London, Actually: Four Days in Shoreditch and Why I'm Already Planning to Go Back

London has a way of making you feel like you’ve arrived somewhere that has always been expecting you. I flew out of BER on a Thursday afternoon, a short two-hour flight, and by the time I stepped out of Liverpool Street station into the grey October air, the city had already swallowed me whole.

I had booked four nights at Z Hotel Shoreditch, and that choice turned out to be one of the better decisions I’ve made this year.

The Hotel: Z Hotel Shoreditch

The Z Hotels are a specific kind of smart. The rooms are compact, genuinely compact, designed by someone who understood that in London what you need is a well-made bed, good water pressure, and a blackout blind that actually works. You are not paying for space. You are paying for location, and the location is exceptional.

Shoreditch High Street is right there. Brick Lane is a ten-minute walk. Spitalfields Market is five. The whole of East London feels accessible in a way that staying near Paddington or Victoria simply doesn’t offer.

The bed was firm and proper. The shower had real pressure. There was a desk, decent wifi, and a minibar that I used responsibly. Which is to say I had one of the small bottles of wine on the first night and then decided to drink outside like a reasonable person for the rest of the trip.

The staff were efficient and unbothered in the way London hospitality often is, which I mean as a genuine compliment. Nobody asked me how my day was going fourteen times. You check in, you get your key card, you are trusted to be an adult.

Thursday Evening: Getting Oriented

There is a specific pleasure in arriving somewhere in the late afternoon and having nowhere you need to be. I dropped my bag, changed out of my travel clothes, and walked.

Shoreditch on a Thursday evening is already at full tilt. The street art around Brick Lane and Shoreditch High Street is extraordinary. Not the occasional mural you find in other cities, but wall after wall of it, professionally executed, constantly being updated. I spent an hour just walking and photographing walls.

Dinner at a Lebanese restaurant on Commercial Street. Grilled halloumi, lamb flatbread, a mezze plate that was genuinely too large for one person and which I finished anyway. About thirty-five pounds with a glass of wine. Not cheap, but London. You make peace with this.

Friday: Borough Market, the Tate, and Bermondsey Street

Borough Market on a Friday morning before 10am is the correct version of Borough Market. After 11am it becomes a different experience: excellent, still, but crowded. At 9am it is calm enough to actually look at things, talk to the vendors, taste the cheese samples without feeling rushed.

I bought a wedge of Montgomery Cheddar aged fourteen months, a jar of wildflower honey from a Kent beekeeper who told me more about bee behaviour than I expected to learn that morning, and a coffee from a stall that ground the beans in front of me. Then I sat on a bench by the river and watched the Thames do what the Thames does: grey, wide, indifferent, magnificent.

Tate Modern is free. This continues to be one of the best facts about London. I spent two hours inside and could have spent four. There was a Louise Bourgeois retrospective running, and I found myself standing in front of one of her large spider sculptures in the Turbine Hall just holding very still. That is the kind of art that doesn’t ask you to understand it, only to be in its presence.

In the afternoon I walked down to Bermondsey Street, which is the kind of neighbourhood that tells you exactly what Shoreditch looked like fifteen years ago before the brunch places arrived. Independent galleries, a good bookshop, a pub called The Hide that had a proper beer garden even in October. I had a pint of bitter and read for an hour. This is what I mean when I say I travel well.

Dinner: a small Italian place on Bermondsey Street. Fresh pasta, a lamb ragu, tiramisu that arrived in a glass jar for reasons I don’t fully understand but fully support. Sixty pounds for two courses and two glasses of a Sicilian red. Worth it.

Saturday: Columbia Road, Spitalfields, and Dalston

Columbia Road Flower Market on a Saturday morning is not a secret, and so it is crowded, and so it is still completely worth doing. The street is narrow and the stalls are packed together and vendors call out their prices with the kind of volume and rhythm that sounds like performance art. I bought a bunch of eucalyptus because it smelled good and I was going to carry it around London all day, which I did, without any embarrassment whatsoever.

Spitalfields Market afterwards. Good vintage section. I found a leather jacket that I tried on and decided against buying only because I had limited luggage space, and I have thought about it at least six times since returning to Berlin.

Saturday afternoon I walked north to Dalston, which operates at a different frequency: noisier, more chaotic, more interesting. There is an Afro-Caribbean influence up there that hit differently for me, as a Nigerian living in Berlin where that particular cultural energy is harder to find. I heard Afrobeats coming out of a barber shop. I ate jerk chicken from a takeaway counter that was run with the kind of authority that only comes from decades of practice.

Evening: cocktails at a bar in Dalston that had no name visible from the street, only a small light above the door. Inside, a twelve-page cocktail menu and a bartender who took the menu very seriously. I had a Negroni variation with mezcal and blood orange that was thirty percent better than any Negroni I’ve had in Berlin. I had two.

Sunday: Notting Hill, the Long Walk, and the Flight Home

I took the overground across to Notting Hill on Sunday morning, which felt like visiting a different city. The neighbourhood is absurdly beautiful: white terraced houses, flowering trees even in October, streets that look like they were designed by someone who had very strong opinions about proportion and colour.

Portobello Road Market on a Sunday is antiques, mostly. I found a 1960s travel poster for Nigeria, a BOAC Airlines advertisement with Lagos depicted in a style that looks nothing like Lagos but is charming in an archival way, and bought it for twenty-five pounds. It is now framed and on my wall in Berlin.

Lunch at a café near the market. Eggs benedict, fresh orange juice, a flat white. Twenty-two pounds. I paid it without checking twice.

Then I walked. Kensington Gardens to Hyde Park, through the park along the Serpentine, all the way to Green Park. An hour and a half of walking and the city just kept going: endless, layered, full of people running and cycling and reading on benches and living their London lives with no apparent awareness of how much someone visiting from Berlin might envy the ease of it.

Cab to Heathrow. Flight home. Back into BER, the Airport Express into the city, and I was at my front door by midnight.

The Honest Numbers

Flights return, BER to London: €180. Four nights at Z Hotel Shoreditch: £380. Food, drinks, markets, museums: roughly £300. The Nigeria travel poster: £25.

Total for four days in London: just under £900, or around €1,050.

That is not cheap. London is never cheap. But for what the city gave back, the art, the food, the energy, the leather jacket I keep thinking about, it felt like an exchange I was glad to make.

I am already looking at dates for spring.

If you’re doing London for the first time from Berlin, stay east. Shoreditch or Bethnal Green puts you close to everything that makes the city interesting without the tourist markup of central zones. And go to Borough Market before 10am.