London eats like a hundred cities at once: 24-hour Brick Lane beigels, Bermondsey railway arches, Cantonese roast duck off Gerrard Street and nose-to-tail cooking by Smithfield. Three days built around markets, historic dining rooms and old cocktail bars.
A narrow ribbon of railway arches trading Saturdays 10:00–17:00 and Sundays 11:00–16:00. St. John doughnuts filled to order, Bad Brownie slabs, Monty's Deli salt beef and gin poured at Little Bird's arch.
The white-fronted bakery has run 24 hours a day since 1974, boiling and baking beigels on site behind the counter. The salt beef version — hand-carved brisket, English mustard, gherkin — costs around £7.50.
Hackney's Saturday street market runs roughly 130 stalls from London Fields down to the Regent's Canal, 09:00–17:00. Violet Cakes buns, bao, raclette, oysters shucked on ice and cheese from L'Eau à la Bouche.
A Victorian corner pub with a Michelin Bib Gourmand and a wood-panelled ground-floor bar where locals drink cask ale and Guinness. The brown butter and honey tart has stayed on the menu since 2015.
A 1921 car showroom turned grand café, serving breakfast from 07:00 on weekdays beneath vaulted black-and-gold ceilings. Full English around £22.75, plus kippers, eggs Benedict and viennoiserie at the bar.
London's oldest restaurant, open on this Covent Garden corner since 1798, all red banquettes, antlers and oil paintings. Game comes from its own Pennine estate: grouse, snipe, roe deer, plus jugged hare.
The 1707 grocer stacks four floors of tea, preserves and honey from hives on its own roof. More than 300 teas are blended here, and the shop claims the Scotch egg as its 1738 invention for carriage travellers.
Fergus Henderson's nose-to-tail restaurant opened in a former bacon smokehouse beside Smithfield meat market in 1994. Roast bone marrow with parsley salad, Welsh rarebit, and Eccles cake with Lancashire cheese.
A Grade II-listed East End caff run by the same Italian family since 1900, with marquetry panelling installed in 1946. A full English lands around £10, alongside bubble and squeak and home-made lasagne.
A former banana warehouse behind Covent Garden holding two floors of traders, including Pick & Cheese's conveyor-belt cheese bar, Yum Bun and Nanny Bill's. Open daily, with most plates between £8 and £14.
Painted gates and lanterns front roughly 80 restaurants and bakeries. Four Seasons lacquers its roast duck to a mahogany skin, Bake sells custard tarts by the box, and Wong Kei has fed students since the 1980s.
The Savoy's first-floor bar has mixed drinks since the 1890s and produced Harry Craddock's 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, still the reference text for the Corpse Reviver No. 2. Live piano nightly, cocktails around £25.