London

Transport
Get an Oyster card at the earliest opportunity. Top it up and use it. I see so many tourists queueing up to buy Tube tickets and pay cash for them. They are paying over the odds and wasting their time, and cluttering up tube stations and getting in people's way. Get Oyster, use.

Buses are not mobile tourist information centres. Get on the bus if you want to travel, stay off if you don't know where you are going. While going to work, I've stood waiting for five minutes for tourists having an extended chat with the bus driver about how to get to blasted Leicester Square or wherever while everyone else on the bus seethes.

If you can get around our bus system—which is a little bit confusing at first—it's cheaper, sometimes quicker and often a lot more fun than travelling by tube. You'll see more of London out the window and you'll see how it all sort of hooks together. Tourists often use the tourist buses like The Original Tour and so on. They are expensive. You'll pay £25 or more for a day's ticket on the tourist buses, but if you took regular city buses with an Oyster card, you'll pay £1.45 a journey up to a maximum of £4.40 a day.

If you have an iOS device like an iPhone or iPad, grab OffMaps and download the London map. You can then use it without any data roaming charges and see what's nearby.

Walk a lot in London. There's loads to see and if you walk up a busy street in the centre of town you won't ever get bored.

Things to do
The big museums are mostly free: British Museum, the Museum of London, Natural History Museum, the British Library, Science Museum, V&A, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Modern and the Imperial War Museum. You have to pay for special exhibitions and events but there's an enormous amount you can see for nothing. There's also lots of small museums like the Sir John Soames Museum, the Freud Museum, the Florence Nightingale Museum, the Geffrye Museum, and the Jewish Museum. If you get a chance to go to the Hunterian Museum, go. It's an amazingly graphic and gruesome museum on the history of surgery.

If you are in town on a weekday, go into the Supreme Court, the Royal Courts of Justice or the Old Bailey. For the Old Bailey, you'll need to not take any bags with you so you might need to make a special trip from wherever you are staying. You'll get to see the theatre of the British legal system: wigged judges and barristers in court. The Supreme Court is just like the US Supreme Court but doesn't meet so often and is only a recent creation. The Royal Courts of Justice has both appellate court cases and civil litigation while the Old Bailey is London's main criminal court (its formal name is the Central Criminal Court) which has heard cases from the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe to Oscar Wilde to the News of the World journalists.

Go to a theatre and see a musical or a play. Go to choral evensong at one of the cathedrals, even if you aren't religious.

Eating
Don't ever be tempted to eat in an Aberdeen Angus Steak House. They are overpriced and rubbish and are designed to scam tourists. Our city is filled with these ghastly restaurants that no locals want to eat in because tourists keep on going to them and spending money on overpriced steaks. In fact, most of the restaurants and bars near touristy places like Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square are often tourist trap rip-offs. Save your money and go a bit further afield.

Places to eat that I find fairly good:


 * Bill's. It's a chain of restaurants owned by an Australian man called—well, I'm sure you can guess. They do good vegetarian food and it's reasonably priced.
 * Sagar. Vegetarian Indian restaurants in a few West End locations. Have found the service a bit average but the food is good.
 * tbc

Drinking
If you want cheap and cheerful pubs, try the Sam Smiths-owned pubs in Fitzrovia. Some of them used to be utter shitholes but have improved by leaps and bounds since the smoking ban came in.

For cocktails, LAB in Old Compton Street is fairly good. For cocktails served with a side-serving of gay, try The Yard or The Edge.

Shopping
The standard London shopping advice:


 * Regent Street, Bond Street and Chelsea if you want to spend silly money on clothes.
 * Camden for alternative stuff: punk, goth, retro etc. Or whichever formerly dull north London suburb hipsters have invaded this month.
 * Spitalfields Market and Borough Market for gourmet food (although it can be a bit pricy), Smithfields Market for meat
 * Tottenham Court Road for tech accessories, although it seems to have gone more downmarket in the last few years since Micro Anvika closed. Be prepared to deal with dodgy operators and bad salesmen in cheap suits.
 * Oxford Street for all the standard chain retailers. Or maybe go to Westfield in Shephard's Bush. Or preferably don't go to those places at all.
 * Nerd friends rave about Forbidden Planet. If you have an obsession with comic books, video games or anime, go there.

Bookshops

 * Charing Cross Road area:
 * Foyle's is a must visit. They are in the process of redevelopment at the moment, so it might be a bit noisy or disrupted.
 * Blackwell's, almost opposite Foyle's: it'll never be as good as the original in Oxford, but it's got a lot of interesting academic books.
 * Soho Original Books right next to Foyle's. There's another one in Soho too. They are kind of quirky: the upstairs is mostly art books—visual arts, advertising, that kind of stuff. The downstairs is a sex shop. Pick whichever takes your fancy.
 * There's a lot of second-hand, antiquarian and specialist bookshops in Cecil Court, and some bigger second-hand places along the bottom half of Charing Cross Road (south of Cambridge Circus).
 * Koenig Books, just down from Cambridge Circus, is a specialist art and photography bookshop.
 * Bookmarks, 1 Bloomsbury Street: London's premier socialist bookshop. You don't have to be a committed socialist to find interesting things to read in there—just be interested in politics and have a broad and open mind.
 * Gay's The Word: a small specialist bookshop stocking queer fiction and non-fiction.
 * Gosh! in Berwick Street: a comic book paradise.
 * Judd Books: an excellent second hand non-fiction collection in Marchmont Street.