East End

Made famous by Dickens and infamous by Jack the Ripper, the East End is one of London's most hauntingly evocative neighborhoods. It may have fewer conventional tourist attractions but is rich in folk history, architectural gems, and feisty burgeoning culture. Once home to French Huguenots, then Ashkenazi Jews, the area now has a large Bangladeshi community. Since the early 1990s the area has also attracted students and creative media types, lured by the old industrial spaces.

Nowadays the East End is London's most culturally diverse area. Near Whitechapel Road is the Bevis Marks Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, London's oldest synagogue. Farther east, you'll come across the famous Whitechapel Art Gallery; the Whitechapel Bell Foundry; and Brick Lane, the heart of the Bangladeshi East End, filled with innumerable curry houses and glittering sari shops, and also home to the Old Truman Brewery,now converted to studios and gallery space. The Sunday morning junk market on Brick Lane adds further complements to the rewarding vintage-clothes shopping in this area.

Since the East End was heavily bombed in World War II, and subsequently rebuilt with public housing estates, it's not the best-looking part of the capital, although pockets of historic buildings do remain. Nicholas Hawksmoor's masterpiece, Christ Church, Spitalfields soars above Fournier Street, along with some fine early Georgian houses. For a sensory experience of Georgian life, visit Dennis Severs's House. Kids enjoy Spitalfields City Farm and, to the east in Bethnal Green, the quirky V&A Museum of Childhood. Farther east still, toward Mile End, are the former Trinity Almshouses, with the statue of William Booth on the very spot where the first Salvation Army meetings were held, and the notorious Blind Beggar pub. The immense Royal London Hospital and its museum are just a few yards away.

Today Spitalfields and Shoreditch are London's most exciting bohemian neighborhoods, together with Hoxton, just north of here. There are stylish boutiques (especially on Cheshire Street) and cafés, artists' studios, and galleries in the plentiful old, derelict industrial spaces that were bought up cheaply and have been imaginatively remodeled. Spitalfields Market, with its arts and crafts and design booths, is open daily, but the weekends are the most lively. In Shoreditch, Columbia Road on Sunday (8-2) gets buried under forests of shrubs and blooms of all shapes and sizes during London's main plant and flower market. The Geffrye Museum occupies a row of early-18th-century almshouses, and that bastion of contemporary art, the White Cube gallery, lies to the west in the very hip Hoxton Square.