The Time Out London blog team

Whether you’re a non-fiction fanatic, a lover of romance novels or a sci-fi epic expert, London has a literary store to scratch your bookworm itch. Beyond the wordsmith heavyweights like Waterstones, Foyles and Daunt Books, the city is home to small booksellers aplenty. And now, we come to you with the indie to trump all indies.  Every year, the Bookseller takes on the challenge of finding the best of the best at its annual British Book Awards. Ahead of announcing the overall Independent Bookshop of the Year in May, nine regional and country winners have been revealed, and Backstory in Balham has been named London’s best independent for 2026.  Home to a wine bar as well as fully-stocked shelves, Backstory is more than a bookshop, acting as a third space and community hub for locals. Launched by former journalist Tom Rowley, who left the Economist to open the literary-emporium-turned-boozer, Backstory has been serving up great reads and tasty sips since its debut in 2023. Photograph: Louise Rose Photography Backstory’s big win shows that patience pays off, because it finally took home the prize after appearing on the shortlist for three years running, beating eight other London sellers to the top spot. Tom Tivnan, the Bookseller deputy editor, said 2026 had been a ‘record year for submissions’ to the awards. The victors were selected from the 76 finalists announced last month. The overall winner, announced on May 11, will receive a cheque for £5,000 and will go on to...

Quarterpounder connoisseurs, listen up. The UK’s best burger has just been crowned for 2026 – and you may be surprised to hear that a national chain has come out on top. Now in its 12th year, the National Burger Awards brings together restaurants, pubs and street food vendors to battle it out to see whose burger is crowned the best in Britain. This year’s winning patty was the brainchild of Honest Burgers, which operates 45 restaurants across the country. Its victorious sandwich, The Honest, was cooked up by co-founder Tom Barton, made from dry-aged beef, thick cut Wiltshire bacon, homemade beef and onion relish, XL cheese, pickles and diced onion. While Honest Burgers has outposts up and down the UK, The Honest is only available at one of those locations – and, excitingly, it’s here in London. You can get The Honest at Honest Burgers’ Smash + Grab site in London’s Liverpool Street. ‘The burger we won with is an evolution of the original Honest, so we just upped every ingredient and the results are obvious,’ said Adam Layton, head of food at Honest Burgers. The British burger chain, which beat 15 other contenders in the final on Tuesday (March 24), was a debutante at the 2026 competition. Photograph: National Burger Awards Second place in the signature round went to London’s Burger & Beyond, which was also a new entrant this year, while third place was awarded to Newcastle’s Meat Stack. Burger Chef of the Year went to Tom Curtis from Dodo Pub Co (pictured above)....

Tracey Emin is a total British icon, so it’s only natural that everything she touches becomes iconic too. That certainly goes for her former Spitalfields studio, which she began using as a red-hot Young British Artist (YBA) in the early 2000s. Emin announced her move to Margate in 2016, leaving a question mark over the building’s future. Now, the London-based Chris Dyson Architects has won planning permission to transform the former creative hub into homes and commercial units. In 2015, Emin, who worked at 1-5 Tenter Ground, appointed the architect David Chipperfield to mastermind a plan to knock down the adjacent 66-68 Bell Lane and link the studio to a new home. Tower Hamlets Council rejected the plan amid opposition from local residents. At the time, she said to the Guardian: ‘Why would you want to be somewhere you’re not wanted? What I’m going to do now is move out of London. I don’t have any choice on that … There’s places now in Britain that are desperate for artists – Margate’s thriving, Folkestone, Hastings. All that Kent coast. And I could have a giant studio and be really relaxed.’ Emin made good on the statement, although it’s worth noting that she was granted permission to link the buildings in 2019. It was evidently too little, given that she’s now based in Cliftonville, the super-cool Margate neighbourhood (that’s set to get a new £1.1m skatepark). In a statement, Chris Dyson Architects – which has its headquarters in Spitalfields – explained that the former...