Green Room Cafe | Stoke Newington | London

While a straight-up cafe is always a pleasure, it's the ones that combine interests that I love to discover. I'll never forget how much my grandmother and I used to adore a local cafe that was inside a bakery and had a craft section, too.

Cafes with bookshops, cafes with live music, cafes in the corner of a shop... these independent, collaborative establishments go beyond a good cup and are evocative of inspiration with their unique identity and charm.

As it is, there are already so many cafes in London, it can be somewhat hard to compete for the limelight, especially in a nook as thriving in cafe culture as London's Stoke Newington but Green Room Cafe sets itself aside by marrying floristry with a clean and large space dedicated to the enjoyment of good food and coffee.

Wandering past the peonies, freesias and more, you'll be led into a room filled with natural light that opens up into a secluded sunlit garden, an area covered by trellis and ivy for those who prefer the shade, and a further ground for outdoor plant-perusing.

What I like most and least about the cafe is the abundance of young stuff who are all at once as charming in their youth as they are completely unaware of what's beyond their nose. Call me a nit-pick, I spent more than a decade in hospitality and grew eyes in the back of my head - neither of which, of course, I would have acquired if it weren't for those dreamy days of waitressing hard and spending my few pennies on the pursuit of pleasure. And so it is, that the sometimes slow service can be made up for by the bittersweet reminder that you're only young once.

A wonderful place for reasonably priced and delicious food, it is my lunchtime cafe of choice on Church Street before a wander in the magical Abney Park Cemetery.

Where are your favourite combo-cafes?

 I'd love to find more in London!