A lunchtime look down from the gallery of The Counting House, the Cornhill pub under the glass dome of a Victorian banking hall.

My photos of London staircases, from palace and hotel grand stairs to Georgian mahogany, iron spirals and Art Deco foyers, with how to see each one.

A winter walk through the Temple's cobbled lanes and Fountain Court ends inside 2 Temple Place, William Waldorf Astor's carved and gilded estate office on the Embankment.

Giant trainers, a winged Dark Angel, a sweet shop dressed as London and a boxer's blue plaque. A walk up Camden High Street from the station to Camden Lock, and why the shops look like this.

Somerset House went from a Tudor palace to government offices to an arts centre. Its history, and how the building pays its way in the 2020s.

A 45-minute Sunday walk from the Sun in Splendour to Westbourne Park Road, with the history behind Notting Hill's painted stucco terraces.

A Sunday morning at Broadway Tower on Fish Hill, where a Georgian folly holds stories of printers, Pre-Raphaelites, a wartime crash and a nuclear bunker.

A walk through the Courtauld Gallery's Great Room, spiral staircase and Blavatnik Fine Rooms, with the history of Samuel Courtauld and the Royal Academy at Somerset House.

A painted ceiling, a rainbow arch, a library under the beams and the old clock winding room, in a private flat at the top of St Pancras.

Eight-metre palms, brass chandeliers and Gothic windows in St Pancras station's old Victorian ticket hall.

A tiny, crammed museum outside the gate of a working Victorian prison: nooses, a blue cell door, Oscar Wilde, Ronnie Biggs and the last gallows in Britain. What's inside and how to get in.

Christmas in St James's, from Fortnum & Mason's advent-calendar front on Piccadilly to Lock & Co's windows and the gingerbread house in the courtyard of The OWO.

Christmas in the City of London, from the Royal Exchange's columns of light and the St Paul's tree to Leadenhall's snowfall and the giant wreaths of Old Spitalfields Market.

He won medals at the Royal Academy, killed his father in 1843 and painted for forty-two years in Bethlem and Broadmoor. The first Dadd retrospective in fifty years, the painting Freddie Mercury named a song after, and where his pictures live in London once the show closes.

From forensic workshops with real human bones to Francis Bacon's triptychs, a 3,300-year-old pharaoh's sarcophagus and a candlelit house where a family stepped out in 1724 and never came back – these are the twenty-one culturally dark things actually worth your time in London this October.

The house in Hampstead where the clock stopped in 1939. Persian rugs, over 1,600 books, and more than two thousand antiquities that Freud carried from Vienna. The most affecting house museum in London, and the one I keep returning to.

A Roman forum, a poultry market, Horace Jones's 1881 ironwork and a monthly vintage flea market, all on one set of cobbles in the City of London.

Old Masters, Sevres porcelain, and the armoury that sent Henry Moore off on a lifetime of shapes inside shapes. A nineteenth century house behind Oxford Street, free to walk into and almost always empty.

Turquoise curtains from John Lewis, a rubber rat, Coronation Street on the television, and George Frideric Handel through the wall. The only preserved Hendrix home in the world.

Henrietta Howard's white villa at Twickenham: a perfect twenty-four-foot cube of a Great Room, hand-painted Chinese wallpaper, a shell grotto and sixty-six acres by the Thames.