My guide to visiting Blenheim Palace: the Long Library and its Willis organ, the Indian Room, the cafés and shop, and how a day ticket turns into a 12-month pass.

The Neasden Temple was carved from 26,300 pieces of stone in India and assembled in north-west London. What to look for, the rules for visitors, and how to get there.

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.

Rooftops, towers and a cathedral dome I've photographed across London, with which views are free, which need a ticket and which open only for Open House.

A morning in Painswick: the Rococo Garden in October, the yews and lychgate at St Mary's, and the stone-cottage doors dressed for Halloween.

Autumn in Chelsea and Kensington happens on the shopfronts before it happens in the parks: pumpkin wreaths, dried-flower doorways, a pub buried in orange flowers and a street that turns scarlet.

A house built in 1902–1908 to feel like a Greek home on Delos: marble, mosaics, a library like a monk's cell, and the perfect opposite of the Villa Ephrussi up the hill.

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.

A June afternoon in Woodstock in Oxfordshire: the honey-stone town outside Blenheim's gate, its two pub streets, a queen held prisoner, a glove trade that paid for the stone, and how to see the park for free.

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.

Foster Books, a bronze Hogarth with his pug, a greengrocer worth photographing, and Lord Burlington's Palladian villa at the end of the walk.

The library that played the cottage hospital, the church that hosted every wedding, and a thousand years of Oxfordshire market town that the series never mentions.

Fifty-odd stalls, three bunches for a tenner, and sixty independent shops behind them. When to arrive, what things cost, and how the shouting works.

A house built between two bays by a Rothschild who wanted to live on a ship, with nine gardens, a loggia buried in bougainvillea and the best terrace view on the Riviera.

A marble bust in a top hat and a masquerade mask, paper chains in the library and a Tudor gatehouse in the frost. The National Trust's Warwickshire house at its best.

An hour from Liverpool Street: pargeted plasterwork, jettied timber houses, the largest turf maze in Europe, a free Victorian garden, and Audley End a walk across the park.

A house so big that Charles II bought it as a palace, and the third of it that survives, with Robert Adam interiors, a Capability Brown park and a parterre full of tulips in April.

Four hundred years of arrivals on one East End street: Huguenot weavers, the Sunday market, salt beef at four in the morning and walls that get repainted every few months.

A freezing February morning among the snowdrops of Hyde Park and the Serpentine, plus where else to find London's first flowers of the year.

John Hatchard opened on Piccadilly in 1797 and the shop has never left the street. Its history, the royal warrants, Oscar's table, whether it really is the oldest – and what it can still do that the internet cannot.