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In 1777 Samuel Johnson spoke his immortal line, that when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. The phrase itself may have grown tired with use, but the words still ring true. In the 250 intervening years the city has morphed almost beyond recognition: the population has swelled tenfold, St Paul’s Cathedral (once the city’s tallest building) is now towered over by the Shard and a hundred others, and Lime bikes have become our horse and carriage. Yet many of the things which make London great are the same ones that Johnson named: not just the grand buildings and squares but the winding backstreets and byways, and the fact that its “wonderful immensity” allows for such multitudes. Here are just a few reasons why we will never tire of London. The National may be best known for its Shakespeare productions, but it is no stranger to the modern bard. In April next year it will collaborate with rapper Stormzy in a top secret production featuring his music. Can’t wait? The theatre’s new artistic director Indu Rubasingham has kicked off her debut season with an updated version of Euripides’ Bacchae, where characters rap in verse and dance to heavy bass beats. There was nothing quite like sitting in a grand old wood-panelled room, having a Sunday roast wheeled up to you on a trolley and presented with a flourish from beneath a silver dome. Simpson’s in the Strand was loved by everyone from Charles Dickens to Churchill, right up until the pandemic when it closed its doors. After five years of obsolescence, restaurateur Jeremy King has come to the rescue and will be bringing Simpson’s back early next year — domes and all. Off licences may exist up and down the country, but London’s may be the most delightful. At Londis N16 you can buy the best homemade Gujarati curry this side of the Arabian Sea for lunch, while Rococo in Notting Hill is single-handedly keeping print alive by stocking all the nichest fashion and arts magazines. A good relationship with your friendly local bossman can add years to your life. Pubs are like football teams. In each you can find your tribe, whether it’s the old geezers and Gen Zs singing karaoke at the Army and Navy in Stoke Newington or the fashion types in their toe shoes at The Spurstowe Arms. With pub culture comes great camaraderie. Once I walked into my local and everyone clapped — it really doesn’t get better than that. Timothée Chalamet, Lila Moss, Harry Styles — who hasn’t swung their legs over a Lime bike in London? Yes, they litter the streets and the beeping is a soundtrack as common as rain, but there’s no feeling quite like sailing past the traffic to reach some far-flung corner of Zone 2 in half the time it would have taken on an overground and two buses. The Burlington Arcade is a flâneur’s dream. A walk through it — past the art galleries and champagne bar, past the priceless jewellery, the handmade shoes — is a glimpse into the lives of the leisure class. Central London’s nightlife may be flailing, but there are always people partying. Head out further east to the clubs below the Canning Town flyover and you’ll find sweaty bodies writhing up against each other until the wee hours of Monday morning. And once you eventually get kicked out, you can make all the bankers uncomfortable on the DLR. Bliss! Head to the Windmill in Brixton and you can catch someone who will be on the billing for BST in five years’ time. Lola Young was spotted by Amy Winehouse’s former manager at the The Bedford pub in Balham, while The Last Dinner Party played their first live gig at The George Tavern in Stepney. Now, they’ve both played Glastonbury. London is a talent machine; the baby prodigies just need a stage. London is a city of second chances. The Clink restaurant in Brixton Prison trains inmates in the art of hospitality. One who benefited was former drug dealer Nathaniel Mortley (better known as Natty Can Cook), who fell back in love with kitchens while inside. Now he’s opened pan-Caribbean restaurant, 2210, in Herne Hill. And it’s fabulous. Otto’s is unlike anywhere else, a room of theatre, fire, sauces made of every known alcohol, and ducks and lobsters being crushed in giant silver-plated presses. And now it has a £350 burger made with three cuts of beef, lamb, lobster slaw and frankly an obscene amount of caviar. It regularly sells out. You’re not getting that in Ottawa. Mumbai is the beating heart of Bollywood, but London is where they live. Actress Sonam Kapoor moved to the capital with her husband Anand Ahuja in 2019 and has since called Notting Hill home. She follows a line of other Hindi film fraternity heavyweights like Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol who live here and are frequently spotted in Marylebone and Mayfair. London is one of the best places to celebrate Indian festivities in style — from Holi to Diwali. Some of London’s most lauded architects are helping solve the affordable housing problem. Peter Barber has worked on projects from Camden to Colindale, while newer practice Apparata has won countless awards for its brutalist community apartment block, House for Artists, in Barking. The capital’s best and brightest are committed to the principle that beautiful, liveable homes shouldn’t be the preserve of the rich. Layton Williams, actor: The nights are always fabulous. The best might be such a cliche but I don’t mind a cheeky Freedom. And if I can’t be bothered to go into central — I live in south London — then Two Brewers will just do quite nicely. It’s local vibes, a little bit older, I feel like I’m the youngest person in there, so it makes me feel good. At no point in its two-millennia history has this sprawling collection of villages succumbed to wrecking ball or masterplan. The tangle of roads, streets and crescents may bamboozle the grid-accustomed Americans, but it translates into a glorious hodgepodge of architectural styles and street layouts. Royalist or not, any Londoner can admit it’s pretty special to accidentally witness a Red Arrows flypast or catch sight of some royal pomp and circumstance, purely because we live in such close proximity to the nation’s monarchy. Buckingham Palace might have lost its appeal after your first school trip, but happening upon a horse parade or unintentionally passing during the changing of the guard does still slightly knock the wind out of you. Jack Rooke, comedian: I’ve been going to see a lot of late-night films at Screen on the Green in Islington. On a Saturday they do films at 11pm and I saw a Scorsese film called After Hours, which I’d never heard of before — it was amazing. It’s a fact that often gets bandied about, but London does technically qualify as a forest. In fact, we are the second greenest city in the world after Tokyo. Each park has its own lore, from the late-night mischief that happens in the more secluded bits of Hampstead Heath to Highbury Fields, where Paul Mescal is spotted on a near daily basis. There are 78 parks for the curious to explore: that’s a recipe for happiness. This time next year, the whopping 70-metre-long Bayeux Tapestry will come to the British Museum. It’s the first time it has ever been shown in the UK since its creation 1,000 years ago. Meanwhile, two of Hogarth’s 18th-century murals recently went on display in St Bartholomew’s Hospital, marking the first time they’ll have ever been seen by the public. So if any London leaver tries to tell you they’ve seen and done it all, you can stew in good conscience knowing they’re wrong. Battersea Power Station is a landmark of London’s riverscape and has been immortalised in countless works of art, including a Pink Floyd album cover. Now it’s possible to get a lift all the way up to the top of one of the chimneys and gaze across the cityscape. The best time to go? The first weekend of November, when the Battersea Park fireworks are on. Never let it be said that the capital doesn’t cater to its Gen Z inhabitants. Bébé Bob, the fun little sister to Bob Bob Ricard (of “press button for champagne” fame) has a very glam new menu which offers £15 for a bump of caviar and a shot of ice-cold vodka. If that hasn’t sufficiently scratched the itch, diners at Jackson Boxer’s restaurant Henri can get two martinis, plus a plate of chips and mayo with a big dollop of cost-price caviar for £30. Rude not to. Hollywood’s finest are trading up Beverly Hills for Notting Hill. Keen celeb-spotters will find Ryan Gosling browsing the vegetables in Daylesford Organic, or Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach wandering Portobello, while Lily Collins is a fixture in Queen’s Park. Collins loves the city so much that she’s been pushing for an “Emily in London” spin-off. Books can be found in the most unlikely of places. In among the fabric shops of Shepherd’s Bush Market is Special Rider Books, which sells tomes old and new; common and rare. They also put on events with authors like Geoff Dyer in a little fairy-lit room under the railway arches. Meanwhile, Osterley Bookshop is in an old Tube station, complete with boxes full of glasses for customers to use while browsing. Where else but St James’s would have a proper old-school boozer like The Red Lion — truly, a glorious pub — only a couple of doors down from Wiltons, a seafood restaurant as smart as The Ritz? Better still, the Duke of Westminster has been spotted at both. Club bathrooms can be scuzzy and utilitarian, or a place of Narnia-style delight. There’s a new members’ club in Fitzrovia called CoOc where the bathroom is almost as big as the club and full of plush upholstery, big banquettes and a DJ playing. Two of the bathroom stalls have a secret door between them. At the Roses of Elagabalus, a queer bar in Dalston, the bathroom is so big and grand that people sometimes wonder where the dancefloor is. You could feasibly spend the whole evening in there. Thom Yorke’s anti-corporate oracles of doom are shuffling into the O2 (November 21-25) to give fans of “serious music” a chance to nod solemnly, mansplain Schopenhauer and criticise the weighting of the setlist. But Radiohead also happen to be one of the greatest live performers in rock history, and this one can’t be missed. Excellent live alternatives include Queens of the Stone Age (Royal Albert Hall, October 29), Lorde (The O2, November 16 & 17), The Last Dinner Party (Brixton Academy, December 7 & 8), Wolf Alice (The O2, December 2 & 3), or for Radiohead-esque apocalyptic noise, My Bloody Valentine (Wembley Arena, November 25). You’d be forgiven for walking past this Chinatown hole-in-the-wall without a backward glance. But stop, and you’ll see the team busying themselves at hot plates, deftly cooking up made-to-order jianbing: crispy Chinese pancakes filled with spring onions, pickles, pork belly or crab sticks. It makes an excellent pre-theatre or post-pub stomach liner — and it costs about £7. Nothing brings Londoners together quite like a fight against a greedy landlord. When the billionaire landlord of the Prince Charles Cinema planned to hike its rent to an unsustainable level in January, the troops rallied. Within 24 hours, 100,000 people had signed a petition to save the cinema. In May, the cinema was listed as an Asset of Community Value, meaning its fans could buy it out if it were listed for sale. Similar victories have been mounted to save venues like The George Tavern and the Moth Club in Hackney. Not only do we have almost every world cuisine on our streets, but the best versions of them can be found at the tiniest food stalls. From the cheery Jordanian falafel seller on Petticoat Lane to Indian dosas at the wonderfully named Horn OK Please in Borough Market. Jazz clubs are often mistakenly thought to be staid affairs. It’s simply not true, and Ronnie’s is better (and busier) than ever. It’s cool again. How cool? Its street party in the summer was so popular that Soho was gridlocked all day. Emily Atack, actor: My favourite things about London will always be the pubs. The Flask in Highgate is one of the best pubs in London. The Queens Head in Winchmore Hill is very lovely. The Pineapple in Kentish Town. I used to live above the Assembly House, and it was mental. My partner is always trying to get me into another hobby, but the pub is my hobby. Nothing makes a Londoner despair quite like the news that an old boozer is closing down. Hats off to artist Peter Doig, then, who is reviving the beloved McGlynn’s in King’s Cross, which has been shuttered since the landlord died in 2023. Doig promises that the pub will maintain all of its old charms, so expect the fuzzy carpet and fruit machines to be in their rightful place. Vodka or gin — or both — is poured straight from bottles kept in the freezer. The liquid is viscous, head-clearing, and the glasses are filled right to the brim. Meaning that, in the elegant surrounds of the old-school Egerton House Hotel, you have to lean down and slurp from the glass while it’s still on the table. It is a pleasing way to be humbled. Oisin Rogers, landlord of The Devonshire: I recommend restaurants to people probably 20 times a week. And every single time I do it, I get a text back saying, ‘That was f***ing great.’ I recommend great stalwarts of the city, from The Quality Chop House, Andrew Edmunds and Bentley’s to Mountain or Brat. Let the new things survive six months and bed in, and then go. Head to the restaurant above the French House for the garlic on toast, or Bouchon Racine for the rabbit and mustard dish — literally can’t be done anywhere else in the world. Now theatre is not simply about providing a chance to share air with a famous person from films, but in our celebrity-junky times, we’re all suckers for an A-List gawp, and London’s stages are crammed with screen stars. Currently on stage are Alicia Vikander in The Lady from the Sea at The Bridge, Susan Sarandon in Mary Page Marlowe at the Old Vic, Ncuti Gatwa in Born with Teeth at Wyndham’s, and Minnie Driver in Every Brilliant Thing at Soho Place. Coming up this autumn there’s Bryan Cranston, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Paapa Essiedu in All My Sons at Wyndhams, Clive Owen and Saskia Reeves in End at the National Theatre, and then into 2026 we’ll have sexy Paul Mescal hitting the National in Death of a Salesman and A Whistle in the Dark. It’s not all about megastars — London is a key incubator for the superstars of the future. Right now you can check out writer/director Sarah Shelton’s darkly funny family drama debut Blessings at Riverside Studios, and the hotly tipped Josh Seymour directing Ragdoll at Jermyn St Theatre. Mega-talented Jack Holden has adapted The Line of Beauty at the Almeida and will also be returning to his true crime tour de force Kenrex in December as it’s been transferred to The Other Palace. On the acting side, check out Lucy Karczewski in Stereophonic, Rosy McEwen in Mary Page Marlowe and Francesca Mills in Hamlet. From Central Saint Martins to Westminster to the London College of Fashion, our design colleges lead not only the country, but the entire world. Just this week, Grace Wales Bonner, a CSM alum, took the top job at Hermès Menswear. Jonathan Anderson, creative director at Dior Men, studied at LCF. Sarah Burton, now at the helm of Givenchy, and Daniel Lee, the creative force behind Burberry, both studied at CSM. Other esteemed talents who’ve walked the Saint Martins halls stretch from Phoebe Philo to Stella McCartney, while Steven Stokey-Daley of SS Daley trained at Westminster. September’s London Fashion Week marked a major return to form for the catwalks in the capital. It’s been all change at the British Fashion Council, with a new CEO, and London’s fashion stars did not disappoint. Burberry! Simone Rocha! Erdem! And a fresh batch of new independent labels our city is known for incubating.
