Things to do in London (on Tuesdays)

I’m in London every Tuesday night for work, which sounds like a small thing, but it’s turned into one of my favourite parts of the week. Almost everything worth doing in this city is rammed on a weekend and noticeably calmer on a weekday. Not empty, some places are busy no matter what day it is, but calmer enough that the whole experience changes. So here’s everything I’ve built up over dozens of Tuesdays: the places I go back to, the food I actually recommend, and the stuff worth planning around.

The essentials

Sky Garden is my favourite thing in London. It’s one of the City skyscrapers with public viewing floors near the top, two levels with a proper garden, a bar, and a coffee shop (pricey, but you don’t have to buy anything to get in). Entry is free, you just need a ticket, and they release tickets about three weeks ahead for each day. Book early if you’re planning a trip. Even midweek there’s usually a queue, but it’s nothing like the weekend. The view over the rooftops is genuinely one of the best in the city.

Leake Street Arches (the graffiti tunnel under Waterloo station) is another one I keep coming back to. Unlike most of this list, it’s not even that crowded on a Saturday, so it’s a safe bet any day. It’s weatherproof too, duck in if it’s raining, duck in if it’s boiling. The whole tunnel is a five to ten minute walk, but I’d budget half an hour to an hour if you stop for a drink. The art changes constantly. I’ve been five or six times and there’s always someone repainting a new piece, and you can just stand and watch them work. There are a couple of bars off to the side that are never busy, so grab a pint and watch the tunnel change in real time.

Food markets

Borough Market: the one rule is avoid lunchtime, it’s slammed then on weekdays and weekends alike. Go around 10am or 2pm instead. It’s bigger than people expect, with a proper old industrial feel, you can hear the trains overhead. Get the doughnuts from Bread Ahead (there’s a stall inside near the cheese vendors, and another cluster of stalls outside on the street through the middle of the market that specialise in doughnuts and pastries). For food, get The Black Pig’s pork sandwich: slow-cooked pork, sauces, salad, on excellent bread. The queue looks brutal but they run six or seven people doing different jobs on the line, so it moves fast, and you can sit on the steps and watch them assemble it. Also worth grabbing: the fruit smoothies, an apple juice slushie if it’s on (only saw it once, not sure it’s permanent), sausage rolls, empanadas, and the paella stall that always has a huge queue (haven’t tried it myself yet).

Camden Market is a different experience depending on the day. I’ve done it on a Saturday (packed) and a Tuesday after work just before closing (some stalls shut, but no queues for the ones still open). The walk from Camden Town tube to the market is five minutes past shops on both sides. Once you’re in, it’s bigger than it looks: cross to the building on the other side of the road by the canal and there’s three floors of food stalls, drinks, breweries, and little shops. If you’ve got time and energy, keep walking past the food stalls along the canal for another 15 to 20 minutes and you’ll end up in Regent’s Park, which is worth the detour, there’s a nicer, newer landscaped section of the park worth seeing, and a good coffee shop and bar right in the middle of it. From there you’re well connected to the rest of central London anyway.

Canal walks and the east side

Hackney is Camden’s scruffier, more hippie cousin: canals, graffiti everywhere, a rejuvenated old-industrial look, and five or six genuinely good breweries. I’ve done it on a Tuesday multiple times and once on a Saturday to show friends around, and the Tuesday version wins easily, you can actually find a spot to sit. If you want a proper walk there, take the tube to Stratford, cut through the Westfield shopping centre (not my favourite bit, but fine), then out through the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park past the London Stadium. It’s about 20 to 25 minutes on foot and a much nicer way to arrive than just taking the tube. If you’ve still got energy, Hackney isn’t far from Victoria Park, so you can keep following the canal, through a park, along another stretch of canal, for as long as you like before looping back into central London.

Covent Garden, Soho, and Chinatown

Covent Garden is another one that’s much nicer on a weekday. The Apple Market in the middle has small shops, cafes, chocolate shops, and always a street performer or magician working the crowd. It’s about as central as London gets, you can walk to almost anywhere from here. It’s also my favourite part of London at Christmas, the tree and the market decorations are the best in the city.

Walk through into Soho next, a younger, more modern part of central London with a lot of small shops and restaurants (a bit pricier, and I wouldn’t go there specifically for the food, but it’s a great area to wander). Don’t skip Chinatown either, well decorated, sizeable, and busy even on a Tuesday. I haven’t sat down for a proper meal there but the snacks from the smaller shops are good. Leicester Square is fine to walk through, and Trafalgar Square is right next door, worth seeing if it’s your first time in the area.

A few food recommendations nearby: Kanada-Ya for ramen (get the classic with an extra egg, it’s excellent, and it’s a bit of a chain now but the original was around Covent Garden). SushiDog for a quick bite, a sushi roll you eat like a hot dog rather than with chopsticks, easy to find across London these days. And Gordon’s Wine Bar near Embankment, tucked just off the same area: it’s always packed, but if you’re lucky enough to get a seat, especially downstairs in the candlelit cellar, get one of the ports straight from the barrel. It’s an experience worth the effort of finding a seat.

Theatre, on the cheap

If you want to see a West End show without paying full price, get the TodayTix app. Every day at 10am they release a batch of discounted same-day tickets (Rush), usually around £25 to £30 for genuinely good seats, and some shows also run lotteries or ballots for tickets. I’ve seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Wicked, and Moulin Rouge through Rush, and I eventually won the ballot for Operation Mincemeat after entering repeatedly. My advice: pick a few shows that run these schemes and just keep trying, most nights something is available even if that specific show doesn’t officially have a rush ticket that day. For a first-timer, I’d point people toward Hamilton or Wicked as classics, Lion King or Frozen if you want something more family-friendly, and Operation Mincemeat and Book of Mormon if you want something genuinely funny.

The classic first-timer walk

If someone’s never been to London, this is the walk I send them on: start around Hyde Park, head down through Kensington past the Royal Albert Hall, then across toward Buckingham Palace and St James’s Park, on to Westminster Abbey and Big Ben, then across to the London Eye. From there, keep following the Thames and you’ll pass some great spots, all the way to Tower Bridge if you’re up for a long one. On that stretch you can also swing by Leake Street, the National Theatre, and Borough Market. If you’re doing Christmas lights, everyone goes to Oxford Street, but I actually prefer Regent Street just off it, a bit smarter and prettier.

Film, comedy, and other nights out

BFI IMAX is the best screen in the country and always has something good on. I saw Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein there with an intro from del Toro himself and Jacob Elordi, who played the Creature, ahead of the screening, a genuinely great night out. The Science Museum also does film screenings, but don’t expect current blockbusters, it’s more random programming.

For comedy, my favourite is the Top Secret Comedy Club in Soho / Covent Garden (two locations). Their regular near-daily show brings out six comedians, kept secret in advance, usually including one or two well-known names. Tickets cost about £1 to book, then they ask for donations at the end (most people give £15 to £20). When I went, one of the six was Munya Chawawa, off the back of his Taskmaster run and a huge following on Instagram, and it was one of the best comedy nights I’ve had. Soho Theatre also does regular comedy, and the Comedy Store is worth it too, I caught a stand-up-of-the-year final there around Christmas and it was much better than expected. If you know Edinburgh Fringe, Camden Fringe is the cheaper, more relaxed London version where a lot of the same acts rehearse their sets, well worth a look.

Sport and events

There’s always something on. I’ve been to a Spurs game and a Crystal Palace game so far, both Premier League fixtures that happened to fall on a Tuesday, and I want to get to more. Arsenal are in such good form right now that their tickets are hard to get, but Fulham, Chelsea, and West Ham are all on the list too. Big concerts run on weeknights constantly, and demand (and prices) are sometimes lower midweek than you’d expect. I also managed to get tickets to Premier Padel’s first ever London event on a Tuesday, worth taking time off work for. Wimbledon is another one: tickets through the public ballot are tough, and resale prices are steep, but if you can get there on a Tuesday during the tournament it’s one of the best things London does all year.

During the World Cup I went out for as many England-adjacent games as I could: Ghana in a pub around Euston, France v Senegal at one of the free-entry Boxpark screenings (great atmosphere with fans of both sides), Colombia v Switzerland in the last 16 at Elephant and Castle (a brilliant night, lots of Colombia fans, electric atmosphere), and England v Argentina at Outernet by Tottenham Court Road, which has a huge screen right by the tube station. If you’re in that area, Krispy Kreme does an original glazed doughnut that’s worth grabbing on the way.

Other areas worth a wander

Notting Hill is a nice one if you want a slower afternoon: pretty streets, colourful houses, small shops, and it’s an easy walk down to Kensington if you want to combine the two. I also want to get out to Greenwich more, I went once for a run and got a great view over London from the park, plus the area around the tube station is worth a look. And I keep hearing good things about Hampstead Heath that I still haven’t followed up on.

A few practical tips

• Get the Too Good To Go app. I use it constantly for discounted pastries and coffee shop leftovers the next morning, and sometimes proper sandwiches or lunch meals just after the lunch rush.
• For coffee, Prufrock near Chancery Lane is excellent, and I’m lucky enough to have my office nearby.
• Also near Chancery Lane: Leather Lane Market, a weekday lunch market with cheap, solid food stalls. I’d specifically recommend the Venezuelan stall doing a corn-based flatbread (a cachapa) with avocado, meat, sauce, and cheese, really good.
• I’m planning to start running more London routes on Tuesday evenings once the weather cools down, this year’s been too hot so far.

The bottom line

None of this requires a special trip. It’s just what happens when your work forces you into London on the least glamorous night of the week, and you decide to make the most of it. If you can shift even a couple of these to a weekday instead of a weekend, do it, it’s the same city, just a much better version of it.