I’ve been in London twenty-two years now. I came here to try and be a stand-up in the year 17 BM (Before Macintyre, 1989 Common Era). There was no-where else to do it. Asked what I loved about London then I’d have said music and comedy venues, and second hand book and record shops. But we collector scum have moved on-line, and with kids culture’s not easily consumable anymore.

With the inconvenience of everyday London life, what’s left to like? After nearly a quarter of a century living in a two thousand year old settlement, everywhere is alive with shared history and personal memory in a way that no other city will ever be for me.

Sitting on the top deck and looking around, I can even get a temporally shifted buzz off a bus journey, so here’s a best of London that’s about people and places, not restaurants and retail outlets.

1) Arthur Machen.
The 19th century Welsh mystic lived and wrote in London from the 1880s onwards, and was strangely fascinated by the idea that the city’s emerging residential districts were magical zones where reality was somehow thin.
The Green Round (1933) renders everything in a five mile radius of Pentonville Road disturbingly opaque. N (1935) will make you doubt the very existence of Stoke Newington.

2) Arthur Smith’s Balham.
The comedian and dada-ist proclaimed himself the unofficial mayor of Balham in the 1980s, and brought the area to life with piquant detail in his shows and writings.
Because of Arthur, when I am required to visit Balham, the experience seems vividly absurd and Ducane Court, the art deco apartment block where Arthur’s adventures begin, seems no more real than Hogwarts.

3) The Astoria, Charing Cross Road.
Many of the people I saw here – Kurt Cobain, David McComb of The Triffids, Grant McLennan of The Go-Betweens, Jeff Buckley and The Fall’s Mark E Smith – are no longer with us, but the sticky nostalgia vortex’s richly deserved obliteration somehow makes their memories more vibrant every time I cough through the dust of the perpetual building site The Astoria has become.

4) William Blake.
Read Ackroyd’s Blake biography alongside the poems and you can get visionary all over London. Blake was baptized at St James’ Church, Piccadilly in 1757.
Run your fingers round the very Grinling Gibbons font in which baby William splashed.

5) Bowman’s Place, Holloway.
There’s a perfunctory plaque to Edward Lear, who wrote The Owl and The Pussycat and was born here in 1812, up this rubbish strewn alleyway at the Nag’s Head crossroads.
There’s so many London literary associations most are barely celebrated, making the rest of the UK, especially Scotland, seem desperate; “Samuel Johnson shat here c 1773. Buy souvenir tea towel, £10.”

6) The Fox Reformed, Stoke Newington Church Street, N16.
Edgar Allen Poe went to school in this wine bar, Daniel Defoe lived over the road above the mini-cab office, and the grave of Coleridge’s confidant Anna Laetitia Barbauld nudges out of the nettles five hundred yards West.
I walk past them all every day and thank God I no longer live in Solihull, where a parking meter Bev Bevan once used in is the local museum.

7) The Winchester pub on Essex Road, Islington.
In the 1980s and the 1990s this was the considerably scruffier but infinitely nicer Market Tavern, with its cellar of almost nightly comedy gigs.
In 1990 I joined a new material night that included the then unknown Eddie Izzard, Patrick Marber, Jo Brand, and Alan Davies and went to Pizza Express afterwards where Jo somehow placated the manager after I accidentally broke a marble table-top.
I was there for Izzard’s first transvestite performance and Johnny Vegas’ first London gigs. Comedy history was in the making and we thought it was just business as usual.

8) The Box, Walker’s Court, Soho.
In 1990, back when this was The Raymond Revue Bar, Izzard used to run a gig alongside the sex shows in another room. One night I arrived early and the dressing room was full of buff naked guys masturbating their penises into legally permissible states of arousal.
And that was just Ivor Dembina, Roger Mann and Simon Munnery!
Walking under the fake Venetian bridge of Walker’s Court always makes me remember that moment. It was everything my Gran feared would happen when I ran away to London to be in showbiz.

9) The Red Rose, Seven Sisters’ Road.
For twenty years the back room of this working men’s club was a great comedy venue, and also home to experimental music nights Back In Your Town and Mopomoso, which brought in free jazz improvisers from all over the world.
I saw Sunny Murray play drums in Seven Sisters! A few years back all the Red Rose gigs got kicked out for a snooker hall. Despite official indifference, London’s the best city in the world for improvised music and the closure of your local experimental music gig usually presages irreversible gentrification, as the bohos who made the area fly get forced out by weekend beatniks.
Stoke Newington’s Vortex went down to Gilette Square when it became a Nandos, and The Spitz got squeezed out of Spittalfields. At Dalston Junction, Café Oto flies the flag, programming world class events without a sniff of funding.
It’s one of the reasons I’m still here.

10) Time Out.
Coming to London from the midlands in the Eighties, Time Out was a lexicon of life-changing possibilities, and the thoroughness of its comedy listings section, the nation’s first ever, made London the stand-up comedy capital of the world and helped legitimize the scene.
And the first time you got your name in the small print, you felt like it was the start of something.