London

London is less a single city than a collection of villages that never stopped growing into one another. In a morning you can stand under the vaulted grandeur of Westminster Abbey, browse a thousand years of the world for free at the British Museum — still the country’s most-visited attraction — then ride the fast purple Elizabeth line clear across town, tapping in with a contactless card. The city’s real texture is in its neighbourhoods: the market stalls of Borough and Brick Lane, the Georgian squares of Bloomsbury, the leafy calm of Hampstead, and the new cultural quarter rising in the old Olympic park at Stratford, where the V&A’s vast East Storehouse now lets you order almost any object from the archive to see up close. Green threads through all of it — Hyde Park, the Regent’s canals, the long view from Primrose Hill. Royal and rebellious, historic and restless, London always keeps a few neighbourhoods in reserve, waiting for the next visit.

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