Oh good Lord, I’m having another total freakin’ break down, I just spent £100 on a t-shirt. Okay so the cotton feels like silk and the heavy studding weighs down like chainmail, actually no this is a bargain it’s so beautiful. I tried it on thinking I CAN NOT spend £100 on a t-shirt, I [...]

I’d read many a review of the Grocery café all of which condemned the service but enthused about the food. They weren’t wrong about the food, it’s amazing. And I didn’t have a problem with the service – it was fine plus I was served by a guy who looked like the freakish blond choir [...]

163-167 Bermondsey Street, London, SE1 3UW
020 7423 1525
Monday – Sunday 7am – 8pm

Specialising in independent films, including a lot of British and European ones and perfectly located on the edge of Soho and Chinatown. It has a street level café selling cakes and cookies from my favourite bakery, Konditor & Cook and a dark relaxing lower ground floor café and bar with a number of cushy leather [...]

On a sunny Sunday be warned that you will barely be able to move due to the sheer volume of people. Every Sunday street vendors come and lay out stuff all along the street whether it be vintage clothes, general carboot sale clutter, hand printed t-shirts or food ranging from falafel to the most amazing [...]

It’s often hard to get a seat here as it’s always heaving. The types who come here are the kind who move to Brick Lane because it’s cool not because they’re cool. I bet everyone here has a job in something related to advertising but they hang out on Brick Lane at Coffee @ on [...]

On my initial discovery it was like an episode of the Twilight Zone. I decided to walk up Cambridge Heath Road to avoid waiting for a bus as it was a rare sunny day when I came across what looked like a garden centre or children’s crèche with an abundance of garden gnomes, miniature chairs [...]

A home away from home with big comfy chairs (which they probably salvaged from the street thrown away by some landlord who couldn’t use them due to the fire hazard). It’s hidden in the Candid Arts Trust and you wouldn’t know it was there unless you knew it was there, which is its main attraction. [...]

When I asked if I could take a photograph I got a grunted reply of “urgh people are always asking us that” , the main reason anyone comes here is for the “super elevated gillie” platforms with 9-inch heels and 4-inch platforms from Vivienne Westwood’s 1993 fall-winter Anglomania collection that Naomi Campbell fell over in, [...]

This is my main go-to place for bags, boots and shoes. There are a lot of shoes and this is when being arranged by colour can be useful. Despite the fact that slouchy leather boots your mother wore in the 70’s is a trend that I feel should have died out circa 2006, Absolute [...]

An awful lot of fuss is made about Beacon’s Closet in New York, it’s supposed to be a big deal that all the clothes are arranged in colour rather than style. I personally don’t know many people who go out shopping for something orange rather than those that say go looking for a dress or [...]

Antique shops one after the other line the southern end of Portobello Road on a Saturday. Then come the food stalls followed by the junk and vintage clothes stalls. My advice is to take the tube to Ladbroke Grove station and walk underneath the Westway (the motorway) as this is where all the best vintage [...]

It’s primarily a flower market but this is the one day of the week that everything on Columbia road is open if flowers aren’t really your thing. The street harks back to a time when as Napoleon put it “Britain is a nation of shop keepers”* with independent little shops selling anything from perfume [...]

It’s a food market and an expensive one at that. This is where all the local farmers from around London and stretching as far as Devon and Cornwall come to sell their goods on a Friday and Saturday. You can find every conceivable foodstuff here and it goes without saying that it’s pretty much mostly [...]

Ok so another faux-Italian deli cum café, I guess I can’t get enough of these places. Distressed furniture and walls adorned with shelves of jars and Italian produce are two themes I always plum for and like gastro pubs, London has no shortage of them. I’m just picking out a few of my favourites. [...]