London is expensive to sleep in and startlingly cheap to experience. Every national museum is free, the parks are vast, and the best views cost nothing. Three days of galleries, markets, canals and city-farm detours, with transport capped at about £8.90 daily.
The architect's 1837 house left exactly as he died in it: Hogarth's Rake's Progress on hinged panels, a Seti I sarcophagus in the basement crypt, mirrors everywhere. Free, Wed–Sun 10:00–17:00, no ticket needed but timed entry helps.
A weekday lunch street since the 17th century, running Mon–Fri roughly 10:00–14:30. Falafel wraps, Sri Lankan kottu, Daddy Donkey burritos and jacket potatoes mostly £6–9 — the cheapest hot lunch inside the City fringe.
A pocket garden beside the old General Post Office holding 54 hand-painted Doulton tiles, each recording an ordinary Londoner who died saving someone — a boy drowned in the Thames, a woman lost in a burning house. Open daily 08:00 to dusk.
Horace Jones's 1881 cast-iron arcade in maroon and cream, built over the Roman forum's basilica. After 17:30 on weekdays the square-mile crowd drains away and the painted vaults are yours, floodlit and almost silent.
Saturday market on a Victorian street between the canal and London Fields, roughly 09:00–17:00. Around 130 stalls: salt beef bagels, Ethiopian plates, £2 pastries at closing. The park lido and benches make a free picnic room.
A flat four-kilometre walk past narrowboats, the Kingsland Basin moorings and Victorian warehouse conversions, ending where the towpath ducks into Islington Tunnel. No entrance, no traffic, and benches the whole way.
Roughly a dozen Vietnamese kitchens between Old Street and Dalston, established by refugee families from the late 1980s. Song Que, Cay Tre and Viet Grill serve bowls of pho and bun cha at £9–12, with tap water and no cover charge.
Rebuilt in 1667 after the Great Fire, a warren of sawdust bars and cellars that Dickens and Yeats drank in. Sam Smith's own-brew pints run around £4.50 — among the cheapest in central London, and no music or phones by house rule.
320 hectares of unmanicured commons with a protected sightline from Parliament Hill across the whole City skyline. Free and open 24 hours; the mixed bathing pond charges about £4.50 if you want a swim in the ponds.
London's first city farm, founded in 1972 on derelict railway land. Goats, pigs, ponies and a herb garden beside the Gospel Oak line, open Tue–Sun 09:00–17:00 with free entry and a volunteer-run tea hut.
A Marylebone townhouse holding Fragonard's The Swing, Frans Hals's Laughing Cavalier and Europe's best princely armoury — bequeathed to the nation in 1897 on condition nothing ever leaves. Free daily 10:00–17:00.
The Walkie Talkie's three-storey glass conservatory 155 metres up, planted with ferns and bird of paradise. Free entry with an online ticket released three weeks ahead, giving the same skyline as paid viewing platforms.