London Guide
Things not to miss
1 Portobello Market
• London's best street market (Friday and Saturday) offers brilliant clothes, bric-a-brac, antiques, and fruit and veg.
2 Covent Garden
• With its spacious, pedestrianized piazza, covered markets and trendy, offbeat stores, Covent Garden is one of the most enjoyable areas in London.
3 National Gallery
• From the Renaissance to Picasso: one of the world's great art galleries.
4 Sir John Soane's Museum
• Part architectural set piece, part art gallery, the Soane museum is small and perfectly formed.
5 Victoria and Albert Museum
• In terms of sheer variety and scale, the V&A is the greatest applied art museum in the world.
6 Hoxton
• Take in some of the city's cutting-edge contemporary art and then trawl the trendy bars of this fashionable district.
7 Hampstead Heath
• Fly kites, look across London and walk over to Kenwood, for fine art, tea and cakes.
8 Somerset House
• Visit the art galleries, chill out by the dancing fountain, or (in winter) skate the night away at this wonderful riverside palace.
9 British Museum
• The spectacular Great Court and the renovated Round Reading Room have brought new life to the world's oldest and greatest public museum.
10 Tower of London
• Bloody royal history, Beefeaters, lots of armour, the Crown Jewels and ravens – and a great medieval castle.
11 Hampton Court Palace
• A sprawling red-brick affair on the banks of the Thames, Hampton Court is the finest of London's royal palaces.
12 London Eye
• Londoners have taken to their new landmark, and there is certainly no better view, but book in advance.
13 The South Bank
• Stroll along the bank of the Thames, and admire the vista of the north bank.
14 St Paul's Cathedral
• Christopher Wren's masterpiece remains one of London's greatest landmarks.
15 Houses of Parliament
• See the "mother of all parliaments at work from the public gallery or take a summertime tour.
16 Kew Gardens
• Kew boasts three hundred acres of beautiful botanic gardens by the River Thames, with the curvaceous Palm House as its centrepiece.
17 Tate Modern
• One of the world's greatest modern art collections housed in a spectacularly converted riverside power station.
18 Imperial War Museum
• The former Bedlam lunatic asylum is now home to London's most even-handed military museum and the country's only permanent gallery devoted to the Holocaust.
19 Highgate Cemetery
• The city's most atmospheric Victorian necropolis, thick with trees and crowded with famous corpses, with Karl Marx topping the bill.
20 Greenwich
• Soak up the naval history at the National Maritime Museum, and climb up to the Royal Observatory to enjoy the view over the river.