The people's 101: shopping

According to Noemi Fumagall, Brick Lane on a Sunday offers ‘brilliant food and shopping’. She’s not wrong – the UpMarket has rare treats from Lithuania, Venezuela and Tibet; the Boiler House food hall has great Gujarati and Cuban dishes, the Tea Rooms boast vintage fashions and characterful collectibles, and the Backyard Market can’t be beaten for handmade clothes and accessories.

Bohemian shopping joins forces with ‘yours-for-a-paaand’ Cockney patter to ensure this Sunday flower market remains a firm favourite among readers.

The sole department store to bag a gong from our readers, Dover Street Market mixes designer labels with a market-style layout. A large number of respondents cited the cakes at Rose Bakery on the fourth floor as being worth the visit alone.

Readers including Vicky Dennis and Samantha Doyle follow in the footsteps of Florence Nightingale and Mary Shelley in frequenting this Jermyn Street seller of fragrances, established in 1730.

It’s tempting to mourn the dusty, disorganised charm of twentieth-century Foyles, but modernisation has been a rewarding process for London’s most famous bookshop. While its rivals struggle to stay alive, Foyles continues to delight our readers with its enormous collection and laid back coffee shop.

London’s oldest bookshop is also one of its best, a temple for collectors in search of rare and signed editions. Current patrons include a large swathe of the Time Out massive: past patrons include Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde.

The capital’s foremost purveyor of non-fiction. Everything you’d expect from a shop owned by the London Review of Books, plus brilliant cakes.

When Virgin and Tower Records folded and everybody predicted the death of the record industry, legendary London label Rough Trade didn’t merely fight for survival. It responded by raising its game, opening a large new home in east London, staging fantastic in-store gigs, and leading London’s vinyl revival.
Read more about Rough Trade East

Having sold cheese from the same Piccadilly location for more than 200 years, Paxton’s (‘where the Queen gets her cheese’ according to @Mariacos82) stakes a convincing claim for the title of Britain’s Greatest Fromagerie. Sublime.

‘A badly hidden secret’, says Amir S of a book market that occupies prime tourist territory under Waterloo Bridge and yet never feels crowded. Expect well-thumbed paperbacks and an unpredictable assortment of out-of-print titles and manuscripts.