Things to do in London ON

Landmark · 442 Adelaide Street North

The boarding house where Frederick Banting woke at two in the morning in October 1920 and wrote down the idea that became insulin. A small museum in an ordinary brick house, with the Flame of Hope burning in the garden outside.

Local tip: It is easy to walk past and it is the most consequential address in the city by a wide margin. Go for the bedroom and the notebook page rather than the displays, and understand what the flame is: it is meant to be extinguished only when a cure for diabetes is found. Locals mostly have not been, which tells you something about the city and nothing about the site.

Food · 130 King Street, downtown

A market on the same block since 1845, rebuilt in 1999 — greengrocers, butchers, a fishmonger, bakeries and enough hot food counters to make it the default downtown lunch, with an outdoor farmers' market on Thursdays and Saturdays.

Local tip: This is where you buy food properly rather than at a supermarket, and it is the fastest way to work out what southwestern Ontario actually grows. The skating rink outside runs all winter and is free. Go on a Saturday morning, then walk five minutes to the Forks.

Neighborhood · Across the river south of downtown

A crossroads of independent shops, a bakery, a bookshop and a couple of good restaurants, wrapped in the best-preserved late-Victorian residential streets in the city, ten minutes' walk from downtown.

Local tip: Walk the side streets rather than only the commercial block — Bruce, Craig, Askin — because the housing stock is the point. It is also the clearest illustration of London's price gradient: a one-bed here costs meaningfully more than the same flat a fifteen-minute walk east, purely for the address.

Nature · West London, along the Thames

The city's largest park — some 300 hectares of riverside trails, meadow and gardens strung along the Thames, with a small children's attraction, Storybook Gardens, inside it.

Local tip: The Thames Valley Parkway runs through it, a continuous multi-use path that follows the river for tens of kilometres across the city and is how you actually get around London on a bike. Join it at Springbank and ride east through the Forks to Fanshawe; you will barely touch a road.

Neighborhood · Dundas Street east of Adelaide

The old east-end commercial main street — a century of low brick shopfronts now holding coffee roasters, a brewery, restaurants and a year-round Saturday farmers' market in the Western Fair District's Confederation Building.

Local tip: The cheapest walkable address in London and the one visibly changing, which cuts both ways — this is also where the city's street homelessness and drug crisis is most concentrated, and you should walk it at different times of day before signing anything. The market on a Saturday morning is genuinely excellent and unlike anything else in the city.

Nature · North-east London, on the dammed Thames

A large reservoir behind the Fanshawe Dam with beaches, trails, camping and a reconstructed nineteenth-century Upper Canadian village of some thirty buildings moved here from around the region.

Local tip: The dam is the reason London has not had a repeat of the 1937 flood, which is worth knowing when you are looking at how close a rental sits to the river. The lake itself is the closest thing to a swimming beach in the city, and the village is much better than its name suggests — real trades demonstrated by people who know them.