Take Monday off! Enjoy a kids-free lunch date with your baby daddy in Barrafina is always a good idea!

Teeny, French cafe with amazing pastries, great coffee and incredible croque-monsieur. Long table in the front and small garden in the back or take away and head to Highbury Fields, which is only a couple of minutes away.  

This beautiful 19thC industrial building is situated in Markfield Park just around the corner from my studio. Once a sewage treatment works serving the whole of Tottenham and now a museum. The fully restored Victorian pump engine is only open to the public on the second Sunday of every month but the outside of the building and surrounding park is a worth a visit regardless.

The Lambeth Walk is not as billed in the song. Quite a bleak but somehow beautiful mishmash of architectural accident–or–design; a legacy of stray WWII bombs intended for more auspicious near-at-hand targets, such as the Houses of Parliament. I study sculpture here each Monday; a lovely workshop inside. The exterior features one of only a few examples of an outside pulpit, apparently for the minister to take his message direct to the shoppers, in the Walk's heyday.

Hidden away in the backstreets of Finsbury Park, I used to share a house opposite this pub, where it assumed the role as our second living room. A real north London gem, I still go there these days for the tree-house-like, leafy terraced beer garden, which is perfect for summer evenings.