Music: See any Proms concert (even sold out ones) for £5 without having to book

This is one of our absolute favourite tip offs in terms of getting the very best out of cultural London life: how to see any Prom (even the sold out ones) just by turning up before the concert starts and paying £5 – then listening to some unbelievable piece of music for as long or as little as you like (if you are paying a fiver, even to get 30 or 45 minutes worth of amazing music before you go on somewhere else, in a lunch break, or after work, can transform your day or week), and being able to sit or lie down with a glass of wine or a bite to eat while you take in this great pleasure. Heaven.

All you need do is queue up 45 minutes before a performance starts (we’ve often turned up mere minutes before the beginning of a concert and never not got a ticket, but it’s certainly wiser to turn up earlier). Then you can choose either to stand in the front arena (queue at Door 11), or, our favourite option by far, go up to the gallery (Door 10) where you can get a good view of everything going on beneath you by leaning on the balcony, or munch away on a picnic or lie down with a blanket and bottle of wine, and let the music float up towards you. There are 500 tickets available for each Prom so even if the concert has been booked out for months, you can still see it – although you must buy your ticket in person (i.e no waiting in line to buy multiple tickets for others), and you have to pay in cash.

The concerts we’re dying to see include the already sold out Prom 47: Cage, which marks the centenary of John Cage, including works by Cage himself as well as a piece by The Clock artist Christian Marclay (Friday 17th August at 7.45pm), Proms 63 and 64 (also sold out), when Sir Simon Rattle conducts the Berliner Philharmoniker playing Ligeti, Wagner, Sibelius, Debussy and Ravel (Thursday 30 August at 7.30pm), and Brahms and Lutosławski (Friday 31 August at 7.00pm), and Prom 74 when fantastic Congolese street musicians Staff Benda Bilili and rapper Beloji bring their African music to the Royal Albert Hall (Thursday 6th September at 10.15pm).