The UK keeps confusing me in a way I've come to enjoy: London, Edinburgh, and the bits between
Mika Soren
There is a version of me that should not like the UK.
Expensive. Notoriously variable food reputation. Famously inconsistent weather. Everyone has an opinion about whether you’ve gone to the right pub.
And yet. I’ve been three times now, each time planning to stay a week and ending up staying longer, each time finding something I didn’t expect to find in a country I’d already written a mental shorthand for.
Here’s what’s actually in there.
London: it’s too big and that’s the whole point
London is enormous in a way that stops being overwhelming once you accept it’s not a city you will ever fully know. That changes the game. Stop trying to see it. Just be somewhere specific and good in it.
The neighbourhood question. Where you stay in London is a decision with actual consequences because the tube has zones and your hotel’s proximity to a station is not abstract. For first visits: Shoreditch/Bethnal Green (east London, good food and bar scene, relatively affordable), South Bank/Borough (central, walkable to a lot, the market), Dalston (further east, cheaper, younger, good for an extended stay). Avoid anywhere within fifteen minutes of Heathrow unless you’re there for a connection.
Borough Market. I have to mention it first because it’s the one thing I tell everyone. Open Thursday-Saturday, under London Bridge station. Not a tourist attraction disguised as a market. An actual food market where restaurants buy ingredients and you can also eat extraordinarily well while standing up. The cheeses, the bread, the pastries, the South African biltong stand, the Ethiopian food stall, the Portuguese custard tart place. Eat breakfast here. Budget four times what you expect.
The free museums. The British Museum, the V&A, the Natural History Museum, the National Gallery: all free, all world-class. The British Museum alone takes a full day if you do it properly. The V&A is the one people underrate: decorative arts and design across five thousand years, collection that has no business being this good, the best museum café in London.
Maltby Street Market (SE1). Weekend mornings, smaller than Borough, less known, under railway arches, genuinely excellent: cheese toasties, oysters, artisan bread, coffee. Twenty minutes from Borough Market by foot. If Borough is too crowded, this is the alternative.
Columbia Road Flower Market. East London, Sunday mornings only, runs from about 8am to 2pm before the flowers are gone. The narrowest street filled completely with plants and cut flowers and shouting vendors and everyone slightly damp from the drizzle. Buy something. The Vietnamese food cart at one end is very good. This is extremely London.
Where I ate beyond the markets: Breddos Tacos in Clerkenwell (Mexican-influenced, excellent, no reservations), St. John in Smithfield (British nose-to-tail cooking, the place that made unfashionable cuts fashionable, bone marrow on toast is required), Hoppers in Soho (Sri Lankan food, no reservations, expect a queue, worth it). The curry houses on Brick Lane get recommended everywhere and some are fine; the one two streets away on Commercial Street with no reviews and a handwritten menu was better.
The pubs. The correct pub is the one where someone is reading a newspaper and there’s a dog asleep and the beer is properly poured and nobody is trying to get you to order food via QR code. These exist in every neighbourhood. Find one near where you’re staying. Return twice.
Edinburgh: the city I didn’t give enough time
I had four days. I needed seven.
Edinburgh is stunning in a way that feels slightly unfair.
The castle on the rock above the Old Town. Arthur’s Seat (an extinct volcano, in the middle of the city, a 45-minute walk up for a view that stops people mid-conversation). The New Town Georgian architecture. The closes (narrow alleyways running off the Royal Mile) that go down steep stairs into the lower parts of the city, each one containing something unexpected: a bookshop, a distillery, a very old pub.
The Royal Mile. The tourist drag, and worth it. Start at the castle (book ahead, the queues without a ticket are significant). Walk down to Holyrood Palace at the bottom. Go into every close you pass. The closes are the real Edinburgh. Victoria Street, curving uphill, is the street you’ve seen in photos. It curves the right way and looks slightly magical in any weather.
Arthur’s Seat. I cannot overstate this. A proper hill walk from the middle of a capital city. Views of the whole city, the Firth of Forth, the Pentland Hills on a clear day. Takes an hour to the top, longer if you stop (stop). Go early morning for the light and to avoid the middle-of-the-day crowds. No special equipment needed but decent shoes help on the last stretch.
The whisky thing. I am not a whisky person. I became slightly more of a whisky person in Edinburgh because when you’re there, the context makes sense. The Scotch Whisky Experience on the Royal Mile does a good introductory tasting if you’re starting from zero. The whisky bars off the Royal Mile will let you try a flight of single malts and the bartenders will explain the difference between regions if you ask. The Highlands versus Islay situation is a whole topic. I left knowing more than I arrived with and having enjoyed the education.
Eating in Edinburgh: The Kitchin in Leith is the famous one (seasonal, local, Michelin-starred, book well ahead). For everyday eating: Cafe St Honore in the New Town for French-influenced bistro food that genuinely competes with Paris, The Gardener’s Cottage for a set menu in a beautiful small room, the fish and chip shops near the Shore in Leith for the actual experience of eating good fish and chips near water in Scotland.
The Cotswolds: slow, photogenic, worth two days
I had a week and a car and a vague plan to drive around the English countryside looking for the version of England that exists in your head.
The Cotswolds delivers this more completely than anywhere else I’ve been.
Bourton-on-the-Water, Burford, Chipping Campden, Stow-on-the-Wold: all extremely pretty, all extremely popular in summer, all slightly surreal if you’re coming from Southeast Asia. Stone houses, flower boxes, pubs with thatched roofs, village greens with cricket nets.
The practical approach: Stay in one village and drive out from it. Bourton-on-the-Water is the most famous (busy in peak season) but Burford and Chipping Campden are slightly less overrun. The drives between villages are part of the experience: single-track lanes through fields, sheep staring at you from the roadside, hedges so tall they block all peripheral vision.
Eat at the village pub. Sunday roast specifically. Every country pub worth its salt does a Sunday roast: roast meat (beef, lamb, chicken), roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, gravy, vegetables. Order ahead for Sunday roasts at the smaller places, they run out.
A few practical things
The Oyster card. For London, get one at any tube station and load it with £20 minimum. It caps your daily spending on transport automatically, which means you never overpay. Don’t buy individual tickets.
Rail travel between cities. Train from London to Edinburgh: 4.5 hours on the LNER East Coast line, book ahead for the best prices. The West Coast route via the Caledonian Sleeper overnight train from London Euston is an experience I’d recommend once: you wake up in Scotland. Book months ahead, sleeper cabins sell out.
The weather is simply real. It will rain in Edinburgh in August. It will also be lovely in January. Pack layers. Waterproof jacket is not optional for Scotland or anywhere rural. This is not a bug, it’s a feature of places that are genuinely green.
VAT refunds. If you’re not an EU/UK resident, you can sometimes get VAT refunded on large purchases. Ask at the point of purchase. Less relevant than it used to be post-Brexit but worth knowing for expensive items.
Mobile coverage in England is excellent across cities and major towns. Rural areas can have gaps, particularly on single-track roads in the Cotswolds and anywhere in the Scottish Highlands. I’ve tested eSIM options for the UK and put together a current guide to what works there if you want the breakdown.
The UK doesn’t announce itself. It’s the country that reveals things sideways: a view from the top of a hill you climbed on a whim, a pub you walked into because it was raining, a bookshop you found in a close in Edinburgh.
Pay attention to the sideways things.
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