Within the City of Westminster, the entertainment district of the West End has its focus around Leicester Square, where London and world film premieres are held, and Piccadilly Circus, with its giant electronic advertisements.
London's theatre district is here, as are many cinemas, bars, clubs and restaurants, including the city's Chinatown district (in Soho), and just to the east is Covent Garden, an area housing speciality shops.
The United Kingdom's Royal Ballet, English National Ballet, Royal Opera and English National Opera are based in London and perform at the Royal Opera House, The London Coliseum, Sadler's Wells Theatre and the Royal Albert Hall as well as touring the country.
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Islington's 1 mile (1.6 km) long Upper Street, extending Northwards from The Angel, has more bars and restaurants than any other street in the UK.
Europe's busiest shopping area is Oxford Street, a shopping street nearly 1 mile (1.6 km) long—which makes it the longest shopping street in the uk—and home to many shops and department stores including Selfridges.
Knightsbridge—home to the Harrods department store—lies just to the southwest.
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London is home to designers Vivienne Westwood, Galliano, Stella McCartney, Manolo Blahnik, and Jimmy Choo among others; its renowned art and fashion schools make it an international centre of fashion alongside Paris, Milan and New York.
London offers a great variety of cuisine as a result of its ethnically diverse population.
Gastronomic centres include the Bangladeshi restaurants of Brick Lane and the Chinese food restaurants of Chinatown.
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There are a variety of regular annual events in the city.
The beginning of the year is celebrated with the relatively new New Year's Day Parade, fireworks display at London Eye, and the world's second largest street party, the Notting Hill Carnival is held during the late August Bank holiday each year.
Traditional parades include November's Lord Mayor's Show, a centuries-old event celebrating the annual appointment of a new Lord Mayor of the City of London with a procession along the streets of the City, and June's Trooping the Colour, a formal military pageant performed by regiments of the Commonwealth and British armies to celebrate the Queen's Official Birthday.
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London has been the setting for many works of literature.
The literary centres of London have traditionally been hilly Hampstead and (since the early 20th century) Bloomsbury.
Writers closely associated with the city are the diarist Samuel Pepys, noted for his eyewitness account of the Great Fire, Charles Dickens, whose representation of a foggy, snowy, grimy London of street sweepers and pickpockets has been a major influence on people's vision of early Victorian London, Virginia Woolf, novelist, epistle, feminist, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.
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The earlier (1722) A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe is a fictionalisation of the events of the 1665 Great Plague.
William Shakespeare spent a large part of his life living and working in London; his contemporary Ben Jonson was also based in London, and some of his work—most notably his play The Alchemist—was set in the state.
Later important depictions of London from the 19th and early 20th centuries are Dickens' novels, and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.
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A modern writer pervasively influenced by the city is Peter Ackroyd, in works such as London: The Biography, The Lambs of London and Hawksmoor.
London was also the setting of Peter Pan (1953), The 101 Dalmatians (1961), Mary Poppins (1964), Blowup (1966), Secrets & Lies (1996), Notting Hill (1999), Match Point (2005), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street (2008), and is home to the television soap EastEnders.
London has played a significant role in the film industry, and has major studios at Ealing and a special effects and post-production community centred in Soho.
Working Title Films has its headquarters in London.
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London is home to many museums, galleries, and other institutions which are major tourist attractions as well as playing a research role.
The Natural History Museum (biology and geology), Science Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum (fashion and design) are clustered in South Kensington's "museum quarter", while the British Museum houses historic artefacts from around the world.
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The British Library at St Pancras is the UK's national library, housing 150 million items.
The city also houses extensive art collections, primarily in the National Gallery, Tate Britain and Tate Modern.
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London is one of the major classical and popular music capitals of the world and is home to major music corporations, such as EMI, as well as countless bands, musicians and industry professionals.
London is home to many orchestras and concert halls such as the Barbican Arts Centre (principal base of the London Symphony Orchestra), Cadogan Hall (Royal Philharmonic Orchestra) and the Royal Albert Hall (BBC Promenade Concerts).
London's two main opera houses are the Royal Opera House and the Coliseum Theatre.
London is home to the UK's largest pipe organ, at the Royal Albert Hall.
Other significant instruments are found at the cathedrals and major churches.
Several conservatoires are located within the city: Royal Academy of Music, Royal College of Music, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and Trinity College of Music.
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London has numerous venues for rock and pop concerts, including large arenas such as Earls Court, Wembley Arena and the O2 Arena, as well as numerous mid-size venues, such as Brixton Academy, Hammersmith Apollo and The Shepherd's Bush Empire.
London also hosts many music festivals, including the O2 Wireless Festival.
London is home to the first and original Hard Rock Cafe and the Abbey Road Studios where The Beatles recorded many of their hits.
In the seventies and eighties, musicians like David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Cat Stevens, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Madness, The Jam, The Small Faces, Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, Fleetwood Mac, The Police, The Cure, Squeeze and Sade (band), took the world by storm, deriving their sound from the streets and rhythms vibrating through London.
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London was instrumental in the development of punk music, with figures such as the Sex Pistols, The Clash, and Vivienne Westwood all based in the city.
More recent artists to emerge from the London music scene include Bananarama, Bush, East 17, Siouxie and the Banshees, Spice Girls, Jamiroquai, The Libertines, Babyshambles, Bloc Party, Coldplay and Amy Winehouse.
London is also a centre for urban music.
In particular the genres UK Garage, Drum and Bass, dubstep and Grime evolved in the city from the foreign genres of hip hop and reggae, alongside local drum and bass.
Black music station BBC 1Xtra was set up to support the rise of homegrown urban music both in London and the rest of the UK.
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