A London Primer For The Curious

To be honest, I wrote this more for my fiancée than anything. I wanted to make a list of the things people should know about London but never really get written down anywhere. Of course, if this helps the curious, from people who want to move or visit here to a writer looking for more information, then I'm happy to help (and if you have any more questions, please let me know below!)

View of the City of London at Dusk - Amelia Springett (2011)

The Newspapers 'City AM', 'Metro', 'Evening Standard' and the magazines 'The Stylist', 'TimeOut', 'The ES' and 'ShortList' are all free and distributed outside most Tube stations. The magazines are a really good way of keeping up to date on new events and fun things to do in the city. Feel free to take these when offered, or help yourself to one from the pile that usually lurks outside if there isn't a person to hand them out.

Be wary about accepting anything else a person is handing out on the street. This can be anything from religious dogma to a begging tactic (people will hand you an item like a flower and then try and get you to pay for it).

Supermarkets are where most local people buy food. From cheapest to most expensive, generally speaking, these are:

• Aldi/Lidl
• Asda/Morrison
• Tesco
• Sainsburys
• Marks & Spencer
• Waitrose

Eating out is really easy – virtually anywhere where there are people, there are restaurants and cafés of various cultures. It's also really expensive – even 'cheap' fast food is comparatively more expensive than some other countries. In many restaurants, service is not included on the bill, and it's considered impolite to tip under 15%. In most cafés, change is greatly appreciated as a tip.

Travel can be really expensive in London. From most expensive to least, generally speaking, your options are:

• Owning your own car/vehicle
• Taxis
• Mainline trains
• The underground/Tube/Overground network
• Buses
• Cycling
• Walking

Public transport is generally quite reliable in London, with most Tube services running a train every 3 minutes and most bus routes operating a daytime service of 5-10 minutes, with some offering 24 hour service. The exception to this is travelling on weekends, where planned engineering works are reasonably common, though they limit disruptions as much as possible.

Always use an oyster card in London. They can be bought at all ticket windows and some machines, and it's a card you preload with money to pay for tube and bus travel. Given that buses have recently stopped taking cash, your options are oyster or contactless credit/debit card or paper tickets. Paper tickets are ridiculously expensive and totally unneeded - if you are doing a lot of travelling in a day, and oyster card will cap off at the equivalent day roamer price, and every journey after that is effectively free. (For example, a single paper ticket for zone 1 is £4.80. On an oyster card, it cost £2.30 - under half! And if you make journeys after spending £6.40 on journeys that day, your oyster card will not be charged any more money, and you travel for free until midnight that day.) In theory, a contactless credit/debit card should work in exactly the same way as an oyster, except you don't need to preload it. I haven't tried it out for myself, yet.

Generally speaking, within central London, if a place is only one or two stops on the tube, then it will be faster to walk than get public transport.

Buses can't be hailed from any point on the route and they can't stop at any point on the route except at designated bus stop, unless in exceptional circumstances. Luckily, bus stops are quite distinctive and very common, as below. They always have a list of the buses that will stop there, the rough direction they're travelling in and the name of the stop itself. There is occasionally, but not always, a shelter along with the stop, which often has a map of local bus routes and what nearby stop they can be found at, and a map of night buses. They've recently added codes that can be texted to find out when the next bus will be, if there isn't an electronic display built into the shelter.

Picture sourced from here

Buses are a little more confusing than the tube, and I'd always recommend asking the driver before you pay, if you are unsure about the route and the area.

There is also the option of taking a boat up/down river. Of course, both locations would have to be near the river, but theoretically you could commute from North Greenwich to Blackfriars or Westminster. For infrequent journeys, it's about 4 times more expensive than the tube, but if you were to make that journey every day for a month, it's very similarly priced to the zone 1-2 travelcard for a month. Of course, the tube services more stops and a wider area, so it's unlikely to be better value, but in exceptional circumstances, perhaps!

A smartphone is a great tool to have in London. Lost? You have maps. Want to know if there's a bus route going where you want? There are many free apps available, usually with a tube map in there, too. Want to know if there's a branch of your favourite store nearby? Search for it. That being said, if you are lost in central London, there are helpful little posts with maps and directions to local landmarks quite commonly dotted around.

Most people live outside of central London and commute in to work. Generally speaking, if you can afford to live in zone 1, you are making quite a bit of money. However, there are little pockets of local council houses dotted around central London which are cheaper to live in, but are difficult to get and are becoming rarer.

Generally speaking, west and north London are more affluent areas than east and south London. There are exceptions - Brixton was formally seen as quite a rough area, but lately it's been revitalised as an art/culture/food hub. Similarly, Old Street was run down and shabby, but it becoming quite trendy.

Camden Lock is a great place to visit if you like alternative culture, street markets, music...even just fancy a canalside walk. Places of note include Cyberdog - a cyberpunk clothing/accessories store with the atmosphere of a nightclub; and the Horse Market - named for all the metal horse statues and the fact it once was a stables, you can find vintage clothing, intricate leather work, unique hand made gifts...and a fair bit of tourist-y garbage, too, to be fair. I would recommend taking a canal boat from Little Venice into Camden on a nice day - it's a relaxing journey that takes you through London Zoo and gives you a chance to see an entirely different side of London.

Camden Lock - By Amelia Springett (2011)

Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Circus aren't actually circuses in the sense of clowns and animals and acrobatics... It comes from the latin word for circle, in this context being a round open space. It's a posh way of saying junction or crossroads, essentially.

So, hopefully this is a helpful short guide for you. If you have any questions, or tips of your own to add, please don't hesitate to comment below!