Where do locals actually go in London?

Saturday in Hackney starts at Broadway Market, the run of stalls between Regent's Canal and London Fields. Regulars queue first at E5 Bakehouse, in a railway arch on Mentmore Terrace beside London Fields station, and the sourdough there is often still warm and crackles when you squeeze it. Locals finish their shopping before the market fills, then drink coffee on the damp grass of London Fields. On Sunday the crowd moves a mile east to Columbia Road Flower Market in Bethnal Green. Get there by 8:30am and you'll hear traders bellowing prices for ferns and buckets of dahlias. After about 2pm they tend to cut prices to empty the van, and that is when the Shoreditch flat-sharers turn up. Skip the Brick Lane food halls on Sundays, which mostly serve visitors. The Beigel Bake at 159 Brick Lane is the exception: open 24 hours, it feeds black-cab drivers at 3am.

On weeknights, Londoners live in pubs. Tuesday to Thursday is the time to go, after work and before the weekend crowds. The Wenlock Arms on Wenlock Road in Hoxton has poured rotating cask ales for decades, and the carpet smells faintly of spilled bitter. The Auld Shillelagh on Stoke Newington Church Street is a narrow Irish pub where fiddlers play trad sessions and the Guinness is poured slowly. Order at the bar in both: most London pubs won't bring drinks to your table, and a group of four is expected to buy rounds. A pint of cask ale in Hoxton costs roughly £6 to £7, which is about $8 to $9.30 at the October rate of 0.7499 GBP to the dollar. For the craft-beer crowd, try the Bermondsey Beer Mile in the railway arches south of Tower Bridge. The Blackhorse Road taprooms in Walthamstow, Wild Card and Signature Brew, are quieter and mostly draw people who live in E17.

For a stay of two weeks to three months, what matters most is finding somewhere you can work. London scores 5.8/10 for digital nomads (sourced from TTDI's editorial rubric), pulled down mainly by how much rent and coworking space cost. The Barbican Library on Level 2 of the Barbican Centre has free wifi and plug sockets, and the room stays quiet except for the squeak of book trolleys. The Wellcome Collection reading room on Euston Road has sofas, power sockets and enforced quiet. The British Library at St Pancras offers free wifi in its public areas without a Reader Pass, though the seats near the sockets are usually gone by mid-morning. Many cafes in Hackney and Peckham put up no-laptop signs on Saturdays and Sundays, and in Soho, one flat white at 3pm might buy you less than an hour before staff start clearing your table pointedly.

Bad weather does not keep Londoners indoors. On the evening of 17 October it was 12.3°C and overcast, with a feels-like of 9.2°C, and that still passes for swimming weather among regulars at the Hampstead Heath ponds. The Kenwood Ladies' Pond and the Men's Pond are spring-fed, with brown water cold enough to sting your fingertips, and swims are booked online through the City of London Corporation, which runs the Heath. Parliament Hill Lido, on the Gospel Oak side, is an unheated steel-lined pool that stays open through the winter. After a swim, regulars walk up Parliament Hill, which rises to about 98 metres and looks south over the towers of the City.