Westerns Laundry is a restaurant and wine bar (natural wine) in a converted laundrette that does brilliant small plates (focus on seafood).

Inspired by Dave Eggers’ projects in the USA such as the Pirate Store in San Francisco and Superhero store in Brooklyn, The Monster Supplies Store in Hoxton is home to the Ministry of Stories: A volunteer run organization, founded by Nick Hornby, to help young people with creative writing of all kinds through workshops and free mentoring sessions. The store is the “Purveyor of quality goods for monsters of every kind” with fascinating bottles and tins containing everything from eyeballs to Zadie Smith’s short story Mortal Terror.

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.

Get on the list for tickets and surprise someone who will appreciate the 'village of books' upstairs in particular.

London is so vast I end up spending hours travelling on trains. They are by far the best way to travel around on and are always full of weird and wonderful characters.