London

London is not a city you finish. It is a collection of villages that grew into each other over two thousand years, and the seams still show: a Roman wall behind a coffee shop in the City, a Georgian square off a Victorian shopping street, a 1960s tower block looking down on a churchyard that predates the Great Fire. The Thames runs through the middle of it, and almost everything of consequence in the city's history happened within a mile of the water. Nine million people live here, speaking something like three hundred languages, and the result is a capital that feels less like a single place than a negotiated settlement between dozens of them.

For a British visitor, London is the easiest short break in the country to organise and the hardest to plan. Every mainline railway in England ends here, the museums are free, and you can cross the whole centre on foot in an afternoon. The difficulty is choosing. You could spend a weekend entirely inside the British Museum, or entirely in Borough Market and the pubs around it, or entirely walking the towpaths of the Regent's Canal from Little Venice to Limehouse, and each would feel like a complete trip. The people who enjoy London most are usually the ones who pick two or three things and let the rest go.

The character of the city changes sharply over short distances. The City of London empties at weekends and fills on weekday mornings with people in a hurry. The West End runs on theatre times. Shoreditch and Peckham get going after dark. Hampstead and Richmond feel semi-rural, with genuine woodland and deer parks inside the M25. Understanding that London is really several cities with one transport network is the single most useful thing to grasp before you arrive, because it determines where you should stay and how much of your holiday you will spend underground.

Top things to do in London

The following is a starting point rather than a checklist. Most of these can be reached from each other on foot or by a short Tube ride, and several cost nothing.

• The British Museum - eight million objects in Bloomsbury, from the Rosetta Stone to the Sutton Hoo helmet, housed around Norman Foster's glass-roofed Great Court. Entry is free, the collection is far too large for one visit, and the quietest hours are the first and last of the day.
• The Tower of London - a working fortress since William the Conqueror, home to the Crown Jewels, the ravens and the Yeoman Warders whose tours are considerably better than the guidebooks suggest. Book a timed slot and arrive early, because the queue for the jewels builds fast.
• Tate Modern and the South Bank - the former Bankside power station turned free-entry modern art gallery, with the Turbine Hall commissions and a top-floor viewing level over the river. Walk east or west along the South Bank afterwards for street performers, the Globe and the National Theatre.
• Westminster and the Houses of Parliament - Big Ben, Westminster Abbey and Whitehall in a tight cluster. Parliament runs tours on Saturdays and during recess, and the Abbey holds the graves of monarchs, Newton, Darwin and half the English poets worth reading.
• The royal parks - Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, Regent's Park, Green Park and St James's Park form a nearly continuous green corridor across the West End. St James's has the best view of Buckingham Palace, and Regent's Park has the rose gardens and the open-air theatre.
• Borough Market and Bermondsey - a wholesale market since at least the twelfth century, now the best place in London to eat standing up. Thursday to Saturday are the full trading days. Walk south afterwards along Bermondsey Street for the small galleries and the railway-arch breweries.
• Greenwich - the Cutty Sark, the Royal Observatory, the Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College and the view back over Canary Wharf from the top of the park. Arrive by river boat from Westminster or Tower Pier, which turns the journey into part of the day out.
• The Victoria and Albert Museum - decorative arts and design in South Kensington, next to the Natural History and Science Museums. All three are free, and the V&A's cast courts, fashion galleries and Friday late openings are the reason to choose it over the dinosaurs next door if time is short.

Getting to London

Every intercity line in Britain terminates in London, and for most of the country the train is faster than driving. From Manchester, Euston is about two hours ten minutes; from Birmingham, an hour and twenty to Euston; from Leeds, roughly two and a quarter hours to King's Cross; from Edinburgh, about four and a half hours on the East Coast line; from Bristol, an hour and forty to Paddington; from Cardiff, just under two hours. Advance fares booked twelve weeks out are a fraction of the walk-up price, and a Railcard pays for itself on a single return.

Driving into central London is a poor idea and an expensive one. The Congestion Charge applies inside the inner ring seven days a week, the Ultra Low Emission Zone now covers the whole of Greater London, and central parking runs to eye-watering hourly rates. If you must drive, the sensible approach is to leave the car at a Tube station on the outer edge of the network and travel in. Epping, Cockfosters, Stanmore, Uxbridge, Morden and Hammersmith all have parking, as do the mainline park-and-ride style stations further out at Watford Junction, Reading and Sevenoaks.

The main motorway approaches are the M1 and M40 from the north and Midlands, the M4 from the west, the M3 and A3 from the south-west, and the M11 and A12 from East Anglia, all feeding the M25 orbital. Allow generously for the M25 itself, which is unreliable at almost any hour. Coaches run into Victoria Coach Station from most large towns and are the cheapest option by a wide margin if you have the time.

Six airports serve the city. Heathrow is on the Piccadilly line and the Elizabeth line, with the Heathrow Express reaching Paddington in fifteen minutes. Gatwick runs to Victoria and London Bridge in around half an hour. Stansted connects to Liverpool Street, Luton to St Pancras via a shuttle, and London City sits on the DLR twenty minutes from Bank. Eurostar arrives at St Pancras International from Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam.

Best time to visit London

Spring is the best all-round season. From late March the parks come into blossom, the daffodils in St James's and the magnolias in Kew are genuinely worth timing a trip around, and the crowds have not yet arrived. April can be wet and May is often the driest month of the year; either way the light is good and the outdoor tables come out. Chelsea Flower Show in late May pushes hotel rates up sharply in the south-west of the city.

Summer brings the longest days, with light until nearly ten o'clock in late June, and the whole calendar of open-air events: Wimbledon, the Proms at the Albert Hall, Notting Hill Carnival over the August bank holiday, and outdoor theatre in Regent's Park and Greenwich. It is also the most expensive and most crowded time, and the Tube in a July heatwave is genuinely unpleasant. August is quieter than July in the City and West End as Londoners leave, which can work in your favour.

Autumn is the season most regular visitors prefer. September holds summer temperatures without the queues, October turns the parks - Richmond, Hampstead Heath, Kew - a deep copper, and the cultural calendar restarts with the new theatre and gallery seasons. Hotel rates dip noticeably between the end of the school holidays and the middle of November.

Winter is cold rather than harsh, rarely dropping much below freezing, and dark by four o'clock. That suits a city with this many museums, pubs and theatres. From mid-November the Christmas markets, the Southbank Centre's winter events, the ice rinks at Somerset House and the Natural History Museum, and the lights on Regent Street give the centre a real lift. January and February are the cheapest weeks of the year to stay, and the museums are close to empty on a weekday morning.

Where to stay in London

Covent Garden and Soho put you inside the West End, within walking distance of thirty theatres, the National Gallery and most of the restaurants worth crossing town for. It suits people on a short trip who want to step out of the door into the middle of things. It is noisy, and it is priced accordingly.

Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia sit just north, quieter and cheaper, full of Georgian squares and university buildings. The British Museum is on the doorstep, King's Cross, Euston and St Pancras are a short walk, and you can still reach Soho on foot in fifteen minutes. This is the best-value central option for most visitors.

South Kensington and Chelsea are for museum trips and for anyone who wants a calmer, more residential base. White stucco terraces, good restaurants, the three big museums and Hyde Park, with the Piccadilly and District lines running into the centre.

Belgravia, Victoria and Pimlico combine grand streets with a genuine mainline station and a run of small hotels and guest houses at more reasonable rates than the postcode suggests. Convenient for Westminster, the Tate and Gatwick trains.

Shoreditch, Hoxton and Spitalfields are the choice for nightlife, markets and modern design hotels, with the City a fifteen-minute walk south. Bermondsey and London Bridge offer river views, Borough Market and fast connections south and east. Paddington and Bayswater are the pragmatic option: cheaper rooms, the Elizabeth line and the Heathrow Express. Further out, Greenwich, Richmond and Hampstead trade travel time for space, quiet and a village feel, and work well for families and longer stays.

Food and drink in London

London has no single native cuisine, which is precisely the point. The oldest surviving dishes are working-class river food: pie and mash with liquor, the green parsley sauce that has outlived the eel trade that produced it, still served at M. Manze on Tower Bridge Road, trading since 1902. Jellied eels and whelks survive on a handful of market stalls. Fish and chips are done properly at the Golden Hind in Marylebone and Poppies in Spitalfields. The full English breakfast, the salt beef bagel from Beigel Bake on Brick Lane at three in the morning, and a Sunday roast in a proper pub are the other genuinely local rituals.

What the city really does is everyone else's food, cooked by people who grew up eating it. Brick Lane and Whitechapel for Bengali and Bangladeshi cooking; Southall and Tooting for Punjabi and Sri Lankan; Peckham for West African; Dalston for Turkish ocakbasi grills; Chinatown around Gerrard Street for Cantonese and increasingly for regional Sichuan and Hunan. Some of the best meals in London cost under fifteen pounds and come from a room with strip lighting and no reservation system.

At the other end, the city holds more Michelin stars than anywhere in Britain. Core by Clare Smyth in Notting Hill, The Ledbury, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in Chelsea and Ikoyi near St James's sit at the top; Lyle's in Shoreditch, St John in Smithfield - the restaurant that reset British cooking around offal and nose-to-tail - and Brat in Shoreditch are the ones chefs talk about. Book weeks ahead.

The markets are worth a morning on their own. Borough for produce and prepared food, Maltby Street's Ropewalk on Saturdays, Broadway Market in Hackney, Brixton Village for Caribbean and Latin American, and Spitalfields for a mix of everything. For drinking, London's pubs are the point: the Lamb and Flag in Covent Garden, the Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street, the Prospect of Whitby in Wapping and the Holly Bush in Hampstead all predate anything on the tourist trail. The city's brewing scene has grown up in the railway arches of Bermondsey - the so-called Bermondsey Beer Mile - where the taprooms open on Saturdays and you can walk between six or seven of them.