My Design London: Sharon Ament, director of the Museum of London, shares her favourite design hotspots in the capital

Sharon Ament, Museum of London director since 2012, is overseeing the move to the museum’s new home in West Smithfield in 2021.

She was formerly director of public engagement at the Natural History Museum.

We’ve lived in East Dulwich for over 20 years and really love it. At one end of our road we have Peckham Rye, at the other Dulwich Park.

We’re also at the edge of a those big glacial hills that were thrown up along the Thames.

Peckham Rye is a Victorian park and there’s that great sense of the outdoors and health being important to people, as the Victorians were clearing slums and thinking about new ways of living in a city.

Flying over London you see what a green city it is. One of my big finds is the new free map produced by Urban Good, showing London as a garden city.

I’m going to do all the walks this year, starting with Southwark Woods because walking and talking with people I love was my New Year’s Resolution.

I like London’s democratic nature — we’re all on the street together.

Ours is an 1879 terrace house with a garage that used to be a stable. It was built for the huge growth of the middle classes in Victorian times.

When we pulled up the floorboards we found oats under there, and we’ve reused the chimney pots as garden planters.

I don’t really like Victorian furniture, so it’s modernish. We have a Heal’s sofa and my very best friend’s grandmother’s Twenties chairs which we’ve covered in funky leather.

The biggest rows between my husband and I are about paint colours. We agree to compromise so our dining room/kitchen is Farrow & Ball’s deep purple Pelt, with grey-green woodwork.

I love the Artists’ Open House weekend that we have in Dulwich every May.

It gives me a chance to be very nosy, get ideas for houses like ours and see great work.

I can’t get away from Tate Britain. It’s the gallery I like to go to when I am sad.

I sometimes go when I’m happy, of course, but there is something about being sad in an art gallery…

I love Joss Graham for a Persian rug or ethnic jewellery. The stuff in his shop is art.

The Conran Shop has kept true to its original aspiration. We bought a swinging wooden chair from there made out of barrel stays from Stellenbosch, and a Korean street table.

Skandium has wonderful glassware and the most comfortable seats in the world.

Lifestyle shop Roullier White on Lordship Lane is fantastic, and Eco Karavan nearby sells rugs, Indian barbecues and washing up liquid refills.

They’ve done all the ethical sourcing for you.

Take a picnic to One Tree Hill in Honor Oak. If you go past Peckham Rye, and keep on going up the hill, there’s a convent on the corner. Go round the back of the hill, up through the churchyard and you have one of the great views of London.

Legend says it’s called Honor Oak because Elizabeth I got a bit drunk in old age and knighted an oak instead of a person.

My other secret pleasure is the Thames foreshore. Go to Rotherhithe train station and when the tide is out you can get on to the foreshore. You see thousands of oyster shells and nails from wrecked Napoleonic ships.

It’s proper mudlarking and much of it comes into our museum.

I really love the skyscrapers in the City which are beautifully set beside each other, and really purposefully contained by the City of London: The Gherkin, the original NatWest Tower, the Lloyd’s Building, the WalkieTalkie, the Cheesegrater.

And then I love the way you have the combination of Tower Bridge and the Tower of London and the hyperbolic City of London.

It tells a story, with the river flowing through it.

Melange, the chocolatier in Peckham, does amazing hot chocolate — as good as Paris. I drop in there on Sunday mornings. You don’t need anything else to eat.

And I’m commissioning a cake for my niece’s wedding from a wonderful woman who runs Piece of Cake bakery on East Dulwich Grove.

I love the way local markets reinvent themselves: from the food market at Tachbrook Street Market in Pimlico to Columbia Road, and North Cross Road Market in East Dulwich, which has vintage furniture and street food.

We’re making a cultural hotspot with the Culture Mile. I’d love people to fall back in love with the City.

Peckham is obviously a cultural hotspot, but around here demands a cultural re-engagement because you’ve got everything from St Bartholomew’s Hospital Museum and Archive and the Pathology Museum right up to Silk Street Market and the Barbican and Charterhouse.

St Bartholomew the Great is London’s oldest parish church and a memorial to William Wallace.

My four bikes are the things I love most so probably the one made for me by bike maker Justin Burls. I’m tall so I was measured for the frame, which fits me perfectly, and I chose the colours of duck-egg blue and white.

And I’m having this fantastic piece of animalistic jewellery made for me by Emmeline Hastings. I love the idea of helping to perpetuate crafts. I found her at Goldsmiths Fair.

The Goldsmiths’ Company, based across the road from us, is the first big donor to our new museum, pledging £10 million which is phenomenal.

My super dream property would be having Chelsea Physic Garden all to myself. Inside the main building there’s an old-fashioned classroom and I’d like to live there.