Sager & Wilde is a small wine bar on Hackney Road, close to many other amazing places on Hackney and Columbia Road. The perfect place for an aperitif or a nightcap.

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.

Rochelle Canteen, established in 2004 by Melanie Arnold and Margot Henderson, is housed in the converted bike shed of the old Rochelle School. Rochelle Canteen is one of my favourite restaurants in London for breakfast, lunch and/ or dinner. 

It's a members-only library but you might be granted access with a research request. The writer's room is great but there's a few special, hidden corners among the bookshelves to tuck yourself away in.

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.