A very good selection of non-fiction, essays, and rare books. The Japanese book collection is gorgeous!

The second coffee shop has to be Kaffeine. Having only recently come across this one, I was certainly impressed and they may even have the best coffee I've had, since a short stay in Portland, Oregon.

A treasure trove in the The City of London. The Archive of London. Strongrooms hold kilometres of shelving; boxes of matter that has somehow been catalogued and categorised in a traceable manner by the public, for academic, genealogical and other research. This beautiful book is from a box on Epping Forest. On the same visit, I looked through photographs of Blitz singsongs in Bethnal Green Underground station, 1980s anti-Thatcher / pro-GLC gig posters and paper concertina optical models of the Crystal Palace.

A beautiful and spacious (outside of rush hour) way to get from Highbury, through east London to south of the river in minutes. The train snakes epically through Hoxton and Shoreditch and opens up the Jubilee Line via the beautiful Canada Water / Bermondsey stations.

At the end of the Victoria line at the Walthomstow station, and then a 15 minute walk through some suburban streets with some lefts and at other times rights is an industrial estate. Through the gate and buried at the very end of the units where you are convinced you are lost and doubting it's existence at all is God's Own Junkyard. It's a worthy pilgrimage and actually sort of where you expect God would put a junkyard. The warehouse is a monument to neon and the life works of the late Mr Neon, Chris Bracey. It's littered to the rooftop with cables, plug sockets and choice words with neon epigrams, the whole collection is stacked, I suppose how a junkyard of the sort would be. Full of sex, religion, americana, sci-fi and nostalgia that all blend together surprisingly well, It's a visual feast that you can take in with a coffee and an open mouth. It is a gem of a place. It is really great.