empty because few people can afford them.\n\nThis is the tension running through modern Spitalfields. The old market building survives magnificently, but the wholesale fruit traders have gone. The Truman brewery survives as an enormous architectural presence, but nobody brews Truman's beer there. Huguenot houses that once became crowded Jewish sweatshops are now among the most valuable small houses in East London. Brick Lane's Bengali restaurants turned the street into an international destination, yet the community that created \u201cBanglatown\u201d has itself increasingly followed earlier Spitalfields populations towards suburbs farther east. Delwar Hussain has described friends and relatives moving to Seven Kings, Ilford, Barking, Dagenham and Essex \u2014 a migration outward that echoes the earlier departure of Huguenot and Jewish families.\n\nAnd yet it would be a mistake to declare the old neighbourhood dead.\n\nOn Sundays people still trade in Petticoat Lane. Sandys Row still functions as a synagogue. Five daily prayers take place in the former Huguenot chapel on Brick Lane. African textile dealers continue the centuries-old association of Wentworth Street with cloth. Christ Church still towers over Fournier Street. The Victorian market hall is still crowded with stalls, even if what they sell has changed almost beyond recognition.\n\nMore importantly, memories continue to migrate back into the neighbourhood even when people do not.\n\nJewish families whose grandparents left return to Sandys Row. Huguenot descendants search old addresses on Wilkes Street. Bangladeshi Londoners return to the mosque in which they studied as children. Photographers such as Phil Maxwell, Sarah Ainslie and Paul Trevor have spent decades recording people who might otherwise disappear from the historical record. And through Spitalfields Life, market porters, shopkeepers, tailors, publicans, silk weavers' descendants, brewers, imams, artists and eccentrics have been allowed to occupy the same historical space.\n\nThat may ultimately be what makes Spitalfields different from London's more perfectly preserved historic quarters.\n\nIts importance does not reside solely in its Georgian houses, Hawksmoor church or old market. Nor is it simply that generations of refugees and migrants settled here.\n\nIt is that the same fundamental process has occurred repeatedly. Someone arrives with very little. They rent a room. They learn a trade or use one they already possess. A front room becomes a workshop. A market stall becomes a shop. A machinist becomes a restaurateur. Children grow up with opportunities their parents did not have. Eventually the family moves somewhere more comfortable, while another newcomer occupies the space they leave behind.\n\nThe buildings endure precisely because their meanings do not.\n\nAt the corner of Fournier Street, the eighteenth-century sundial still looks down upon worshippers entering Brick Lane Mosque.\n\n*Umbra sumus.*\n\nWe are shadows.\n\nSpitalfields is what remains when the shadows overlap.","reading_sources":[{"label":"Spitalfields Life","url":"https://spitalfieldslife.com/"},{"label":"Brick Lane Mosque \u2014 Historic England","url":"https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1240697"},{"label":"Tower Hamlets: Urban Structure & Characterisation Study","url":"https://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/Documents/Planning-and-building-control/Strategic-Planning/Local-Plan/Urban_Structure_and_Characterisation_Study_Final_Draft_New_Reduced.pdf"},{"label":"City of London: History of New Spitalfields Market","url":"https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/supporting-businesses/wholesale-markets/new-spitalfields-market/history-of-new-spitalfields-market"},{"label":"Huguenots of Spitalfields","url":"https://www.huguenotsofspitalfields.org/huguenot-towns/spitalfields/"}],"reading_cta":{"label":"View our map of Spitalfields","href":"/neighbourhoods/spitalfields-brick-lane/"},"figure":{"src":"/img/spitalfields-brushfield-street.jpg?v=b0986003","thumb":"/img/spitalfields-brushfield-street-480.jpg?v=cc34609e","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Christ Church Spitalfields at the end of Brushfield Street, its spire above the shopfronts","caption":"Hawksmoor's Christ Church closes the view down Brushfield Street."},"reading_figures":{"elder-street":{"src":"/img/spitalfields-elder-street.jpg?v=2258440b","thumb":"/img/spitalfields-elder-street-480.jpg?v=aca320a3","width":768,"height":1024,"thumb_width":360,"alt":"A Morris Minor parked on the cobbles of Elder Street, between Georgian brick terraces","caption":"Elder Street, where the campaigners occupied the threatened houses."},"sandys-row":{"src":"/img/spitalfields-sandys-row.jpg?v=ede22c29","thumb":"/img/spitalfields-sandys-row-480.jpg?v=2fd5c589","width":776,"height":1024,"thumb_width":363,"alt":"A blue arched door under a fanlight lettered Sandys Row Synagogue, founded 1854","caption":"The door of Sandys Row Synagogue, built as a Huguenot chapel in 1766."},"brick-lane-arch":{"src":"/img/spitalfields-brick-lane-arch.jpg?v=166029d8","thumb":"/img/spitalfields-brick-lane-arch-480.jpg?v=873d6c4f","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A green and gold arch lettered Bangla Town spanning Brick Lane, a mural of a boatman on the gable beside it","caption":"The Bangla Town arch over Brick Lane, and the boatman painted on the gable at Hopetown Street."}},"reading_links":[{"phrase":"Brick Lane Jamme Masjid","name":"Brick Lane Jamme Masjid","slug":"brick-lane-jamme-masjid","cat":"Sacred London","href":"/sacred/brick-lane-jamme-masjid/"},{"phrase":"Spitalfields Market","name":"Old Spitalfields Market","slug":"old-spitalfields-market","cat":"Food Markets","href":"/food-markets/old-spitalfields-market/"},{"phrase":"Christ Church Spitalfields","name":"Christ Church Spitalfields","slug":"christ-church-spitalfields","cat":"Sacred London","href":"/sacred/christ-church-spitalfields/"},{"phrase":"Petticoat Lane","name":"Petticoat Lane Market","slug":"petticoat-lane-market","cat":"Food Markets","href":"/food-markets/petticoat-lane-market/"},{"phrase":"Sandys Row Synagogue","name":"Sandys Row Synagogue","slug":"sandys-row-synagogue","cat":"Sacred London","href":"/sacred/sandys-row-synagogue/"},{"phrase":"the beigel shop","name":"Beigel Bake","slug":"beigel-bake","cat":"Bakeries","href":"/bakeries/beigel-bake/"},{"phrase":"18 Folgate Street","name":"Dennis Severs' House","slug":"dennis-severs-house","cat":"Museums","href":"/museums/dennis-severs-house/"}],"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-spitalfields-brick-lane-2.jpg?v=6ebd3510","thumb":"/img/area-spitalfields-brick-lane-2-480.jpg?v=2e8b1b40","width":1024,"height":771,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Inside Old Spitalfields Market: stalls under the Victorian roof","caption":"Old Spitalfields Market.","credit":"Photo by Andy Li, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_Spitalfields_Market_(3)_2024-12-21.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-spitalfields-brick-lane-3.jpg?v=c7de85fc","thumb":"/img/area-spitalfields-brick-lane-3-480.jpg?v=d320cf4b","width":1024,"height":682,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The Ten Bells pub on the corner of Commercial Street and Fournier Street","caption":"The Ten Bells, on Commercial Street.","credit":"Photo by Mike Lidgley from Barnet (North London), UK, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Ten_Bells,_London_E1_(54073153347).jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-spitalfields-brick-lane-4.jpg?v=1a48f5cf","thumb":"/img/area-spitalfields-brick-lane-4-480.jpg?v=16a9743d","width":1024,"height":769,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Brick Lane under its Banglatown arch, curry houses and shops along both sides","caption":"Brick Lane.","credit":"Photo by Abu Ayyub, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brick_Lane_Banglatown.jpg"}],"edges":["the City line","Bethnal Green Road","Vallance Road","Whitechapel Road"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.06396,51.52408],[-0.06439,51.52181],[-0.06266,51.51845],[-0.06673,51.51725],[-0.07391,51.51431],[-0.07693,51.51665],[-0.0782,51.51847],[-0.07813,51.51898],[-0.07944,51.51888],[-0.07856,51.5215],[-0.07725,51.5237],[-0.07456,51.52375],[-0.06968,51.52569],[-0.06461,51.52643],[-0.06396,51.52408]]]},"centre":[-0.07131,51.52018],"bounds":[[-0.07944,51.51431],[-0.06266,51.52643]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":26,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":3,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":3,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"shopping","name":"Shopping","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":11,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":3,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":3,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"breakfast","name":"Breakfast & Brunch","count":4,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":5,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"cocktails","name":"Cocktails","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"politics","name":"Power & Politics","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"sacred","name":"Sacred London","count":3,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"beautiful-streets","name":"Beautiful Streets","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"classic-british-shops","name":"Classic British Shops","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":1,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"A Slow Jams Day Party","slug":"a-slow-jams-day-party","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/a-slow-jams-day-party/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"Neo-soul and R&B in the afternoon, because summer is over."},{"name":"AKRIILA","slug":"akriila","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/akriila/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"Chilean pop twisted through drum and bass and urban production."},{"name":"Ady Suleiman","slug":"ady-suleiman","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/ady-suleiman/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"Nottingham soul, back on the road."},{"name":"Big Squeeze Soul","slug":"big-squeeze-soul","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/big-squeeze-soul/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"A party built for dancing rather than standing still."},{"name":"Book Sale","slug":"book-sale","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/bishopsgate-institute/book-sale/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-27","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.518725,"lng":-0.07932,"verdict":"The library sells its duplicates for one afternoon."},{"name":"Brick Lane Curry Festival","slug":"brick-lane-curry-festival","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/brick-lane-curry-festival/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-20","to":"2026-09-20"},"lat":51.521021,"lng":-0.071826,"verdict":"Brick Lane closed to traffic and given over to curry, for one Sunday."},{"name":"Cecilia Vicu\u00f1a: Living Threads","slug":"cecilia-vicuna-living-threads","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/whitechapel-gallery/cecilia-vicuna-living-threads/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-07","to":"2027-02-14"},"lat":51.516163,"lng":-0.070356,"verdict":"Six decades of the Chilean poet-artist, from the precarios to a new city of geometry."},{"name":"Central: Youandewan b2b Liquid Earth, Laurine and Ron Obvious","slug":"central-youandewan-b2b-liquid-earth-laurine-and-ron-obvious","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/central-youandewan-b2b-liquid-earth-laurine-and-ron-obvious/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"Three years of a deep house night, marked with a back-to-back."},{"name":"Dance in a Day: Lindy Hop","slug":"dance-in-a-day-lindy-hop","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/bishopsgate-institute/dance-in-a-day-lindy-hop/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-27","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.518725,"lng":-0.07932,"verdict":"Learn enough Lindy Hop in an afternoon to get through the evening."},{"name":"Dankie Room presents QUE DJ","slug":"dankie-room-presents-que-dj","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/dankie-room-presents-que-dj/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"Amapiano and Afro house until five in the morning."},{"name":"Dead Calm","slug":"dead-calm","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/dead-calm/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"A FORM Presents night in the brick hall."},{"name":"Dennis Severs' House","slug":"dennis-severs-house","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/dennis-severs-house/","lat":51.520903,"lng":-0.077152,"verdict":"Ten rooms lit by candles, each one just abandoned by people who never existed.","thumb":"/img/dennis-severs-house-480.jpg?v=6ff10bd4","img":"/img/dennis-severs-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":681},{"name":"Ecca Vandal","slug":"ecca-vandal","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/ecca-vandal/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-15","to":"2026-09-15"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"A performer who cites Nina Simone and Fugazi and sounds like both."},{"name":"Escape Plan","slug":"escape-plan","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/escape-plan/","lat":51.524402,"lng":-0.073346,"verdict":"Second World War missions rather than another generic puzzle room."},{"name":"Frog and Middleman","slug":"frog-and-middleman","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/frog-and-middleman/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"Queens indie rock about American places the writer has never been."},{"name":"Le Boom + AE MAK","slug":"le-boom-ae-mak","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/le-boom-ae-mak/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-15","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"Two Irish acts in a Shoreditch railway shed, both closer to a house party than a gig."},{"name":"Margins United Festival 2026","slug":"margins-united-festival-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/margins-united-festival-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"Sixteen artists across two venues, celebrating alternative East and South-East Asian culture."},{"name":"Mi Casa","slug":"mi-casa","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/mi-casa/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-24"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"South African house, played live by the trio who made it popular."},{"name":"Mulaa Joans","slug":"mulaa-joans","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/village-underground/mulaa-joans/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-14","to":"2026-09-14"},"lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"A nineteen-year-old songwriter with a voice that sounds older than that."},{"name":"Spitalfields City Farm","slug":"spitalfields-city-farm","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/spitalfields-city-farm/","lat":51.5216,"lng":-0.065807,"verdict":"Goats and growing beds on old railway land off Brick Lane."},{"name":"Swing Live","slug":"swing-live","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/bishopsgate-institute/swing-live/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.518725,"lng":-0.07932,"verdict":"A live band and a room full of Lindy Hoppers on Bishopsgate."},{"name":"Swing Live! Performance Ball","slug":"swing-live-performance-ball","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/bishopsgate-institute/swing-live-performance-ball/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-17","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.518725,"lng":-0.07932,"verdict":"Swing Patrol's students take the stage, then everyone dances until one in the morning."},{"name":"The London Coffee Festival","slug":"the-london-coffee-festival","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/the-london-coffee-festival/","runs":{"from":"2027-05-13","to":"2027-05-16","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.5218,"lng":-0.0722,"verdict":"Two hundred and seventy-five coffee and food brands in the Truman Brewery, with the Coffee Masters final."},{"name":"This Must Be the Place: Artists for Whitechapel 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sit still."},{"name":"Dennis Severs' House","slug":"dennis-severs-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/dennis-severs-house/","lat":51.520943,"lng":-0.07779,"verdict":"Ten candlelit rooms left as if a family of Huguenot silk weavers had just walked out of them, which they never did, because Dennis Severs invented them.","thumb":"/img/dennis-severs-house-480.jpg?v=6ff10bd4","img":"/img/dennis-severs-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":681},{"name":"Museum of Immigration and Diversity","slug":"museum-of-immigration-and-diversity","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/museum-of-immigration-and-diversity/","deep":true,"lat":51.519846,"lng":-0.072486,"verdict":"Open selected days only.","thumb":"/img/museum-of-immigration-and-diversity-480.jpg?v=dd0c7dd0","img":"/img/museum-of-immigration-and-diversity.jpg","w":546,"h":1024},{"name":"Whitechapel Gallery","slug":"whitechapel-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/whitechapel-gallery/","lat":51.516163,"lng":-0.070356,"verdict":"The East End's gallery since 1901, free, where Guernica hung in 1939 and Rothko, Pollock and Hockney were first shown to London.","thumb":"/img/whitechapel-gallery-480.jpg?v=b1cfcfa0","img":"/img/whitechapel-gallery.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Broadgate Venus","slug":"broadgate-venus","cat":"art","url":"/art/broadgate-venus/","lat":51.519713,"lng":-0.080458,"verdict":"Fernando Botero's reclining bronze woman, five tons of her, in Exchange Square.","thumb":"/img/broadgate-venus-480.jpg?v=26d4e2d1","img":"/img/broadgate-venus.jpg","w":1024,"h":576},{"name":"Whitechapel Gallery","slug":"whitechapel-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/whitechapel-gallery/","lat":51.516163,"lng":-0.070356,"verdict":"The East End's gallery since 1901, free, where Guernica hung in 1939 and Rothko, Pollock and Hockney were first shown to London.","thumb":"/img/whitechapel-gallery-480.jpg?v=b1cfcfa0","img":"/img/whitechapel-gallery.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Christ Church Spitalfields","slug":"christ-church-spitalfields","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/christ-church-spitalfields/","lat":51.519101,"lng":-0.073721,"verdict":"Hawksmoor's largest church, and the home of the Spitalfields Music festival.","thumb":"/img/christ-church-spitalfields-480.jpg?v=f5ea2aca","img":"/img/christ-church-spitalfields.jpg","w":559,"h":1024},{"name":"Rich Mix","slug":"rich-mix","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/rich-mix/","lat":51.524398,"lng":-0.07313,"verdict":"A former garment factory on Bethnal Green Road with three cinema screens and a stage."},{"name":"Village Underground","slug":"village-underground","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/village-underground/","lat":51.523561,"lng":-0.078631,"verdict":"Three hollowed-out Jubilee line carriages on the roof, and a Victorian warehouse under them."},{"name":"Brick Lane","slug":"brick-lane","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/brick-lane/","lat":51.521749,"lng":-0.071669,"verdict":"Vintage clothes by the kilo and by the piece, north of the railway."},{"name":"% Arabica","slug":"arabica-spitalfields","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/arabica-spitalfields/","lat":51.519435,"lng":-0.077179,"verdict":"A kiosk whose doors shut into the % logo."},{"name":"Allpress Espresso","slug":"allpress-redchurch","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/allpress-redchurch/","lat":51.524423,"lng":-0.074244,"verdict":"The Kiwi espresso bar the rest of Redchurch Street grew up around."},{"name":"Attendant","slug":"attendant","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/attendant/","lat":51.52127,"lng":-0.078922,"verdict":"The Folgate Street room, from the people who put a caf\u00e9 in a Victorian gents."},{"name":"Climpson & Sons Coffee Bar","slug":"climpson-sons-coffee-bar","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/climpson-sons-coffee-bar/","lat":51.519763,"lng":-0.074933,"verdict":"Climpson's market kiosk, roasted a mile up the road in London Fields."},{"name":"Dark Arts Coffee","slug":"dark-arts-coffee-shoreditch","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/dark-arts-coffee-shoreditch/","lat":51.52386,"lng":-0.077815,"verdict":"Holywell Lane, and shut by three."},{"name":"Department of Coffee and Social Affairs","slug":"department-of-coffee-and-social-affairs","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/department-of-coffee-and-social-affairs/","lat":51.514847,"lng":-0.073493,"verdict":"Whitechapel High Street, open late by City standards."},{"name":"Doppio","slug":"doppio","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/doppio/","lat":51.520058,"lng":-0.069647,"verdict":"Hanbury Street, and the espresso bar attached to the equipment."},{"name":"Kahaila","slug":"kahaila-spitalfields","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/kahaila-spitalfields/","lat":51.523824,"lng":-0.071624,"verdict":"A Brick Lane caf\u00e9 whose profits go to the charity that runs it."},{"name":"Store Street Espresso","slug":"store-street-espresso-broadgate","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/store-street-espresso-broadgate/","lat":51.518535,"lng":-0.079325,"verdict":"Red Brick espresso, served at Liverpool Street pace."},{"name":"Urban Baristas","slug":"urban-baristas-aldgate","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/urban-baristas-aldgate/","lat":51.516273,"lng":-0.076776,"verdict":"Australian habits at Aldgate speed."},{"name":"Urban Baristas","slug":"urban-baristas-whitechapel","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/urban-baristas-whitechapel/","lat":51.523771,"lng":-0.06302,"verdict":"Sydney caf\u00e9 habits on a Bethnal Green backstreet."},{"name":"Beigel Bake","slug":"beigel-bake","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/beigel-bake/","lat":51.524512,"lng":-0.071752,"verdict":"Twenty-four hours a day on Brick Lane, and it has earned every one of them.","thumb":"/img/beigel-bake-480.jpg?v=f638d197","img":"/img/beigel-bake.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Jolene Redchurch Street","slug":"jolene-redchurch-street","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/jolene-redchurch-street/","lat":51.524571,"lng":-0.07431,"verdict":"Jolene on Redchurch Street, milling its own flour."},{"name":"Rinkoff's","slug":"rinkoffs","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/rinkoffs/","lat":51.52198,"lng":-0.06453,"verdict":"A Jewish bakery from 1911, and the crodough it invented."},{"name":"Crosstown","slug":"crosstown","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/crosstown/","lat":51.52445,"lng":-0.071814,"verdict":"Sourdough doughnuts, wedged between the two beigel shops at the top of Brick Lane."},{"name":"Dark Sugars Chocolates","slug":"dark-sugars-chocolates","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/dark-sugars-chocolates/","lat":51.523951,"lng":-0.071637,"verdict":"Ghanaian cocoa, and a hot chocolate with a hedge of chocolate shavings on top."},{"name":"Darlish Spitalfields","slug":"darlish-spitalfields","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/darlish-spitalfields/","lat":51.518857,"lng":-0.078896,"verdict":"Persian ice cream and baklava sandwiches, facing Old Spitalfields Market."},{"name":"Brother Marcus Spitalfields","slug":"brother-marcus-spitalfields","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/brother-marcus-spitalfields/","lat":51.519391,"lng":-0.075747,"verdict":"East Med cooking where the covered market meets Brushfield Street."},{"name":"Dishoom Shoreditch","slug":"dishoom-shoreditch","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/dishoom-shoreditch/","lat":51.524521,"lng":-0.07683,"verdict":"Bacon naan on Boundary Street, with the Permit Room below."},{"name":"E. Pellicci","slug":"e-pellicci","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/e-pellicci/","lat":51.526496,"lng":-0.063379,"verdict":"A caff on Bethnal Green Road with a historically protected interior, same family since 1900."},{"name":"Jolene Redchurch Street","slug":"jolene-redchurch-street","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/jolene-redchurch-street/","lat":51.524571,"lng":-0.07431,"verdict":"Own-milled flour, in a narrow Shoreditch shopfront."},{"name":"BOXPARK Shoreditch","slug":"boxpark-shoreditch","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/boxpark-shoreditch/","lat":51.523486,"lng":-0.076266,"verdict":"Fifty vendors in shipping containers, and the upper deck is all food.","thumb":"/img/boxpark-shoreditch-480.jpg?v=f220e543","img":"/img/boxpark-shoreditch.jpg","w":1024,"h":576},{"name":"Brick Lane Market","slug":"brick-lane-market","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/brick-lane-market/","lat":51.524274,"lng":-0.071561,"verdict":"East London's Sunday market, and still a sliver of the original underneath.","thumb":"/img/brick-lane-market-480.jpg?v=5593071f","img":"/img/brick-lane-market.jpg","w":694,"h":1024},{"name":"Eataly","slug":"eataly","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/eataly/","lat":51.518741,"lng":-0.080115,"verdict":"Two thousand wine labels, and mozzarella pulled in front of you on a Saturday."},{"name":"Old Spitalfields Market","slug":"old-spitalfields-market","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/old-spitalfields-market/","lat":51.519594,"lng":-0.075372,"verdict":"Trading here since 1682, under one grand Victorian roof.","thumb":"/img/old-spitalfields-market-480.jpg?v=4142b92a","img":"/img/old-spitalfields-market.jpg","w":1024,"h":486},{"name":"Petticoat Lane Market","slug":"petticoat-lane-market","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/petticoat-lane-market/","lat":51.5179281,"lng":-0.0790292,"verdict":"London's oldest clothes market on Sunday mornings, and a weekday street-food court on Wentworth Street the rest of the week."},{"name":"Discount Suit Company","slug":"discount-suit-company","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/discount-suit-company/","lat":51.516777,"lng":-0.075448,"verdict":"A narrow basement in a former tailor's stockroom."},{"name":"Altab Ali Park","slug":"altab-ali-park","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/altab-ali-park/","lat":51.516187,"lng":-0.068505,"verdict":"A churchyard renamed for a young man murdered walking home, and the movement that came after.","thumb":"/img/altab-ali-park-480.jpg?v=379af335","img":"/img/altab-ali-park.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Toynbee Hall","slug":"toynbee-hall","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/toynbee-hall/","lat":51.516644,"lng":-0.072185,"verdict":"The East End settlement where the welfare state was partly worked out."},{"name":"Brick Lane Jamme Masjid","slug":"brick-lane-jamme-masjid","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/brick-lane-jamme-masjid/","lat":51.519453,"lng":-0.072052,"verdict":"One building that has been a Huguenot chapel, a Methodist chapel, a synagogue and a mosque.","thumb":"/img/brick-lane-jamme-masjid-480.jpg?v=1f35f783","img":"/img/brick-lane-jamme-masjid.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Christ Church Spitalfields","slug":"christ-church-spitalfields","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/christ-church-spitalfields/","lat":51.519101,"lng":-0.073721,"verdict":"Hawksmoor's masterpiece, its spire closing the view down Brushfield Street since 1729.","thumb":"/img/christ-church-spitalfields-480.jpg?v=f5ea2aca","img":"/img/christ-church-spitalfields.jpg","w":559,"h":1024},{"name":"Sandys Row Synagogue","slug":"sandys-row-synagogue","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/sandys-row-synagogue/","lat":51.518519,"lng":-0.07772,"verdict":"The oldest Ashkenazi synagogue in London still in use, inside a Huguenot chapel of 1766.","thumb":"/img/sandys-row-synagogue-480.jpg?v=c0c07ad0","img":"/img/sandys-row-synagogue.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Brick Lane","slug":"brick-lane","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/brick-lane/","lat":51.521021,"lng":-0.071826,"verdict":"Not a tidy street. Curry houses, bagels at four in the morning, and every wave of arrivals still written on it.","thumb":"/img/street-brick-lane-480.jpg?v=84dfefe6","img":"/img/street-brick-lane.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Labour and Wait","slug":"labour-and-wait","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/labour-and-wait/","lat":51.524686,"lng":-0.073321,"verdict":"Household tools chosen for how long they will last, in a tiled former pub off Brick Lane.","thumb":"/img/labour-and-wait-480.jpg?v=0a222695","img":"/img/labour-and-wait.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Bishopsgate Institute","slug":"bishopsgate-institute","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/bishopsgate-institute/","lat":51.518725,"lng":-0.07932,"verdict":"A free library of London's radicals, protests and everyday lives, in Townsend's 1895 building by Liverpool Street.","thumb":"/img/bishopsgate-institute-480.jpg?v=5652b381","img":"/img/bishopsgate-institute.jpg","w":768,"h":1024}]},{"slug":"st-jamess","name":"St James's","verdict":"Clubland: a Tudor palace, shirtmakers and hatters, wine merchants who have not moved since 1698, and the art trade.","note":"Henry VIII built St James's Palace on the site of a leper hospital in the 1530s, and after Whitehall Palace burned down in 1698 it became the monarch's official London home. It still is, formally: ambassadors are accredited to the Court of St James's even though no monarch has lived there since 1837.\n\nThe district around it was laid out for courtiers. Charles II gave the land to Henry Jermyn in the 1660s, and Jermyn built a grid of streets around St James's Square for people who needed to be near the palace. When the aristocracy moved on, the shops that had served them stayed, which is what makes this the strangest surviving piece of old London: Berry Bros and Rudd have sold wine from the same shop on St James's Street since 1698, Lock the hatters since 1676, Floris scent since 1730, and Jermyn Street is still a run of shirtmakers.\n\nThe clubs came in the nineteenth century and gave the area its other name. White's, Brooks's and Boodle's are all on the same short street, and none of them has a sign on the door.\n\nThe art and auction trade fills the rest: Christie's on King Street, and dealers with a single painting in the window. Fortnum & Mason has been on Piccadilly since 1707, and the park is a minute's walk from any of it.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-st-jamess-4.jpg?v=f695e5f9","thumb":"/img/area-st-jamess-4-480.jpg?v=0fac0461","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A garden square in early spring: lawn, clipped box hedges and a bench under bare plane trees, an equestrian statue on its plinth at the left, and white stucco terraces behind.","caption":"St James's Square, with William III on his horse.","credit":"Photo by Philippe Cendron, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_James's_Square_nord-ouest.jpg"},"figures":[{"src":"/img/own-st-jamess-piccadilly.jpg?v=2cae187a","thumb":"/img/own-st-jamess-piccadilly-480.jpg?v=723f7264","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Duke of York Street towards St James's Piccadilly, the Red Lion and a barber's shopfront in front of the church tower","caption":"Duke of York Street, with the Red Lion and the church tower behind."},{"src":"/img/area-st-jamess-5.jpg?v=936c343f","thumb":"/img/area-st-jamess-5-480.jpg?v=4ab66dc3","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"A courtyard of St James's Palace: dark red Tudor brick with battlements and tall chimneys, an arcade of pointed arches along the ground floor, and two guardsmen in red tunics and bearskins at their sentry boxes.","caption":"St James's Palace, from the courtyard.","credit":"Photo by Colin Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London_-_St_James's_Palace_-_geograph.org.uk_-_7485488.jpg"}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Piccadilly","Haymarket","The Mall","Constitution Hill"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.12969,51.50645],[-0.13147,51.50559],[-0.1401,51.50205],[-0.14158,51.50217],[-0.14891,51.50246],[-0.1522,51.5031],[-0.14982,51.50337],[-0.14232,51.50701],[-0.13874,51.50848],[-0.13624,51.50928],[-0.13464,51.51009],[-0.13274,51.50958],[-0.13104,51.50778],[-0.1286,51.50754],[-0.12969,51.50645]]]},"centre":[-0.13782,51.50594],"bounds":[[-0.1522,51.50205],[-0.1286,51.51009]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":60,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":8,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":20,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":5,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"shopping","name":"Shopping","count":9,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":3,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"breakfast","name":"Breakfast & Brunch","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"cocktails","name":"Cocktails","count":4,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"wine","name":"Wine","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"royal","name":"Royal London","count":8,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"politics","name":"Power & Politics","count":4,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"sacred","name":"Sacred London","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"monuments","name":"Monuments & Ruins","count":8,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"classic-british-shops","name":"Classic British Shops","count":20,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"science","name":"Science & Engineering","count":4,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"secrets","name":"Secrets & Espionage","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":3,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":6,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"harry-potter","name":"Harry Potter","count":1,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"1 Irishman: Reece Kidd","slug":"1-irishman-reece-kidd","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/1-irishman-reece-kidd/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-28","to":"2026-10-28"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"Crowd work and walk-and-talk stories, two hundred million views\u2019 worth."},{"name":"A Cabinet of Curiosities: Decorative Papers and Natural History","slug":"a-cabinet-of-curiosities-decorative-papers-and-natural-history","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/linnean-society/a-cabinet-of-curiosities-decorative-papers-and-natural-history/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-17","to":"2026-11-17"},"lat":51.5088,"lng":-0.1395,"verdict":"Make marbled paper the eighteenth-century way, then a cabinet to line with it."},{"name":"A Primer of Birds","slug":"a-primer-of-birds","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/cristea-roberts-gallery/a-primer-of-birds/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.505772,"lng":-0.136318,"verdict":"Prints of birds, hung together, in the gallery that does almost nothing else but prints."},{"name":"Ali Kazim: Alphabets","slug":"ali-kazim-alphabets","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/cristea-roberts-gallery/ali-kazim-alphabets/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.505772,"lng":-0.136318,"verdict":"A Pakistani painter's alphabet pictures, in a Pall Mall print gallery."},{"name":"An Evening with the Sunbirds of the World","slug":"an-evening-with-the-sunbirds-of-the-world","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/linnean-society/an-evening-with-the-sunbirds-of-the-world/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-22","to":"2026-10-22"},"lat":51.5088,"lng":-0.1395,"verdict":"The Old World's answer to the hummingbird, which it is not related to."},{"name":"Art For Youth London 2026","slug":"art-for-youth-london-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/mall-galleries/art-for-youth-london-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-04","to":"2026-11-06"},"lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"A selling show whose proceeds go to youth clubs, running since 1988."},{"name":"Astonished By Beauty: The Essential Practice of Natural History","slug":"astonished-by-beauty-the-essential-practice-of-natural-history","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/linnean-society/astonished-by-beauty-the-essential-practice-of-natural-history/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-03","to":"2026-11-03"},"lat":51.5088,"lng":-0.1395,"verdict":"A defence of looking at things closely as a serious method."},{"name":"Autumn Knight: I Can't Complain","slug":"autumn-knight-i-cant-complain","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/institute-of-contemporary-arts/autumn-knight-i-cant-complain/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-29","to":"2026-11-29"},"lat":51.506158,"lng":-0.130952,"verdict":"The New York artist's first big UK show, on complaint as a form."},{"name":"Beginner's Showcase","slug":"beginners-showcase","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/beginners-showcase/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-11","to":"2026-10-11"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"The graduates of the Store\u2019s own course, doing five minutes each on the stage they trained for."},{"name":"Big Love Big Laughs","slug":"big-love-big-laughs","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/big-love-big-laughs/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-01","to":"2026-12-01"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"Jo Caulfield and Stephen K Amos host a bill of television names for two hospices."},{"name":"Brad Upton","slug":"brad-upton","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/brad-upton/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-07","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"A thirty-seven-year veteran of American clubs having a very late run of luck."},{"name":"Christmas Best in Stand Up","slug":"christmas-best-in-stand-up","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/christmas-best-in-stand-up/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-03","to":"2026-12-29"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"The Store\u2019s five-act bill, in its Christmas run."},{"name":"Corinthian Chamber Orchestra: Kodaly, Saint-Saens, Mendelssohn","slug":"corinthian-chamber-orchestra-kodaly-saint-saens-mendelssohn","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/corinthian-chamber-orchestra-kodaly-saint-saens-mendelssohn/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-10-02"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"Bruno Philippe plays the Saint-Saens cello concerto to open the season."},{"name":"Discerning Eye 2026","slug":"discerning-eye-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/mall-galleries/discerning-eye-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-13","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"Six selectors, six small hangs, no house style."},{"name":"Diwali on the Square","slug":"diwali-on-the-square","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/diwali-on-the-square/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-25","to":"2026-10-25","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.508,"lng":-0.1281,"verdict":"Two hundred dancers open the Mayor's Diwali on Trafalgar Square, free, no ticket."},{"name":"Emma Reyes","slug":"emma-reyes","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/white-cube-masons-yard/emma-reyes/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.507573,"lng":-0.137301,"verdict":"A Colombian painter who wrote one of the great memoirs of a childhood and hid the paintings."},{"name":"Eva Victoria Schockmel plays Barrios and Buxtehude","slug":"eva-victoria-schockmel-plays-barrios-and-buxtehude","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/eva-victoria-schockmel-plays-barrios-and-buxtehude/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"A Luxembourgish guitarist's hour, ending on a Hungarian fantasy."},{"name":"Firenze Lai: North and True North","slug":"firenze-lai-north-and-true-north","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/white-cube-masons-yard/firenze-lai-north-and-true-north/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-13","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.507573,"lng":-0.137301,"verdict":"Hong Kong paintings of bodies bent into the shapes their surroundings leave them."},{"name":"Funny Women Glitter Challenge","slug":"funny-women-glitter-challenge","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/funny-women-glitter-challenge/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-30","to":"2026-09-30"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"Eight women who took a summer comedy challenge, doing it for real on the Store\u2019s stage."},{"name":"HOPE, Youth Voices for Change","slug":"hope-youth-voices-for-change","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/mall-galleries/hope-youth-voices-for-change/","runs":{"from":"2027-01-10","to":"2027-01-23"},"lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"A youth-led exhibition asking whether anyone is listening."},{"name":"Herbarium: Plants in a New Light","slug":"herbarium-plants-in-a-new-light","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/linnean-society/herbarium-plants-in-a-new-light/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-21","to":"2026-09-21"},"lat":51.5088,"lng":-0.1395,"verdict":"Linnaeus's own pressed plants, photographed from behind with the light coming through."},{"name":"Hidden London: Dover Street \u2014 alight here for Green Park","slug":"hidden-london-dover-street-alight-here-for-green-park","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-dover-street-alight-here-for-green-park/","lat":51.506624,"lng":-0.142944,"verdict":"A station inside a station, shut to passengers since 1933."},{"name":"Hidden London: Down Street \u2014 Churchill's secret station","slug":"hidden-london-down-street-churchills-secret-station","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-down-street-churchills-secret-station/","lat":51.50475,"lng":-0.14757,"verdict":"The disused Mayfair station where the railways were run from, and Churchill slept, through the Blitz.","thumb":"/img/own-down-street-480.jpg?v=20c64caa","img":"/img/own-down-street.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Hidden London: Piccadilly Circus \u2014 the heart of London","slug":"hidden-london-piccadilly-circus-the-heart-of-london","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-piccadilly-circus-the-heart-of-london/","lat":51.509819,"lng":-0.134548,"verdict":"Edwardian tunnels sealed in 1929, under the busiest circus in London."},{"name":"Honeypot Comedy Night","slug":"honeypot-comedy-night","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/honeypot-comedy-night/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-09-16"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"Milton Jones, Ian Stone, Sikisa and Felicity Ward on one bill, for a children\u2019s charity."},{"name":"Ian Stone: Looking for the Wow","slug":"ian-stone-looking-for-the-wow","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/ian-stone-looking-for-the-wow/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-23","to":"2026-11-23"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"An argument that life should not just be the humdrum and then the decline."},{"name":"Jane Colden's Plants","slug":"jane-coldens-plants","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/linnean-society/jane-coldens-plants/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-19","to":"2026-10-19"},"lat":51.5088,"lng":-0.1395,"verdict":"The first woman to describe American plants, working in colonial New York."},{"name":"Jesse Glazzard: The Sound of Dirt and Beauty","slug":"jesse-glazzard-the-sound-of-dirt-and-beauty","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/institute-of-contemporary-arts/jesse-glazzard-the-sound-of-dirt-and-beauty/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-15","to":"2026-09-20"},"lat":51.506158,"lng":-0.130952,"verdict":"A photographer reimagining family, shown for six days during the ICA's book fair."},{"name":"Kamilla Arku: Emahoy, Bonis, Ellington and Bonds","slug":"kamilla-arku-emahoy-bonis-ellington-and-bonds","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/kamilla-arku-emahoy-bonis-ellington-and-bonds/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-09","to":"2026-10-09"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"An hour of piano music by composers the recital circuit mostly skips."},{"name":"Kane Brown: Crowd Work King","slug":"kane-brown-crowd-work-king","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/kane-brown-crowd-work-king/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-04","to":"2026-11-18"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"A show with no script, built out of whoever turns up."},{"name":"Laughter is the Best Medicine","slug":"laughter-is-the-best-medicine","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/laughter-is-the-best-medicine/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-19","to":"2026-10-19"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"International comics on the Store\u2019s stage, with the takings going to medical charities in Gaza and the West Bank."},{"name":"Layla Wang and Yihan Jin: Coleridge-Taylor to The Butterfly Lovers","slug":"layla-wang-and-yihan-jin-coleridge-taylor-to-the-butterfly-lovers","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/layla-wang-and-yihan-jin-coleridge-taylor-to-the-butterfly-lovers/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-14","to":"2026-10-14"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"Four African Dances and a Chinese violin concerto in one lunch hour."},{"name":"London Oyster Championships","slug":"london-oyster-championships","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/london-oyster-championships/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.509726,"lng":-0.137736,"verdict":"England's fastest shuckers, on a Piccadilly terrace, judged by Stanley Tucci."},{"name":"New Year's Eve at the Comedy Store","slug":"new-years-eve-at-the-comedy-store","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/new-years-eve-at-the-comedy-store/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-31","to":"2026-12-31"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"Four comics, a band and a party that runs past midnight."},{"name":"Nights of Al-Andalus: Algerian songs of memory and heritage","slug":"nights-of-al-andalus-algerian-songs-of-memory-and-heritage","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/nights-of-al-andalus-algerian-songs-of-memory-and-heritage/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-10","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"Nouba, the Andalusian classical music that left Spain in 1492 and stayed in Algeria."},{"name":"Open House at the Linnean Society","slug":"open-house-at-the-linnean-society","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/linnean-society/open-house-at-the-linnean-society/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-19","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.5088,"lng":-0.1395,"verdict":"The rooms where Darwin and Wallace were first read out, open with no booking."},{"name":"Out of the Sand: Ancient Egypt Rediscovered","slug":"out-of-the-sand-ancient-egypt-rediscovered","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/colnaghi/out-of-the-sand-ancient-egypt-rediscovered/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-11-17"},"lat":51.507223,"lng":-0.138966,"verdict":"Egyptian antiquities in the oldest commercial gallery in the world, free to walk into."},{"name":"Outsider Animals: Cherishing Shunned Creatures","slug":"outsider-animals-cherishing-shunned-creatures","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/linnean-society/outsider-animals-cherishing-shunned-creatures/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-15","to":"2026-10-15"},"lat":51.5088,"lng":-0.1395,"verdict":"What the rat, the raccoon and the gull know that the chimpanzee does not."},{"name":"Ray Atkins Unseen","slug":"ray-atkins-unseen","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/mall-galleries/ray-atkins-unseen/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-20","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"Paintings never shown, by a painter who worked outdoors on enormous canvases."},{"name":"Richard Tuttle: Small Sculptures of the 1970s","slug":"richard-tuttle-small-sculptures-of-the-1970s","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/modern-art/richard-tuttle-small-sculptures-of-the-1970s/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.507056,"lng":-0.140402,"verdict":"Very small things made of wire, cloth and plywood, by an artist who spent a career refusing scale."},{"name":"Royal Institute of Oil Painters: Annual Exhibition 2026","slug":"royal-institute-of-oil-painters-annual-exhibition-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/mall-galleries/royal-institute-of-oil-painters-annual-exhibition-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-26","to":"2026-12-12"},"lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"The only annual show in Britain given over entirely to oil paint."},{"name":"Royal Society of Marine Artists: Annual Exhibition 2026","slug":"royal-society-of-marine-artists-annual-exhibition-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/mall-galleries/royal-society-of-marine-artists-annual-exhibition-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"Everything the sea has done to British painting, in one room, once a year."},{"name":"Sadra Mahshidfar plays his own preludes and Bortkiewicz","slug":"sadra-mahshidfar-plays-his-own-preludes-and-bortkiewicz","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/sadra-mahshidfar-plays-his-own-preludes-and-bortkiewicz/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-25","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"A pianist playing his own music alongside a Russian romantic almost nobody programmes."},{"name":"Sarah Schlesinger: Sight Line","slug":"sarah-schlesinger-sight-line","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/huxley-parlour/sarah-schlesinger-sight-line/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.509214,"lng":-0.137434,"verdict":"New work at the Swallow Street gallery, off Regent Street."},{"name":"Shani Rhys James: The Afternoon House","slug":"shani-rhys-james-the-afternoon-house","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/connaught-brown/shani-rhys-james-the-afternoon-house/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-10","to":"2026-10-02"},"lat":51.508103,"lng":-0.140771,"verdict":"Forty years of women in rooms, and the rooms keep closing in."},{"name":"Shreeja Chaturvedi","slug":"shreeja-chaturvedi","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/shreeja-chaturvedi/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-05","to":"2026-10-05"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"One of India\u2019s sharpest stand-ups, on her first proper run at Europe."},{"name":"Society of Wildlife Artists: The Natural Eye 2026","slug":"society-of-wildlife-artists-the-natural-eye-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/mall-galleries/society-of-wildlife-artists-the-natural-eye-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"The wildlife artists' annual show, which is mostly birds and unapologetic about it."},{"name":"St Luke's Senior Choir, Argentina","slug":"st-lukes-senior-choir-argentina","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/st-lukes-senior-choir-argentina/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"Sixteen-year-olds from Buenos Aires singing Latin America and Europe in the same hour."},{"name":"Tcha Limberger Quartet","slug":"tcha-limberger-quartet","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/crazy-coqs/tcha-limberger-quartet/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-22","to":"2026-09-22"},"lat":51.510623,"lng":-0.135584,"verdict":"A blind Belgian violinist who plays Hungarian village music, Gypsy jazz and Flemish song."},{"name":"The Black Cat Cabaret: Salon des Artistes","slug":"the-black-cat-cabaret-salon-des-artistes","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/crazy-coqs/the-black-cat-cabaret-salon-des-artistes/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.510623,"lng":-0.135584,"verdict":"Late-night circus, burlesque and variety in an art deco basement off Piccadilly."},{"name":"The Clap: Comedy for Parents In Need","slug":"the-clap-comedy-for-parents-in-need","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/the-clap-comedy-for-parents-in-need/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"Stephen Mangan, Julian Rhind-Tutt and Bobby Davro among a bill raising money for parents."},{"name":"The Sixteen: music for All Saints and All Souls","slug":"the-sixteen-music-for-all-saints-and-all-souls","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/the-sixteen-music-for-all-saints-and-all-souls/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-27","to":"2026-10-27"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"Harry Christophers's choir on Portuguese requiem polyphony and English Renaissance sacred music."},{"name":"The Standard of Living","slug":"the-standard-of-living","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/theatre-royal-haymarket/the-standard-of-living/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-21","to":"2026-12-12"},"lat":51.508633,"lng":-0.131278,"verdict":"A limited season behind Nash's 1821 portico."},{"name":"Tom Ward: Post-millennium Tension","slug":"tom-ward-post-millennium-tension","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/tom-ward-post-millennium-tension/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-14","to":"2026-10-14"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"A man who would rather live in 1993 giving the present one last go, for his son\u2019s sake."},{"name":"Underdog: The Other Other Bronte","slug":"underdog-the-other-other-bronte","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/criterion-theatre/underdog-the-other-other-bronte/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.509617,"lng":-0.133988,"verdict":"Anne Bronte, who wrote two novels and got forgotten, tells you what she thinks of that."},{"name":"Victor Patrascan in London","slug":"victor-patrascan-in-london","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/victor-patrascan-in-london/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-18","to":"2026-10-21"},"lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"A Romanian comic banned by one government for being, officially, too funny."},{"name":"Vivaldi by candlelight at St James's Piccadilly","slug":"vivaldi-candlelight-st-jamess-september","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/vivaldi-candlelight-st-jamess-september/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-26","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"The Four Seasons in a Wren church lit by candles."},{"name":"Vivaldi by candlelight at St James's Piccadilly: October","slug":"vivaldi-candlelight-st-jamess-october","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/vivaldi-candlelight-st-jamess-october/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-24","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"The candlelit Four Seasons again, this time with Jenny Sacha."},{"name":"Wildlife Artist of the Year 2026","slug":"wildlife-artist-of-the-year-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/mall-galleries/wildlife-artist-of-the-year-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"The David Shepherd Foundation's international wildlife art competition, hung in full."},{"name":"party of one: performance by Autumn Knight","slug":"party-of-one-performance-by-autumn-knight","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/institute-of-contemporary-arts/party-of-one-performance-by-autumn-knight/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.506158,"lng":-0.130952,"verdict":"A performance lecture on the pleasures of complaining, by the artist."},{"name":"Apsley House","slug":"apsley-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/apsley-house/","lat":51.503488,"lng":-0.151712,"verdict":"Number One London: the Duke of Wellington's house at Hyde Park Corner, still full of what Europe gave him, with Napoleon naked in the stairwell.","thumb":"/img/apsley-house-480.jpg?v=8f66f6bc","img":"/img/apsley-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":738},{"name":"Canada House Gallery","slug":"canada-house-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/canada-house-gallery/","deep":true,"lat":51.5079,"lng":-0.1294,"verdict":"Canadian historical and contemporary art and artefacts."},{"name":"Clarence House","slug":"clarence-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/clarence-house/","deep":true,"lat":51.503983,"lng":-0.138436,"verdict":"London residence of His Majesty King Charles III and Queen Camilla (normally open only during August).","thumb":"/img/clarence-house-480.jpg?v=7886d9f2","img":"/img/clarence-house.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Institute of Contemporary Arts","slug":"institute-of-contemporary-arts","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/institute-of-contemporary-arts/","lat":51.506158,"lng":-0.130952,"verdict":"The avant-garde's clubhouse since 1946: galleries, two cinemas and a bar behind Nash's grandest terrace on the Mall, deliberately uncomfortable.","thumb":"/img/institute-of-contemporary-arts.jpg?v=483f68fb","img":"/img/institute-of-contemporary-arts.jpg","w":320,"h":427},{"name":"Kennel Club Dog Art Gallery","slug":"kennel-club-dog-art-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/kennel-club-dog-art-gallery/","deep":true,"lat":51.5068,"lng":-0.1448,"verdict":"Exhibits and collection of dog paintings, open by appointment."},{"name":"Mall Galleries","slug":"mall-galleries","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/mall-galleries/","deep":true,"lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"Gallery exhibits of the Federation of British Artists.","thumb":"/img/mall-galleries-480.jpg?v=46b9bf89","img":"/img/mall-galleries.jpg","w":1024,"h":762},{"name":"Spencer House","slug":"spencer-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/spencer-house/","lat":51.505153,"lng":-0.140252,"verdict":"The grandest private house left in London, built for the Spencers in the 1750s and looking over Green Park, open on Sundays.","thumb":"/img/spencer-house-480.jpg?v=910474f1","img":"/img/spencer-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":750},{"name":"Wellington Arch","slug":"wellington-arch","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/wellington-arch/","lat":51.502536,"lng":-0.150818,"verdict":"Decimus Burton's arch at Hyde Park Corner, with the largest bronze sculpture in Europe on top and balconies inside to climb to.","thumb":"/img/wellington-arch-480.jpg?v=3fc925e4","img":"/img/wellington-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":669},{"name":"Canada Gallery","slug":"canada-house-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/canada-house-gallery/","lat":51.5079,"lng":-0.1294,"verdict":"Canada's art collection on show in its High Commission on Trafalgar Square, free and largely unvisited."},{"name":"Charles I at Charing Cross","slug":"charles-i-at-charing-cross","cat":"art","url":"/art/charles-i-at-charing-cross/","lat":51.507334,"lng":-0.127655,"verdict":"The oldest bronze equestrian statue in England, and the point from which every distance to London is measured.","thumb":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross-480.jpg?v=db81f3c1","img":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Christie's","slug":"christies","cat":"art","url":"/art/christies/","lat":51.506273,"lng":-0.137878,"verdict":"King Street, St James's, since 1823: the salerooms whose viewings put Old Masters and Impressionists on public show for free."},{"name":"Colnaghi","slug":"colnaghi","cat":"art","url":"/art/colnaghi/","deep":true,"lat":51.507223,"lng":-0.138966,"verdict":"The oldest commercial gallery in the world, dealing in Old Masters since 1760, now on Bury Street."},{"name":"Connaught Brown","slug":"connaught-brown","cat":"art","url":"/art/connaught-brown/","deep":true,"lat":51.508103,"lng":-0.140771,"verdict":"Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modern British pictures on Albemarle Street."},{"name":"Cristea Roberts Gallery","slug":"cristea-roberts-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/cristea-roberts-gallery/","deep":true,"lat":51.505772,"lng":-0.136318,"verdict":"The prints and editions gallery on Pall Mall: Hodgkin, Hockney, Paula Rego, Julian Opie, Grayson Perry."},{"name":"Dickinson","slug":"dickinson","cat":"art","url":"/art/dickinson/","deep":true,"lat":51.507903,"lng":-0.138225,"verdict":"Simon Dickinson's Jermyn Street rooms, where museum-quality Old Masters and Impressionists pass through on their way between collections."},{"name":"Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert","slug":"hazlitt-holland-hibbert","cat":"art","url":"/art/hazlitt-holland-hibbert/","deep":true,"lat":51.506931,"lng":-0.138526,"verdict":"Bury Street dealers in British art from the Camden Town Group to the 1960s: Sickert, Nicholson, Hitchens, Hockney."},{"name":"Huxley-Parlour","slug":"huxley-parlour","cat":"art","url":"/art/huxley-parlour/","deep":true,"lat":51.509214,"lng":-0.137434,"verdict":"Photography and painting in two Mayfair galleries, with a line in the twentieth-century masters."},{"name":"Institute of Contemporary Arts","slug":"institute-of-contemporary-arts","cat":"art","url":"/art/institute-of-contemporary-arts/","lat":51.506158,"lng":-0.130952,"verdict":"The avant-garde's clubhouse since 1946: galleries, two cinemas and a bar behind Nash's grandest terrace on the Mall, deliberately uncomfortable.","thumb":"/img/institute-of-contemporary-arts.jpg?v=483f68fb","img":"/img/institute-of-contemporary-arts.jpg","w":320,"h":427},{"name":"Mall Galleries","slug":"mall-galleries","cat":"art","url":"/art/mall-galleries/","lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"The exhibition rooms of the Federation of British Artists on the Mall, where the portrait, pastel and marine societies show each year.","thumb":"/img/mall-galleries-480.jpg?v=46b9bf89","img":"/img/mall-galleries.jpg","w":1024,"h":762},{"name":"Modern Art","slug":"modern-art","cat":"art","url":"/art/modern-art/","deep":true,"lat":51.507056,"lng":-0.140402,"verdict":"Stuart Shave's gallery, now on Bennet Street in St James's, with a list from Barry McGee to Yngve Holen."},{"name":"Philip Mould & Company","slug":"philip-mould-company","cat":"art","url":"/art/philip-mould-company/","deep":true,"lat":51.506915,"lng":-0.133748,"verdict":"Five centuries of British portraits on Pall Mall, from Tudor panels to Cedric Morris, by the dealer from Fake or Fortune."},{"name":"Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain","slug":"shaftesbury-memorial-fountain","cat":"art","url":"/art/shaftesbury-memorial-fountain/","lat":51.509896,"lng":-0.134486,"verdict":"Eros, who is not Eros, on the fountain at Piccadilly Circus.","thumb":"/img/shaftesbury-memorial-fountain-480.jpg?v=ed5db40b","img":"/img/shaftesbury-memorial-fountain.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Stern Pissarro Gallery","slug":"stern-pissarro-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/stern-pissarro-gallery/","deep":true,"lat":51.506076,"lng":-0.139119,"verdict":"Impressionists and the Pissarro family on St James's Street, run by the painter's great-granddaughter."},{"name":"The Weiss Gallery","slug":"the-weiss-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/the-weiss-gallery/","deep":true,"lat":51.507903,"lng":-0.138225,"verdict":"Tudor and Stuart portraits, the best in the trade, on Jermyn Street."},{"name":"Trafalgar Square & Nelson's Column","slug":"nelsons-column","cat":"art","url":"/art/nelsons-column/","lat":51.507759,"lng":-0.12793,"verdict":"The symbolic heart of London: Barry's square with Nelson fifty-two metres above it, and Landseer's lions to climb on.","thumb":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2-480.jpg?v=b27c88fb","img":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Victoria Memorial","slug":"victoria-memorial","cat":"art","url":"/art/victoria-memorial/","lat":51.50184,"lng":-0.140587,"verdict":"Twenty-three hundred tons of white marble in front of the Palace, with a gilded Victory on top.","thumb":"/img/victoria-memorial-480.jpg?v=6ff38e58","img":"/img/victoria-memorial.jpg","w":685,"h":1024},{"name":"Wellington Arch","slug":"wellington-arch","cat":"art","url":"/art/wellington-arch/","lat":51.502536,"lng":-0.150818,"verdict":"Decimus Burton's arch at Hyde Park Corner, with the largest bronze sculpture in Europe on top and balconies inside to climb to.","thumb":"/img/wellington-arch-480.jpg?v=3fc925e4","img":"/img/wellington-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":669},{"name":"White Cube Mason's Yard","slug":"white-cube-masons-yard","cat":"art","url":"/art/white-cube-masons-yard/","deep":true,"lat":51.507573,"lng":-0.137301,"verdict":"The St James's White Cube, a freestanding box of galleries in a courtyard off Duke Street."},{"name":"Crazy Coqs","slug":"crazy-coqs","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/crazy-coqs/","lat":51.510623,"lng":-0.135584,"verdict":"An intact art deco cabaret room in the basement of a Piccadilly hotel, doing songbook, jazz singers and cabaret.","thumb":"/img/crazy-coqs-480.jpg?v=ee96c4ba","img":"/img/crazy-coqs.jpg","w":1024,"h":683},{"name":"Criterion Theatre","slug":"criterion-theatre","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/criterion-theatre/","lat":51.509617,"lng":-0.133988,"verdict":"A Victorian theatre thirty feet under Piccadilly Circus, reached by going down."},{"name":"St James's Piccadilly","slug":"st-jamess-piccadilly","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/st-jamess-piccadilly/","lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"Wren's own favourite of his churches, with free lunchtime recitals three days a week.","thumb":"/img/own-st-jamess-piccadilly-480.jpg?v=723f7264","img":"/img/own-st-jamess-piccadilly.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"The Comedy Store","slug":"the-comedy-store","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/the-comedy-store/","lat":51.510121,"lng":-0.132257,"verdict":"The club that made British stand-up what it is, running since 1979."},{"name":"Theatre Royal Haymarket","slug":"theatre-royal-haymarket","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/theatre-royal-haymarket/","lat":51.508633,"lng":-0.131278,"verdict":"Nash's portico of 1821, put where it is to close the view down Charles Street."},{"name":"Berry Bros. & Rudd","slug":"berry-bros-rudd","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/berry-bros-rudd/","lat":51.505554,"lng":-0.138067,"verdict":"Wine merchants on the same site since 1698, in a shop whose floor slopes and whose scales weighed Byron.","thumb":"/img/berry-bros-rudd-480.jpg?v=2d82b24e","img":"/img/berry-bros-rudd.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Floris London","slug":"floris-london","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/floris-london/","lat":51.508142,"lng":-0.137214,"verdict":"A perfumer on the same Jermyn Street site since 1730, still run by the founder's family nine generations on.","thumb":"/img/floris-london-480.jpg?v=f30aac58","img":"/img/floris-london.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Fortnum & Mason","slug":"fortnum-mason","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/fortnum-mason/","lat":51.508236,"lng":-0.13817,"verdict":"The Piccadilly grocer since 1707, and still the most reliable place in London to buy something British to take home.","thumb":"/img/fortnum-mason-480.jpg?v=9e0e4d11","img":"/img/fortnum-mason.jpg","w":989,"h":1024},{"name":"Hatchards","slug":"hatchards","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/hatchards/","lat":51.508475,"lng":-0.138049,"verdict":"London's oldest bookshop, opened in 1797 and still selling books over five floors of Piccadilly.","thumb":"/img/hatchards-480.jpg?v=7c738126","img":"/img/hatchards.jpg","w":688,"h":1024},{"name":"Jermyn Street","slug":"jermyn-street","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/jermyn-street/","lat":51.50848,"lng":-0.136445,"verdict":"Shirtmakers, shoemakers, a cheesemonger and a perfumer, most of them here for a century or more.","thumb":"/img/jermyn-street-480.jpg?v=cf6b7a88","img":"/img/jermyn-street.jpg","w":836,"h":1024},{"name":"Lock & Co. Hatters","slug":"lock-co-hatters","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/lock-co-hatters/","lat":51.505727,"lng":-0.138203,"verdict":"The oldest hat shop in the world, trading from the same premises since 1676, where the bowler was invented.","thumb":"/img/lock-co-hatters-480.jpg?v=d13911b7","img":"/img/lock-co-hatters.jpg","w":1024,"h":740},{"name":"Paxton & Whitfield","slug":"paxton-whitfield","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/paxton-whitfield/","lat":51.508272,"lng":-0.136902,"verdict":"Cheesemonger to Jermyn Street since 1797, with a counter of British farmhouse cheese cut to order.","thumb":"/img/paxton-whitfield-480.jpg?v=f69078a0","img":"/img/paxton-whitfield.jpg","w":1024,"h":604},{"name":"Turnbull & Asser","slug":"turnbull-asser","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/turnbull-asser/","lat":51.507482,"lng":-0.139247,"verdict":"The Jermyn Street shirtmaker, cutting bespoke on the premises since 1885 and holding a royal warrant for most of a century.","thumb":"/img/turnbull-asser-480.jpg?v=4acee55e","img":"/img/turnbull-asser.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Waterstones Piccadilly","slug":"waterstones-piccadilly","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/waterstones-piccadilly/","lat":51.50899,"lng":-0.135875,"verdict":"The largest bookshop in Europe, eight miles of shelves in the modernist Simpson's building on Piccadilly.","thumb":"/img/waterstones-piccadilly-480.jpg?v=d07eaeed","img":"/img/waterstones-piccadilly.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Bija","slug":"bija","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/bija/","lat":51.508902,"lng":-0.133118,"verdict":"Indonesian single origins, and the best new coffee shop of 2025."},{"name":"Guillam St James's","slug":"guillam-st-jamess","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/guillam-st-jamess/","lat":51.506865,"lng":-0.138743,"verdict":"Coffee in the Economist Plaza."},{"name":"Redemption Roasters","slug":"redemption-roasters-st-james-s","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/redemption-roasters-st-james-s/","lat":51.508468,"lng":-0.136869,"verdict":"Jermyn Street, which is a pointed address for this business."},{"name":"Le Caf\u00e9 Robuchon","slug":"le-cafe-robuchon","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/le-cafe-robuchon/","lat":51.50648,"lng":-0.14376,"verdict":"Robuchon on Piccadilly, and a pain au chocolat that earns the address."},{"name":"Guillam St James's","slug":"guillam-st-jamess","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/guillam-st-jamess/","lat":51.506865,"lng":-0.138743,"verdict":"Coffee in the Economist Plaza."},{"name":"The Wolseley","slug":"the-wolseley","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/the-wolseley/","lat":51.507395,"lng":-0.140908,"verdict":"The grand caf\u00e9 breakfast, in a former car showroom.","thumb":"/img/the-wolseley-480.jpg?v=88b136c7","img":"/img/the-wolseley.jpg","w":765,"h":1024},{"name":"Fortnum & Mason Food Halls","slug":"fortnum-mason-food-halls","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/fortnum-mason-food-halls/","lat":51.508236,"lng":-0.13817,"verdict":"Three centuries of provisions, and the Scotch egg it claims to have invented.","thumb":"/img/fortnum-mason-food-halls-480.jpg?v=9e0e4d11","img":"/img/fortnum-mason-food-halls.jpg","w":989,"h":1024},{"name":"Bar Am\u00e9ricain","slug":"bar-americain","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/bar-americain/","lat":51.510628,"lng":-0.1356,"verdict":"An Art Deco room off Piccadilly, at sensible prices."},{"name":"Dukes Bar","slug":"dukes-bar","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/dukes-bar/","lat":51.50546,"lng":-0.139424,"verdict":"The martini trolley that reputedly gave Ian Fleming his line."},{"name":"Rivoli Bar","slug":"rivoli-bar","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/rivoli-bar/","lat":51.507191,"lng":-0.141425,"verdict":"A jewel box in camphor wood and gold leaf, with a dress code."},{"name":"The American Bar at The Stafford","slug":"the-american-bar-at-the-stafford","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/the-american-bar-at-the-stafford/","lat":51.505873,"lng":-0.13992,"verdict":"A hotel bar hung with signed photographs and ceiling memorabilia."},{"name":"Berry Bros. & Rudd","slug":"berry-bros-rudd","cat":"wine","url":"/wine/berry-bros-rudd/","lat":51.505282,"lng":-0.138019,"verdict":"Britain's oldest wine merchant, trading from the same shop since 1698.","thumb":"/img/berry-bros-rudd-480.jpg?v=2d82b24e","img":"/img/berry-bros-rudd.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Admiralty Arch","slug":"admiralty-arch","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/admiralty-arch/","lat":51.506738,"lng":-0.128576,"verdict":"The gateway at the Trafalgar Square end of the processional route, built by Edward VII in memory of his mother.","thumb":"/img/admiralty-arch-480.jpg?v=5c965b9a","img":"/img/admiralty-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":501},{"name":"Clarence House","slug":"clarence-house","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/clarence-house/","lat":51.503983,"lng":-0.138436,"verdict":"The Queen Mother's house for half a century and Charles's for twenty years, where Elizabeth and Philip lived as a young couple.","thumb":"/img/clarence-house-480.jpg?v=7886d9f2","img":"/img/clarence-house.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"George VI and Queen Elizabeth memorial","slug":"george-vi-and-queen-elizabeth-memorial","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/george-vi-and-queen-elizabeth-memorial/","lat":51.505217,"lng":-0.133807,"verdict":"The Queen's parents together above the Mall: the King of 1955 and the Queen Mother added beside him in 2009, with reliefs of the war years.","thumb":"/img/george-vi-and-queen-elizabeth-memorial-480.jpg?v=2063b0b1","img":"/img/george-vi-and-queen-elizabeth-memorial.jpg","w":1024,"h":683},{"name":"Lancaster House","slug":"lancaster-house","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/lancaster-house/","lat":51.503822,"lng":-0.139112,"verdict":"The Buckingham Palace of The Crown: the state rooms, the staircase and the Queen's office were filmed here, round the corner from the real thing.","thumb":"/img/lancaster-house-480.jpg?v=6814ffc3","img":"/img/lancaster-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":680},{"name":"Spencer House","slug":"spencer-house","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/spencer-house/","lat":51.505153,"lng":-0.140252,"verdict":"The Spencers' London palace of the 1750s, the finest private house in the city and the one Diana's family gave up in 1926.","thumb":"/img/spencer-house-480.jpg?v=910474f1","img":"/img/spencer-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":750},{"name":"St James's Palace & the Chapel Royal","slug":"st-jamess-palace-the-chapel-royal","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/st-jamess-palace-the-chapel-royal/","lat":51.504548,"lng":-0.137973,"verdict":"The senior palace, where new monarchs are proclaimed from the Friary Court balcony and where Diana lay in the Chapel Royal before her funeral.","thumb":"/img/st-jamess-palace-the-chapel-royal-480.jpg?v=0681f1fc","img":"/img/st-jamess-palace-the-chapel-royal.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Victoria Memorial","slug":"victoria-memorial","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/victoria-memorial/","lat":51.50184,"lng":-0.140587,"verdict":"The gilded Victory over the roundabout in front of the palace, and the steps everybody stands on for the balcony.","thumb":"/img/victoria-memorial-480.jpg?v=6ff38e58","img":"/img/victoria-memorial.jpg","w":685,"h":1024},{"name":"Wellington Arch","slug":"wellington-arch","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/wellington-arch/","lat":51.502536,"lng":-0.150818,"verdict":"The arch at Hyde Park Corner where the Queen's coffin left the gun carriage for the hearse in September 2022, and the walk to Windsor began.","thumb":"/img/wellington-arch-480.jpg?v=3fc925e4","img":"/img/wellington-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":669},{"name":"Charles I at Charing Cross","slug":"charles-i-at-charing-cross","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/charles-i-at-charing-cross/","lat":51.507334,"lng":-0.127655,"verdict":"The king Parliament executed, put back on his horse and pointed at the place where it happened.","thumb":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross-480.jpg?v=db81f3c1","img":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Marlborough House","slug":"marlborough-house","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/marlborough-house/","lat":51.504974,"lng":-0.13603,"verdict":"A duchess's mansion handed to the Commonwealth as the empire was ending.","thumb":"/img/marlborough-house-480.jpg?v=8487b453","img":"/img/marlborough-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":761},{"name":"St James's Palace & the Chapel Royal","slug":"st-jamess-palace-the-chapel-royal","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/st-jamess-palace-the-chapel-royal/","lat":51.504548,"lng":-0.137973,"verdict":"The Tudor palace that lost the monarch and kept the constitution.","thumb":"/img/st-jamess-palace-the-chapel-royal-480.jpg?v=0681f1fc","img":"/img/st-jamess-palace-the-chapel-royal.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Trafalgar Square & Nelson's Column","slug":"nelsons-column","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/nelsons-column/","lat":51.507759,"lng":-0.12793,"verdict":"Built to celebrate a naval victory; used ever since by crowds arguing with the government behind it.","thumb":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2-480.jpg?v=b27c88fb","img":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"St James's Piccadilly","slug":"st-jamess-piccadilly","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/st-jamess-piccadilly/","lat":51.50866,"lng":-0.13664,"verdict":"The only church Wren built on a new site of his own choosing, and the one he thought worked best.","thumb":"/img/own-st-jamess-piccadilly-480.jpg?v=723f7264","img":"/img/own-st-jamess-piccadilly.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Admiralty Arch","slug":"admiralty-arch","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/admiralty-arch/","lat":51.506738,"lng":-0.128576,"verdict":"The gate from Trafalgar Square to the Mall, built as a memorial to Queen Victoria, with a nose on the inside.","thumb":"/img/admiralty-arch-480.jpg?v=5c965b9a","img":"/img/admiralty-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":501},{"name":"Charles I at Charing Cross","slug":"charles-i-at-charing-cross","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/charles-i-at-charing-cross/","lat":51.507334,"lng":-0.127655,"verdict":"The oldest bronze equestrian statue in England, and the point from which every distance to London is measured.","thumb":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross-480.jpg?v=db81f3c1","img":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Duke of York Column","slug":"duke-of-york-column","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/duke-of-york-column/","lat":51.50631,"lng":-0.131735,"verdict":"The Grand Old Duke of York, on a column paid for by docking every soldier a day's wages.","thumb":"/img/duke-of-york-column.jpg?v=a1476dc5","img":"/img/duke-of-york-column.jpg","w":394,"h":1024},{"name":"Royal Artillery Memorial","slug":"royal-artillery-memorial","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/royal-artillery-memorial/","lat":51.502566,"lng":-0.151953,"verdict":"A stone howitzer and four bronze gunners, one of them dead under his greatcoat: the most honest war memorial in London.","thumb":"/img/royal-artillery-memorial-480.jpg?v=660ad31d","img":"/img/royal-artillery-memorial.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain","slug":"shaftesbury-memorial-fountain","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/shaftesbury-memorial-fountain/","lat":51.509896,"lng":-0.134486,"verdict":"Eros, who is not Eros, on the fountain at Piccadilly Circus.","thumb":"/img/shaftesbury-memorial-fountain-480.jpg?v=ed5db40b","img":"/img/shaftesbury-memorial-fountain.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Trafalgar Square & Nelson's Column","slug":"nelsons-column","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/nelsons-column/","lat":51.507759,"lng":-0.12793,"verdict":"The symbolic heart of London: Barry's square with Nelson fifty-two metres above it, and Landseer's lions to climb on.","thumb":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2-480.jpg?v=b27c88fb","img":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Victoria Memorial","slug":"victoria-memorial","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/victoria-memorial/","lat":51.50184,"lng":-0.140587,"verdict":"Twenty-three hundred tons of white marble in front of the Palace, with a gilded Victory on top.","thumb":"/img/victoria-memorial-480.jpg?v=6ff38e58","img":"/img/victoria-memorial.jpg","w":685,"h":1024},{"name":"Wellington Arch","slug":"wellington-arch","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/wellington-arch/","lat":51.502536,"lng":-0.150818,"verdict":"Decimus Burton's arch at Hyde Park Corner, with the largest bronze sculpture in Europe on top and balconies inside to climb to.","thumb":"/img/wellington-arch-480.jpg?v=3fc925e4","img":"/img/wellington-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":669},{"name":"Bentley & Skinner","slug":"bentley-skinner","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/bentley-skinner/","lat":51.508283,"lng":-0.139825,"verdict":"Antique and period jewellery at the level museums buy at, in a shop window people stop dead in front of.","thumb":"/img/bentley-skinner-480.jpg?v=3729bb98","img":"/img/bentley-skinner.jpg","w":1024,"h":583},{"name":"Berry Bros. & Rudd","slug":"berry-bros-rudd","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/berry-bros-rudd/","lat":51.505554,"lng":-0.138067,"verdict":"Wine merchants on the same site since 1698, in a shop whose floor slopes and whose scales weighed Byron.","thumb":"/img/berry-bros-rudd-480.jpg?v=2d82b24e","img":"/img/berry-bros-rudd.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Crockett & Jones","slug":"crockett-jones","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/crockett-jones/","lat":51.508231,"lng":-0.136996,"verdict":"The most-bought serious English shoe, made in Northampton since 1879 and still family-owned.","thumb":"/img/crockett-jones-480.jpg?v=a0b30e2c","img":"/img/crockett-jones.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"D. R. Harris","slug":"d-r-harris","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/d-r-harris/","lat":51.507021,"lng":-0.139511,"verdict":"A chemist trading on St James's Street since 1790, and the source of the pick-me-up that Victorian London swore by.","thumb":"/img/d-r-harris-480.jpg?v=c463f8d6","img":"/img/d-r-harris.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Edward Green","slug":"edward-green","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/edward-green/","lat":51.507641,"lng":-0.138744,"verdict":"Northampton welted shoes at the top of the ready-to-wear range, with a finish most bespoke work does not match.","thumb":"/img/edward-green-480.jpg?v=38c39488","img":"/img/edward-green.jpg","w":1024,"h":641},{"name":"Floris London","slug":"floris-london","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/floris-london/","lat":51.508142,"lng":-0.137214,"verdict":"A perfumer on the same Jermyn Street site since 1730, still run by the founder's family nine generations on.","thumb":"/img/floris-london-480.jpg?v=f30aac58","img":"/img/floris-london.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Fortnum & Mason","slug":"fortnum-mason","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/fortnum-mason/","lat":51.508236,"lng":-0.13817,"verdict":"The Piccadilly grocer since 1707, and still the most reliable place in London to buy something British to take home.","thumb":"/img/fortnum-mason-480.jpg?v=9e0e4d11","img":"/img/fortnum-mason.jpg","w":989,"h":1024},{"name":"Geo. F. Trumper","slug":"geo-f-trumper","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/geo-f-trumper/","lat":51.508354,"lng":-0.136467,"verdict":"A Victorian gentleman's barber with the mahogany cubicles still in place, and its own colognes made to nineteenth-century formulas.","thumb":"/img/geo-f-trumper-480.jpg?v=7bdbbed6","img":"/img/geo-f-trumper.jpg","w":1024,"h":739},{"name":"Hatchards","slug":"hatchards","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/hatchards/","lat":51.508475,"lng":-0.138049,"verdict":"London's oldest bookshop, opened in 1797 and still selling books over five floors of Piccadilly.","thumb":"/img/hatchards-480.jpg?v=7c738126","img":"/img/hatchards.jpg","w":688,"h":1024},{"name":"James J. Fox","slug":"james-j-fox","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/james-j-fox/","lat":51.506366,"lng":-0.138824,"verdict":"The cigar merchant Churchill bought from, with his chair and his account ledger still in the basement museum.","thumb":"/img/james-j-fox-480.jpg?v=bc00cfe7","img":"/img/james-j-fox.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Jermyn Street","slug":"jermyn-street","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/jermyn-street/","lat":51.507892,"lng":-0.138221,"verdict":"Two hundred yards holding more shirtmakers, perfumers, cheesemongers and shoemakers than the rest of Britain put together.","thumb":"/img/jermyn-street-480.jpg?v=cf6b7a88","img":"/img/jermyn-street.jpg","w":836,"h":1024},{"name":"John Lobb","slug":"john-lobb","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/john-lobb/","lat":51.508136,"lng":-0.137276,"verdict":"Bespoke shoemaking at its most complete: a wooden last carved for your foot and kept for life.","thumb":"/img/john-lobb-480.jpg?v=485bff6e","img":"/img/john-lobb.jpg","w":738,"h":1024},{"name":"Lock & Co. Hatters","slug":"lock-co-hatters","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/lock-co-hatters/","lat":51.505727,"lng":-0.138203,"verdict":"The oldest hat shop in the world, trading from the same premises since 1676, where the bowler was invented.","thumb":"/img/lock-co-hatters-480.jpg?v=d13911b7","img":"/img/lock-co-hatters.jpg","w":1024,"h":740},{"name":"Paxton & Whitfield","slug":"paxton-whitfield","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/paxton-whitfield/","lat":51.508272,"lng":-0.136902,"verdict":"Cheesemonger to Jermyn Street since 1797, with a counter of British farmhouse cheese cut to order.","thumb":"/img/paxton-whitfield-480.jpg?v=f69078a0","img":"/img/paxton-whitfield.jpg","w":1024,"h":604},{"name":"Penhaligon's","slug":"penhaligons","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/penhaligons/","lat":51.508923,"lng":-0.140165,"verdict":"The Victorian perfumer that started in a barber's shop opposite a Turkish bath and built its scents around it.","thumb":"/img/penhaligons-480.jpg?v=d488ba92","img":"/img/penhaligons.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Peter Harrington","slug":"peter-harrington","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/peter-harrington/","lat":51.508016,"lng":-0.141916,"verdict":"London's leading rare book dealer, where first editions are laid out to be handled rather than locked away.","thumb":"/img/peter-harrington-480.jpg?v=e73740a0","img":"/img/peter-harrington.jpg","w":1024,"h":759},{"name":"Prestat","slug":"prestat","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/prestat/","lat":51.508349,"lng":-0.137591,"verdict":"The chocolate shop that invented the chocolate truffle in Britain, in a pink-and-gold arcade shop."},{"name":"Swaine","slug":"swaine","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/swaine/","lat":51.508064,"lng":-0.139045,"verdict":"Whips, umbrellas and bridle-leather cases from a firm that has held a royal warrant continuously since 1798."},{"name":"Truefitt & Hill","slug":"truefitt-hill","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/truefitt-hill/","lat":51.505759,"lng":-0.138759,"verdict":"Founded in 1805 and recognised as the oldest barbershop in the world, still shaving with a straight razor.","thumb":"/img/truefitt-hill-480.jpg?v=7ff3cfe5","img":"/img/truefitt-hill.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Turnbull & Asser","slug":"turnbull-asser","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/turnbull-asser/","lat":51.507482,"lng":-0.139247,"verdict":"The Jermyn Street shirtmaker, cutting bespoke on the premises since 1885 and holding a royal warrant for most of a century.","thumb":"/img/turnbull-asser-480.jpg?v=4acee55e","img":"/img/turnbull-asser.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Ada Lovelace's house, 12 St James's Square","slug":"ada-lovelaces-house-12-st-jamess-square","cat":"science","url":"/science/ada-lovelaces-house-12-st-jamess-square/","lat":51.507653,"lng":-0.136443,"verdict":"Where Lovelace wrote the notes of 1843 that described a computer program before there was a computer to run it.","thumb":"/img/ada-lovelaces-house-12-st-jamess-square-480.jpg?v=f4f08675","img":"/img/ada-lovelaces-house-12-st-jamess-square.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Isaac Newton's house, 87 Jermyn Street","slug":"isaac-newtons-house-87-jermyn-street","cat":"science","url":"/science/isaac-newtons-house-87-jermyn-street/","lat":51.50808,"lng":-0.13737,"verdict":"Where Newton lived for thirteen years as Master of the Mint and President of the Royal Society, marked by a plaque above a shirt shop.","thumb":"/img/isaac-newtons-house-87-jermyn-street-480.jpg?v=789e7110","img":"/img/isaac-newtons-house-87-jermyn-street.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Linnean Society","slug":"linnean-society","cat":"science","url":"/science/linnean-society/","lat":51.5088,"lng":-0.1395,"verdict":"The room where evolution was announced: Darwin and Wallace's papers were read here on 1 July 1858, and Linnaeus's own collections are in the vault."},{"name":"Royal Society","slug":"royal-society","cat":"science","url":"/science/royal-society/","lat":51.5063,"lng":-0.1315,"verdict":"The oldest scientific academy in the world, in a Nash terrace on the Mall, open to all one weekend in September and to readers by appointment."},{"name":"Admiralty Citadel","slug":"admiralty-citadel","cat":"secrets","url":"/secrets/admiralty-citadel/","lat":51.505725,"lng":-0.129465,"verdict":"The ivy-covered concrete blockhouse on Horse Guards Parade, built in 1940 as the Navy's bomb-proof nerve centre and still in use.","thumb":"/img/admiralty-citadel-480.jpg?v=feea8999","img":"/img/admiralty-citadel.jpg","w":1024,"h":622},{"name":"Hatchards","slug":"hatchards","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/hatchards/","lat":51.508475,"lng":-0.138049,"verdict":"London's oldest bookshop, trading on Piccadilly since 1797, with three royal warrants over the door.","thumb":"/img/hatchards-480.jpg?v=7c738126","img":"/img/hatchards.jpg","w":688,"h":1024},{"name":"The London Library","slug":"the-london-library","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/the-london-library/","lat":51.507322,"lng":-0.136938,"verdict":"Carlyle's lending library of 1841, a million books on open shelves that members may take home.","thumb":"/img/the-london-library-480.jpg?v=a6e366e5","img":"/img/the-london-library.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Waterstones Piccadilly","slug":"waterstones-piccadilly","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/waterstones-piccadilly/","lat":51.50899,"lng":-0.135875,"verdict":"The largest bookshop in Europe, eight miles of shelves in the modernist Simpson's building on Piccadilly.","thumb":"/img/waterstones-piccadilly-480.jpg?v=d07eaeed","img":"/img/waterstones-piccadilly.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Charles de Gaulle","slug":"charles-de-gaulle","cat":"world","url":"/world/charles-de-gaulle/","lat":51.505627,"lng":-0.133743,"verdict":"The house from which Free France was governed, when France itself had surrendered.","thumb":"/img/charles-de-gaulle-480.jpg?v=a48b63bd","img":"/img/charles-de-gaulle.jpg","w":640,"h":480},{"name":"Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Chopin","slug":"frederic-chopin","cat":"world","url":"/world/frederic-chopin/","lat":51.505886,"lng":-0.139417,"verdict":"The house Chopin left for his last public performance, a benefit for Polish refugees at Guildhall.","thumb":"/img/frederic-chopin-480.jpg?v=32f88bb9","img":"/img/frederic-chopin.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Giuseppe Garibaldi","slug":"giuseppe-garibaldi","cat":"world","url":"/world/giuseppe-garibaldi/","lat":51.503822,"lng":-0.139112,"verdict":"The palace where the hero of Italian unification stayed on the visit that brought half a million into the streets.","thumb":"/img/giuseppe-garibaldi-480.jpg?v=529daf54","img":"/img/giuseppe-garibaldi.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Ho Chi Minh","slug":"ho-chi-minh","cat":"world","url":"/world/ho-chi-minh/","lat":51.507842,"lng":-0.131716,"verdict":"The site of the hotel kitchen where the future president of Vietnam trained under Escoffier.","thumb":"/img/ho-chi-minh-480.jpg?v=a00afb24","img":"/img/ho-chi-minh.jpg","w":480,"h":640},{"name":"Napoleon III","slug":"napoleon-iii","cat":"world","url":"/world/napoleon-iii/","lat":51.506807,"lng":-0.1366,"verdict":"The oldest plaque in London, on the house where a future emperor waited for his moment.","thumb":"/img/napoleon-iii-480.jpg?v=21149efb","img":"/img/napoleon-iii.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Ottobah Cugoano","slug":"ottobah-cugoano","cat":"world","url":"/world/ottobah-cugoano/","lat":51.505717,"lng":-0.135704,"verdict":"The painters' house on Pall Mall where a former slave wrote the first African demand for total abolition.","thumb":"/img/ottobah-cugoano-480.jpg?v=ddf9f7da","img":"/img/ottobah-cugoano.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Piccadilly Circus","slug":"piccadilly-circus","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/piccadilly-circus/","lat":51.509898,"lng":-0.134382,"verdict":"Where Harry, Ron and Hermione land after apparating out of the wedding in Deathly Hallows Part 1.","thumb":"/img/piccadilly-circus-480.jpg?v=69fea33d","img":"/img/piccadilly-circus.jpg","w":1024,"h":768}]},{"slug":"the-city","name":"The City","verdict":"Where London began: the Roman city, the Square Mile of banks, and St Paul's in the middle of it.","note":"This is the original London. The Romans walled a square mile here around the year 200, and the modern boundary still follows most of that line, which is why the City is a separate thing from the rest of the capital: it has its own council, its own police force and its own Lord Mayor, none of whom govern anything outside it.\n\nIt has burned down and been rebuilt twice. The Great Fire of 1666 took four fifths of it in four days, after which Wren rebuilt fifty-one churches and put St Paul's above them; the Blitz took much of what the fire had left, and the towers of the last twenty years, the Gherkin and the Cheesegrater and the Walkie-Talkie, have gone up in those gaps. Almost nothing here is old and everything here is on an old plan: the lanes still run where they ran before the fire, and the ward boundaries are medieval.\n\nMoney arrived early and stayed. The Bank of England has been on Threadneedle Street since 1734, Lloyd's has insured ships since a coffee house in the 1680s, and the insurers and banks that made the Square Mile a byword are still here.\n\nAbout eight thousand people live in it and several hundred thousand come in to work, so it empties completely at the weekend. Sunday morning is the best time to walk it: the Roman wall at Tower Hill, the churchyards, and the alleys, with nobody in them.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-the-city-2.jpg?v=388fef04","thumb":"/img/area-the-city-2-480.jpg?v=4453cc3f","width":768,"height":1024,"thumb_width":360,"alt":"A narrow City lane between stone facades, with glass towers rising directly behind them","caption":"Threadneedle Walk, old stone frontages under new towers."},"reading_title":"The City of London: Money, Monarchy and the Square Mile","reading_deck":"How a Roman port became a merchant republic inside a kingdom, and why so much of its medieval machinery - wards, Aldermen, livery companies, a Remembrancer watching Parliament - is still running.","reading":"Once a year, the City of London puts its constitution on parade. A gilded state coach rolls through streets normally occupied by bankers and delivery vans. Livery companies (London's trade associations and guilds) appear in gowns and regalia, soldiers carry pikes, the City's ancient officers process with sword and mace, and enormous wicker figures of Gog and Magog \u2014 mythical guardians of London \u2014 join a spectacle whose origins lie more than eight centuries in the past. The Lord Mayor's Show can look like an exceptionally elaborate piece of British eccentricity. In fact, it began as something much more serious: a political bargain between a king and a city wealthy enough to bargain with him. In 1215 King John confirmed London's right to choose its own mayor, but required the successful candidate to leave the City and present himself to the Crown. The modern procession is the descendant of that annual journey westwards to Westminster.\n\nThat mixture of pageantry, commerce and constitutional ambiguity is a good introduction to the City itself. The Square Mile is not an independent state hiding inside Britain, as some more excitable accounts claim. The monarch does not need permission to enter it; Parliament can legislate for it; businesses there pay British taxes and obey British law. Yet it is also emphatically not an ordinary London borough. It has a Lord Mayor separate from the Mayor of London, its own police force, 25 medieval wards, elected Aldermen, Sheriffs, livery companies that still participate in civic elections, an official called the Remembrancer whose office has represented City interests to Parliament since the sixteenth century, and a local electoral system in which businesses can nominate voters. The Corporation even administers ancient investment funds, five Thames bridges and thousands of acres of green space far beyond its boundaries. The explanation is not that the City escaped history. It is that so much of its history was never completely abolished.\n\nThe story begins with trade rather than finance. Roman Londinium was established around AD 50 at a place where the Thames could be bridged and ships could penetrate deep into southern Britain. Wine, olive oil, pottery and luxury goods arrived at wharves along the northern bank; metals and other products left in the opposite direction. By the end of the second century the Romans had enclosed the settlement behind a wall roughly two miles long and six metres high. That wall continued to shape London for more than a thousand years and helps explain why the present City has such a peculiar outline. The Square Mile is actually about 1.12 square miles, but its territory still broadly reflects the ancient commercial settlement from which the rest of London grew. Beneath Bloomberg's headquarters lies the Temple of Mithras; beneath Guildhall is the Roman amphitheatre; fragments of the Roman and medieval wall still surface unexpectedly between offices and car parks. The newest global financial centre in London is sitting almost directly on top of the oldest one.\n\nThe crucial development came after Rome. By the eleventh century London had recovered into a major European trading centre whose merchants possessed traditions of local government already old enough to be defended as customary rights. William the Conqueror understood both the opportunity and the danger. London initially resisted him after Hastings, and William responded with the combination that would characterise the City's relationship with monarchy for centuries: reassurance in one hand, force in the other. In 1067 he issued a tiny charter promising that Londoners could retain the laws and customs they had enjoyed under Edward the Confessor. At the same time he established the great fortress at the City's eastern edge that became the Tower of London, intended quite explicitly to proclaim Norman royal power over potentially troublesome Londoners. One of the oldest surviving documents in the City archives is therefore a guarantee of civic privilege issued by the same conqueror who was building an enormous castle to keep the recipients under control.\n\nThe City gradually converted economic importance into political autonomy. Londoners gained the right to elect their own Sheriffs in 1199 \u2014 significant because the Sheriff had traditionally represented royal authority \u2014 and the annual election of a Mayor was formally confirmed in 1215. When King John was forced to agree Magna Carta weeks later, London was the only city named individually: its existing liberties were explicitly protected. The Mayor of London was not a democratic mayor in anything like the modern sense, but the principle was unusual. In a feudal world where power generally descended from king to nobleman, London's merchant elite increasingly governed itself. Guildhall became the architectural expression of that confidence: the present Great Hall was begun in the fifteenth century as a civic palace large enough for London's rulers to hold courts, banquets and ceremonies on a scale comparable with royal government.\n\nThe reason successive monarchs tolerated this independence was straightforward. The City had money. Medieval London's wealth came from its position as England's dominant port and commercial marketplace. Wool and cloth were particularly important, but merchants dealt in wine, grain, fish, metal, spices and an expanding range of imported luxuries. Trades organised themselves into guilds that regulated entry into a profession, controlled standards and competition, trained apprentices and supported members who fell on hard times. These evolved into the livery companies, so-called after they adopted distinctive uniforms and regalia (liveries). To trade freely in the City, a craftsman generally needed the Freedom of the City and membership of the appropriate company. Streets still preserve the economic geography this produced \u2014 Milk Street, Bread Street, Poultry, Ironmonger Lane, Fish Street Hill \u2014 as if fragments of a medieval business directory were embedded in the modern map.\n\nFew lives demonstrate how easily commerce, civic government and monarchy overlapped better than Richard Whittington. The historical Dick Whittington was not the penniless orphan of pantomime fame but a wealthy mercer dealing in expensive cloth. He lent substantial sums to the Crown, served repeatedly as Mayor and became an important royal financier. This was the basic relationship between monarch and City distilled into one career. Kings needed London's merchants because wars, courts and government required credit; merchants needed kings because charters, trading privileges and political stability protected commerce. The City Corporation itself notes that from the medieval period into Stuart times London was the monarchy's principal source of loans. The balance could produce loyalty, resentment or outright confrontation depending on how each side behaved.\n\nLondon's horizons expanded enormously in the Tudor and Stuart periods. In 1571 Elizabeth I formally opened Thomas Gresham's Royal Exchange at Cornhill, London's first purpose-built commercial exchange. Merchants from across Europe could meet under one roof, trading goods and information in a building consciously modelled on the exchanges of Antwerp. Around it developed the institutions of a new kind of capitalism. Chartered companies pooled money and political privilege to undertake trading ventures far beyond Europe. The East India Company, founded in 1600, moved between City addresses before establishing its great headquarters on Leadenhall Street. Coffee houses became informal exchanges where merchants gathered intelligence and arranged deals. Edward Lloyd's coffee house specialised in news about ships; the network that formed there evolved into the insurance market Lloyd's of London. The Bank of England would follow at the end of the century. The City was becoming less a place where things were manufactured and more a place where distant transactions were organised, financed, insured and recorded.\n\nThis global expansion also produced some of the darkest sources of City wealth. London's financial and mercantile institutions were deeply entangled with slavery and colonial exploitation. In 1660 City merchants and the Stuart royal family established the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa, reorganised as the Royal African Company in 1672. The company became a major trafficker of enslaved Africans. London's insurers underwrote slave ships and the commodities produced by enslaved labour; Lloyd's itself now acknowledges that its market became a global centre for insuring shipping connected to the slave economy. Individual civic leaders profited directly. William Beckford, twice Lord Mayor, owned huge Jamaican estates and 1,356 enslaved people at the time of his death. Sir John Cass, another prominent City figure whose philanthropy was commemorated for centuries, was an active official of the Royal African Company.\n\nIt would be too simple to say that the City became wealthy because of slavery: its commercial importance long predated Atlantic slavery and rested on a much broader economy. But it would be equally misleading to detach the rise of London finance from the imperial system in which it operated. Sugar, tobacco, coffee and other colonial commodities passed through London's docks and markets; fortunes generated from plantations flowed into property, banking, art and politics; insurance and credit reduced the commercial risks of long-distance shipping. The Corporation has itself commissioned further research into the institutional investments and personal involvement of Lord Mayors, Sheriffs, Aldermen and Common Councillors between 1640 and 1807. The full accounting is therefore still being constructed, but the broad conclusion is no longer seriously in doubt: the slave economy was woven into the financial networks that helped make the City globally powerful.\n\nLong before this commercial empire reached its height, the City's relationship with the Crown had produced a constitutional crisis. Charles I's attempts to raise money without Parliament, combined with conflicts over religion and royal authority, alienated significant sections of London's merchant and political establishment. In January 1642 Charles entered the House of Commons intending to arrest five MPs. They escaped and found refuge in the City. The following day the King went personally to Guildhall seeking their surrender. He failed. As the country moved towards civil war, London's enormous financial, manufacturing and military resources became crucial to Parliament. City financiers supplied loans, businesses supplied equipment and the London Trained Bands provided thousands of armed men; modern scholarship on Civil War London describes the mobilisation of the capital's money and manpower as fundamental to Parliament's war effort.\n\nThe significance of this is easy to underestimate. Westminster possessed Parliament, but the City possessed much of the financial machinery required to make Parliament's decisions effective. Thomas Hobbes later wrote that without London, Parliament could never have made the war. The City's support was not unanimous \u2014 wealthy Royalists existed and London's politics fluctuated considerably \u2014 but Charles's failure to secure the capital deprived him of England's principal port, commercial centre, tax base and source of credit. The struggle between Crown and Parliament was therefore also a struggle over London's resources. It was an early demonstration of a principle that would define modern states: political power depends upon the ability to raise money reliably.\n\nThat lesson eventually produced perhaps the City's most consequential financial institution. Kings had long borrowed personally from wealthy Londoners, but royal credit could be unreliable. In 1672 Charles II suspended repayments owed to goldsmith-bankers in the notorious Stop of the Exchequer, damaging businesses and confidence. After the Glorious Revolution replaced James II with William III and Mary II, England needed enormous sums to finance another war with France. The solution in 1694 was the Bank of England: private investors subscribed \u00a31.2 million, which was lent to the government, while the new Bank received a royal charter. The full subscription was raised in only eleven days. The Bank began life not primarily as the guardian of inflation but as a mechanism for turning private City wealth into dependable state finance.\n\nThis represented a subtle shift in the balance between Crown, Parliament and City. Government borrowing was no longer simply a king asking merchants for money and hoping they trusted him to repay it. Parliament controlled taxation and underpinned the state's ability to service its debts; the Bank mobilised private capital; the City supplied investors and financial expertise. The resulting system of public credit allowed Britain to borrow on a scale that became a formidable strategic advantage during the long eighteenth-century wars with France. The same financial sophistication that served merchants could now sustain navies, armies and empire. The City's power increasingly came not from resisting the state but from becoming indispensable to it.\n\nThe physical City repeatedly changed while the institutions survived. The Great Fire of 1666 destroyed the Royal Exchange, Guildhall's roof, thousands of houses and most of the parish churches within the old walls. Grand schemes proposed replacing the medieval lanes with rational boulevards and piazzas, but property ownership, cost and the urgency of reopening businesses defeated them. London was rebuilt broadly on its old street pattern. This is one reason today's City remains so strange at ground level: glass towers rise from lanes that curve around property boundaries inherited from medieval merchants. The architecture can change almost completely while the underlying commercial geography refuses to disappear.\n\nBy the nineteenth century the City was becoming a place increasingly devoted to work rather than residence. Banking, insurance, shipping and securities trading expanded while wealthier inhabitants moved westward or into the suburbs. The old markets and warehouses remained important, but the office was becoming the characteristic City building. This transformation eventually created an extraordinary demographic inversion. The medieval City may have held around 80,000 inhabitants; in the mid-nineteenth century the population exceeded 100,000. Today only about 8,600 people live in the Square Mile, while more than 670,000 people work there. Few places on earth experience such a dramatic daily change of population.\n\nThat unusual population is one reason the City's government looks so peculiar. The Square Mile remains divided into 25 wards, each represented by one Alderman and between two and ten Common Councillors. There are 100 Common Councillors and 25 Aldermen in total. Elections are formally non-party political and the members are unpaid. But unlike anywhere else in Britain, residents are not the only local electors. Because workers vastly outnumber inhabitants, qualifying companies and organisations can nominate individuals to vote in City elections. Supporters argue that a government serving a district overwhelmingly composed of workplaces needs to represent those organisations; critics see the business vote as an extraordinary survival that gives corporations a formal political role unavailable elsewhere in Britain. Either way, a medieval merchant city has solved a twenty-first-century demographic problem by retaining a franchise unlike that of any other British local authority.\n\nThe old guild system survives too, although almost none of its members now needs permission from the Fishmongers or Mercers to carry out a trade. More than a hundred livery companies remain, ranging from ancient bodies such as the Mercers (fine textiles merchants), Goldsmiths and Merchant Taylors to modern companies representing professions including information technology, tax advisers and financial traders. Their economic regulatory power largely disappeared centuries ago, but they still support training and charity \u2014 collectively giving tens of millions of pounds each year \u2014 and their liverymen continue to participate in the elections of the City's two Sheriffs and the annual choice of Lord Mayor. Before somebody can become a liveryman, they still first become a Freeman of the City of London, repeating an institution that once determined who had the right to trade.\n\nMany of the celebrated privileges of a Freeman are mythology. You do not acquire a legally enforceable right to drive sheep across London Bridge, wander drunk through the City without arrest or carry an unsheathed sword in public. What survives is more interesting because it is real: the actual civic machinery. The Lord Mayor must first have served as a Sheriff and be an Alderman. The incoming Mayor is installed at Guildhall in the Silent Ceremony, conducted almost entirely without speech. The next day comes the Lord Mayor's Show. The City's Swordbearer and Common Cryer still hold offices dating back to the Middle Ages, while the City Marshal carries out ceremonial duties originating under Elizabeth I. Regiments granted the Freedom of the City may still parade through the streets with drums beating, colours flying and bayonets fixed.\n\nThe relationship with monarchy is similarly real but often misunderstood. The sovereign can enter the City whenever they wish; there is no constitutional border checkpoint. Yet when a new monarch makes a ceremonial visit, an old ritual may be performed involving the City's extraordinary Pearl Sword, whose scabbard is decorated with more than 2,500 pearls. The Lord Mayor offers it to the sovereign, who touches and returns it, symbolically confirming the Mayor's delegated authority within the Square Mile. Charles III performed the ceremony in 2023. The symbolism is almost a summary of City history: civic independence exists, but under the Crown; the monarch's authority is acknowledged, but through a ritual that also acknowledges the City's separate civic identity.\n\nParliament is treated with the same mixture of submission and vigilance. Parliamentary sovereignty applies fully in the City, but the Corporation has maintained an office specifically concerned with protecting its interests since 1571. The Remembrancer is the City's parliamentary agent and head of protocol, examining proposed legislation, communicating with government departments and giving evidence to parliamentary committees. The position has inspired exaggerated claims that the City possesses a secret lobbyist sitting inside Parliament with special legislative powers. It does not. The reality is less conspiratorial but arguably more revealing: a municipal government has maintained a permanent institutional mechanism for following Westminster legislation for more than four centuries because protecting City privileges and commercial interests has always required paying close attention to what Parliament is doing.\n\nOther anomalies are scattered across the Corporation of London. The Square Mile has its own police force, formally separate from the Metropolitan Police since the City of London Police Act of 1839. The Corporation is London's port health authority and manages Epping Forest and Hampstead Heath despite both lying miles beyond the City. An ancient fund now called City's Estate, built from property, land, bequests and investments accumulated over centuries, finances activities without drawing on ordinary local taxation. A still older charitable endowment, City Bridge Foundation, grew from medieval gifts made for maintaining London Bridge; it now owns and maintains Tower Bridge, London Bridge, Southwark Bridge, Blackfriars Bridge and the Millennium Bridge, while also operating as a major charitable funder. The medieval City did not leave behind merely costumes. It left behind assets.\n\nFor centuries all this civic machinery operated beneath a skyline dominated by church towers and, after 1710, the dome of St Paul's. The modern financial skyline is startlingly recent. Tower 42, originally the NatWest Tower, was completed in 1980 and at 183 metres became London's first true skyscraper and the tallest building in Britain. Richard Rogers's inside-out Lloyd's Building followed in 1986, the same year as the financial-market reforms known as the Big Bang. Those reforms abolished old Stock Exchange practices, intensified competition and opened the market to large foreign financial institutions. Electronic dealing replaced much of the traditional face-to-face world of jobbers and brokers, while larger international banks demanded different kinds of office space. The architecture of finance began catching up with the scale of the businesses operating inside it.\n\nThe transition was violent as well as economic. An IRA bomb destroyed the historic Baltic Exchange in St Mary Axe in 1992; another enormous bomb at Bishopsgate in 1993 badly damaged Tower 42 and surrounding buildings. The Baltic Exchange could not be successfully reconstructed and was eventually replaced by Norman Foster's 30 St Mary Axe, completed in 2004 and instantly nicknamed the Gherkin. The building helped establish a new architectural identity for the City: individual, highly engineered towers rather than the repetitive office slabs of earlier decades. The Leadenhall Building became the Cheesegrater, 20 Fenchurch Street the Walkie Talkie, while 22 Bishopsgate rose to form the current peak of an increasingly dense eastern cluster.\n\nYet even the skyscrapers are constrained by the past. The City has protected certain views of St Paul's since the 1930s, and modern planning policy deliberately concentrates much of the tallest development east of the cathedral. From the South Bank, the skyscrapers are intended to rise as a separate cluster rather than swallowing Wren's dome. This produces one of London's defining visual relationships: a seventeenth-century cathedral separated by protected sky from a forest of twenty-first-century offices. The skyline looks accidental, but to a surprising extent it is curated. Every proposed tower must negotiate not only surrounding buildings but sightlines towards monuments hundreds of years older.\n\nThe modern City's economy is also broader than its popular stereotype. Finance remains dominant \u2014 around a third of jobs \u2014 but professional services such as law, accountancy and consultancy provide another large share, and technology now represents roughly 14 per cent of employment. In 2024 the Square Mile supported about 676,000 jobs, a record and roughly a quarter more than before the pandemic. The City Corporation estimates annual economic output at over \u00a3100 billion. What began as a Roman port and medieval market has become a dense concentration of capital, legal expertise, insurance, technology and professional services whose influence extends far beyond its physical boundary.\n\nThe most striking thing about the City, however, is not that it became rich. Many cities became rich. It is how much of the machinery created during earlier stages of that wealth survived into the next one. Merchant guilds became charitable livery companies but kept a role in civic elections. The Mayor became the Lord Mayor and lost much practical power but retained international and ceremonial influence. Medieval wards became electoral districts. A bridge fund accumulated enough wealth to become a modern charity. An office created under Elizabeth I still scrutinises Parliament. An independent police force remained when the rest of metropolitan London acquired the Met. The City's boundaries persisted while London expanded around them until the original town became a tiny patch in the middle of a metropolis of millions.\n\nThis continuity can make the City seem more mysterious than it really is. Its institutions attract mythology because they look so unlike the standard structures of modern government. But the City is not powerful because a medieval charter secretly exempts it from Britain. Its more durable achievement has been the opposite: it repeatedly adapted its ancient structures sufficiently to avoid becoming obsolete. Parliament can reform it. The Crown no longer depends upon the Lord Mayor for loans. The livery companies cannot control most trades. The City wall has almost disappeared. Yet the institutions remain because each acquired another purpose.\n\nThat is why the best place to understand the Square Mile may still be Guildhall.\n\nBeneath it lies the amphitheatre of Roman Londinium. Above those ruins stands the medieval Great Hall built for a merchant government powerful enough to rival royal magnificence. Inside are monuments to former Lord Mayors, including men whose fortunes expose the City's involvement in slavery and empire. Around it sit offices administering a twenty-first-century local authority with business voters, Aldermen and a Remembrancer. A few streets away are the Bank of England, the Royal Exchange and towers containing some of the largest financial institutions on earth.\n\nThe forms of power have changed repeatedly. The location has not.","reading_links":[{"phrase":"Temple of Mithras","name":"London Mithraeum","slug":"london-mithraeum","cat":"Museums","href":"/museums/london-mithraeum/"},{"phrase":"Roman amphitheatre","name":"Guildhall Roman Amphitheatre","slug":"guildhall-roman-amphitheatre","cat":"Monuments & Ruins","href":"/monuments/guildhall-roman-amphitheatre/"},{"phrase":"Tower of London","name":"Tower of London","slug":"tower-of-london","cat":"Museums","href":"/museums/tower-of-london/"},{"phrase":"Guildhall","name":"Guildhall","slug":"guildhall","cat":"Power & Politics","href":"/politics/guildhall/"},{"phrase":"Royal Exchange","name":"Royal Exchange","slug":"royal-exchange","cat":"Architecture","href":"/architecture/royal-exchange/"},{"phrase":"Lloyd's of London","name":"Lloyd's of London","slug":"lloyds-of-london","cat":"Architecture","href":"/architecture/lloyds-of-london/"},{"phrase":"Bank of England","name":"Bank of England 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Waterloo Bridge: St Paul's dome on the left, and the cluster of glass towers around 22 Bishopsgate and the Walkie-Talkie filling the rest of the frame","caption":"St Paul's at one end and the Walkie-Talkie at the other, with 22 Bishopsgate over the middle.","credit":"Photo by APK, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:City_of_London_skyline_viewed_from_Waterloo_Bridge.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-the-city-3.jpg?v=8560ae98","thumb":"/img/area-the-city-3-480.jpg?v=6f3b6b0c","width":1024,"height":683,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Leadenhall Market: the painted Victorian arcade of 1881 under its glass roof","caption":"Leadenhall Market.","credit":"Photo by Michael D Beckwith from England, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leadenhall_Market_(49850206607).jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-the-city-4.jpg?v=b64be43c","thumb":"/img/area-the-city-4-480.jpg?v=619ad208","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The City from the dome of St Paul's: the Shard across the river and the towers of the Square Mile","caption":"The Square Mile from the top of St Paul's.","credit":"Photo by Alex Hoekerd, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View_from_St_Paul%27s_Cathedral_-_2025-08-04.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-the-city-5.jpg?v=3cb8a979","thumb":"/img/area-the-city-5-480.jpg?v=0e46326b","width":1024,"height":576,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The blank stone wall of the Bank of England on Threadneedle Street, Soane's curtain wall","caption":"The Bank of England, Soane's wall on Threadneedle Street.","credit":"Photo by Michael, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bank_of_England_Facade.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-the-city-6.jpg?v=3a0cba99","thumb":"/img/area-the-city-6-480.jpg?v=cd0b3b73","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Bank junction: the Royal Exchange's tall columned portico and carved pediment, with the equestrian statue of Wellington in front, the Bank of England's stone wall on the left and the glass towers of 22 Bishopsgate rising behind, on a bright afternoon with cyclists crossing.","caption":"The Royal Exchange from Bank junction."}],"edges":null,"osm":"relation/51800","geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.08021,51.50687],[-0.07536,51.50552],[-0.07444,51.50687],[-0.07384,51.50931],[-0.07276,51.51041],[-0.07363,51.51409],[-0.07391,51.51431],[-0.07693,51.51665],[-0.0782,51.51847],[-0.07813,51.51898],[-0.07944,51.51888],[-0.07856,51.5215],[-0.07855,51.52151],[-0.08105,51.52195],[-0.08176,51.52076],[-0.08333,51.51981],[-0.08526,51.52035],[-0.08623,51.51881],[-0.08998,51.51997],[-0.08979,51.52072],[-0.09239,51.52103],[-0.09252,51.52147],[-0.09333,51.52133],[-0.09357,51.52159],[-0.09434,51.52148],[-0.09512,51.52311],[-0.09644,51.52283],[-0.09678,51.52331],[-0.09795,51.52288],[-0.09797,51.52287],[-0.09786,51.52267],[-0.09738,51.52178],[-0.09769,51.52071],[-0.1005,51.52009],[-0.10785,51.51776],[-0.11139,51.51815],[-0.11154,51.51817],[-0.1124,51.51826],[-0.11291,51.51826],[-0.11383,51.51826],[-0.11184,51.51579],[-0.11108,51.51383],[-0.11196,51.5137],[-0.11173,51.51319],[-0.11233,51.51302],[-0.11221,51.51289],[-0.11253,51.51273],[-0.11158,51.5118],[-0.11147,51.50977],[-0.10792,51.50987],[-0.10651,51.50991],[-0.10415,51.50986],[-0.10159,51.50981],[-0.09773,51.50953],[-0.09573,51.50928],[-0.09406,51.50888],[-0.09193,51.50836],[-0.08519,51.50769],[-0.08064,51.50694],[-0.08021,51.50687]]]},"centre":[-0.09522,51.51525],"bounds":[[-0.11383,51.50552],[-0.07276,51.52331]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s 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centenary."},{"name":"Company in Residence: Scottish Ensemble","slug":"company-in-residence-scottish-ensemble","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/company-in-residence-scottish-ensemble/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2027-06-15"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"Britain's only professional string orchestra, in residence for the season."},{"name":"Composer in Focus: Caroline Shaw","slug":"composer-in-focus-caroline-shaw","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/composer-in-focus-caroline-shaw/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2027-06-15"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"Six evenings with the composer who won a Pulitzer at thirty for a piece written for eight voices."},{"name":"Concert Theatre","slug":"concert-theatre","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/concert-theatre/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2027-06-24"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"The strand for concerts that refuse to sit still: opera, dance and staged music across the season."},{"name":"Concrete and Clay: Archiving the Barbican","slug":"concrete-and-clay-archiving-the-barbican","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/barbican-centre/concrete-and-clay-archiving-the-barbican/","runs":{"to":"2027-01-01"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"The Barbican's own archive on the mezzanine, with the 1:22 model at the centre."},{"name":"Critical Moment","slug":"critical-moment","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/st-bride-foundation/critical-moment/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.51342,"lng":-0.10498,"verdict":"New dance made and performed entirely by people over sixty."},{"name":"Dance in a Day: Lindy Hop","slug":"dance-in-a-day-lindy-hop","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/bishopsgate-institute/dance-in-a-day-lindy-hop/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-27","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.518725,"lng":-0.07932,"verdict":"Learn enough Lindy Hop in an afternoon to get through the evening."},{"name":"Darbar Festival 2026","slug":"darbar-festival-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/darbar-festival-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-24","to":"2026-11-01"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"Nine days of Indian classical music, including a violin and veena duel that starts at 00:00."},{"name":"Edmund Finnis and Bruckner's Ninth","slug":"edmund-finnis-and-bruckners-ninth","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/edmund-finnis-and-bruckners-ninth/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-25","to":"2026-10-25"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"Sheku Kanneh-Mason in a new cello concerto, then Bruckner's unfinished last symphony."},{"name":"Enigma Quests","slug":"enigma-quests","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/enigma-quests/","lat":51.517226,"lng":-0.10965,"verdict":"Story-heavy rooms with sets built like theatre, not like a warehouse."},{"name":"Ensemble Renard at Barts North Wing","slug":"ensemble-renard-at-barts-north-wing","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/st-bartholomews-hospital-museum/ensemble-renard-at-barts-north-wing/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.517723,"lng":-0.100474,"verdict":"A wind quintet in the Great Hall at lunchtime: Bart\u00f3k, Reicha, Birtwistle and Nielsen."},{"name":"Finzi Anniversary Gala","slug":"finzi-anniversary-gala","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/temple-church/finzi-anniversary-gala/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-27","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.513259,"lng":-0.110263,"verdict":"Two concerts in a day for Gerald Finzi, matinee and evening."},{"name":"Free concerts at the Guildhall School","slug":"free-concerts-at-the-guildhall-school","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/milton-court-concert-hall/free-concerts-at-the-guildhall-school/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.520094,"lng":-0.090409,"verdict":"Hundreds of public performances a year at Milton Court and on Silk Street, most of them free."},{"name":"Gathering Rest","slug":"gathering-rest","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/two-temple-place/gathering-rest/","runs":{"from":"2027-01-23","to":"2027-04-18"},"lat":51.51165,"lng":-0.112284,"verdict":"Two Temple Place's free winter show, this year on rest as healing and imagination."},{"name":"Goldfish","slug":"goldfish","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/st-bride-foundation/goldfish/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-03","to":"2026-11-07"},"lat":51.51342,"lng":-0.10498,"verdict":"The end of the Klondike gold rush, a dying child and a lie that has to keep going."},{"name":"Grease","slug":"grease","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/st-bride-foundation/grease/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-12","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.51342,"lng":-0.10498,"verdict":"Rydell High in a Fleet Street basement theatre."},{"name":"Gresham College lectures","slug":"gresham-college-lectures","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/gresham-college-lectures/","lat":51.5177,"lng":-0.1105,"verdict":"Free public lectures since 1597, from a professor of music, of astronomy, of law and the rest, in a medieval hall off Holborn."},{"name":"Guildhall Art Gallery and London's Roman amphitheatre","slug":"guildhall-art-gallery-and-londons-roman-amphitheatre","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/guildhall-art-gallery/guildhall-art-gallery-and-londons-roman-amphitheatre/","lat":51.515558,"lng":-0.091404,"verdict":"The City's own art collection, and the amphitheatre found underneath it in 1988."},{"name":"Guildhall Symphony Orchestra and Chorus: Mahler 4","slug":"guildhall-symphony-orchestra-and-chorus-mahler-4","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/milton-court-concert-hall/guildhall-symphony-orchestra-and-chorus-mahler-4/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-25"},"lat":51.520094,"lng":-0.090409,"verdict":"Two hundred students, Mahler's Fourth, twenty pounds."},{"name":"Half Six Fix","slug":"half-six-fix","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/half-six-fix/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-21","to":"2027-05-12"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"One hour, one symphony, half past six: the LSO's answer to a concert that ends too late."},{"name":"Halloween at the Tower of London","slug":"halloween-at-the-tower-of-london","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tower-of-london/halloween-at-the-tower-of-london/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-24","to":"2026-11-01"},"lat":51.508133,"lng":-0.076286,"verdict":"The Tower's ghosts come out for half term: a poet, a pirate, a queen and a bear."},{"name":"Haruki Murakami's Jazz at Peter Cat","slug":"haruki-murakamis-jazz-at-peter-cat","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/haruki-murakamis-jazz-at-peter-cat/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-21","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"The bar Murakami ran before he was a novelist, rebuilt as a night of Japanese jazz."},{"name":"Heavy House Society","slug":"heavy-house-society","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/fabric/heavy-house-society/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-11"},"lat":51.519608,"lng":-0.102516,"verdict":"Eleven at night until six in the morning, in the Smithfield cold store."},{"name":"Hidden London: Moorgate \u2014 Metropolitan maze","slug":"hidden-london-moorgate-metropolitan-maze","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-moorgate-metropolitan-maze/","lat":51.518252,"lng":-0.089063,"verdict":"Disused tracks and vintage tiling left over from 160 years of rebuilds."},{"name":"Hijingo","slug":"hijingo","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hijingo/","lat":51.521891,"lng":-0.081178,"verdict":"Bingo staged as a game show, with lasers."},{"name":"Horizon 22","slug":"horizon-22","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/horizon-22/","lat":51.514478,"lng":-0.082973,"verdict":"Level 58, 300 degrees of London, and the highest free view in Europe."},{"name":"I am Being: Cacao and Sound Immersion","slug":"i-am-being-cacao-and-sound-immersion","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/st-bartholomews-hospital-museum/i-am-being-cacao-and-sound-immersion/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-09-13"},"lat":51.517723,"lng":-0.100474,"verdict":"A ceremonial cacao circle and crystal-bowl sound bath under a Georgian ceiling."},{"name":"Jaga Jazzist","slug":"jaga-jazzist","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/milton-court-concert-hall/jaga-jazzist/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-19","to":"2026-11-19"},"lat":51.520094,"lng":-0.090409,"verdict":"Eight Norwegians, thirty years of refusing to settle on a genre."},{"name":"Jazz on Screen: Ascenseur pour l'echafaud","slug":"jazz-on-screen-ascenseur-pour-lechafaud","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/jazz-on-screen-ascenseur-pour-lechafaud/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-22","to":"2026-11-22"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"Louis Malle's first film, with the score Miles Davis improvised to the picture."},{"name":"Jazz on Screen: Blues Like Showers of Rain and Jazz Is Our Religion","slug":"jazz-on-screen-blues-like-showers-of-rain-and-jazz-is-our-religion","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/jazz-on-screen-blues-like-showers-of-rain-and-jazz-is-our-religion/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-21","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"Two documentaries on the roots of the blues and the life of the jazz musician."},{"name":"Jazz on Screen: Coltrane and the Cinema","slug":"jazz-on-screen-coltrane-and-the-cinema","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/jazz-on-screen-coltrane-and-the-cinema/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-15","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"Three films that use Coltrane rather than explain him, ending on Spike Lee."},{"name":"Jazz on Screen: Miles Davis on The Late Show","slug":"jazz-on-screen-miles-davis-on-the-late-show","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/jazz-on-screen-miles-davis-on-the-late-show/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-14","to":"2026-11-14"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"Miles Davis as BBC Two's arts programme filmed him, dug out of the archive."},{"name":"Keys Club experience","slug":"keys-club-experience","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tower-of-london/keys-club-experience/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.508133,"lng":-0.076286,"verdict":"A Warder, forty-five minutes, and a room the public does not normally get into."},{"name":"Letterpress Poster Printing Workshop","slug":"letterpress-poster-printing-workshop","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/st-bride-foundation/letterpress-poster-printing-workshop/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.51342,"lng":-0.10498,"verdict":"Set wood type by hand and pull your own poster."},{"name":"London Museum opens at Smithfield","slug":"london-museum-opens-at-smithfield","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/london-museum-opens-at-smithfield/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-28"},"lat":51.5189,"lng":-0.1027,"verdict":"The Museum of London's ten-year move into Smithfield's General Market, with trains running past the galleries."},{"name":"Love's Labour's Lost","slug":"loves-labours-lost","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/st-bride-foundation/loves-labours-lost/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-15","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.51342,"lng":-0.10498,"verdict":"Shakespeare's comedy as a rock musical at a college reunion."},{"name":"Lovett","slug":"lovett","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/st-bride-foundation/lovett/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-24","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.51342,"lng":-0.10498,"verdict":"Mrs Lovett before the pies, and before Sweeney Todd."},{"name":"Maarja Nuut and Shards: Combing Hair Into Sand","slug":"maarja-nuut-and-shards-combing-hair-into-sand","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/milton-court-concert-hall/maarja-nuut-and-shards-combing-hair-into-sand/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-17","to":"2026-11-17"},"lat":51.520094,"lng":-0.090409,"verdict":"An Estonian song cycle for voices, violin, percussion and electronics."},{"name":"Mahler 2 and Fujikura","slug":"mahler-2-and-fujikura","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/mahler-2-and-fujikura/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-22","to":"2026-10-22"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"The second night of the LSO's Resurrection Symphony."},{"name":"Mr Moore's Bizarre Secret Society","slug":"mr-moores-bizarre-secret-society","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/st-bride-foundation/mr-moores-bizarre-secret-society/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.51342,"lng":-0.10498,"verdict":"A disused Victorian tearoom, a tea tournament, and the misfits who run it."},{"name":"Now & Then: Peter S Smith","slug":"now-then-peter-s-smith","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/st-bride-foundation/now-then-peter-s-smith/","runs":{"from":"2026-07-13","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.51342,"lng":-0.10498,"verdict":"Sixty years of one printmaker's work, hung in a theatre bar."},{"name":"One Day Adana Letterpress","slug":"one-day-adana-letterpress","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/st-bride-foundation/one-day-adana-letterpress/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-14","to":"2026-10-14"},"lat":51.51342,"lng":-0.10498,"verdict":"How to run an Adana in your own back room."},{"name":"One New Change Roof Terrace","slug":"one-new-change-roof-terrace","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/one-new-change-roof-terrace/","lat":51.513856,"lng":-0.095048,"verdict":"The best free view of St Paul's dome, from the roof of a shopping centre."},{"name":"Purcell's Dido and Aeneas at Temple Church","slug":"purcells-dido-and-aeneas-at-temple-church","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/temple-church/purcells-dido-and-aeneas-at-temple-church/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-29","to":"2026-09-29"},"lat":51.513259,"lng":-0.110263,"verdict":"Dido's Lament in a round twelfth-century church built by the Knights Templar."},{"name":"Ravens experience","slug":"ravens-experience","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tower-of-london/ravens-experience/","lat":51.508133,"lng":-0.076286,"verdict":"Forty-five minutes with the Ravenmaster before the Tower opens."},{"name":"Robert Ryman: The Real Thing","slug":"robert-ryman-the-real-thing","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/barbican-centre/robert-ryman-the-real-thing/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-08","to":"2027-02-28"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"Sixty white paintings, and the case that you had to be in the room with them."},{"name":"Ryman in Rhythm: Sarathy Korwar","slug":"ryman-in-rhythm-sarathy-korwar","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/ryman-in-rhythm-sarathy-korwar/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-18","to":"2026-11-18"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"A percussionist improvising in the gallery, in front of paintings made the same way."},{"name":"Scottish Ensemble: Bach and Blood","slug":"scottish-ensemble-bach-and-blood","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/milton-court-concert-hall/scottish-ensemble-bach-and-blood/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-02","to":"2026-10-02"},"lat":51.520094,"lng":-0.090409,"verdict":"Bach's Chaconne with the chorales hidden inside it sung aloud."},{"name":"Season Opening: Mahler 2 and Fujikura","slug":"season-opening-mahler-2-and-fujikura","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/season-opening-mahler-2-and-fujikura/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-18","to":"2026-10-18"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"The Resurrection Symphony opens the LSO's season, with a Fujikura premiere before it."},{"name":"Sky Garden","slug":"sky-garden","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/sky-garden/","lat":51.51127,"lng":-0.08354,"verdict":"Three storeys of planting under a glass dome, 35 floors up, free."},{"name":"Sofar Sounds at Barts North Wing","slug":"sofar-sounds-at-barts-north-wing","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/st-bartholomews-hospital-museum/sofar-sounds-at-barts-north-wing/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.517723,"lng":-0.100474,"verdict":"Three rising acts, unannounced until you are in the room, in an eighteenth-century hall."},{"name":"Soul and The Point of Unity at St Paul's","slug":"soul-and-the-point-of-unity-at-st-pauls","cat":"whats-on","url":"/royal/st-pauls-cathedral/soul-and-the-point-of-unity-at-st-pauls/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-11","to":"2026-09-21"},"lat":51.51379,"lng":-0.09845,"verdict":"Two light works by Mykola Kabluka for the London Design Festival: a participatory projection across the west front, and a mirrored canopy in the churchyard that lights up at night."},{"name":"Sound & Vision","slug":"sound-vision","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/st-bride-foundation/sound-vision/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-17","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.51342,"lng":-0.10498,"verdict":"St Bride's annual design conference, this year on music and how it looks."},{"name":"Soweto Kinch: Trilogy","slug":"soweto-kinch-trilogy","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/soweto-kinch-trilogy/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-19","to":"2026-11-19"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"Three works written with the LSO since 2019, played in one evening."},{"name":"Stack Magazines and St Bride Foundation","slug":"stack-magazines-and-st-bride-foundation","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/st-bride-foundation/stack-magazines-and-st-bride-foundation/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.51342,"lng":-0.10498,"verdict":"Three hundred years of the magazine, argued over by the people still making them."},{"name":"Steve Reich at 90 with Colin Currie","slug":"steve-reich-at-90-with-colin-currie","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/steve-reich-at-90-with-colin-currie/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-28","to":"2027-05-09"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"A year of Reich for his ninetieth, with the percussionist who has become his standard-bearer."},{"name":"Swing Live","slug":"swing-live","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/bishopsgate-institute/swing-live/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.518725,"lng":-0.07932,"verdict":"A live band and a room full of Lindy Hoppers on Bishopsgate."},{"name":"Swing Live! Performance Ball","slug":"swing-live-performance-ball","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/bishopsgate-institute/swing-live-performance-ball/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-17","to":"2026-10-17"},"lat":51.518725,"lng":-0.07932,"verdict":"Swing Patrol's students take the stage, then everyone dances until one in the morning."},{"name":"Take Five Showcase: David Kayode and Marlon the Pannist","slug":"take-five-showcase-david-kayode-and-marlon-the-pannist","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/take-five-showcase-david-kayode-and-marlon-the-pannist/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-21","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"A Yoruba-rooted saxophonist and a steel pan player, in the Pit."},{"name":"Talk: Celebration and Ceremony at Barts, Charterhouse and the Royal Hospital Chelsea","slug":"talk-celebration-and-ceremony-at-barts-charterhouse-and-the-royal-hospital-chelsea","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/st-bartholomews-hospital-museum/talk-celebration-and-ceremony-at-barts-charterhouse-and-the-royal-hospital-chelsea/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-15","to":"2026-09-15"},"lat":51.517723,"lng":-0.100474,"verdict":"Three ancient City institutions on the ceremonies they have each kept going for centuries."},{"name":"Tchaikovsky's Fifth with a Hannah Kendall premiere","slug":"tchaikovskys-fifth-with-a-hannah-kendall-premiere","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/tchaikovskys-fifth-with-a-hannah-kendall-premiere/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-29","to":"2026-10-29"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"A new Hannah Kendall piece between Liadov's fairy tales and Tchaikovsky's Fifth."},{"name":"The Art of Listening: the Beatrice Warde Memorial Lecture","slug":"the-art-of-listening-the-beatrice-warde-memorial-lecture","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/st-bride-foundation/the-art-of-listening-the-beatrice-warde-memorial-lecture/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.51342,"lng":-0.10498,"verdict":"The annual lecture named for the woman who wrote that type should be a crystal goblet."},{"name":"The Bank of England Museum's permanent galleries","slug":"the-bank-of-england-museums-permanent-galleries","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/bank-of-england-museum/the-bank-of-england-museums-permanent-galleries/","lat":51.514197,"lng":-0.08768,"verdict":"Lift a gold bar worth about a million pounds, inside the Bank itself."},{"name":"The Crown Jewels","slug":"the-crown-jewels","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tower-of-london/the-crown-jewels/","lat":51.508133,"lng":-0.076286,"verdict":"The working regalia of a monarchy, on a moving walkway, behind the thickest glass in London."},{"name":"The Garden at 120","slug":"the-garden-at-120","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/the-garden-at-120/","lat":51.51226,"lng":-0.080825,"verdict":"The City's largest free roof garden, and you can just walk in."},{"name":"The Joy","slug":"the-joy","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/the-joy/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-22","to":"2026-11-22"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"Five voices from KwaZulu-Natal and almost no instruments."},{"name":"The Lookout at 8 Bishopsgate","slug":"the-lookout-at-8-bishopsgate","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/the-lookout-at-8-bishopsgate/","lat":51.513809,"lng":-0.083571,"verdict":"A 50th-floor gallery looking straight across at the other towers."},{"name":"Thomas Ades conducts Sibelius and Norgard","slug":"thomas-ades-conducts-sibelius-and-norgard","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/thomas-ades-conducts-sibelius-and-norgard/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-05","to":"2026-11-05"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"Ades conducts his own Creation piece with Chamayou, and Sibelius's Fifth."},{"name":"Tour for Muggles","slug":"tour-for-muggles","cat":"whats-on","url":"/food-markets/leadenhall-market/tour-for-muggles/","lat":51.512803,"lng":-0.083607,"verdict":"An actor-led walk through the City and Bankside filming locations, Leadenhall Market to Borough Market, in groups of twenty."},{"name":"Tour of St Bride Foundation","slug":"tour-of-st-bride-foundation","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/st-bride-foundation/tour-of-st-bride-foundation/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-17"},"lat":51.51342,"lng":-0.10498,"verdict":"Behind the door on Bride Lane: the library of printing, and what is in the cases."},{"name":"Tower Bridge","slug":"tower-bridge","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/tower-bridge/","lat":51.505517,"lng":-0.075366,"verdict":"Walk the high walkways on a glass floor, with the road forty metres below.","thumb":"/img/own-tower-bridge-480.jpg?v=b557d989","img":"/img/own-tower-bridge.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Tower of London Opening Ceremony experience","slug":"tower-of-london-opening-ceremony-experience","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tower-of-london/tower-of-london-opening-ceremony-experience/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2026-09-30"},"lat":51.508133,"lng":-0.076286,"verdict":"In through the Middle Drawbridge before the Tower opens, to watch the gates unlocked."},{"name":"Tower of London River Tour","slug":"tower-of-london-river-tour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tower-of-london/tower-of-london-river-tour/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-09","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.508133,"lng":-0.076286,"verdict":"Forty minutes on the Thames, leaving from the Tower every hour."},{"name":"UK Fetish Archive Open Day","slug":"uk-fetish-archive-open-day","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/bishopsgate-institute/uk-fetish-archive-open-day/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-09-13"},"lat":51.518725,"lng":-0.07932,"verdict":"The magazines, badges and rubber of British kink history, out on tables for an afternoon."},{"name":"Wild Arts: An Evening of Opera at Barts North Wing","slug":"wild-arts-an-evening-of-opera-at-barts-north-wing","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/st-bartholomews-hospital-museum/wild-arts-an-evening-of-opera-at-barts-north-wing/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-17"},"lat":51.517723,"lng":-0.100474,"verdict":"Handel to Sondheim, semi-staged for four singers and a string quintet in the Great Hall."},{"name":"Wood Engraving Taster Day","slug":"wood-engraving-taster-day","cat":"whats-on","url":"/literary/st-bride-foundation/wood-engraving-taster-day/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-15","to":"2026-09-15"},"lat":51.51342,"lng":-0.10498,"verdict":"A day cutting into end-grain boxwood, in the building that keeps the printing library."},{"name":"Yasuaki Shimizu","slug":"yasuaki-shimizu","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/milton-court-concert-hall/yasuaki-shimizu/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-15","to":"2026-11-15"},"lat":51.520094,"lng":-0.090409,"verdict":"The Japanese saxophonist who recorded the Bach cello suites on a tenor, in a fifty-year sweep."},{"name":"Yeoman Warder tours","slug":"yeoman-warder-tours","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tower-of-london/yeoman-warder-tours/","lat":51.508133,"lng":-0.076286,"verdict":"The Beefeaters' own tour, every 45 minutes, included in the ticket and unbookable."},{"name":"Yuko Mohri: In Concert","slug":"yuko-mohri-in-concert","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/barbican-centre/yuko-mohri-in-concert/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2027-01-24"},"lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"Umbrellas, feather dusters and apples, moved by magnets and humidity, along the Curve."},{"name":"fabric presents Mount Kimbie mix launch","slug":"fabric-presents-mount-kimbie-mix-launch","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/fabric/fabric-presents-mount-kimbie-mix-launch/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-12","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.519608,"lng":-0.102516,"verdict":"A fabric mix launch, eleven till seven."},{"name":"All Hallows-by-the-Tower Crypt Museum","slug":"all-hallows-by-the-tower-crypt-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/all-hallows-by-the-tower-crypt-museum/","lat":51.5094,"lng":-0.0794,"verdict":"The oldest church in the City, with a Saxon arch of Roman brick and a second-century Roman floor in the crypt beneath, free.","thumb":"/img/all-hallows-by-the-tower-crypt-museum-480.jpg?v=04a9da0e","img":"/img/all-hallows-by-the-tower-crypt-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":912},{"name":"Bank of England Museum","slug":"bank-of-england-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/bank-of-england-museum/","lat":51.514197,"lng":-0.08768,"verdict":"Free, and you can pick up a gold bar.","thumb":"/img/bank-of-england-museum-480.jpg?v=56aaef98","img":"/img/bank-of-england-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":835},{"name":"Barbican Centre","slug":"barbican-centre","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/barbican-centre/","lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"The City's concrete arts centre of 1982, concert hall, theatres, cinemas, a gallery and a tropical conservatory, inside an estate worth getting lost in.","thumb":"/img/own-barbican-centre-3-480.jpg?v=8d3a2e35","img":"/img/own-barbican-centre-3.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"British Red Cross Museum and Archives","slug":"british-red-cross-museum-and-archives","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/british-red-cross-museum-and-archives/","deep":true,"lat":51.519238,"lng":-0.088524,"verdict":"History and memorabilia of the British Red Cross."},{"name":"College of Arms","slug":"college-of-arms","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/college-of-arms/","lat":51.512175,"lng":-0.098744,"verdict":"The heralds' own building, with four centuries of arms and pedigrees in the record room.","thumb":"/img/own-college-of-arms-2-480.jpg?v=27e797de","img":"/img/own-college-of-arms-2.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Dennis Severs' House","slug":"dennis-severs-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/dennis-severs-house/","lat":51.520943,"lng":-0.07779,"verdict":"Ten candlelit rooms left as if a family of Huguenot silk weavers had just walked out of them, which they never did, because Dennis Severs invented them.","thumb":"/img/dennis-severs-house-480.jpg?v=6ff10bd4","img":"/img/dennis-severs-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":681},{"name":"Dr Johnson's House","slug":"dr-johnsons-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/dr-johnsons-house/","lat":51.514909,"lng":-0.108166,"verdict":"The garret where the Dictionary was compiled, up a City court.","thumb":"/img/dr-johnsons-house-480.jpg?v=4803f944","img":"/img/dr-johnsons-house.jpg","w":720,"h":1024},{"name":"Fusiliers Museum","slug":"fusiliers-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/fusiliers-museum/","lat":51.508224,"lng":-0.075258,"verdict":"The regiment raised at the Tower in 1685, told inside the Tower itself."},{"name":"Guildhall Art Gallery","slug":"guildhall-art-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/guildhall-art-gallery/","lat":51.515558,"lng":-0.091404,"verdict":"The City's own paintings, free, over the walls of London's Roman amphitheatre, which the builders found underneath.","thumb":"/img/guildhall-art-gallery-480.jpg?v=128a8e7f","img":"/img/guildhall-art-gallery.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"HMS Belfast","slug":"hms-belfast","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/hms-belfast/","lat":51.506563,"lng":-0.081311,"verdict":"A Second World War cruiser kept as she was, nine decks to climb through, moored between the bridges.","thumb":"/img/own-hms-belfast-480.jpg?v=439bec86","img":"/img/own-hms-belfast.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"London Mithraeum","slug":"london-mithraeum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/london-mithraeum/","lat":51.512379,"lng":-0.090676,"verdict":"The Roman temple of Mithras, found in 1954 and put back where it stood seven metres under Bloomberg's building, staged in sound and haze, free.","thumb":"/img/london-mithraeum-480.jpg?v=6648991e","img":"/img/london-mithraeum.jpg","w":1024,"h":678},{"name":"Mansion House","slug":"mansion-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/mansion-house/","deep":true,"lat":51.512973,"lng":-0.089477,"verdict":"Guided tours of the public rooms of the official residence of the Lord Mayor of the City of London, includes city regalia, 17th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings, gold and silver plate collections."},{"name":"St Bartholomew's Hospital Museum","slug":"st-bartholomews-hospital-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/st-bartholomews-hospital-museum/","lat":51.517723,"lng":-0.100474,"verdict":"Nine centuries of one hospital, with Hogarth's staircase on the way in."},{"name":"Tower Bridge","slug":"tower-bridge","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/tower-bridge/","lat":51.505517,"lng":-0.075366,"verdict":"Two towers, the high walkways with a glass floor over the road, and the Victorian machinery that lifted it.","thumb":"/img/own-tower-bridge-480.jpg?v=b557d989","img":"/img/own-tower-bridge.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Tower of London","slug":"tower-of-london","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/tower-of-london/","lat":51.508133,"lng":-0.076286,"verdict":"A Norman fortress that has been a palace, a prison, a mint, a zoo and the strongroom for the Crown Jewels, and is still the last of these.","thumb":"/img/tower-of-london-480.jpg?v=f02693b3","img":"/img/tower-of-london.jpg","w":1024,"h":643},{"name":"Two Temple Place","slug":"two-temple-place","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/two-temple-place/","deep":true,"lat":51.51165,"lng":-0.112284,"verdict":"The estate office William Waldorf Astor built to be safe in, carved with Musketeers, Arthurian heroines and fifty-four gilded heads.","thumb":"/img/two-temple-place-480.jpg?v=6a8862a3","img":"/img/two-temple-place.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Barbican Centre","slug":"barbican-centre","cat":"art","url":"/art/barbican-centre/","lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"The City's concrete arts centre of 1982, concert hall, theatres, cinemas, a gallery and a tropical conservatory, inside an estate worth getting lost in.","thumb":"/img/own-barbican-centre-3-480.jpg?v=8d3a2e35","img":"/img/own-barbican-centre-3.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Broadgate Venus","slug":"broadgate-venus","cat":"art","url":"/art/broadgate-venus/","lat":51.519713,"lng":-0.080458,"verdict":"Fernando Botero's reclining bronze woman, five tons of her, in Exchange Square.","thumb":"/img/broadgate-venus-480.jpg?v=26d4e2d1","img":"/img/broadgate-venus.jpg","w":1024,"h":576},{"name":"Fulcrum","slug":"fulcrum","cat":"art","url":"/art/fulcrum/","lat":51.518273,"lng":-0.083828,"verdict":"Richard Serra's five leaning slabs of steel at the Liverpool Street entrance to Broadgate.","thumb":"/img/fulcrum-480.jpg?v=5be3fe99","img":"/img/fulcrum.jpg","w":780,"h":1024},{"name":"Girl with a Dolphin","slug":"girl-with-a-dolphin","cat":"art","url":"/art/girl-with-a-dolphin/","lat":51.506244,"lng":-0.073736,"verdict":"David Wynne's girl and dolphin leaping over a fountain beside Tower Bridge.","thumb":"/img/girl-with-a-dolphin-480.jpg?v=7edd7514","img":"/img/girl-with-a-dolphin.jpg","w":677,"h":1024},{"name":"Golden Boy of Pye Corner","slug":"golden-boy-of-pye-corner","cat":"art","url":"/art/golden-boy-of-pye-corner/","lat":51.517244,"lng":-0.101586,"verdict":"A small gilded boy high on a corner, marking where the Great Fire stopped and blaming it on gluttony.","thumb":"/img/golden-boy-of-pye-corner-480.jpg?v=a039d355","img":"/img/golden-boy-of-pye-corner.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Guildhall Art Gallery","slug":"guildhall-art-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/guildhall-art-gallery/","lat":51.515558,"lng":-0.091404,"verdict":"The City's own paintings, free, over the walls of London's Roman amphitheatre, which the builders found underneath.","thumb":"/img/guildhall-art-gallery-480.jpg?v=128a8e7f","img":"/img/guildhall-art-gallery.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Rush Hour","slug":"rush-hour","cat":"art","url":"/art/rush-hour/","lat":51.519286,"lng":-0.084674,"verdict":"George Segal's six bronze commuters walking nowhere, outside Broadgate's offices.","thumb":"/img/rush-hour-480.jpg?v=e354a031","img":"/img/rush-hour.jpg","w":1024,"h":706},{"name":"Shepherd and Sheep","slug":"shepherd-and-sheep","cat":"art","url":"/art/shepherd-and-sheep/","lat":51.514646,"lng":-0.098913,"verdict":"Elisabeth Frink's shepherd and his flock in Paternoster Square, under the dome of St Paul's.","thumb":"/img/shepherd-and-sheep-480.jpg?v=90977402","img":"/img/shepherd-and-sheep.jpg","w":1024,"h":600},{"name":"Two Temple Place","slug":"two-temple-place","cat":"art","url":"/art/two-temple-place/","lat":51.51165,"lng":-0.112284,"verdict":"A Thames-side mansion built for William Waldorf Astor, opened once a year for an exhibition drawn from Britain's regional collections.","thumb":"/img/two-temple-place-480.jpg?v=6a8862a3","img":"/img/two-temple-place.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Barbican Centre","slug":"barbican-centre","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/barbican-centre/","lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"The concert hall at the centre of the Barbican, and the London Symphony Orchestra's home.","thumb":"/img/own-barbican-centre-3-480.jpg?v=8d3a2e35","img":"/img/own-barbican-centre-3.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Milton Court Concert Hall","slug":"milton-court-concert-hall","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/milton-court-concert-hall/","lat":51.520094,"lng":-0.090409,"verdict":"The Guildhall School's own hall, where the players are conservatoire students and the seats cost a few pounds."},{"name":"St Paul's Cathedral","slug":"st-pauls-cathedral","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/st-pauls-cathedral/","lat":51.513785,"lng":-0.098436,"verdict":"Choral evensong under the dome, sung by the cathedral choir most afternoons, free and unticketed.","thumb":"/img/st-pauls-wedding-1981-480.jpg?v=09bb1dd5","img":"/img/st-pauls-wedding-1981.jpg","w":1024,"h":1563},{"name":"Temple Church","slug":"temple-church","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/temple-church/","lat":51.513259,"lng":-0.110263,"verdict":"The round church of the Knights Templar, with a choir of professional singers and one of the great English organs.","thumb":"/img/temple-church-480.jpg?v=f15f7b51","img":"/img/temple-church.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"fabric","slug":"fabric","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/fabric/","lat":51.519608,"lng":-0.102516,"verdict":"Three rooms in a Smithfield cold store, and a dancefloor that plays through your feet."},{"name":"Twinings","slug":"twinings","cat":"shopping","url":"/shopping/twinings/","lat":51.513267,"lng":-0.112842,"verdict":"The oldest tea shop in London, nine feet wide, on the site Thomas Twining took in 1706.","thumb":"/img/twinings-480.jpg?v=5fb21d4f","img":"/img/twinings.jpg","w":708,"h":1024},{"name":"Postman's Park","slug":"postmans-park","cat":"outdoors","url":"/outdoors/postmans-park/","lat":51.5168,"lng":-0.0977,"verdict":"A small garden on the churchyards of three City churches, named for the postmen who ate their lunch in it, with Watts's memorial to ordinary heroes along one wall."},{"name":"% Arabica","slug":"arabica-spitalfields","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/arabica-spitalfields/","lat":51.519435,"lng":-0.077179,"verdict":"A kiosk whose doors shut into the % logo."},{"name":"Alchemy","slug":"alchemy","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/alchemy/","lat":51.513413,"lng":-0.102574,"verdict":"The Wimbledon roaster's own bar, with up to five coffees on any given day."},{"name":"Association Coffee","slug":"association-coffee","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/association-coffee/","lat":51.513631,"lng":-0.07908,"verdict":"A City brew bar pouring a different roaster most weeks, and staff who want to talk about it."},{"name":"Attendant","slug":"attendant","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/attendant/","lat":51.52127,"lng":-0.078922,"verdict":"The Folgate Street room, from the people who put a caf\u00e9 in a Victorian gents."},{"name":"Curators Coffee","slug":"curators-coffee","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/curators-coffee/","lat":51.512079,"lng":-0.082507,"verdict":"A Cullum Street counter for the City lunch hour."},{"name":"Department of Coffee and Social Affairs","slug":"department-of-coffee-and-social-affairs","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/department-of-coffee-and-social-affairs/","lat":51.514847,"lng":-0.073493,"verdict":"Whitechapel High Street, open late by City standards."},{"name":"Old Spike","slug":"old-spike","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/old-spike/","lat":51.516036,"lng":-0.108396,"verdict":"Great New Street, and a late starter by City standards."},{"name":"Ozone Coffee","slug":"ozone-coffee","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/ozone-coffee/","lat":51.514262,"lng":-0.102968,"verdict":"Ozone on Ludgate Hill, built for the nine-to-five."},{"name":"Redemption Roasters","slug":"redemption-roasters-broadgate","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/redemption-roasters-broadgate/","lat":51.51912,"lng":-0.083923,"verdict":"A Broadgate counter funding a barista academy for prison leavers."},{"name":"Rosslyn Coffee","slug":"rosslyn","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/rosslyn/","lat":51.517687,"lng":-0.088974,"verdict":"Half six on London Wall, and sweetness rather than acidity."},{"name":"Rosslyn Coffee","slug":"rosslyn-bank","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/rosslyn-bank/","lat":51.513896,"lng":-0.086732,"verdict":"Under the Royal Exchange colonnade, and quicker than the address suggests."},{"name":"Rosslyn Coffee","slug":"rosslyn-cannon-street","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/rosslyn-cannon-street/","lat":51.510984,"lng":-0.087454,"verdict":"The Cannon Street counter, for the coffee before the train rather than after."},{"name":"Rosslyn Coffee","slug":"rosslyn-cheapside","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/rosslyn-cheapside/","lat":51.51393,"lng":-0.09395,"verdict":"Cheapside, in sight of St Paul's, and open at the weekend."},{"name":"Rosslyn Coffee","slug":"rosslyn-city","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/rosslyn-city/","lat":51.512579,"lng":-0.093437,"verdict":"Queen Victoria Street, and the one Rosslyn that opens on a Saturday morning."},{"name":"Rosslyn Coffee","slug":"rosslyn-fenchurch-street","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/rosslyn-fenchurch-street/","lat":51.51207,"lng":-0.0797,"verdict":"Deep in insurance country, and better than the postcode suggests."},{"name":"Rosslyn Coffee","slug":"rosslyn-leadenhall-market","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/rosslyn-leadenhall-market/","lat":51.512197,"lng":-0.083334,"verdict":"Under the painted ironwork of Leadenhall Market."},{"name":"Rosslyn Coffee","slug":"rosslyn-liverpool-street","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/rosslyn-liverpool-street/","lat":51.51735,"lng":-0.083,"verdict":"A minute from the Liverpool Street barriers, open before the commute."},{"name":"Rosslyn Coffee","slug":"rosslyn-ludgate-circus","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/rosslyn-ludgate-circus/","lat":51.514339,"lng":-0.104696,"verdict":"The western edge of the City, and open on a Saturday."},{"name":"Rosslyn Coffee","slug":"rosslyn-tower-42","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/rosslyn-tower-42/","lat":51.515204,"lng":-0.083929,"verdict":"In the foot of Tower 42, which is not where you expect to find it."},{"name":"Store Street Espresso","slug":"store-street-espresso-broadgate","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/store-street-espresso-broadgate/","lat":51.518535,"lng":-0.079325,"verdict":"Red Brick espresso, served at Liverpool Street pace."},{"name":"The Wren Coffee","slug":"the-wren-coffee","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/the-wren-coffee/","lat":51.512091,"lng":-0.096978,"verdict":"Coffee inside a Christopher Wren church, a minute from St Paul's."},{"name":"Urban Baristas","slug":"urban-baristas-aldgate","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/urban-baristas-aldgate/","lat":51.516273,"lng":-0.076776,"verdict":"Australian habits at Aldgate speed."},{"name":"WatchHouse","slug":"watchhouse-bishopsgate","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/watchhouse-bishopsgate/","lat":51.515436,"lng":-0.079088,"verdict":"City WatchHouse: precise, quick, and shut by Saturday."},{"name":"Aux Merveilleux de Fred Leadenhall","slug":"aux-merveilleux-de-fred-leadenhall","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/aux-merveilleux-de-fred-leadenhall/","lat":51.51279,"lng":-0.08356,"verdict":"Cream and meringue under the painted ironwork of Leadenhall Market."},{"name":"Konditor","slug":"konditor-cullum-street","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/konditor-cullum-street/","lat":51.511789,"lng":-0.082132,"verdict":"A City lunch-hour stop that has packed up before the weekend begins."},{"name":"Crosstown Cannon Street","slug":"crosstown-cannon-street","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/crosstown-cannon-street/","lat":51.511565,"lng":-0.08904,"verdict":"Sourdough doughnuts opposite Cannon Street station."},{"name":"Darlish Spitalfields","slug":"darlish-spitalfields","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/darlish-spitalfields/","lat":51.518857,"lng":-0.078896,"verdict":"Persian ice cream and baklava sandwiches, facing Old Spitalfields Market."},{"name":"Longboys Liverpool Street","slug":"longboys-liverpool-street","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/longboys-liverpool-street/","lat":51.51716,"lng":-0.081799,"verdict":"Foot-long eclairs by Liverpool Street, piped when you order."},{"name":"Duck & Waffle","slug":"duck-waffle","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/duck-waffle/","lat":51.516209,"lng":-0.081045,"verdict":"Breakfast on the fortieth floor, at whatever hour you want it."},{"name":"Ozone Coffee","slug":"ozone-coffee","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/ozone-coffee/","lat":51.514262,"lng":-0.102968,"verdict":"A weekday room on Ludgate Hill, in the shadow of St Paul's."},{"name":"Eataly","slug":"eataly","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/eataly/","lat":51.518741,"lng":-0.080115,"verdict":"Two thousand wine labels, and mozzarella pulled in front of you on a Saturday."},{"name":"Leadenhall Market","slug":"leadenhall-market","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/leadenhall-market/","lat":51.512729,"lng":-0.083569,"verdict":"Cream and maroon Victorian ironwork, and a City lunch underneath it.","thumb":"/img/leadenhall-market-480.jpg?v=fe33070c","img":"/img/leadenhall-market.jpg","w":1024,"h":693},{"name":"Petticoat Lane Market","slug":"petticoat-lane-market","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/petticoat-lane-market/","lat":51.5179281,"lng":-0.0790292,"verdict":"London's oldest clothes market on Sunday mornings, and a weekday street-food court on Wentworth Street the rest of the week."},{"name":"Discount Suit Company","slug":"discount-suit-company","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/discount-suit-company/","lat":51.516777,"lng":-0.075448,"verdict":"A narrow basement in a former tailor's stockroom."},{"name":"Merchant House","slug":"merchant-house","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/merchant-house/","lat":51.513331,"lng":-0.092854,"verdict":"Over a thousand bottles of gin, rum and whisky, in three cellars off Bow Lane."},{"name":"Queen of Hoxton","slug":"queen-of-hoxton","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/queen-of-hoxton/","lat":51.522151,"lng":-0.081134,"verdict":"A rooftop that gets a new theme every season, over a Shoreditch basement."},{"name":"Uncorked","slug":"uncorked","cat":"wine","url":"/wine/uncorked/","lat":51.516645,"lng":-0.08768,"verdict":"A City basement stacked with claret, hidden under Copthall Avenue."},{"name":"College of Arms","slug":"college-of-arms","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/college-of-arms/","lat":51.512175,"lng":-0.098744,"verdict":"Where the Crown's heralds work, and where a coat of arms is still granted in the sovereign's name.","thumb":"/img/own-college-of-arms-2-480.jpg?v=27e797de","img":"/img/own-college-of-arms-2.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"St Paul's Cathedral","slug":"st-pauls-cathedral","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/st-pauls-cathedral/","lat":51.513785,"lng":-0.098436,"verdict":"Charles and Diana married here in 1981, watched by 750 million people on television, and the Queen came here for a service at each of her jubilees.","thumb":"/img/st-pauls-wedding-1981-480.jpg?v=09bb1dd5","img":"/img/st-pauls-wedding-1981.jpg","w":1024,"h":1563},{"name":"Tower of London","slug":"tower-of-london","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/tower-of-london/","lat":51.508133,"lng":-0.076286,"verdict":"The Crown Jewels: St Edward's Crown that was put on Elizabeth II in 1953 and Charles III in 2023, in the fortress that has kept them since 1661.","thumb":"/img/tower-of-london-480.jpg?v=f02693b3","img":"/img/tower-of-london.jpg","w":1024,"h":643},{"name":"Bank of England Museum","slug":"bank-of-england-museum","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/bank-of-england-museum/","lat":51.514197,"lng":-0.08768,"verdict":"The bank invented in 1694 so that the government could borrow enough to fight France.","thumb":"/img/bank-of-england-museum-480.jpg?v=56aaef98","img":"/img/bank-of-england-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":835},{"name":"College of Arms","slug":"college-of-arms","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/college-of-arms/","lat":51.512175,"lng":-0.098744,"verdict":"The office that decides who ranks where, run by a hereditary Great Officer of State.","thumb":"/img/own-college-of-arms-2-480.jpg?v=27e797de","img":"/img/own-college-of-arms-2.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Goldsmiths' Hall","slug":"goldsmiths-hall","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/goldsmiths-hall/","lat":51.515711,"lng":-0.095875,"verdict":"A medieval guild that lost its monopoly, kept its hall, and still helps choose the Lord Mayor.","thumb":"/img/goldsmiths-hall-480.jpg?v=d5f8cddc","img":"/img/goldsmiths-hall.jpg","w":1024,"h":488},{"name":"Gray's Inn","slug":"grays-inn","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/grays-inn/","lat":51.519074,"lng":-0.112202,"verdict":"Bacon's garden, Shakespeare's first Comedy of Errors, and a hall rebuilt after one night of the Blitz.","thumb":"/img/grays-inn-480.jpg?v=71e59de7","img":"/img/grays-inn.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Guildhall","slug":"guildhall","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/guildhall/","lat":51.515906,"lng":-0.091992,"verdict":"The hall of a city government that bargained with kings, standing on a Roman amphitheatre.","thumb":"/img/guildhall-480.jpg?v=71cfff2a","img":"/img/guildhall.jpg","w":1024,"h":741},{"name":"Inner Temple","slug":"inner-temple","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/inner-temple/","lat":51.512821,"lng":-0.110169,"verdict":"The Templars' ground, held by lawyers since 1388 on terms James I set in 1608."},{"name":"Lincoln's Inn","slug":"lincolns-inn","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/lincolns-inn/","lat":51.516616,"lng":-0.113097,"verdict":"The Inn with the oldest records of the four, and the hall where Bleak House opens in fog.","thumb":"/img/lincolns-inn-480.jpg?v=b383a3a6","img":"/img/lincolns-inn.jpg","w":1024,"h":734},{"name":"Mansion House","slug":"mansion-house","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/mansion-house/","lat":51.512973,"lng":-0.089477,"verdict":"The house the City built when it decided its Lord Mayor deserved a palace."},{"name":"Middle Temple","slug":"middle-temple-hall","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/middle-temple-hall/","lat":51.51237,"lng":-0.11146,"verdict":"One of the four medieval societies that still decide who may call themselves a barrister.","thumb":"/img/middle-temple-hall-480.jpg?v=0e8bd0b8","img":"/img/middle-temple-hall.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Old Bailey","slug":"old-bailey","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/old-bailey/","lat":51.515481,"lng":-0.101739,"verdict":"The Central Criminal Court, built over the prison that supplied it.","thumb":"/img/old-bailey-480.jpg?v=b2838a45","img":"/img/old-bailey.jpg","w":523,"h":900},{"name":"Royal Courts of Justice","slug":"royal-courts-of-justice","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/royal-courts-of-justice/","lat":51.514222,"lng":-0.113041,"verdict":"The civil courts of England, given a Gothic palace on the Strand.","thumb":"/img/royal-courts-of-justice-480.jpg?v=a9a42b57","img":"/img/royal-courts-of-justice.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Sir William Wallace Memorial","slug":"sir-william-wallace-memorial","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/sir-william-wallace-memorial/","lat":51.518274,"lng":-0.100374,"verdict":"The man who led Scotland's revolt against English rule was executed on this spot in 1305.","thumb":"/img/sir-william-wallace-memorial-480.jpg?v=5c58e80c","img":"/img/sir-william-wallace-memorial.jpg","w":1024,"h":576},{"name":"Site of East India House","slug":"site-of-east-india-house","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/site-of-east-india-house/","lat":51.51305,"lng":-0.08215,"verdict":"London's most consequential vanished office: the company that ruled India from Leadenhall Street."},{"name":"Statue of John Wilkes","slug":"statue-of-john-wilkes","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/statue-of-john-wilkes/","lat":51.515868,"lng":-0.10924,"verdict":"The rabble-rouser who won the right to report Parliament, cast cross-eyed as he really was.","thumb":"/img/statue-of-john-wilkes-480.jpg?v=b836145d","img":"/img/statue-of-john-wilkes.jpg","w":771,"h":1024},{"name":"Tower of London","slug":"tower-of-london","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/tower-of-london/","lat":51.508133,"lng":-0.076286,"verdict":"A fortress of occupation, holding regalia that Parliament once melted down.","thumb":"/img/tower-of-london-480.jpg?v=f02693b3","img":"/img/tower-of-london.jpg","w":1024,"h":643},{"name":"All Hallows-by-the-Tower Crypt Museum","slug":"all-hallows-by-the-tower-crypt-museum","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/all-hallows-by-the-tower-crypt-museum/","lat":51.5094,"lng":-0.0794,"verdict":"The oldest church in the City, with a Saxon arch of Roman brick and a second-century Roman floor in the crypt beneath, free.","thumb":"/img/all-hallows-by-the-tower-crypt-museum-480.jpg?v=04a9da0e","img":"/img/all-hallows-by-the-tower-crypt-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":912},{"name":"Bevis Marks Synagogue","slug":"bevis-marks-synagogue","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/bevis-marks-synagogue/","lat":51.514493,"lng":-0.078948,"verdict":"Britain's oldest synagogue, in use since 1701 and still lit by candle for services.","thumb":"/img/bevis-marks-synagogue-480.jpg?v=fbaaabbc","img":"/img/bevis-marks-synagogue.jpg","w":640,"h":466},{"name":"London Mithraeum","slug":"london-mithraeum","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/london-mithraeum/","lat":51.512379,"lng":-0.090676,"verdict":"A temple to Mithras, sunk into the ground because his worship belonged in a cave.","thumb":"/img/london-mithraeum-480.jpg?v=6648991e","img":"/img/london-mithraeum.jpg","w":1024,"h":678},{"name":"Sandys Row Synagogue","slug":"sandys-row-synagogue","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/sandys-row-synagogue/","lat":51.518519,"lng":-0.07772,"verdict":"The oldest Ashkenazi synagogue in London still in use, inside a Huguenot chapel of 1766.","thumb":"/img/sandys-row-synagogue-480.jpg?v=c0c07ad0","img":"/img/sandys-row-synagogue.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"St Bartholomew the Great","slug":"st-bartholomew-the-great","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/st-bartholomew-the-great/","lat":51.518892,"lng":-0.099408,"verdict":"London's oldest parish church: Norman, dim, and the one film crews use when they need the Middle Ages.","thumb":"/img/own-st-bartholomew-the-great-480.jpg?v=510ddfdd","img":"/img/own-st-bartholomew-the-great.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"St Bride's Fleet Street","slug":"st-brides-fleet-street","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/st-brides-fleet-street/","lat":51.513776,"lng":-0.105504,"verdict":"The printers' and journalists' church, under the tiered spire that invented the wedding cake.","thumb":"/img/st-brides-fleet-street-480.jpg?v=5ae620bd","img":"/img/st-brides-fleet-street.jpg","w":771,"h":1024},{"name":"St Etheldreda's","slug":"st-etheldredas","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/st-etheldredas/","lat":51.518643,"lng":-0.1074,"verdict":"The chapel of the medieval Bishops of Ely, built in the 1280s, and the oldest Catholic church in England still in use.","thumb":"/img/st-etheldredas-480.jpg?v=dddc4b77","img":"/img/st-etheldredas.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"St Giles-without-Cripplegate","slug":"st-giles-without-cripplegate","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/st-giles-without-cripplegate/","lat":51.518689,"lng":-0.093853,"verdict":"Milton's burial place, a medieval church left standing in the middle of the Barbican.","thumb":"/img/st-giles-without-cripplegate-480.jpg?v=62af44b9","img":"/img/st-giles-without-cripplegate.jpg","w":683,"h":1024},{"name":"St Mary Woolnoth","slug":"st-mary-woolnoth","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/st-mary-woolnoth/","lat":51.512764,"lng":-0.088014,"verdict":"Hawksmoor's only City church, squat and strange on Lombard Street, with Bank station dug out beneath it and a slave captain's pulpit inside.","thumb":"/img/st-mary-woolnoth-480.jpg?v=3a82dfd6","img":"/img/st-mary-woolnoth.jpg","w":711,"h":1024},{"name":"St Mary-le-Bow","slug":"st-mary-le-bow","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/st-mary-le-bow/","lat":51.513748,"lng":-0.093546,"verdict":"The church of the Bow Bells, within whose sound a true Cockney is born.","thumb":"/img/own-st-mary-le-bow-480.jpg?v=f03f767c","img":"/img/own-st-mary-le-bow.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"St Olave Hart Street","slug":"st-olave-hart-street","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/st-olave-hart-street/","lat":51.510898,"lng":-0.079471,"verdict":"Pepys's own church, where he and his wife are buried and where he watched the plague fill the churchyard.","thumb":"/img/st-olave-hart-street-480.jpg?v=ea265bf4","img":"/img/st-olave-hart-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":809},{"name":"St Paul's Cathedral","slug":"st-pauls-cathedral","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/st-pauls-cathedral/","lat":51.513785,"lng":-0.098436,"verdict":"Wren's dome, and the whole of the City arranged around it for three hundred years.","thumb":"/img/st-pauls-wedding-1981-480.jpg?v=09bb1dd5","img":"/img/st-pauls-wedding-1981.jpg","w":1024,"h":1563},{"name":"St Stephen Walbrook","slug":"st-stephen-walbrook","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/st-stephen-walbrook/","lat":51.512621,"lng":-0.089829,"verdict":"Wren's rehearsal for the dome of St Paul's, with a Henry Moore altar under the middle of it.","thumb":"/img/st-stephen-walbrook-480.jpg?v=833c863b","img":"/img/st-stephen-walbrook.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Temple Church","slug":"temple-church","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/temple-church/","lat":51.513259,"lng":-0.110263,"verdict":"The Knights Templar's round church of 1185, with stone knights lying on the floor of it.","thumb":"/img/temple-church-480.jpg?v=f15f7b51","img":"/img/temple-church.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Bow Lane","slug":"bow-lane","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/bow-lane/","lat":51.513176,"lng":-0.093477,"verdict":"A medieval alley in the City with a Wren church at each end and two old pubs off it.","thumb":"/img/bow-lane-480.jpg?v=a61dde14","img":"/img/bow-lane.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Gough Square","slug":"gough-square","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/gough-square/","lat":51.51507,"lng":-0.107557,"verdict":"A cobbled courtyard off Fleet Street with Dr Johnson's house on the far side of it.","thumb":"/img/street-gough-square-480.jpg?v=f32c1c0f","img":"/img/street-gough-square.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Lakeside Terrace","slug":"lakeside-terrace","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/lakeside-terrace/","lat":51.519561,"lng":-0.093784,"verdict":"The Barbican's water terrace: concrete, fountains and a lake with the towers standing over it.","thumb":"/img/street-lakeside-terrace-480.jpg?v=cb212226","img":"/img/street-lakeside-terrace.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Lincoln's Inn","slug":"lincolns-inn","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/lincolns-inn/","lat":51.516616,"lng":-0.113097,"verdict":"Gatehouse, chapel and hall round two courts and a lawn, in the middle of legal London.","thumb":"/img/street-lincolns-inn-480.jpg?v=4689c62e","img":"/img/street-lincolns-inn.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Paternoster Square","slug":"paternoster-square","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/paternoster-square/","lat":51.514584,"lng":-0.099226,"verdict":"A modern square beside St Paul's, entered through Wren's Temple Bar.","thumb":"/img/street-paternoster-square-480.jpg?v=332216e2","img":"/img/street-paternoster-square.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"30 St Mary Axe","slug":"30-st-mary-axe","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/30-st-mary-axe/","lat":51.514475,"lng":-0.080333,"verdict":"The Gherkin: forty-one floors of curved glass, and only one pane of it is actually curved.","thumb":"/img/30-st-mary-axe-480.jpg?v=0b1ab0e7","img":"/img/30-st-mary-axe.jpg","w":747,"h":1024},{"name":"Barbican Centre","slug":"barbican-centre","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/barbican-centre/","lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"Thirty-five acres of concrete, water and planting, built on ground the Blitz had cleared.","thumb":"/img/own-barbican-centre-3-480.jpg?v=8d3a2e35","img":"/img/own-barbican-centre-3.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Daily Express Building","slug":"daily-express-building","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/daily-express-building/","lat":51.514392,"lng":-0.105907,"verdict":"Black glass and chrome on Fleet Street, with a lobby that has to be seen to be believed.","thumb":"/img/daily-express-building-480.jpg?v=668f187f","img":"/img/daily-express-building.jpg","w":685,"h":1024},{"name":"Golden Lane Estate","slug":"golden-lane-estate","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/golden-lane-estate/","lat":51.522466,"lng":-0.096075,"verdict":"The council estate that won Chamberlin, Powell and Bon the Barbican: 1950s flats around courts, a yellow tower with a curled roof, and a swimming pool, still lived in.","thumb":"/img/golden-lane-estate-480.jpg?v=4de31a36","img":"/img/golden-lane-estate.jpg","w":480,"h":640},{"name":"Lloyd's of London","slug":"lloyds-of-london","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/lloyds-of-london/","lat":51.512964,"lng":-0.082426,"verdict":"The building turned inside out: lifts, ducts and lavatories bolted to the outside so the inside can be changed.","thumb":"/img/lloyds-of-london-480.jpg?v=e4fe06be","img":"/img/lloyds-of-london.jpg","w":683,"h":1024},{"name":"Royal Exchange","slug":"royal-exchange","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/royal-exchange/","lat":51.513655,"lng":-0.087196,"verdict":"The third exchange on the site, with a golden grasshopper on the roof and a courtyard you can walk into.","thumb":"/img/own-royal-exchange-480.jpg?v=cd0b3b73","img":"/img/own-royal-exchange.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"The Blackfriar","slug":"the-blackfriar","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/the-blackfriar/","lat":51.512152,"lng":-0.103656,"verdict":"A wedge-shaped pub of 1875 fitted out in marble and bronze with jolly monks doing the moralising.","thumb":"/img/the-blackfriar-480.jpg?v=3c5160b4","img":"/img/the-blackfriar.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Aldgate Pump","slug":"aldgate-pump","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/aldgate-pump/","lat":51.51312,"lng":-0.07794,"verdict":"The pump of death, at the point where the City ends and the East End begins.","thumb":"/img/aldgate-pump-480.jpg?v=f2ccecdc","img":"/img/aldgate-pump.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"All Hallows Staining","slug":"all-hallows-staining","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/all-hallows-staining/","lat":51.511509,"lng":-0.080342,"verdict":"A tower of about 1320, and the only part of its church that did not fall down.","thumb":"/img/all-hallows-staining-480.jpg?v=80b44a50","img":"/img/all-hallows-staining.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Barbican bastions","slug":"barbican-bastions","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/barbican-bastions/","lat":51.518558,"lng":-0.094592,"verdict":"Medieval bastions on the Roman line, standing in the Barbican's ornamental lake.","thumb":"/img/barbican-bastions-480.jpg?v=a966e70a","img":"/img/barbican-bastions.jpg","w":1024,"h":769},{"name":"Billingsgate Roman House and Baths","slug":"billingsgate-roman-house-and-baths","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/billingsgate-roman-house-and-baths/","lat":51.509264,"lng":-0.083094,"verdict":"A Roman townhouse and its bathhouse, complete with underfloor heating, in an office basement.","thumb":"/img/billingsgate-roman-house-and-baths-480.jpg?v=c44fe8d8","img":"/img/billingsgate-roman-house-and-baths.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Christ Church Greyfriars","slug":"christ-church-greyfriars","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/christ-church-greyfriars/","lat":51.515861,"lng":-0.099013,"verdict":"A Wren church's footprint kept as a rose garden, with the pews marked out in box hedge.","thumb":"/img/christ-church-greyfriars-480.jpg?v=c5e449d3","img":"/img/christ-church-greyfriars.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"City Wall at Vine Street","slug":"city-wall-at-vine-street","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/city-wall-at-vine-street/","lat":51.512395,"lng":-0.076408,"verdict":"A stretch of wall and the only Roman bastion foundations on show in London, under a student block, free.","thumb":"/img/city-wall-at-vine-street-480.jpg?v=39d06232","img":"/img/city-wall-at-vine-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Golden Boy of Pye Corner","slug":"golden-boy-of-pye-corner","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/golden-boy-of-pye-corner/","lat":51.517244,"lng":-0.101586,"verdict":"A small gilded boy high on a corner, marking where the Great Fire stopped and blaming it on gluttony.","thumb":"/img/golden-boy-of-pye-corner-480.jpg?v=a039d355","img":"/img/golden-boy-of-pye-corner.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Guildhall Roman Amphitheatre","slug":"guildhall-roman-amphitheatre","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/guildhall-roman-amphitheatre/","lat":51.515591,"lng":-0.092084,"verdict":"Londinium's amphitheatre, found by accident in 1988, with its full oval traced in the paving of the yard above it.","thumb":"/img/guildhall-roman-amphitheatre-480.jpg?v=11c257c4","img":"/img/guildhall-roman-amphitheatre.jpg","w":1024,"h":802},{"name":"London Mithraeum","slug":"london-mithraeum","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/london-mithraeum/","lat":51.512379,"lng":-0.090676,"verdict":"The Roman temple of Mithras, found in 1954 and put back where it stood seven metres under Bloomberg's building, staged in sound and haze, free.","thumb":"/img/london-mithraeum-480.jpg?v=6648991e","img":"/img/london-mithraeum.jpg","w":1024,"h":678},{"name":"London Stone","slug":"london-stone","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/london-stone/","lat":51.511556,"lng":-0.089463,"verdict":"A lump of limestone in a wall on Cannon Street, older than any record of it.","thumb":"/img/london-stone-480.jpg?v=31f10cb2","img":"/img/london-stone.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"London Wall at Cooper's Row","slug":"london-wall-at-coopers-row","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/london-wall-at-coopers-row/","lat":51.510561,"lng":-0.07617,"verdict":"Roman below, medieval above, arrow loops and all, in a hotel courtyard.","thumb":"/img/london-wall-at-coopers-row-480.jpg?v=30f4a4eb","img":"/img/london-wall-at-coopers-row.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"London Wall at St Alphage","slug":"london-wall-at-st-alphage","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/london-wall-at-st-alphage/","lat":51.518007,"lng":-0.09246,"verdict":"The wall with its fifteenth-century brick battlements, seen from a raised walkway.","thumb":"/img/london-wall-at-st-alphage-480.jpg?v=e3b3245b","img":"/img/london-wall-at-st-alphage.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"London Wall at Tower Hill","slug":"london-wall-at-tower-hill","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/london-wall-at-tower-hill/","lat":51.509908,"lng":-0.076,"verdict":"The tallest piece of Roman London still standing, with a Roman emperor looking at it.","thumb":"/img/own-london-wall-480.jpg?v=73371918","img":"/img/own-london-wall.jpg","w":1000,"h":1024},{"name":"Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice","slug":"memorial-to-heroic-self-sacrifice","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/memorial-to-heroic-self-sacrifice/","lat":51.516885,"lng":-0.097856,"verdict":"G.F. Watts's wall of ceramic tablets to ordinary Londoners who died saving others, under a loggia in Postman's Park.","thumb":"/img/memorial-to-heroic-self-sacrifice-480.jpg?v=b0c8d84d","img":"/img/memorial-to-heroic-self-sacrifice.jpg","w":1024,"h":687},{"name":"Roman fort at Noble Street","slug":"roman-fort-at-noble-street","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/roman-fort-at-noble-street/","lat":51.516902,"lng":-0.095756,"verdict":"The corner of a Roman fort that is older than the wall, laid open by the Blitz.","thumb":"/img/roman-fort-at-noble-street-480.jpg?v=ace22e36","img":"/img/roman-fort-at-noble-street.jpg","w":699,"h":1024},{"name":"St Alban's Tower, Wood Street","slug":"st-albans-tower-wood-street","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/st-albans-tower-wood-street/","lat":51.516612,"lng":-0.09408,"verdict":"Wren in Gothic, marooned on an island in the middle of the carriageway with its church gone.","thumb":"/img/st-albans-tower-wood-street-480.jpg?v=c7a16798","img":"/img/st-albans-tower-wood-street.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"St Bartholomew's Gatehouse","slug":"st-bartholomews-gatehouse","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/st-bartholomews-gatehouse/","lat":51.518526,"lng":-0.100166,"verdict":"A thirteenth-century church door with a Tudor house on top, found under the plaster by a Zeppelin.","thumb":"/img/own-st-bartholomews-gatehouse-480.jpg?v=469d19e1","img":"/img/own-st-bartholomews-gatehouse.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"St Dunstan-in-the-East","slug":"st-dunstan-in-the-east","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/st-dunstan-in-the-east/","lat":51.509681,"lng":-0.082514,"verdict":"A bombed church left as a garden, with trees growing through the Gothic windows.","thumb":"/img/st-dunstan-in-the-east-480.jpg?v=30c24069","img":"/img/st-dunstan-in-the-east.jpg","w":683,"h":1024},{"name":"St Mary Aldermanbury Garden","slug":"st-mary-aldermanbury-garden","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/st-mary-aldermanbury-garden/","lat":51.516475,"lng":-0.09299,"verdict":"The footings of a church that was shipped to Missouri, and a monument to the two men who saved Shakespeare.","thumb":"/img/st-mary-aldermanbury-garden-480.jpg?v=039b34a3","img":"/img/st-mary-aldermanbury-garden.jpg","w":1024,"h":769},{"name":"Temple Bar","slug":"temple-bar","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/temple-bar/","lat":51.514258,"lng":-0.099511,"verdict":"The only surviving gateway into the City, back after a century in a field in Hertfordshire.","thumb":"/img/temple-bar-480.jpg?v=d9be6b78","img":"/img/temple-bar.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"The Monument","slug":"the-monument","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/the-monument/","lat":51.510142,"lng":-0.085949,"verdict":"Wren's column to the Great Fire, 311 steps up, and secretly a scientific instrument.","thumb":"/img/the-monument-480.jpg?v=821ecb89","img":"/img/the-monument.jpg","w":680,"h":1024},{"name":"Tower Hill Memorial","slug":"tower-hill-memorial","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/tower-hill-memorial/","lat":51.509737,"lng":-0.077676,"verdict":"Thirty-six thousand names of merchant seamen with no grave but the sea, beside the spot where the Tower's prisoners were beheaded.","thumb":"/img/own-tower-hill-memorial-480.jpg?v=6432fcd3","img":"/img/own-tower-hill-memorial.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Tower of St Mary Somerset","slug":"tower-of-st-mary-somerset","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/tower-of-st-mary-somerset/","lat":51.511404,"lng":-0.096851,"verdict":"A Wren tower left standing on Upper Thames Street after the church was taken down around it.","thumb":"/img/tower-of-st-mary-somerset-480.jpg?v=4287bc6b","img":"/img/tower-of-st-mary-somerset.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Watts Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice","slug":"watts-memorial-to-heroic-self-sacrifice","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/watts-memorial-to-heroic-self-sacrifice/","lat":51.516885,"lng":-0.097856,"verdict":"Fifty-four ceramic tiles to ordinary people who died saving others, under a wooden shelter in a small park.","thumb":"/img/watts-memorial-to-heroic-self-sacrifice-480.jpg?v=b0c8d84d","img":"/img/watts-memorial-to-heroic-self-sacrifice.jpg","w":1024,"h":687},{"name":"Whitefriars Crypt","slug":"whitefriars-crypt","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/whitefriars-crypt/","lat":51.513109,"lng":-0.10743,"verdict":"A fourteenth-century crypt behind glass at the bottom of an alley off Fleet Street."},{"name":"Fortnum & Mason Royal Exchange","slug":"fortnum-mason-royal-exchange","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/fortnum-mason-royal-exchange/","lat":51.513755,"lng":-0.087074,"verdict":"Fortnum's in the City, under the arcades of the Royal Exchange, with the bar in the courtyard."},{"name":"Royal Exchange","slug":"royal-exchange","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/royal-exchange/","lat":51.513655,"lng":-0.087196,"verdict":"Three centuries of City trading, now a luxury arcade under a colonnade, and free to walk into.","thumb":"/img/own-royal-exchange-480.jpg?v=cd0b3b73","img":"/img/own-royal-exchange.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"The London Silver Vaults","slug":"the-london-silver-vaults","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/the-london-silver-vaults/","lat":51.5172,"lng":-0.112578,"verdict":"Thirty dealers selling silver in a set of underground strongrooms built in 1876 for people's valuables.","thumb":"/img/the-london-silver-vaults-480.jpg?v=1b3185fc","img":"/img/the-london-silver-vaults.jpg","w":1024,"h":681},{"name":"Twinings","slug":"twinings","cat":"classic-british-shops","url":"/classic-british-shops/twinings/","lat":51.513267,"lng":-0.112842,"verdict":"The oldest tea shop in London, nine feet wide, on the site Thomas Twining took in 1706.","thumb":"/img/twinings-480.jpg?v=5fb21d4f","img":"/img/twinings.jpg","w":708,"h":1024},{"name":"HMS Belfast","slug":"hms-belfast","cat":"science","url":"/science/hms-belfast/","lat":51.506563,"lng":-0.081311,"verdict":"A Second World War cruiser kept as she was, nine decks to climb through, moored between the bridges.","thumb":"/img/own-hms-belfast-480.jpg?v=439bec86","img":"/img/own-hms-belfast.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Millennium Bridge","slug":"millennium-bridge","cat":"science","url":"/science/millennium-bridge/","lat":51.509765,"lng":-0.098523,"verdict":"Foster, Arup and Anthony Caro's blade of light across the Thames, and the sway on the opening weekend that shut it for twenty months.","thumb":"/img/own-millennium-bridge-480.jpg?v=16fe07d2","img":"/img/own-millennium-bridge.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"St Bartholomew's Hospital Museum","slug":"st-bartholomews-hospital-museum","cat":"science","url":"/science/st-bartholomews-hospital-museum/","lat":51.517723,"lng":-0.100474,"verdict":"Nine centuries of one hospital, with Hogarth's staircase on the way in."},{"name":"The Monument","slug":"the-monument","cat":"science","url":"/science/the-monument/","lat":51.510142,"lng":-0.085949,"verdict":"Wren's column to the Great Fire, 311 steps up, and secretly a scientific instrument.","thumb":"/img/the-monument-480.jpg?v=821ecb89","img":"/img/the-monument.jpg","w":680,"h":1024},{"name":"Tower Bridge","slug":"tower-bridge","cat":"science","url":"/science/tower-bridge/","lat":51.505517,"lng":-0.075366,"verdict":"The Victorian steam engines that used to raise the bridge, kept in the rooms under the south tower, with a glass floor over the road on the way to them.","thumb":"/img/own-tower-bridge-480.jpg?v=b557d989","img":"/img/own-tower-bridge.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Tower Subway","slug":"tower-subway","cat":"science","url":"/science/tower-subway/","lat":51.508436,"lng":-0.07892,"verdict":"The first tube railway in the world, 1870, under the Thames from Tower Hill: all that is left above ground is a round kiosk by the Tower ticket office.","thumb":"/img/tower-subway-480.jpg?v=4d15b5bb","img":"/img/tower-subway.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Tower of London","slug":"tower-of-london","cat":"secrets","url":"/secrets/tower-of-london/","lat":51.508133,"lng":-0.076286,"verdict":"Where eleven German spies were shot in the first war and Josef Jakobs in the second, the last man executed at the Tower, in a chair in the rifle range.","thumb":"/img/tower-of-london-480.jpg?v=f02693b3","img":"/img/tower-of-london.jpg","w":1024,"h":643},{"name":"Aldgate: Chaucer's rooms over the gate","slug":"aldgate-chaucers-rooms-over-the-gate","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/aldgate-chaucers-rooms-over-the-gate/","lat":51.5137,"lng":-0.0763,"verdict":"Where Chaucer lived for twelve years, in the rooms above the eastern gate of the City, and wrote The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls."},{"name":"Bishopsgate Institute","slug":"bishopsgate-institute","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/bishopsgate-institute/","lat":51.518725,"lng":-0.07932,"verdict":"A free library of London's radicals, protests and everyday lives, in Townsend's 1895 building by Liverpool Street.","thumb":"/img/bishopsgate-institute-480.jpg?v=5652b381","img":"/img/bishopsgate-institute.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Black British Book Festival","slug":"black-british-book-festival","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/black-british-book-festival/","lat":51.519867,"lng":-0.093841,"verdict":"Europe's largest celebration of Black literature: one Sunday at the Barbican with more than eighty authors."},{"name":"Capital Crime","slug":"capital-crime","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/capital-crime/","lat":51.52057,"lng":-0.091233,"verdict":"Three days of crime and thriller writers at the Brewery on Chiswell Street."},{"name":"Dr Johnson's House","slug":"dr-johnsons-house","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/dr-johnsons-house/","lat":51.514909,"lng":-0.108166,"verdict":"Where the Dictionary was made, with the garret the six clerks worked in under the roof.","thumb":"/img/dr-johnsons-house-480.jpg?v=4803f944","img":"/img/dr-johnsons-house.jpg","w":720,"h":1024},{"name":"Guildhall Library","slug":"guildhall-library","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/guildhall-library/","lat":51.516176,"lng":-0.092598,"verdict":"The City's own library of London, from a 1425 bequest, free to anyone who walks in from Aldermanbury.","thumb":"/img/guildhall-library-480.jpg?v=e441d16d","img":"/img/guildhall-library.jpg","w":1024,"h":741},{"name":"Lincoln's Inn","slug":"lincolns-inn","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/lincolns-inn/","lat":51.516616,"lng":-0.113097,"verdict":"The Old Hall where Bleak House opens, in the Inn where Donne and Thomas More were students.","thumb":"/img/lincolns-inn-480.jpg?v=b383a3a6","img":"/img/lincolns-inn.jpg","w":1024,"h":734},{"name":"Middle Temple Hall","slug":"middle-temple-hall","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/middle-temple-hall/","lat":51.51237,"lng":-0.11146,"verdict":"The Elizabethan hall where Twelfth Night was played in February 1602, with its double hammerbeam roof intact.","thumb":"/img/middle-temple-hall-480.jpg?v=0e8bd0b8","img":"/img/middle-temple-hall.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"St Bride Foundation","slug":"st-bride-foundation","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/st-bride-foundation/","lat":51.51342,"lng":-0.10498,"verdict":"Fleet Street's own institute, founded in 1891 for the print trade, with the finest library of printing and typography in Britain."},{"name":"St Giles-without-Cripplegate","slug":"st-giles-without-cripplegate","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/st-giles-without-cripplegate/","lat":51.518689,"lng":-0.093853,"verdict":"Milton's burial place, a medieval church left standing in the middle of the Barbican.","thumb":"/img/st-giles-without-cripplegate-480.jpg?v=62af44b9","img":"/img/st-giles-without-cripplegate.jpg","w":683,"h":1024},{"name":"St Mary Aldermanbury Garden","slug":"st-mary-aldermanbury-garden","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/st-mary-aldermanbury-garden/","lat":51.516475,"lng":-0.09299,"verdict":"The memorial to the two actors who published the First Folio, with a bronze Shakespeare on top.","thumb":"/img/st-mary-aldermanbury-garden-480.jpg?v=039b34a3","img":"/img/st-mary-aldermanbury-garden.jpg","w":1024,"h":769},{"name":"St Olave Hart Street","slug":"st-olave-hart-street","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/st-olave-hart-street/","lat":51.510898,"lng":-0.079471,"verdict":"Pepys's own church, where he and his wife are buried and where he watched the plague fill the churchyard.","thumb":"/img/st-olave-hart-street-480.jpg?v=ea265bf4","img":"/img/st-olave-hart-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":809},{"name":"Stationers' Hall","slug":"stationers-hall","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/stationers-hall/","lat":51.5146,"lng":-0.1007,"verdict":"The livery hall of the company that licensed every book printed in England for a century and a half: copyright began in its register."},{"name":"Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese","slug":"ye-olde-cheshire-cheese","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/ye-olde-cheshire-cheese/","lat":51.514342,"lng":-0.107183,"verdict":"The Fleet Street chophouse of 1667 that Johnson, Dickens, Twain and Conan Doyle all drank in.","thumb":"/img/ye-olde-cheshire-cheese-480.jpg?v=d12337dc","img":"/img/ye-olde-cheshire-cheese.jpg","w":1024,"h":680},{"name":"Giuseppe Mazzini","slug":"giuseppe-mazzini","cat":"world","url":"/world/giuseppe-mazzini/","lat":51.518111,"lng":-0.107606,"verdict":"The plaque London's Italians put up to the prophet of their united country, in the old Italian quarter.","thumb":"/img/giuseppe-mazzini-480.jpg?v=9e5001d9","img":"/img/giuseppe-mazzini.jpg","w":866,"h":1024},{"name":"Sun Yat-sen","slug":"sun-yat-sen","cat":"world","url":"/world/sun-yat-sen/","lat":51.518943,"lng":-0.114224,"verdict":"Where the father of the Chinese republic lodged in exile, before his own legation kidnapped him.","thumb":"/img/sun-yat-sen-480.jpg?v=75d92dc3","img":"/img/sun-yat-sen.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Enigma Quests","slug":"enigma-quests","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/enigma-quests/","lat":51.517226,"lng":-0.10965,"verdict":"An hour-long escape room built as a school of witchcraft and wizardry, several rooms deep, on Fetter Lane."},{"name":"Leadenhall Market","slug":"leadenhall-market","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/leadenhall-market/","lat":51.512729,"lng":-0.083569,"verdict":"Diagon Alley in Philosopher's Stone: the Leaky Cauldron's door was an optician's in Bull's Head Passage.","thumb":"/img/leadenhall-market-480.jpg?v=fe33070c","img":"/img/leadenhall-market.jpg","w":1024,"h":693},{"name":"Millennium Bridge","slug":"millennium-bridge","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/millennium-bridge/","lat":51.509765,"lng":-0.098523,"verdict":"The footbridge the Death Eaters twist into the Thames at the start of Half-Blood Prince.","thumb":"/img/own-millennium-bridge-480.jpg?v=16fe07d2","img":"/img/own-millennium-bridge.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Tour for Muggles","slug":"tour-for-muggles","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/tour-for-muggles/","lat":51.512803,"lng":-0.083607,"verdict":"An actor-led walk through the City and Bankside locations, Leadenhall Market to Borough Market, in groups of twenty."},{"name":"Tower Bridge","slug":"tower-bridge","cat":"harry-potter","url":"/harry-potter/tower-bridge/","lat":51.505517,"lng":-0.075366,"verdict":"The Order flies Harry up the Thames and between the towers of Tower Bridge in Order of the Phoenix.","thumb":"/img/own-tower-bridge-480.jpg?v=b557d989","img":"/img/own-tower-bridge.jpg","w":1024,"h":768}]},{"slug":"waterloo","name":"Waterloo","verdict":"The busiest station in Britain, two of its best theatres, and a graffiti tunnel underneath the tracks.","note":"Waterloo is a station and the district that grew around it. The first trains ran in 1848, and it is now the busiest railway station in the country, with more than twenty platforms and tens of millions of journeys a year through it. The name, and the bridge, come from the battle of 1815.\n\nThat bridge has a story of its own. The present Waterloo Bridge was put up during the Second World War, when much of the labour on it was women's because the men were away; it is still called the Ladies' Bridge, and the view from the middle of it, with the City one way and Westminster the other, is the best from any bridge in London.\n\nThe theatre came before the trains. The Old Vic opened in 1818 and has been going ever since, with Olivier's National Theatre company based there for a decade before it got a building of its own; the Young Vic next door does the newer work.\n\nBehind the station, Lower Marsh keeps a street market and the shops that go with it, and Roupell Street is a complete row of workers' houses of the 1820s that film crews use whenever they need Victorian London.\n\nUnder the platforms is Leake Street, a tunnel Banksy opened to painters in 2008; it is legal to paint there, and the walls change from week to week.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-waterloo-4.jpg?v=15dfb967","thumb":"/img/area-waterloo-4-480.jpg?v=d0bd1fe2","width":1024,"height":576,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The Old Vic's pale stucco front on a street corner, its name in raised letters across the upper storey and 'We'll be back' in red on the balcony, a cyclist passing on an empty road and red buses beyond.","caption":"The Old Vic on The Cut, in the spring of 2020.","credit":"Photo by Kwh1050, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_Vic_Theatre_London_SE1_during_COVID_19_lock_down.jpg"},"figures":[],"reading_links":[],"edges":["Stamford Street","York Road","Westminster Bridge Road","Blackfriars Road"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.11514,51.50032],[-0.11245,51.49884],[-0.1106,51.49834],[-0.1047,51.49875],[-0.10449,51.50712],[-0.10684,51.50715],[-0.10817,51.50692],[-0.11315,51.50495],[-0.11313,51.50464],[-0.11291,51.50442],[-0.11336,51.50448],[-0.1136,51.50449],[-0.11414,51.50447],[-0.1148,51.50402],[-0.11658,51.50222],[-0.11754,51.50074],[-0.11514,51.50032]]]},"centre":[-0.11,51.50178],"bounds":[[-0.11754,51.49834],[-0.10449,51.50715]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":16,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":2,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":3,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"bakeries","name":"Bakeries","count":2,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"cocktails","name":"Cocktails","count":3,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"wine","name":"Wine","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"beautiful-streets","name":"Beautiful Streets","count":3,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"monuments","name":"Monuments & Ruins","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"science","name":"Science & Engineering","count":1,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"A Christmas Carol","slug":"a-christmas-carol","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-old-vic/a-christmas-carol/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-10","to":"2027-01-09"},"lat":51.502008,"lng":-0.109284,"verdict":"Matthew Warchus's production, in the round, with the audience handed satsumas."},{"name":"Bits & Bobs: The Anatomy of Sex","slug":"bits-bobs-the-anatomy-of-sex","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/bits-bobs-the-anatomy-of-sex/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-03","to":"2026-11-03"},"lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"Eight activity stations on reproductive anatomy, run by the scientists who study it."},{"name":"Christmas Storytelling with Michael Rosen","slug":"christmas-storytelling-with-michael-rosen","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-old-vic/christmas-storytelling-with-michael-rosen/","runs":{"from":"2026-12-19","to":"2026-12-19"},"lat":51.502008,"lng":-0.109284,"verdict":"Michael Rosen reads to children on a Saturday morning, then signs books."},{"name":"Daughter of Bala: The Betsi Cadwaladr Story","slug":"daughter-of-bala-the-betsi-cadwaladr-story","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/daughter-of-bala-the-betsi-cadwaladr-story/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-30","to":"2026-09-30"},"lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"The Welsh nurse who went to Scutari in her sixties and fell out with Nightingale."},{"name":"Eurotrash","slug":"eurotrash","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/young-vic/eurotrash/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-13","to":"2027-01-09"},"lat":51.50328,"lng":-0.107317,"verdict":"The Young Vic's winter show in the main house."},{"name":"Florence Nightingale's London: Walking Tour","slug":"florence-nightingales-london-walking-tour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/florence-nightingales-london-walking-tour/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-03","to":"2026-10-03"},"lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"Two hours through Mayfair and St James's, where she actually lived."},{"name":"Girls","slug":"girls","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/young-vic/girls/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-22","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.50328,"lng":-0.107317,"verdict":"In the Maria, the Young Vic's smaller room."},{"name":"Healing Spaces","slug":"healing-spaces","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/healing-spaces/","runs":{"from":"2025-11-18","to":"2026-12-31"},"lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"Why hospital wards are shaped the way they are, and who decided."},{"name":"Heritage Open Day: free entry","slug":"heritage-open-day-free-entry","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/heritage-open-day-free-entry/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-14","to":"2026-09-14"},"lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"The whole museum free for a day, with three suffragette medals to handle."},{"name":"How the Other Half Loves","slug":"how-the-other-half-loves","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-old-vic/how-the-other-half-loves/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-09-19"},"lat":51.502008,"lng":-0.109284,"verdict":"Alan Ayckbourn's farce where two dinner parties happen on the same set at the same time."},{"name":"In Focus: Nurse Catherine Pine","slug":"in-focus-nurse-catherine-pine","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/in-focus-nurse-catherine-pine/","runs":{"from":"2026-03-06","to":"2026-10-04"},"lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"The nurse who took hunger-striking suffragettes into her own nursing home."},{"name":"Magic Lantern Show: Victorian Halloween","slug":"magic-lantern-show-victorian-halloween","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/magic-lantern-show-victorian-halloween/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-26","to":"2026-10-26"},"lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"A triple magic lantern, three projections at once, doing Victorian ghosts."},{"name":"Martin Guerre","slug":"martin-guerre","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/the-old-vic/martin-guerre/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.502008,"lng":-0.109284,"verdict":"The imposter who came home to a French village, and the wife who let him."},{"name":"National Hygiene Week: \u00a35 entry","slug":"national-hygiene-week-5-entry","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/national-hygiene-week-5-entry/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-06","to":"2026-10-11"},"lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"Bring soap, get in for five pounds."},{"name":"The Nightingale Training School: A Talk by the Curator","slug":"the-nightingale-training-school-a-talk-by-the-curator","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/the-nightingale-training-school-a-talk-by-the-curator/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-17"},"lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"Starched caps, timetables and what it took to earn the Nightingale Badge."},{"name":"Thelma & Louise","slug":"thelma-louise","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/young-vic/thelma-louise/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.50328,"lng":-0.107317,"verdict":"The 1991 road film on a stage, in the main house."},{"name":"Florence Nightingale Museum","slug":"florence-nightingale-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/florence-nightingale-museum/","lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"Nightingale's own lamp, her stuffed owl and her statistics, at the hospital where she founded modern nursing.","thumb":"/img/florence-nightingale-museum-480.jpg?v=c891c153","img":"/img/florence-nightingale-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":705},{"name":"Morley Gallery","slug":"morley-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/morley-gallery/","deep":true,"lat":51.498055,"lng":-0.109504,"verdict":"Part of Morley College, exhibitions include painting, printmaking, sculpture, photography, ceramics, textiles, installations, digital and sound art."},{"name":"Leake Street Arches","slug":"leake-street-arches","cat":"art","url":"/art/leake-street-arches/","lat":51.501353,"lng":-0.114741,"verdict":"The graffiti tunnel under Waterloo station, where painting the walls is the point."},{"name":"The Old Vic","slug":"the-old-vic","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/the-old-vic/","lat":51.502008,"lng":-0.109284,"verdict":"The 1818 house where the National Theatre began, and never a subsidised one."},{"name":"Young Vic","slug":"young-vic","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/young-vic/","lat":51.50328,"lng":-0.107317,"verdict":"Built of breeze blocks to last five years, and still here fifty on."},{"name":"Calico Coffee","slug":"calico-coffee","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/calico-coffee/","lat":51.501252,"lng":-0.112069,"verdict":"A Brewers Cup finalist's own roastery counter on Lower Marsh."},{"name":"Origin Coffee","slug":"origin-scoresby","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/origin-scoresby/","lat":51.504235,"lng":-0.10361,"verdict":"A Network Rail arch behind Blackfriars, and the fourth Origin in London."},{"name":"Scootercaffe","slug":"scootercaffe","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/scootercaffe/","lat":51.500366,"lng":-0.113852,"verdict":"A Lower Marsh caf\u00e9 that roasts its own, and stays open like a bar."},{"name":"Konditor","slug":"konditor-cornwall-road","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/konditor-cornwall-road/","lat":51.504162,"lng":-0.110284,"verdict":"The original Konditor, still on the Waterloo side street where it started."},{"name":"Little Bread Pedlar","slug":"little-bread-pedlar","cat":"bakeries","url":"/bakeries/little-bread-pedlar/","lat":51.50062,"lng":-0.113039,"verdict":"Lower Marsh, and the best thing on a street of good things."},{"name":"Konditor","slug":"konditor","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/konditor/","lat":51.504162,"lng":-0.110284,"verdict":"The Waterloo shop where Gerhard Jenne started in 1993, and still where the Curd Pie comes from."},{"name":"Lower Marsh Market","slug":"lower-marsh-market","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/lower-marsh-market/","lat":51.500914,"lng":-0.112558,"verdict":"Waterloo's weekday lunch market, on the street that has had one for two centuries.","thumb":"/img/lower-marsh-market-480.jpg?v=452c1d1f","img":"/img/lower-marsh-market.jpg","w":1024,"h":576},{"name":"Lyaness","slug":"lyaness","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/lyaness/","lat":51.507974,"lng":-0.10684,"verdict":"River views at Sea Containers, and a menu built on house-made ingredients."},{"name":"Seabird","slug":"seabird","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/seabird/","lat":51.50584,"lng":-0.10476,"verdict":"The longest oyster list in London, fourteen floors up."},{"name":"Tonight Josephine","slug":"tonight-josephine","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/tonight-josephine/","lat":51.502797,"lng":-0.110369,"verdict":"Neon slogans, pink everything, and a very late licence."},{"name":"Lower","slug":"lower","cat":"wine","url":"/wine/lower/","lat":51.500602,"lng":-0.113014,"verdict":"A Lower Marsh wine bar with a working cellar shop underneath it."},{"name":"Leake Street Arches","slug":"leake-street-arches","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/leake-street-arches/","lat":51.501353,"lng":-0.114741,"verdict":"A railway tunnel under Waterloo where painting the walls is not only allowed but expected.","thumb":"/img/street-leake-street-arches-480.jpg?v=e241b73f","img":"/img/street-leake-street-arches.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Lower Marsh","slug":"lower-marsh","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/lower-marsh/","lat":51.501295,"lng":-0.111719,"verdict":"Waterloo's own street, with a weekday market and not a chain in sight.","thumb":"/img/street-lower-marsh-480.jpg?v=af94455a","img":"/img/street-lower-marsh.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Roupell Street","slug":"roupell-street","cat":"beautiful-streets","url":"/beautiful-streets/roupell-street/","lat":51.504737,"lng":-0.10797,"verdict":"Two unbroken rows of 1820s workers' cottages, five minutes from Waterloo and a century away.","thumb":"/img/street-roupell-street-480.jpg?v=6aafb75b","img":"/img/street-roupell-street.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"The Obelisk at St George's Circus","slug":"the-obelisk-at-st-georges-circus","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/the-obelisk-at-st-georges-circus/","lat":51.498703,"lng":-0.104744,"verdict":"London's first purpose-built road junction still has its 1771 signpost, carved with the distances to Fleet Street, London Bridge and Westminster.","thumb":"/img/the-obelisk-at-st-georges-circus-480.jpg?v=20b46a2d","img":"/img/the-obelisk-at-st-georges-circus.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Florence Nightingale Museum","slug":"florence-nightingale-museum","cat":"science","url":"/science/florence-nightingale-museum/","lat":51.500007,"lng":-0.11767,"verdict":"Nightingale's own lamp, her stuffed owl and her statistics, at the hospital where she founded modern nursing.","thumb":"/img/florence-nightingale-museum-480.jpg?v=c891c153","img":"/img/florence-nightingale-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":705}]},{"slug":"westminster","name":"Westminster","verdict":"The abbey, the palace and the government: a thousand years of English power in half a square mile.","note":"The name means the minster west of the City, and the abbey is why everything else is here. Edward the Confessor rebuilt it and was buried in it days after it was consecrated in 1065; William the Conqueror was crowned in it the next year, and every coronation since has happened on the same spot. Henry III rebuilt it again in the Gothic it wears now.\n\nKings living beside the abbey brought the government with them. By about 1200 the Palace of Westminster was the main royal residence and the treasury had moved down from Winchester; Parliament met in the palace, and when it burned down in 1834 in front of a crowd that included Turner, who painted it, Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin replaced it with the building the world now uses as shorthand for Britain.\n\nWhitehall runs north from Parliament Square, lined with the ministries, the Cenotaph in the middle of the road and the gates of Downing Street halfway up. St James's Park lies alongside it, with pelicans that have been there since 1664.\n\nTwo other churches are worth the detour: St Margaret's, the parish church in the abbey's shadow, and Westminster Cathedral on Victoria Street, a Byzantine pile of red and white brick finished in 1903, whose campanile has a lift and one of the best views in London for a couple of pounds.","figure":{"src":"/img/area-westminster.jpg?v=48bb44b5","thumb":"/img/area-westminster-480.jpg?v=7482c990","width":1024,"height":682,"thumb_width":500,"alt":"The Palace of Westminster and the river from above, the London Eye beyond","caption":"Parliament from the dome of Central Hall.","credit":"Photo by Colin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palace_of_Westminster_from_the_dome_on_Methodist_Central_Hall.jpg"},"figures":[{"src":"/img/area-westminster-4.jpg?v=eea76e2f","thumb":"/img/area-westminster-4-480.jpg?v=668c5002","width":1024,"height":768,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"The Palace of Westminster and the clock tower in silhouette against a low sun, seen across the Thames from the South Bank, with a pier and a moored boat in front, gulls in the air and light on the water.","caption":"Across the river from the South Bank at the end of the day."},{"src":"/img/area-westminster-2.jpg?v=cc8265e5","thumb":"/img/area-westminster-2-480.jpg?v=8009ba4c","width":1024,"height":684,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"County Hall and the London Eye across the river from Westminster Pier","caption":"Across the river from Westminster Pier.","credit":"Photo by Aethonatic, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Westminster_Pier_(1)_-_17_May_2026.jpg"},{"src":"/img/area-westminster-3.jpg?v=bf033a0c","thumb":"/img/area-westminster-3-480.jpg?v=50d8c392","width":1024,"height":752,"thumb_width":480,"alt":"Thornycroft's bronze of Boadicea and her daughters in their chariot at the end of Westminster Bridge","caption":"Boadicea, at the end of Westminster Bridge.","credit":"Photo by Aethonatic, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons","credit_url":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boadicea_and_Her_Daughters_-_17_May_2026.jpg"}],"reading_links":[],"edges":["The Mall","River Thames","Vauxhall Bridge Road"],"osm":null,"geo":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-0.12735,51.5074],[-0.12263,51.50658],[-0.12257,51.50665],[-0.12187,51.50693],[-0.12012,51.50644],[-0.12076,51.50576],[-0.12122,51.50446],[-0.1231,51.49346],[-0.12386,51.49215],[-0.12404,51.49119],[-0.1275,51.4869],[-0.1297,51.4886],[-0.13311,51.49051],[-0.14039,51.49399],[-0.1418,51.49525],[-0.14231,51.49652],[-0.14185,51.49658],[-0.1421,51.49759],[-0.14386,51.49807],[-0.14538,51.49601],[-0.14684,51.49797],[-0.14677,51.49819],[-0.14877,51.50005],[-0.15167,51.50189],[-0.1522,51.5031],[-0.14891,51.50246],[-0.14158,51.50217],[-0.1401,51.50205],[-0.13147,51.50559],[-0.12969,51.50645],[-0.1286,51.50754],[-0.12735,51.5074]]]},"centre":[-0.13165,51.49819],"bounds":[[-0.1522,51.4869],[-0.12012,51.50754]],"cats":[{"slug":"whats-on","name":"What\u2019s On","count":57,"group":"What's On"},{"slug":"museums","name":"Museums","count":17,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"art","name":"Art","count":14,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"venues","name":"Performance venues","count":3,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"outdoors","name":"Outdoors & Nature","count":1,"group":"Things to do"},{"slug":"coffee","name":"Coffee","count":5,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"desserts","name":"Desserts & Gelato","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"breakfast","name":"Breakfast & Brunch","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"food-markets","name":"Food Markets","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"cocktails","name":"Cocktails","count":1,"group":"Food & drink"},{"slug":"royal","name":"Royal London","count":17,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"politics","name":"Power & Politics","count":18,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"sacred","name":"Sacred London","count":2,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"architecture","name":"Architecture","count":1,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"monuments","name":"Monuments & Ruins","count":16,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"science","name":"Science & Engineering","count":3,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"secrets","name":"Secrets & Espionage","count":6,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"literary","name":"Literary London","count":3,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"world","name":"The World in London","count":4,"group":"Themes"},{"slug":"harry-potter","name":"Harry Potter","count":3,"group":"Themes"}],"places":[{"name":"Art For Youth London 2026","slug":"art-for-youth-london-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/mall-galleries/art-for-youth-london-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-04","to":"2026-11-06"},"lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"A selling show whose proceeds go to youth clubs, running since 1988."},{"name":"Autumn Knight: I Can't Complain","slug":"autumn-knight-i-cant-complain","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/institute-of-contemporary-arts/autumn-knight-i-cant-complain/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-29","to":"2026-11-29"},"lat":51.506158,"lng":-0.130952,"verdict":"The New York artist's first big UK show, on complaint as a form."},{"name":"Azuri Trio: Bridge and Shostakovich","slug":"azuri-trio-bridge-and-shostakovich","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/azuri-trio-bridge-and-shostakovich/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-23","to":"2026-09-23"},"lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"Fifty-five minutes at lunchtime for six pounds, ending on Shostakovich's elegy."},{"name":"Bampton Classical Opera: Zemira e Azor","slug":"bampton-classical-opera-zemira-e-azor","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/bampton-classical-opera-zemira-e-azor/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"Beauty and the Beast as Gr\u00e9try set it in 1771, which Mozart admired and nobody stages."},{"name":"Big Ben Tour","slug":"big-ben-tour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/houses-of-parliament/big-ben-tour/","lat":51.499387,"lng":-0.124481,"verdict":"334 steps up the Elizabeth Tower to stand behind the dials.","thumb":"/img/own-big-ben-480.jpg?v=c7687d4a","img":"/img/own-big-ben.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Buckingham Palace Summer Opening","slug":"buckingham-palace-summer-opening","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/buckingham-palace/buckingham-palace-summer-opening/","runs":{"from":"2026-07-09","to":"2026-09-27","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.500835,"lng":-0.143005,"verdict":"Nineteen State Rooms, open to the public for eleven weeks a year."},{"name":"Changing the Guard","slug":"changing-the-guard","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/buckingham-palace/changing-the-guard/","lat":51.500835,"lng":-0.143005,"verdict":"The New Guard marches up from Wellington Barracks, band and all.","thumb":"/img/changing-the-guard-480.jpg?v=783efd5d","img":"/img/changing-the-guard.jpg","w":1024,"h":613},{"name":"Concerto Copenhagen: Bach's four orchestral suites","slug":"concerto-copenhagen-bachs-four-orchestral-suites","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/concerto-copenhagen-bachs-four-orchestral-suites/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-24","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"All four suites in one evening, one player to a part."},{"name":"Discerning Eye 2026","slug":"discerning-eye-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/mall-galleries/discerning-eye-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-13","to":"2026-11-21"},"lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"Six selectors, six small hangs, no house style."},{"name":"Diwali on the Square","slug":"diwali-on-the-square","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/diwali-on-the-square/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-25","to":"2026-10-25","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.508,"lng":-0.1281,"verdict":"Two hundred dancers open the Mayor's Diwali on Trafalgar Square, free, no ticket."},{"name":"Free Sunday organ recitals","slug":"free-sunday-organ-recitals","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/westminster-abbey/free-sunday-organ-recitals/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-13","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.499401,"lng":-0.127391,"verdict":"Half an hour on the Abbey organ at five on a Sunday, free, no ticket."},{"name":"Free lunchtime organ recitals","slug":"free-lunchtime-organ-recitals","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/westminster-cathedral/free-lunchtime-organ-recitals/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-11-04"},"lat":51.49582,"lng":-0.139519,"verdict":"Thirty minutes on the Willis grand organ at quarter past one, free, every Wednesday in term."},{"name":"Goldsmiths Choral Union: Mozart's Requiem on Remembrance Sunday","slug":"goldsmiths-choral-union-mozarts-requiem-on-remembrance-sunday","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/goldsmiths-choral-union-mozarts-requiem-on-remembrance-sunday/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-08","to":"2026-11-08"},"lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"The Requiem at five o'clock on Remembrance Sunday, with Haydn and Schubert around it."},{"name":"Grand Organ Festival","slug":"grand-organ-festival","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/westminster-cathedral/grand-organ-festival/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-09-30"},"lat":51.49582,"lng":-0.139519,"verdict":"Four Wednesday evenings on the Willis organ, ending on a Michael Berkeley premiere."},{"name":"Guided tour of the Palace of Westminster","slug":"guided-tour-of-the-palace-of-westminster","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/houses-of-parliament/guided-tour-of-the-palace-of-westminster/","lat":51.4995,"lng":-0.1248,"verdict":"Ninety minutes through both chambers and Westminster Hall with a Parliament guide."},{"name":"HOPE, Youth Voices for Change","slug":"hope-youth-voices-for-change","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/mall-galleries/hope-youth-voices-for-change/","runs":{"from":"2027-01-10","to":"2027-01-23"},"lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"A youth-led exhibition asking whether anyone is listening."},{"name":"Hidden London: Charing Cross tour & afternoon tea","slug":"hidden-london-charing-cross-tour-afternoon-tea","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-charing-cross-tour-afternoon-tea/","lat":51.507966,"lng":-0.126394,"verdict":"The same secret platforms, then scones upstairs at the Clermont."},{"name":"Hidden London: Charing Cross \u2014 behind the Silver Screen","slug":"hidden-london-charing-cross-behind-the-silver-screen","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/hidden-london-charing-cross-behind-the-silver-screen/","lat":51.507966,"lng":-0.126394,"verdict":"Disused platforms under Trafalgar Square that keep turning up in films."},{"name":"Historians in Conversation: Tom Cutterham and Leanne O'Boyle","slug":"historians-in-conversation-tom-cutterham-and-leanne-oboyle","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/benjamin-franklin-house/historians-in-conversation-tom-cutterham-and-leanne-oboyle/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-17","to":"2026-09-17"},"lat":51.507651,"lng":-0.124892,"verdict":"Britain's part in the American Revolution, argued in the house Franklin lived in."},{"name":"James McNeill Whistler","slug":"james-mcneill-whistler","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tate-britain/james-mcneill-whistler/","runs":{"from":"2026-05-21","to":"2026-09-27"},"lat":51.491142,"lng":-0.127585,"verdict":"The first big European Whistler show in thirty years, with the Old Battersea Bridge Nocturne."},{"name":"Jesse Glazzard: The Sound of Dirt and Beauty","slug":"jesse-glazzard-the-sound-of-dirt-and-beauty","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/institute-of-contemporary-arts/jesse-glazzard-the-sound-of-dirt-and-beauty/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-15","to":"2026-09-20"},"lat":51.506158,"lng":-0.130952,"verdict":"A photographer reimagining family, shown for six days during the ICA's book fair."},{"name":"Kensington Symphony Orchestra: Rachmaninov's Third","slug":"kensington-symphony-orchestra-rachmaninovs-third","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/kensington-symphony-orchestra-rachmaninovs-third/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-12","to":"2026-10-12"},"lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"The symphony Rachmaninov wrote by Lake Lucerne, from an orchestra that has played new music since 1956."},{"name":"La Nuova Musica: Bach's Mass in B minor","slug":"la-nuova-musica-bachs-mass-in-b-minor","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/la-nuova-musica-bachs-mass-in-b-minor/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-31","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"The B minor Mass closes the baroque festival."},{"name":"London Festival of Baroque Music","slug":"london-festival-of-baroque-music","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/london-festival-of-baroque-music/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-24","to":"2026-10-31"},"lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"Thirteen concerts in eight days, this year on the theme of refractions."},{"name":"Luminiscence","slug":"luminiscence","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/luminiscence/","lat":51.49583,"lng":-0.13942,"verdict":"A 360\u00b0 projection concert inside Westminster Cathedral, narrated by Hugh Bonneville."},{"name":"Mad Lover: Langlois de Swarte and Dunford","slug":"mad-lover-langlois-de-swarte-and-dunford","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/mad-lover-langlois-de-swarte-and-dunford/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-28","to":"2026-10-28"},"lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"Violin and lute on the music of Charles II's London, which was wilder than its reputation."},{"name":"Marco Arcieri: My Chopin","slug":"marco-arcieri-my-chopin","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/marco-arcieri-my-chopin/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-10","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"A whole evening of Chopin from a pianist who spent twenty-two years as an engineer first."},{"name":"Martin Taylor and Guy Barker: The Spirit of Django","slug":"martin-taylor-and-guy-barker-the-spirit-of-django","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/martin-taylor-and-guy-barker-the-spirit-of-django/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-19","to":"2026-11-19"},"lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"Django Reinhardt's tunes, orchestrated, with a big band and a chamber orchestra on the same stage."},{"name":"Paint, Powder and Politics: Hair in the Georgian Age","slug":"paint-powder-and-politics-hair-in-the-georgian-age","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/benjamin-franklin-house/paint-powder-and-politics-hair-in-the-georgian-age/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-18","to":"2026-09-18"},"lat":51.507651,"lng":-0.124892,"verdict":"How a hairstyle told a room your politics."},{"name":"Parliament Choir: Mozart's Requiem","slug":"parliament-choir-mozarts-requiem","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/parliament-choir-mozarts-requiem/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-04","to":"2026-11-04"},"lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"The Requiem from the choir drawn from both Houses and the people who work in them."},{"name":"Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style","slug":"queen-elizabeth-ii-her-life-in-style","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/kings-gallery/queen-elizabeth-ii-her-life-in-style/","runs":{"from":"2026-04-10","to":"2027-04-18"},"lat":51.499828,"lng":-0.142551,"verdict":"Three hundred pieces of the late Queen's wardrobe, and the largest show of it ever mounted."},{"name":"Ray Atkins Unseen","slug":"ray-atkins-unseen","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/mall-galleries/ray-atkins-unseen/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-20","to":"2026-10-24"},"lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"Paintings never shown, by a painter who worked outdoors on enormous canvases."},{"name":"Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph","slug":"remembrance-sunday-at-the-cenotaph","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/remembrance-sunday-at-the-cenotaph/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-08","to":"2026-11-08","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.502679,"lng":-0.126091,"verdict":"Two minutes' silence in the middle of Whitehall, and ten thousand veterans marching past.","thumb":"/img/remembrance-sunday-at-the-cenotaph-480.jpg?v=4217b83b","img":"/img/remembrance-sunday-at-the-cenotaph.jpg","w":1024,"h":638},{"name":"Royal Institute of Oil Painters: Annual Exhibition 2026","slug":"royal-institute-of-oil-painters-annual-exhibition-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/mall-galleries/royal-institute-of-oil-painters-annual-exhibition-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-26","to":"2026-12-12"},"lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"The only annual show in Britain given over entirely to oil paint."},{"name":"Royal Society of Marine Artists: Annual Exhibition 2026","slug":"royal-society-of-marine-artists-annual-exhibition-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/mall-galleries/royal-society-of-marine-artists-annual-exhibition-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-16","to":"2026-09-26"},"lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"Everything the sea has done to British painting, in one room, once a year."},{"name":"Ryan Zhu plays the Paganini Variations","slug":"ryan-zhu-plays-the-paganini-variations","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/ryan-zhu-plays-the-paganini-variations/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-09","to":"2026-10-09"},"lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"Fifty-five minutes at lunchtime for six pounds, ending on Brahms at his most difficult."},{"name":"Salomon Orchestra: The American Dream","slug":"salomon-orchestra-the-american-dream","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/salomon-orchestra-the-american-dream/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-11","to":"2026-10-11"},"lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"Adams's Harmonielehre, an hour of orchestral music that starts with forty hammer blows."},{"name":"Sinfonia Smith Square: Bruch and Beethoven","slug":"sinfonia-smith-square-bruch-and-beethoven","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/sinfonia-smith-square-bruch-and-beethoven/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-15","to":"2026-10-15"},"lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"Hyeyoon Park in the Bruch concerto, and Beethoven's Seventh after it."},{"name":"Sinfonia Smith Square: Goldbergs Reimagined","slug":"sinfonia-smith-square-goldbergs-reimagined","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/sinfonia-smith-square-goldbergs-reimagined/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-29","to":"2026-10-29"},"lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"The Goldberg Variations arranged for orchestra, played straight through."},{"name":"Society of Wildlife Artists: The Natural Eye 2026","slug":"society-of-wildlife-artists-the-natural-eye-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/mall-galleries/society-of-wildlife-artists-the-natural-eye-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-10"},"lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"The wildlife artists' annual show, which is mostly birds and unapologetic about it."},{"name":"Speaker's House Tour","slug":"speakers-house-tour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/houses-of-parliament/speakers-house-tour/","lat":51.499387,"lng":-0.124481,"verdict":"The Speaker of the Commons lives in the Palace, and this is the way into the state rooms."},{"name":"Spooky Children's Day","slug":"spooky-childrens-day","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/benjamin-franklin-house/spooky-childrens-day/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-27","to":"2026-10-27"},"lat":51.507651,"lng":-0.124892,"verdict":"Butter churning, dressing up and a scavenger hunt through a Georgian house."},{"name":"Stile Antico: A Renaissance Roadtrip","slug":"stile-antico-a-renaissance-roadtrip","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/stile-antico-a-renaissance-roadtrip/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-25","to":"2026-10-25"},"lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"Twelve singers, no conductor, six European cities in an evening."},{"name":"Tasting Notes: South Africa","slug":"tasting-notes-south-africa","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/tasting-notes-south-africa/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-16","to":"2026-10-16"},"lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"Five South African wines matched to five string quartets, at a table of ten."},{"name":"Tate Britain's permanent galleries","slug":"tate-britains-permanent-galleries","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/tate-britain/tate-britains-permanent-galleries/","lat":51.491142,"lng":-0.127585,"verdict":"Five hundred years of British art in one free run, and all the Turner there is."},{"name":"Thames Rockets","slug":"thames-rockets","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/thames-rockets/","lat":51.503282,"lng":-0.120432,"verdict":"A sightseeing tour that stops being one somewhere past Wapping."},{"name":"The 90s: Art and Fashion","slug":"the-90s-art-and-fashion","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tate-britain/the-90s-art-and-fashion/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-08","to":"2027-02-14"},"lat":51.491142,"lng":-0.127585,"verdict":"Edward Enninful's 1990s: McQueen, Westwood, Corinne Day, Hirst and Steve McQueen in one show."},{"name":"The Secrets of Churchill's War Rooms tour","slug":"the-secrets-of-churchills-war-rooms-tour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/churchill-war-rooms/the-secrets-of-churchills-war-rooms-tour/","lat":51.502209,"lng":-0.129251,"verdict":"An hour in the bunker before the public are let in, with a guide and the run of it after."},{"name":"To Begin the World Over Again: the Life of Thomas Paine","slug":"to-begin-the-world-over-again-the-life-of-thomas-paine","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/benjamin-franklin-house/to-begin-the-world-over-again-the-life-of-thomas-paine/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-15","to":"2026-10-15"},"lat":51.507651,"lng":-0.124892,"verdict":"A one-man play about the corset-maker who wrote Common Sense."},{"name":"Trio Mediaeval and Arve Henriksen: Rimur","slug":"trio-mediaeval-and-arve-henriksen-rimur","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/trio-mediaeval-and-arve-henriksen-rimur/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-30","to":"2026-10-30"},"lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"Icelandic verse-singing and a Norwegian trumpet that sounds like a shakuhachi."},{"name":"Trooping the Colour","slug":"trooping-the-colour","cat":"whats-on","url":"/whats-on/trooping-the-colour/","runs":{"from":"2027-06-12","to":"2027-06-12","repeats":"yearly"},"lat":51.504128,"lng":-0.126228,"verdict":"Fourteen hundred soldiers, two hundred horses and the King's official birthday.","thumb":"/img/trooping-the-colour-480.jpg?v=d2283a1a","img":"/img/trooping-the-colour.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury","slug":"vanessa-bell-duncan-grant-inside-bloomsbury","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/tate-britain/vanessa-bell-duncan-grant-inside-bloomsbury/","runs":{"from":"2026-11-12","to":"2027-04-11"},"lat":51.491142,"lng":-0.127585,"verdict":"Three hundred works and a Charleston studio moved into the gallery."},{"name":"Wagner: Tristan und Isolde, in concert","slug":"wagner-tristan-und-isolde-in-concert","cat":"whats-on","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/wagner-tristan-und-isolde-in-concert/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-18","to":"2026-10-18"},"lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"Six hours of Wagner on a Sunday afternoon, sung without staging."},{"name":"Westminster Hall and the public galleries","slug":"westminster-hall-and-the-public-galleries","cat":"whats-on","url":"/museums/houses-of-parliament/westminster-hall-and-the-public-galleries/","lat":51.499387,"lng":-0.124566,"verdict":"Free into the oldest building in Parliament, and into the Commons and the Lords when they sit."},{"name":"Wildlife Artist of the Year 2026","slug":"wildlife-artist-of-the-year-2026","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/mall-galleries/wildlife-artist-of-the-year-2026/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-08","to":"2026-09-12"},"lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"The David Shepherd Foundation's international wildlife art competition, hung in full."},{"name":"World News Day Book Drive","slug":"world-news-day-book-drive","cat":"whats-on","url":"/science/benjamin-franklin-house/world-news-day-book-drive/","runs":{"from":"2026-09-28","to":"2026-09-28"},"lat":51.507651,"lng":-0.124892,"verdict":"Bring a book, get into Franklin's house free."},{"name":"party of one: performance by Autumn Knight","slug":"party-of-one-performance-by-autumn-knight","cat":"whats-on","url":"/art/institute-of-contemporary-arts/party-of-one-performance-by-autumn-knight/","runs":{"from":"2026-10-01","to":"2026-10-01"},"lat":51.506158,"lng":-0.130952,"verdict":"A performance lecture on the pleasures of complaining, by the artist."},{"name":"Apsley House","slug":"apsley-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/apsley-house/","lat":51.503488,"lng":-0.151712,"verdict":"Number One London: the Duke of Wellington's house at Hyde Park Corner, still full of what Europe gave him, with Napoleon naked in the stairwell.","thumb":"/img/apsley-house-480.jpg?v=8f66f6bc","img":"/img/apsley-house.jpg","w":1024,"h":738},{"name":"Banqueting House, Whitehall","slug":"banqueting-house-whitehall","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/banqueting-house-whitehall/","lat":51.504577,"lng":-0.125916,"verdict":"Inigo Jones's hall of 1622, with a ceiling by Rubens that Charles I walked under on his way to the scaffold.","thumb":"/img/banqueting-house-whitehall-480.jpg?v=4d22d25b","img":"/img/banqueting-house-whitehall.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Benjamin Franklin House","slug":"benjamin-franklin-house","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/benjamin-franklin-house/","lat":51.507651,"lng":-0.124892,"verdict":"The only house of Benjamin Franklin left standing anywhere, on Craven Street, where he lodged for sixteen years and where the basement was full of bones.","thumb":"/img/benjamin-franklin-house-480.jpg?v=acfd733e","img":"/img/benjamin-franklin-house.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"British Optical Association Museum","slug":"british-optical-association-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/british-optical-association-museum/","deep":true,"lat":51.507892,"lng":-0.125392,"verdict":"History of eye care (by appointment only)."},{"name":"Buckingham Palace","slug":"buckingham-palace","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/buckingham-palace/","deep":true,"lat":51.500834,"lng":-0.142658,"verdict":"Nash's palace for George IV, refaced for George V, and the State Rooms Victoria complained were too small.","thumb":"/img/buckingham-palace-480.jpg?v=723d676a","img":"/img/buckingham-palace.jpg","w":1024,"h":670},{"name":"Canada House Gallery","slug":"canada-house-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/canada-house-gallery/","deep":true,"lat":51.5079,"lng":-0.1294,"verdict":"Canadian historical and contemporary art and artefacts."},{"name":"Churchill War Rooms","slug":"churchill-war-rooms","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/churchill-war-rooms/","lat":51.502209,"lng":-0.129251,"verdict":"The bunker under Whitehall where the War Cabinet met, locked up in 1945 and left exactly as it was.","thumb":"/img/churchill-war-rooms-480.jpg?v=c73a1678","img":"/img/churchill-war-rooms.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Guards Museum","slug":"guards-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/guards-museum/","lat":51.500048,"lng":-0.136125,"verdict":"Three centuries of the five regiments of Foot Guards, in the barracks beside Buckingham Palace where they still live.","thumb":"/img/guards-museum-480.jpg?v=7a070871","img":"/img/guards-museum.jpg","w":640,"h":480},{"name":"Household Cavalry Museum","slug":"household-cavalry-museum","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/household-cavalry-museum/","lat":51.50501,"lng":-0.127247,"verdict":"A working stable seen through a glass wall at Horse Guards, and the story of the King's mounted bodyguard, with the guard changing outside.","thumb":"/img/household-cavalry-museum-480.jpg?v=6bd1462b","img":"/img/household-cavalry-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Houses of Parliament & Big Ben","slug":"houses-of-parliament","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/houses-of-parliament/","lat":51.49939,"lng":-0.12457,"verdict":"Barry and Pugin's Gothic palace, the Great Clock and the cracked bell everyone calls Big Ben, with Westminster Hall of 1097 at its heart.","thumb":"/img/houses-of-parliament-480.jpg?v=88dbd74f","img":"/img/houses-of-parliament.jpg","w":1024,"h":576},{"name":"Institute of Contemporary Arts","slug":"institute-of-contemporary-arts","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/institute-of-contemporary-arts/","lat":51.506158,"lng":-0.130952,"verdict":"The avant-garde's clubhouse since 1946: galleries, two cinemas and a bar behind Nash's grandest terrace on the Mall, deliberately uncomfortable.","thumb":"/img/institute-of-contemporary-arts.jpg?v=483f68fb","img":"/img/institute-of-contemporary-arts.jpg","w":320,"h":427},{"name":"Jewel Tower","slug":"jewel-tower","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/jewel-tower/","lat":51.498482,"lng":-0.12642,"verdict":"Edward III's strongroom, one of two pieces of the medieval Palace of Westminster left standing.","thumb":"/img/jewel-tower-480.jpg?v=136b988f","img":"/img/jewel-tower.jpg","w":806,"h":1024},{"name":"King's Gallery","slug":"kings-gallery","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/kings-gallery/","lat":51.499828,"lng":-0.142551,"verdict":"The Royal Collection's shop window at Buckingham Palace: 450 works at a time from a million, changing with each exhibition.","thumb":"/img/kings-gallery-480.jpg?v=09491763","img":"/img/kings-gallery.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Mall Galleries","slug":"mall-galleries","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/mall-galleries/","deep":true,"lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"Gallery exhibits of the Federation of British Artists.","thumb":"/img/mall-galleries-480.jpg?v=46b9bf89","img":"/img/mall-galleries.jpg","w":1024,"h":762},{"name":"Royal Mews","slug":"royal-mews","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/royal-mews/","lat":51.498919,"lng":-0.14425,"verdict":"The working stables of Buckingham Palace, with the four-tonne Gold State Coach that has carried every monarch to their coronation since 1831.","thumb":"/img/royal-mews-480.jpg?v=7f438ebf","img":"/img/royal-mews.jpg","w":771,"h":1024},{"name":"Tate Britain","slug":"tate-britain","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/tate-britain/","lat":51.491142,"lng":-0.127585,"verdict":"Five hundred years of British art in one walk, and the largest Turner collection in the world, free, on Millbank.","thumb":"/img/tate-britain-480.jpg?v=420f8b87","img":"/img/tate-britain.jpg","w":1024,"h":575},{"name":"Wellington Arch","slug":"wellington-arch","cat":"museums","url":"/museums/wellington-arch/","lat":51.502536,"lng":-0.150818,"verdict":"Decimus Burton's arch at Hyde Park Corner, with the largest bronze sculpture in Europe on top and balconies inside to climb to.","thumb":"/img/wellington-arch-480.jpg?v=3fc925e4","img":"/img/wellington-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":669},{"name":"Boadicea and Her Daughters","slug":"boadicea-and-her-daughters","cat":"art","url":"/art/boadicea-and-her-daughters/","lat":51.501096,"lng":-0.123748,"verdict":"Thornycroft's bronze of the queen who burned Roman London, charging at Parliament from the end of Westminster Bridge.","thumb":"/img/boadicea-and-her-daughters-480.jpg?v=029bbb80","img":"/img/boadicea-and-her-daughters.jpg","w":1024,"h":889},{"name":"Canada Gallery","slug":"canada-house-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/canada-house-gallery/","lat":51.5079,"lng":-0.1294,"verdict":"Canada's art collection on show in its High Commission on Trafalgar Square, free and largely unvisited."},{"name":"Charles I at Charing Cross","slug":"charles-i-at-charing-cross","cat":"art","url":"/art/charles-i-at-charing-cross/","lat":51.507334,"lng":-0.127655,"verdict":"The oldest bronze equestrian statue in England, and the point from which every distance to London is measured.","thumb":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross-480.jpg?v=db81f3c1","img":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Institute of Contemporary Arts","slug":"institute-of-contemporary-arts","cat":"art","url":"/art/institute-of-contemporary-arts/","lat":51.506158,"lng":-0.130952,"verdict":"The avant-garde's clubhouse since 1946: galleries, two cinemas and a bar behind Nash's grandest terrace on the Mall, deliberately uncomfortable.","thumb":"/img/institute-of-contemporary-arts.jpg?v=483f68fb","img":"/img/institute-of-contemporary-arts.jpg","w":320,"h":427},{"name":"King's Gallery","slug":"kings-gallery","cat":"art","url":"/art/kings-gallery/","lat":51.499828,"lng":-0.142551,"verdict":"The Royal Collection's shop window at Buckingham Palace: 450 works at a time from a million, changing with each exhibition.","thumb":"/img/kings-gallery-480.jpg?v=09491763","img":"/img/kings-gallery.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Knife Edge Two Piece","slug":"knife-edge-two-piece","cat":"art","url":"/art/knife-edge-two-piece/","lat":51.497964,"lng":-0.126027,"verdict":"Henry Moore's bronze on the green beside Parliament, given by the sculptor himself in 1967.","thumb":"/img/knife-edge-two-piece.jpg?v=701f61e5","img":"/img/knife-edge-two-piece.jpg","w":426,"h":427},{"name":"Locking Piece","slug":"locking-piece","cat":"art","url":"/art/locking-piece/","lat":51.489371,"lng":-0.127599,"verdict":"Moore's two interlocking forms on Millbank, by the river between Tate Britain and Lambeth Bridge.","thumb":"/img/locking-piece-480.jpg?v=20b56134","img":"/img/locking-piece.jpg","w":652,"h":1024},{"name":"Mall Galleries","slug":"mall-galleries","cat":"art","url":"/art/mall-galleries/","lat":51.506528,"lng":-0.129985,"verdict":"The exhibition rooms of the Federation of British Artists on the Mall, where the portrait, pastel and marine societies show each year.","thumb":"/img/mall-galleries-480.jpg?v=46b9bf89","img":"/img/mall-galleries.jpg","w":1024,"h":762},{"name":"Parliament Square statues","slug":"parliament-square-statues","cat":"art","url":"/art/parliament-square-statues/","lat":51.500626,"lng":-0.126826,"verdict":"Twelve statesmen on one square: Churchill, Mandela, Gandhi, Lincoln, and Millicent Fawcett, the first woman.","thumb":"/img/parliament-square-statues-480.jpg?v=0c09db7f","img":"/img/parliament-square-statues.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Tate Britain","slug":"tate-britain","cat":"art","url":"/art/tate-britain/","lat":51.491142,"lng":-0.127585,"verdict":"Five hundred years of British art in one walk, and the largest Turner collection in the world, free, on Millbank.","thumb":"/img/tate-britain-480.jpg?v=420f8b87","img":"/img/tate-britain.jpg","w":1024,"h":575},{"name":"The Burghers of Calais","slug":"the-burghers-of-calais","cat":"art","url":"/art/the-burghers-of-calais/","lat":51.497478,"lng":-0.124912,"verdict":"Rodin's six men walking to their deaths, in a garden beside the House of Lords.","thumb":"/img/the-burghers-of-calais-480.jpg?v=0f383827","img":"/img/the-burghers-of-calais.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Trafalgar Square & Nelson's Column","slug":"nelsons-column","cat":"art","url":"/art/nelsons-column/","lat":51.507759,"lng":-0.12793,"verdict":"The symbolic heart of London: Barry's square with Nelson fifty-two metres above it, and Landseer's lions to climb on.","thumb":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2-480.jpg?v=b27c88fb","img":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Victoria Memorial","slug":"victoria-memorial","cat":"art","url":"/art/victoria-memorial/","lat":51.50184,"lng":-0.140587,"verdict":"Twenty-three hundred tons of white marble in front of the Palace, with a gilded Victory on top.","thumb":"/img/victoria-memorial-480.jpg?v=6ff38e58","img":"/img/victoria-memorial.jpg","w":685,"h":1024},{"name":"Wellington Arch","slug":"wellington-arch","cat":"art","url":"/art/wellington-arch/","lat":51.502536,"lng":-0.150818,"verdict":"Decimus Burton's arch at Hyde Park Corner, with the largest bronze sculpture in Europe on top and balconies inside to climb to.","thumb":"/img/wellington-arch-480.jpg?v=3fc925e4","img":"/img/wellington-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":669},{"name":"Sinfonia Smith Square","slug":"smith-square-hall","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/smith-square-hall/","lat":51.495976,"lng":-0.127049,"verdict":"Thomas Archer's baroque church, burnt out in the Blitz and rebuilt as a concert hall, still standing alone in its square.","thumb":"/img/smith-square-hall-480.jpg?v=a72ba4fe","img":"/img/smith-square-hall.jpg","w":1024,"h":788},{"name":"Westminster Abbey","slug":"westminster-abbey","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/westminster-abbey/","lat":51.499401,"lng":-0.127391,"verdict":"The Abbey choir singing in the building most of the English choral repertoire was written for.","thumb":"/img/own-westminster-abbey-480.jpg?v=b58d218d","img":"/img/own-westminster-abbey.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Westminster Cathedral","slug":"westminster-cathedral","cat":"venues","url":"/venues/westminster-cathedral/","lat":51.49582,"lng":-0.139519,"verdict":"The best Catholic choir in the country, singing the Latin repertoire daily in a vast dark Byzantine basilica.","thumb":"/img/westminster-cathedral-480.jpg?v=0cfc1413","img":"/img/westminster-cathedral.jpg","w":889,"h":1024},{"name":"St James's Park and Green Park","slug":"st-jamess-park-and-green-park","cat":"outdoors","url":"/outdoors/st-jamess-park-and-green-park/","lat":51.502717,"lng":-0.133682,"verdict":"The best view in London from a footbridge, and a colony of pelicans that predates every building in it.","thumb":"/img/st-jamess-park-and-green-park-480.jpg?v=f50bdb57","img":"/img/st-jamess-park-and-green-park.jpg","w":1024,"h":896},{"name":"Coffee Geek and Friends","slug":"coffee-geek-and-friends","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/coffee-geek-and-friends/","lat":51.497712,"lng":-0.141453,"verdict":"Cathedral Walk, and considerably better than Victoria deserves."},{"name":"Formative Coffee","slug":"formative-coffee","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/formative-coffee/","lat":51.497875,"lng":-0.135506,"verdict":"Run by a UK Barista Champion, and it shows in the cup."},{"name":"Hermanos Colombian Coffee Roasters","slug":"hermanos-colombian-coffee-roasters","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/hermanos-colombian-coffee-roasters/","lat":51.496267,"lng":-0.143481,"verdict":"Terminus Place, a minute from the concourse, open six till seven."},{"name":"Iris & June","slug":"iris-june","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/iris-june/","lat":51.496777,"lng":-0.136024,"verdict":"A New Zealand caf\u00e9 in Victoria, which the area badly needed."},{"name":"Nostos","slug":"nostos","cat":"coffee","url":"/coffee/nostos/","lat":51.498524,"lng":-0.133279,"verdict":"Greek for homecoming, and a rare good cup by St James's Park."},{"name":"Badiani Victoria","slug":"badiani-victoria","cat":"desserts","url":"/desserts/badiani-victoria/","lat":51.496405,"lng":-0.144259,"verdict":"A cone on the Victoria Street walk to the station."},{"name":"Regency Cafe","slug":"regency-cafe","cat":"breakfast","url":"/breakfast/regency-cafe/","lat":51.494003,"lng":-0.132098,"verdict":"Black tiles, Formica, and your name shouted across the room.","thumb":"/img/regency-cafe-480.jpg?v=22849676","img":"/img/regency-cafe.jpg","w":1024,"h":576},{"name":"Market Halls Victoria","slug":"market-halls-victoria","cat":"food-markets","url":"/food-markets/market-halls-victoria/","lat":51.496341,"lng":-0.143967,"verdict":"Nine kitchens over three floors, and a roof terrace above Victoria station.","thumb":"/img/market-halls-victoria-480.jpg?v=60d21578","img":"/img/market-halls-victoria.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"The Spy Bar","slug":"the-spy-bar","cat":"cocktails","url":"/cocktails/the-spy-bar/","lat":51.505312,"lng":-0.126149,"verdict":"Cocktails under the Old War Office, where photography is forbidden.","thumb":"/img/own-the-owo-480.jpg?v=469ce189","img":"/img/own-the-owo.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Admiralty Arch","slug":"admiralty-arch","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/admiralty-arch/","lat":51.506738,"lng":-0.128576,"verdict":"The gateway at the Trafalgar Square end of the processional route, built by Edward VII in memory of his mother.","thumb":"/img/admiralty-arch-480.jpg?v=5c965b9a","img":"/img/admiralty-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":501},{"name":"Buckingham Palace","slug":"buckingham-palace","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/buckingham-palace/","lat":51.500834,"lng":-0.142658,"verdict":"The balcony, the flag, the gates: the building where the century's royal story was staged for the cameras.","thumb":"/img/buckingham-palace-480.jpg?v=723d676a","img":"/img/buckingham-palace.jpg","w":1024,"h":670},{"name":"Changing the Guard","slug":"changing-the-guard","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/changing-the-guard/","lat":51.500835,"lng":-0.143005,"verdict":"The bearskins and the band on the palace forecourt, three mornings a week, for the price of standing at the railings.","thumb":"/img/changing-the-guard-480.jpg?v=783efd5d","img":"/img/changing-the-guard.jpg","w":1024,"h":613},{"name":"George VI and Queen Elizabeth memorial","slug":"george-vi-and-queen-elizabeth-memorial","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/george-vi-and-queen-elizabeth-memorial/","lat":51.505217,"lng":-0.133807,"verdict":"The Queen's parents together above the Mall: the King of 1955 and the Queen Mother added beside him in 2009, with reliefs of the war years.","thumb":"/img/george-vi-and-queen-elizabeth-memorial-480.jpg?v=2063b0b1","img":"/img/george-vi-and-queen-elizabeth-memorial.jpg","w":1024,"h":683},{"name":"Guards Museum","slug":"guards-museum","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/guards-museum/","lat":51.500048,"lng":-0.136125,"verdict":"The story of the five regiments of Foot Guards, in the barracks the palace guard marches out of.","thumb":"/img/guards-museum-480.jpg?v=7a070871","img":"/img/guards-museum.jpg","w":640,"h":480},{"name":"Horse Guards","slug":"horse-guards","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/horse-guards/","lat":51.504779,"lng":-0.127044,"verdict":"The mounted sentries in the Whitehall arch, the changing of the Life Guard, and the parade ground where Trooping the Colour is held.","thumb":"/img/horse-guards-480.jpg?v=f14ec0ae","img":"/img/horse-guards.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Household Cavalry Museum","slug":"household-cavalry-museum","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/household-cavalry-museum/","lat":51.50501,"lng":-0.127247,"verdict":"A glass wall into the working stables of the mounted regiment that rides at every state occasion.","thumb":"/img/household-cavalry-museum-480.jpg?v=6bd1462b","img":"/img/household-cavalry-museum.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Houses of Parliament & Big Ben","slug":"houses-of-parliament","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/houses-of-parliament/","lat":51.499387,"lng":-0.124566,"verdict":"Westminster Hall, where the Queen lay in state for five days in 2022 and a quarter of a million people filed past; the State Opening every autumn.","thumb":"/img/houses-of-parliament-480.jpg?v=88dbd74f","img":"/img/houses-of-parliament.jpg","w":1024,"h":576},{"name":"King's Gallery","slug":"kings-gallery","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/kings-gallery/","lat":51.499828,"lng":-0.142551,"verdict":"The Royal Collection's exhibition rooms beside the palace: in 2026, the largest show of the late Queen's clothes ever mounted.","thumb":"/img/kings-gallery-480.jpg?v=09491763","img":"/img/kings-gallery.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph","slug":"remembrance-sunday-at-the-cenotaph","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/remembrance-sunday-at-the-cenotaph/","lat":51.502679,"lng":-0.126091,"verdict":"Two minutes' silence on Whitehall at eleven, the King's wreath, and the veterans' march past.","thumb":"/img/remembrance-sunday-at-the-cenotaph-480.jpg?v=4217b83b","img":"/img/remembrance-sunday-at-the-cenotaph.jpg","w":1024,"h":638},{"name":"Royal Mews","slug":"royal-mews","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/royal-mews/","lat":51.498919,"lng":-0.14425,"verdict":"The Gold State Coach of two coronations, the Glass Coach that took Diana to St Paul's, and the horses that pull them.","thumb":"/img/royal-mews-480.jpg?v=7f438ebf","img":"/img/royal-mews.jpg","w":771,"h":1024},{"name":"St James's Park and Green Park","slug":"st-jamess-park-and-green-park","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/st-jamess-park-and-green-park/","lat":51.502717,"lng":-0.133682,"verdict":"The two parks the palace sits between, with the postcard view from the lake bridge and the site of the national memorial to Elizabeth II.","thumb":"/img/st-jamess-park-and-green-park-480.jpg?v=f50bdb57","img":"/img/st-jamess-park-and-green-park.jpg","w":1024,"h":896},{"name":"The Cenotaph","slug":"the-cenotaph","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/the-cenotaph/","lat":51.502679,"lng":-0.126091,"verdict":"The empty tomb on Whitehall where the sovereign lays the first wreath each November.","thumb":"/img/the-cenotaph-480.jpg?v=f5644dec","img":"/img/the-cenotaph.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Trooping the Colour","slug":"trooping-the-colour","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/trooping-the-colour/","lat":51.504128,"lng":-0.126228,"verdict":"The Sovereign's birthday parade on Horse Guards - fourteen hundred soldiers, two hundred horses, the balcony and the flypast.","thumb":"/img/trooping-the-colour-480.jpg?v=d2283a1a","img":"/img/trooping-the-colour.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Victoria Memorial","slug":"victoria-memorial","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/victoria-memorial/","lat":51.50184,"lng":-0.140587,"verdict":"The gilded Victory over the roundabout in front of the palace, and the steps everybody stands on for the balcony.","thumb":"/img/victoria-memorial-480.jpg?v=6ff38e58","img":"/img/victoria-memorial.jpg","w":685,"h":1024},{"name":"Wellington Arch","slug":"wellington-arch","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/wellington-arch/","lat":51.502536,"lng":-0.150818,"verdict":"The arch at Hyde Park Corner where the Queen's coffin left the gun carriage for the hearse in September 2022, and the walk to Windsor began.","thumb":"/img/wellington-arch-480.jpg?v=3fc925e4","img":"/img/wellington-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":669},{"name":"Westminster Abbey","slug":"westminster-abbey","cat":"royal","url":"/royal/westminster-abbey/","lat":51.499401,"lng":-0.127391,"verdict":"Where the century happened: Elizabeth's wedding and coronation, Diana's funeral, William and Catherine's wedding, the Queen's funeral and the coronation of Charles III.","thumb":"/img/own-westminster-abbey-480.jpg?v=b58d218d","img":"/img/own-westminster-abbey.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Banqueting House, Whitehall","slug":"banqueting-house-whitehall","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/banqueting-house-whitehall/","lat":51.504577,"lng":-0.125916,"verdict":"The room built to prove that kings are divine, and the window a king was led through to the scaffold.","thumb":"/img/banqueting-house-whitehall-480.jpg?v=4d22d25b","img":"/img/banqueting-house-whitehall.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Buckingham Palace","slug":"buckingham-palace","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/buckingham-palace/","lat":51.500834,"lng":-0.142658,"verdict":"A Georgian townhouse rebuilt four times into the face of British monarchy.","thumb":"/img/buckingham-palace-480.jpg?v=723d676a","img":"/img/buckingham-palace.jpg","w":1024,"h":670},{"name":"Charles I at Charing Cross","slug":"charles-i-at-charing-cross","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/charles-i-at-charing-cross/","lat":51.507334,"lng":-0.127655,"verdict":"The king Parliament executed, put back on his horse and pointed at the place where it happened.","thumb":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross-480.jpg?v=db81f3c1","img":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Churchill War Rooms","slug":"churchill-war-rooms","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/churchill-war-rooms/","lat":51.502209,"lng":-0.129251,"verdict":"The basement a world war was run from, left as its staff walked out of it.","thumb":"/img/churchill-war-rooms-480.jpg?v=c73a1678","img":"/img/churchill-war-rooms.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Foreign Office & the former India Office","slug":"foreign-office-the-former-india-office","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/foreign-office-the-former-india-office/","lat":51.502761,"lng":-0.127847,"verdict":"One government building held British diplomacy and the administration of India, side by side."},{"name":"Horse Guards","slug":"horse-guards","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/horse-guards/","lat":51.504779,"lng":-0.127044,"verdict":"A street of ministries standing on the ruins of the largest palace in Europe.","thumb":"/img/horse-guards-480.jpg?v=f14ec0ae","img":"/img/horse-guards.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Houses of Parliament & Big Ben","slug":"houses-of-parliament","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/houses-of-parliament/","lat":51.499387,"lng":-0.124566,"verdict":"A Victorian palace built to make a modern Parliament look ancient.","thumb":"/img/houses-of-parliament-480.jpg?v=88dbd74f","img":"/img/houses-of-parliament.jpg","w":1024,"h":576},{"name":"Jewel Tower","slug":"jewel-tower","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/jewel-tower/","lat":51.49846,"lng":-0.1264,"verdict":"Edward III's strongroom, and later the place Parliament kept its own records.","thumb":"/img/jewel-tower-480.jpg?v=136b988f","img":"/img/jewel-tower.jpg","w":806,"h":1024},{"name":"Pankhurst Memorial","slug":"pankhurst-memorial","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/pankhurst-memorial/","lat":51.497777,"lng":-0.125309,"verdict":"The militant suffragette leader, commemorated in a garden beside the Parliament she besieged.","thumb":"/img/pankhurst-memorial-480.jpg?v=35eeb831","img":"/img/pankhurst-memorial.jpg","w":1024,"h":683},{"name":"Parliament Square statues","slug":"parliament-square-statues","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/parliament-square-statues/","lat":51.500626,"lng":-0.126826,"verdict":"Legislature, court, government and abbey on four sides, and a running argument on the grass.","thumb":"/img/parliament-square-statues-480.jpg?v=0c09db7f","img":"/img/parliament-square-statues.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Robert Clive Statue","slug":"robert-clive-statue","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/robert-clive-statue/","lat":51.5023,"lng":-0.129219,"verdict":"Placed outside the India Office in 1912 to give the empire an origin story."},{"name":"Supreme Court of the United Kingdom","slug":"supreme-court-of-the-united-kingdom","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/supreme-court-of-the-united-kingdom/","lat":51.500405,"lng":-0.128125,"verdict":"Britain's highest court is younger than the iPhone, and anyone can walk in - to the exhibition downstairs, or into a hearing.","thumb":"/img/supreme-court-of-the-united-kingdom-480.jpg?v=f2ca0056","img":"/img/supreme-court-of-the-united-kingdom.jpg","w":1024,"h":721},{"name":"The Cenotaph","slug":"the-cenotaph","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/the-cenotaph/","lat":51.502679,"lng":-0.126091,"verdict":"An empty tomb built for one parade, and kept because the country would not give it up.","thumb":"/img/the-cenotaph-480.jpg?v=f5644dec","img":"/img/the-cenotaph.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"The OWO and the Spy Bar","slug":"the-owo-and-the-spy-bar","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/the-owo-and-the-spy-bar/","lat":51.50526,"lng":-0.12482,"verdict":"A thousand rooms of imperial military bureaucracy, now a hotel anyone can walk into.","thumb":"/img/own-the-owo-480.jpg?v=469ce189","img":"/img/own-the-owo.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Trafalgar Square & Nelson's Column","slug":"nelsons-column","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/nelsons-column/","lat":51.507759,"lng":-0.12793,"verdict":"Built to celebrate a naval victory; used ever since by crowds arguing with the government behind it.","thumb":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2-480.jpg?v=b27c88fb","img":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Westminster Abbey","slug":"westminster-abbey","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/westminster-abbey/","lat":51.499401,"lng":-0.127391,"verdict":"The coronation church, the battered oak chair built to sit on a conquest, and a transept full of prime ministers.","thumb":"/img/own-westminster-abbey-480.jpg?v=b58d218d","img":"/img/own-westminster-abbey.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Westminster Hall","slug":"westminster-hall","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/westminster-hall/","lat":51.499892,"lng":-0.125357,"verdict":"The 900-year-old hall the British state grew up around.","thumb":"/img/westminster-hall-480.jpg?v=4b2ff4ff","img":"/img/westminster-hall.jpg","w":1024,"h":867},{"name":"Whitehall & Downing Street","slug":"whitehall-downing-street","cat":"politics","url":"/politics/whitehall-downing-street/","lat":51.5034,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"The most famous front door in Britain belongs to a Restoration speculator's cheap terrace.","thumb":"/img/downing-street-number-10-480.jpg?v=3a2fa311","img":"/img/downing-street-number-10.jpg","w":1024,"h":740},{"name":"Westminster Abbey","slug":"westminster-abbey","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/westminster-abbey/","lat":51.499401,"lng":-0.127391,"verdict":"Where every English coronation since 1066 has happened, and where much of the country is buried.","thumb":"/img/own-westminster-abbey-480.jpg?v=b58d218d","img":"/img/own-westminster-abbey.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Westminster Cathedral","slug":"westminster-cathedral","cat":"sacred","url":"/sacred/westminster-cathedral/","lat":51.49582,"lng":-0.139519,"verdict":"England's Catholic cathedral, in striped brick and Byzantine domes, with a lift up the campanile.","thumb":"/img/westminster-cathedral-480.jpg?v=0cfc1413","img":"/img/westminster-cathedral.jpg","w":889,"h":1024},{"name":"55 Broadway","slug":"55-broadway","cat":"architecture","url":"/architecture/55-broadway/","lat":51.499395,"lng":-0.133668,"verdict":"London Underground's headquarters of 1929, with sculpture that got its carvers denounced.","thumb":"/img/55-broadway-480.jpg?v=670625aa","img":"/img/55-broadway.jpg","w":1024,"h":955},{"name":"Admiralty Arch","slug":"admiralty-arch","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/admiralty-arch/","lat":51.506738,"lng":-0.128576,"verdict":"The gate from Trafalgar Square to the Mall, built as a memorial to Queen Victoria, with a nose on the inside.","thumb":"/img/admiralty-arch-480.jpg?v=5c965b9a","img":"/img/admiralty-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":501},{"name":"Boadicea and Her Daughters","slug":"boadicea-and-her-daughters","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/boadicea-and-her-daughters/","lat":51.501096,"lng":-0.123748,"verdict":"Thornycroft's bronze of the queen who burned Roman London, charging at Parliament from the end of Westminster Bridge.","thumb":"/img/boadicea-and-her-daughters-480.jpg?v=029bbb80","img":"/img/boadicea-and-her-daughters.jpg","w":1024,"h":889},{"name":"Buxton Memorial Fountain","slug":"buxton-memorial-fountain","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/buxton-memorial-fountain/","lat":51.496129,"lng":-0.124744,"verdict":"A polychrome Gothic fountain to the men who ended slavery in the British Empire.","thumb":"/img/buxton-memorial-fountain-480.jpg?v=a4074328","img":"/img/buxton-memorial-fountain.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Charles I at Charing Cross","slug":"charles-i-at-charing-cross","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/charles-i-at-charing-cross/","lat":51.507334,"lng":-0.127655,"verdict":"The oldest bronze equestrian statue in England, and the point from which every distance to London is measured.","thumb":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross-480.jpg?v=db81f3c1","img":"/img/charles-i-at-charing-cross.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"Duke of York Column","slug":"duke-of-york-column","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/duke-of-york-column/","lat":51.50631,"lng":-0.131735,"verdict":"The Grand Old Duke of York, on a column paid for by docking every soldier a day's wages.","thumb":"/img/duke-of-york-column.jpg?v=a1476dc5","img":"/img/duke-of-york-column.jpg","w":394,"h":1024},{"name":"Houses of Parliament & Big Ben","slug":"houses-of-parliament","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/houses-of-parliament/","lat":51.499387,"lng":-0.124566,"verdict":"Barry and Pugin's Gothic palace, the Great Clock and the cracked bell everyone calls Big Ben, with Westminster Hall of 1097 at its heart.","thumb":"/img/houses-of-parliament-480.jpg?v=88dbd74f","img":"/img/houses-of-parliament.jpg","w":1024,"h":576},{"name":"Jewel Tower","slug":"jewel-tower","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/jewel-tower/","lat":51.49846,"lng":-0.1264,"verdict":"Edward III's strongroom, one of two pieces of the medieval Palace of Westminster left standing.","thumb":"/img/jewel-tower-480.jpg?v=136b988f","img":"/img/jewel-tower.jpg","w":806,"h":1024},{"name":"Millicent Fawcett statue","slug":"millicent-fawcett-statue","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/millicent-fawcett-statue/","lat":51.500667,"lng":-0.127202,"verdict":"Gillian Wearing's bronze of the suffragist leader, the first woman in Parliament Square and the first statue there by a woman, unveiled in 2018.","thumb":"/img/millicent-fawcett-statue-480.jpg?v=936ff34e","img":"/img/millicent-fawcett-statue.jpg","w":750,"h":1024},{"name":"Parliament Square statues","slug":"parliament-square-statues","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/parliament-square-statues/","lat":51.500626,"lng":-0.126826,"verdict":"Twelve statesmen on one square: Churchill, Mandela, Gandhi, Lincoln, and Millicent Fawcett, the first woman.","thumb":"/img/parliament-square-statues-480.jpg?v=0c09db7f","img":"/img/parliament-square-statues.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Royal Artillery Memorial","slug":"royal-artillery-memorial","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/royal-artillery-memorial/","lat":51.502566,"lng":-0.151953,"verdict":"A stone howitzer and four bronze gunners, one of them dead under his greatcoat: the most honest war memorial in London.","thumb":"/img/royal-artillery-memorial-480.jpg?v=660ad31d","img":"/img/royal-artillery-memorial.jpg","w":682,"h":1024},{"name":"The Burghers of Calais","slug":"the-burghers-of-calais","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/the-burghers-of-calais/","lat":51.497478,"lng":-0.124912,"verdict":"Rodin's six men walking to their deaths, in a garden beside the House of Lords.","thumb":"/img/the-burghers-of-calais-480.jpg?v=0f383827","img":"/img/the-burghers-of-calais.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"The Cenotaph","slug":"the-cenotaph","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/the-cenotaph/","lat":51.502679,"lng":-0.126091,"verdict":"Lutyens's empty tomb, plain Portland stone and no religion, the memorial every other memorial answers to.","thumb":"/img/the-cenotaph-480.jpg?v=f5644dec","img":"/img/the-cenotaph.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Trafalgar Square & Nelson's Column","slug":"nelsons-column","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/nelsons-column/","lat":51.507759,"lng":-0.12793,"verdict":"The symbolic heart of London: Barry's square with Nelson fifty-two metres above it, and Landseer's lions to climb on.","thumb":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2-480.jpg?v=b27c88fb","img":"/img/own-nelsons-column-2.jpg","w":1024,"h":768},{"name":"Victoria Memorial","slug":"victoria-memorial","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/victoria-memorial/","lat":51.50184,"lng":-0.140587,"verdict":"Twenty-three hundred tons of white marble in front of the Palace, with a gilded Victory on top.","thumb":"/img/victoria-memorial-480.jpg?v=6ff38e58","img":"/img/victoria-memorial.jpg","w":685,"h":1024},{"name":"Wellington Arch","slug":"wellington-arch","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/wellington-arch/","lat":51.502536,"lng":-0.150818,"verdict":"Decimus Burton's arch at Hyde Park Corner, with the largest bronze sculpture in Europe on top and balconies inside to climb to.","thumb":"/img/wellington-arch-480.jpg?v=3fc925e4","img":"/img/wellington-arch.jpg","w":1024,"h":669},{"name":"Whitehall & Downing Street","slug":"whitehall-downing-street","cat":"monuments","url":"/monuments/whitehall-downing-street/","lat":51.5034,"lng":-0.1263,"verdict":"The government's own street: mounted sentries at Horse Guards, the Cenotaph in the middle of the road, and the gates of Downing Street.","thumb":"/img/downing-street-number-10-480.jpg?v=3a2fa311","img":"/img/downing-street-number-10.jpg","w":1024,"h":740},{"name":"Bazalgette memorial","slug":"bazalgette-memorial","cat":"science","url":"/science/bazalgette-memorial/","lat":51.506094,"lng":-0.122356,"verdict":"The bust of the engineer who built the sewers and the Embankment you are standing on, with the inscription that he put the river in chains.","thumb":"/img/bazalgette-memorial-480.jpg?v=5ecef41a","img":"/img/bazalgette-memorial.jpg","w":1024,"h":683},{"name":"Benjamin Franklin House","slug":"benjamin-franklin-house","cat":"science","url":"/science/benjamin-franklin-house/","lat":51.507651,"lng":-0.124892,"verdict":"The only house of Benjamin Franklin left standing anywhere, on Craven Street, where he lodged for sixteen years and where the basement was full of bones.","thumb":"/img/benjamin-franklin-house-480.jpg?v=acfd733e","img":"/img/benjamin-franklin-house.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Royal Society","slug":"royal-society","cat":"science","url":"/science/royal-society/","lat":51.5063,"lng":-0.1315,"verdict":"The oldest scientific academy in the world, in a Nash terrace on the Mall, open to all one weekend in September and to readers by appointment."},{"name":"54 Broadway","slug":"54-broadway","cat":"secrets","url":"/secrets/54-broadway/","lat":51.4996,"lng":-0.134,"verdict":"The Secret Intelligence Service's headquarters for forty years, behind a brass plate for the Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company, and the model for every fictional spymaster's office."},{"name":"Admiralty Citadel","slug":"admiralty-citadel","cat":"secrets","url":"/secrets/admiralty-citadel/","lat":51.505725,"lng":-0.129465,"verdict":"The ivy-covered concrete blockhouse on Horse Guards Parade, built in 1940 as the Navy's bomb-proof nerve centre and still in use.","thumb":"/img/admiralty-citadel-480.jpg?v=feea8999","img":"/img/admiralty-citadel.jpg","w":1024,"h":622},{"name":"Churchill War Rooms","slug":"churchill-war-rooms","cat":"secrets","url":"/secrets/churchill-war-rooms/","lat":51.502209,"lng":-0.129251,"verdict":"The bunker under Whitehall where the war was run, left as it was when the lights went off in 1945, with the Cabinet Room and the transatlantic telephone disguised as a lavatory.","thumb":"/img/churchill-war-rooms-480.jpg?v=c73a1678","img":"/img/churchill-war-rooms.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"MI5, Thames House","slug":"mi5-thames-house","cat":"secrets","url":"/secrets/mi5-thames-house/","lat":51.49393,"lng":-0.125665,"verdict":"The Security Service's home since 1994, a 1930s Portland stone block on Millbank built for ICI and now the most watched building in Westminster.","thumb":"/img/mi5-thames-house-480.jpg?v=4239e9f2","img":"/img/mi5-thames-house.jpg","w":904,"h":1108},{"name":"Old Admiralty Building: Room 40 and Room 39","slug":"old-admiralty-building-room-40-and-room-39","cat":"secrets","url":"/secrets/old-admiralty-building-room-40-and-room-39/","lat":51.505874,"lng":-0.128546,"verdict":"Where the Navy broke Germany's codes in the first war and where Ian Fleming spent the second, at the desk in Room 39 that gave him M and the Secret Service."},{"name":"The OWO and the Spy 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where Bell, Grant and Fry hang, and where Charleston's studio comes to London for the winter of 2026.","thumb":"/img/tate-britain-480.jpg?v=420f8b87","img":"/img/tate-britain.jpg","w":1024,"h":575},{"name":"Westminster Bridge","slug":"westminster-bridge","cat":"literary","url":"/literary/westminster-bridge/","lat":51.500826,"lng":-0.12099,"verdict":"The bridge Wordsworth crossed at dawn in 1802, when Earth had not anything to show more fair.","thumb":"/img/westminster-bridge-480.jpg?v=2e18aeb2","img":"/img/westminster-bridge.jpg","w":1024,"h":682},{"name":"Benjamin Franklin","slug":"benjamin-franklin-house","cat":"world","url":"/world/benjamin-franklin-house/","lat":51.507651,"lng":-0.124892,"verdict":"The only Franklin home left anywhere in the world, where he spent sixteen years trying to keep America British.","thumb":"/img/benjamin-franklin-house-480.jpg?v=acfd733e","img":"/img/benjamin-franklin-house.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Charles de Gaulle","slug":"charles-de-gaulle","cat":"world","url":"/world/charles-de-gaulle/","lat":51.505627,"lng":-0.133743,"verdict":"The house from which Free France was governed, when France itself had surrendered.","thumb":"/img/charles-de-gaulle-480.jpg?v=a48b63bd","img":"/img/charles-de-gaulle.jpg","w":640,"h":480},{"name":"Heinrich Heine","slug":"heinrich-heine","cat":"world","url":"/world/heinrich-heine/","lat":51.507404,"lng":-0.124593,"verdict":"The Craven Street lodging of Germany's greatest lyric poet, who found London too much.","thumb":"/img/heinrich-heine-480.jpg?v=9901a734","img":"/img/heinrich-heine.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Joseph Conrad","slug":"joseph-conrad","cat":"world","url":"/world/joseph-conrad/","lat":51.493866,"lng":-0.141372,"verdict":"The Pimlico lodging where a Polish sea captain wrote his first novel between voyages.","thumb":"/img/joseph-conrad-480.jpg?v=14e06238","img":"/img/joseph-conrad.jpg","w":768,"h":1024},{"name":"Lambeth 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