This painted of the shopping centre by my brother, Leo Verhoeven, shows a rather idyllic vision of the shopping centre we both share. Its pretty rough, full of budget shops and funny cafes and framed by a shanty town style open air market. I have a real soft spot for it as the classic under dog, thats so often slated and condemned but lives on.

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.

It's really close to my house and one of my favourite pubs in London! (I even went before it was close to where I lived!) It is London's first cooperatively owned pubs and has lovely events and workshops, exercise classes and great parties, and good beer! It's lovely in the beer garden in the hot summer and equally great in the winter, next to a real fire.

Travelling on these uncrowded river buses is such a relaxing way to see the city's landmarks from the Thames. A really quick and lesser-known way to travel from central London to Greenwich, especially on a sunny weekend.

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.