Where do people chill in London?

London doesn't really feel like a city built for relaxing. It's expensive, it's busy, and it has a way of making you feel like you should be doing something productive with your time even when you're supposed to be having a day off. But people do chill here, quite a lot actually, and if you spend enough time in the city you start to notice where and how it happens. It's just not always obvious from the outside.

The most straightforward answer is the parks, and it's worth taking that answer seriously even if it sounds a bit obvious. London has genuinely good parks in a way that not every big city does, and on a warm day they fill up with people who have collectively decided to opt out for a few hours. Hyde Park is the central one and it handles the numbers better than you'd expect given how many people end up there on a sunny Saturday. People swim in the Serpentine, which always strikes visitors as slightly surprising, or just lie on the grass with no particular agenda. It's one of the few places in central London where doing absolutely nothing feels like a legitimate and socially acceptable use of your afternoon.

Victoria Park in east London has a slightly different quality to it. It feels more like a neighbourhood park than a destination, which means the people there are mostly from nearby rather than passing through, and that changes the atmosphere in a way that's hard to pin down exactly but is definitely there. It's more settled. People have their regular spots. There are dogs everywhere. It's the kind of park that makes you understand why east Londoners get slightly evangelical about east London.

Hampstead Heath is its own thing entirely and deserves a mention on its own terms. It's enormous, it's surprisingly wild-feeling given that you're technically still in London, and it has open air swimming ponds that have been there for over a century. Parliament Hill gives you a view over the whole city that still manages to feel like a discovery even when you've seen it before. On a good summer morning it's one of the better places to be in the country, not just the city.

When the weather is doing what it usually does, which is to say something between drizzle and genuine rain, the version of chilling that takes over is the coffee shop. London has got really good at this over the past ten or fifteen years in a way that isn't always acknowledged. There are neighbourhoods now, particularly in east London and parts of south London, where the independent cafe has basically replaced the pub as the place people gravitate towards when they want to be out of the house without committing to an actual plan. You go, you sit, you have a coffee and then probably another one, and an hour and a half disappears quite pleasantly.

The best cafes for this are the ones that don't make you feel like you're overstaying your welcome, which sounds like a low bar but actually filters out quite a lot of places. Monmouth in Borough Market is good and has been good for a long time. Ozone in Old Street, Workshop Coffee in various locations, the slightly obsessive small-batch places that have opened in Hackney and Peckham and Bermondsey over the last few years. These are all worth finding if you're in the right part of the city. The thing they have in common is that the coffee is taken seriously but the atmosphere isn't, which tends to be the right combination.

The less obvious answer to where people chill in London, and in some ways the more interesting one, is creative workshops. This sounds like it might be the opposite of chilling, because it involves doing something, but the kind of focus that comes from making something with your hands for a couple of hours is genuinely relaxing in a way that sitting passively somewhere often isn't. You come out of it feeling like the afternoon had a shape to it.

Painting is probably the best entry point into this if you haven't tried it before. Art Play in Shoreditch runs Sip & Paint sessions through the week where you're guided through a painting step by step by a resident artist, working with acrylics on canvas over a couple of hours. There's a bar, there's food, there's a drink when you arrive, and the whole thing is beginner-friendly in a way that genuinely holds up rather than just being something they say to get people through the door. The guidance means there's never a moment where you're staring at a blank canvas not knowing what to do, and the process of slowly building something up over the session is more absorbing than it sounds when you describe it to someone.

The thing about a session like this is that two hours goes past without you clocking it, which is probably the clearest sign that something is actually working as a way to decompress. You're focused enough that the usual background noise quiets down, but it's not demanding enough that it feels like effort. And you walk out with a finished painting, which is a slightly ridiculous but genuinely pleasing thing to be carrying home on a Saturday afternoon. Art Play runs evening sessions too called Vibe & Paint, which have a DJ and lean more towards a night out than an afternoon off, and they've got a Chelsea location as well if Spitalfields is too far across the city.

If painting isn't your thing the same general principle applies to pottery, candle making, terrarium classes and a fairly long list of other things that sit in the same territory. The common thread is a couple of hours of doing something enjoyable with your hands in a room with other people, which sounds simple but produces a particular kind of relaxed feeling that's quite different from what you get from a scroll through your phone or even a walk in the park.

The real answer to where people chill in London is probably that it's different for everyone and changes depending on where you live in the city. Someone in Brixton will say Brockwell Park without hesitating. Someone in Stoke Newington will mention the canal or a specific cafe they've been going to every Saturday for three years. Someone in Marylebone will say Regent's Park, probably followed by lunch somewhere nearby. The city is big enough that most people end up developing a local version of this question, a small geography of places that work for them, rather than a single answer that applies across the whole thing.

But if you're new to London and still figuring out where your version of that is, the parks and the coffee shops are the obvious starting point and they're obvious for good reason. And if you want an afternoon that leaves you with something a bit more tangible than a pleasant memory of lying on some grass, a painting class is worth trying at least once. Most people who do end up going back, which is usually a fairly reliable indicator that something is worth your time.