I'm afraid I have no recommendations, provider-wise.  If you have any future colleagues that are already in London, they should know.

(is 3fingerspointback)

Welcome to London.

You could actually live in or close to Canary Wharf. The area's been totally redeveloped in the last 15 years - Europe's biggest building site apparently. Personally I find it a bit new and characterless, but the area has all the amenities you'd need and a short commute is something to treasure.

Also easy for getting to Canary Wharf/Docklands are the East End and over the river in Greenwich. The East End is much like Kiwiana described it, but unlike Kiwiana I like it, particularly the massively wanky Hoxton/Shoreditch area. Make sure your hair looks like you had it done for a bet if you live round there though. Greenwich is pretty and has a villagey feel, but I don't know it well.

I live in Angel, which I've found to be as good as anywhere for getting about London. Close to a few main hubs, on bus routes going NSE&W and, best of all, within walking distance of the Shoreditch, the City and the historic centre. Further north you've got the rest of Islington and hippie-friendly Stoke Newington. Both are smart and middle-class. You could get the overland train to Stratford from here.

The south is more of a sprawl and generally cheaper. It's got great parts but it's a pain in the arse to get around so I won't recommend living there.

Don't forget you've got the finest piece of graphic design ever to help you (unless you're in the south, suckers). The tfl journey planner is useful too, but comes unstuck on overland trains, which aren't properly integrated with the rest of the transport system yet.

As for stuff to do, general advice etc, here's a few to start:

1 Do free things. London's very expensive but it's easy to do something free and interesting: BBC TV and radio recordings, lectures and other stuff. The big museums and the Tate Modern are free too, and if you're around next summer there's a music or cultural festival of some sort or other every weekend.

2 Get lost. It's easy to get to know London as just islands around Tube stations. Go on random walks. Get a tube or bus somewhere new and walk home. Central London (Zone 1) isn't that big anyway, so you can get to know it quickly.

(2b Walk. Spend a day walking Regent's canal, the parks, the river.)

3 Talk to people. There's nothing Londoners enjoy more than the chance to talk to a stranger on the Tube. Try to engage the whole carriage in a conversation if you can. Ask them about the Queen, as they'll most likely have met her.

4 Don't eat anywhere with the word "Angus" in the name.

Although the Victoria Line runs out East-ish, lots of East and North-East London is exceptionally bad for connnections to Canary Wharf.

Several perfectly nice people I work with live either side of the eastward reaches of the river - Wapping north, and Rotherhithe to the south, and seem to like it. Both of these are recently developed with purpose-built flats (apartments) which are likely to be more or less trouble-free and may even have decent cable/fibre connections. However you really should walk around any area during the day on a working day to see what the non-commuting denizens are like. Lots of East, and West, South, and North, London is pretty hairy and the scary bits are often cheek-by-jowl with nice bits. eg, Stoke Newington - organic enclave in Hackney - is nice if a bit up-its-own-arse and hand-knitted, but estate agents will extend its borders into Dalston which gets pretty interesting at night. Imagine Asheville, NC with the most boarded-up part of Durham, NC across the road, complete with crack dens. That said, Hackney generally has some lovely bits and some extremely handsome housing/treelined streets. Hackney is famously, although North of the river, not on the tube.

No idea what your budget is but if you want to stay relatively handy in the North, you might look at Holloway, particularly Lower Holloway, around Waitrose/the women's prison (really). Very nice streets, still fairly affordable, one stop outside Zone 1 on the Piccadilly Line which, because it runs to Heathrow, is generally reliable and runs later and earlier than most others. Also it has air steward(esse)s doing their faces on it at any time of day, which I think of as an iconic London sight. Upper Holloway and Archway are slightly further out but also OK - all of these areas have some nice pubs, nice streets and some scary social housing, and horrible main roads which are little less than freeways cutting throough their centres.

Things to do: see live music.   Good venues include the Luminaire in Kilburn and Spitz at Spitalfield Market although this will depend on what you like listening to/watching. There are hundreds of tiny places with all sorts of things on, from pub bands to ferocious but tiny club nights. Start with Time Out or a genre-specfic website and work outwards from there.

Buy women's shoes; every time I have been on holiday in the US even what I thought were my boring work/driving shoes have caused a (positive) stir.

Depending on your job, get a fancy haircut - not necessarily a Hoxton jokewig, but our posh hairdressers are still 60% cheaper, and 70% less conservative, than their equivalents in LA, NY and Chicago.

Learn to drink. Don't, please, learn to lark about on the pavements shouting and singing and conducting courtships that everyone else wishes you would keep private. But there is a lot of fun to be had sitting in a nice pub with nice people for a few hours. Fewer laptops than Starbucks, for a start.