In this guide
There are two questions about London neighbourhoods and they usually get one answer. Where should I go and where should I sleep are not the same question, because the things that make an area good to visit — a museum, a market, a famous street — have very little to do with the things that make it good to wake up in.
What decides a base is duller and more specific. Is there a train home at one in the morning. Is the street outside a nightlife street. Is anything open for breakfast. Does the whole place shut at six. Covent Garden is one of the best days out in London and a mediocre place to sleep. Bethnal Green is close to the reverse.
This page is the sleeping question. If you want the looking-at-things question, our guide to the best areas to visit ranks 26 neighbourhoods on exactly that basis, and the two lists agree less often than you would expect.
💡 The Short Version: First trip: Covent Garden, the South Bank or Bloomsbury — central, walkable, and all three have a train through the night. Going out: Soho or Shoreditch, and neither is cheap. Museums and children: South Kensington, for the tunnel from the station to the museum doors. Budget: stay in Zone 1 and go smaller, not out to Zone 3. Quiet: Chelsea, Notting Hill or Hampstead. Early flight: Paddington. And the single most expensive mistake on this page is booking Zone 3 to save twenty pounds.
The night-train map is not the Tube map
Almost every entry below turns on this, so it is worth thirty seconds up front. London’s Tube does not run all night. On Friday and Saturday nights only, five lines do: Central, Jubilee, Northern, Piccadilly and Victoria, plus a stretch of the Windrush line on the Overground. Everything else stops around midnight and restarts around 5.30am.
Three consequences catch visitors out badly.
| What people assume | What actually happens |
|---|---|
| The Elizabeth line runs late, so it runs all night | It does not run all night on any night. It is the fastest thing in London by day and useless at 2am |
| The Northern line serves Old Street, so Shoreditch is covered | Night Tube on the Northern line runs via Charing Cross only. The whole Bank branch — Old Street, Angel, Moorgate, Borough — has no night service at all |
| Paddington is a huge interchange, so it must have one | Paddington has no Night Tube line whatsoever. Bakerloo, Circle, District, Hammersmith & City and Elizabeth: not one of them runs through the night |
The DLR also shuts every night, which is the trap in Greenwich and Canary Wharf. Night buses do run everywhere and cost £1.75 flat, and they are the fallback — but a night bus from the West End to Zone 3 is the better part of an hour, standing in the cold first.
First time in London
You want to be able to walk home. On a first trip you will overestimate how much you can fit into a day and underestimate how tired you will be by nine at night, and the base that survives that is a central one you can reach on foot from a theatre or a restaurant.
Covent Garden — the most convenient base in London
About £130–£180 · Zone 1 · Piccadilly and Northern Night Tube · area guide
Nowhere else puts you inside a fifteen-minute walk of the theatres, the river, Soho, Trafalgar Square and the British Museum at once. Covent Garden station is on the Piccadilly line and Leicester Square adds the Northern, so you have two Night Tube lines and the option of simply walking back from almost anything you have booked.
The trade is that it is relentless. The Piazza has street performers from mid-morning until late, the surrounding streets carry theatre crowds twice a night, and the area does not have a quiet hour between about ten in the morning and midnight. It is also short of ordinary shops — you will struggle to buy milk.
The Z Hotel Covent Gardenad is about £130 with breakfast and free evening cheese and wine, on the condition that you read the room grade: the cheapest rate is an “Inside” room with no window, and people book it by accident constantly. Strand Palacead is about £140, has nearly eight hundred rooms and an art deco frontage from 1909, and is the one with availability when the boutiques are full.
South Bank — the river, the galleries and a proper night service
About £160 and up · Zone 1 · Jubilee and Northern Night Tube · area guide
The best walk in London runs past your front door, and most of what is on it is free: Tate Modern, the Southbank Centre foyers, the BFI, the covered halls of Borough Market. Tate Modern stays open until 9pm on Fridays and Saturdays and costs nothing, which is a genuinely rare thing — a major free attraction open at night, five minutes from your bed.
Transport here is unusually good after dark. Waterloo has both the Jubilee and the Northern, Southwark and London Bridge have the Jubilee, so you have a night train on Fridays and Saturdays whichever end of the walk you are staying at. Borough Market is closed on Mondays, which matters more than it sounds if you were counting on it for food.
citizenM Banksidead is about £160 for one room type with a wall-to-wall window and a tablet that runs the blinds — and the rooms are genuinely small, the bed filling the width, which shocks people who have not seen the format. Native Banksidead is on a quiet cut-through behind Shakespeare’s Globe and puts a kitchen in the room.
Bloomsbury — the cheapest good decision in Zone 1
From about £26 a hostel bed · Zone 1 · Piccadilly, Central and Northern Night Tube · area guide
The calmest streets in central London, five minutes from the British Museum, ten minutes on foot from St Pancras, and with a spread of prices no other Zone 1 area matches. Russell Square is on the Piccadilly line, which runs all night at weekends and goes straight to Heathrow without a change — that one line covers your arrival, your sightseeing and your flight home.
The honest weakness is evenings. Bloomsbury is academic and residential, so it goes quiet early and the restaurant choice is thin compared with Soho ten minutes west. That is precisely why people sleep well here.
Generator Londonad is about £26 a bed with 750 rooms, a bar built into a bus and a 24-hour reception — and it is unashamedly a party hostel, so it is the wrong call for an early start. Zedwell Tottenham Court Roadad runs £81 to £206 for a private windowless room two minutes from the British Museum, and it undercut the Piccadilly flagship on every date sampled.
Nightlife and going out
Two rules. Stay where the night is, or stay ten minutes from it — the in-between is the worst of both. And accept that the areas with the best nights out have the worst sleep, because those are the same streets.
Soho — the loudest good decision you can make
£33 a capsule to £600 a room · Zone 1 · Piccadilly, Central, Victoria and Northern Night Tube · area guide
The densest concentration of bars, theatres, restaurants and late food in Britain, and the widest price range of any area in this guide. Chinatown’s noodle and roast-meat places run past 1am and are priced for the people who work in them, so the 2am problem that ruins most nights out does not exist here.
It is very loud and it is not a place to sleep lightly. Every one of Soho’s streets carries people until the early hours, and a room facing one of them is a compromise you are making deliberately. Ask for a high floor and an internal room, at booking rather than at check-in.
At the bottom, Zedwell Capsule Piccadilly Circusad is £33 to £68 for a berth one minute from the Tube, and Otherwander Sohoad is £62 to £119 on Dean Street. In the middle, Zedwell Piccadilly Circusad does private windowless rooms at £97 to £287, where the second guest adds about £5. At the top, Broadwick Sohoad is about £450 and was named the UK’s best hotel at the 2026 Muddy Stilettos Awards, and Ham Yard Hotelad is about £500 with a 1950s bowling alley in the basement. Our full Soho and West End hotel guide compares nine of them and the four areas five minutes out.
Shoreditch — the best design hotels, and not cheap
About £110–£250 · Zone 1 · Central and Windrush Night Tube · area guide
The best run of design hotels in London, and the myth attached to it is wrong: the cheapest room we have checked is about £110 and most sit between £180 and £250 — dearer than Bloomsbury or Covent Garden, both of which are more central. Shoreditch stopped being the bargain years ago and the listicles have not caught up.
The station trap here is real. There is no Tube station called Shoreditch. Old Street is on the Northern line’s Bank branch and therefore has no night service at all; Shoreditch High Street is Overground; Liverpool Street, ten minutes’ walk south, is the one that works — Central line at night, Elizabeth line by day.
The Hoxtonad is about £200 with breakfast hung on your door in a bag, and its room grades are named by size so a Shoebox is exactly that. The Z Hotel Shoreditchad is about £110 with the same windowless-cheapest-rate catch as the Covent Garden branch. nhow Londonad is about £150 with a Big Ben rocket in the lobby. Our full Shoreditch hotel guide compares nine of them and five cheaper areas within fifteen minutes.
Spitalfields — Shoreditch’s nightlife at sleeping distance
Studios and about £230 for the townhouse · Zone 1 · Central and Windrush Night Tube
The Georgian streets south of Shoreditch, and the single best compromise on this page: you are a ten-minute walk from the bars and far enough from them to sleep. Liverpool Street is seven minutes away, which on a Friday night means the Central line, and by day means the Elizabeth line and Bond Street in about twelve minutes.
Food after midnight is better here than anywhere else in London. Beigel Bake on Brick Lane is open twenty-four hours and sells a salt beef beigel for £7.50, and the Polo Bar opposite Liverpool Street has traded around the clock since 1953 and has no front door to shut.
Batty Langley’sad is about £230 on cobbled Folgate Street, all dark walls, silk curtains and oil paintings, and next door to Dennis Severs’ House. It has no lift and no air conditioning — a genuine problem in July or with a heavy case, and the price of a real Georgian building. Leman Lockead is the studio-with-a-kitchen option, five minutes from Aldgate East, and the one that started the aparthotel format in London.
Museums, and going with children
Different priorities entirely: a short walk to the front door of the thing, somewhere to make a sandwich, and a lift.
South Kensington — the tunnel is the whole argument
From about £27 a hostel bed · Zone 1 · Piccadilly Night Tube · area guide
Three world-class museums — the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the V&A — sit within 400 metres of each other and all three are free. But the reason to sleep here rather than visit is smaller and better: a tiled Victorian pedestrian subway, built in 1885, runs from inside the station to all three museum entrances. It is free, signposted from the ticket hall, and it means a wet February morning with two children involves no outdoors at all.
South Kensington station is on the Piccadilly line, so it has a night service at weekends and a direct train to Heathrow. The District and Circle lines there do not run at night. The area is expensive and quiet in the evening — dinner options thin out fast and the residential streets are dead by nine.
Astor Hyde Parkad is about £27 a bed in a Victorian townhouse opposite the Royal Albert Hall, with the cornicing and fireplaces intact — but townhouse stairs, no lift, and hard work with a big case. Nell Gwynn Housead does serviced apartments with their own kitchens in a 1930s mansion block, which is the only self-catering option in this postcode.
Bermondsey — a kitchen, a night train and Tower Bridge
About £180, or £550 in the Shard · Zones 1–2 · Jubilee Night Tube · area guide
The family answer on this page, for an unglamorous reason: breakfast for four in central London runs £60 to £80 a day, and Bermondsey’s aparthotels put a hob and a fridge in the room. Tower Bridge is fifteen minutes’ walk, Borough Market and the Shard are ten, and Bermondsey station is on the Jubilee line, which runs all night at weekends.
It is a walking area rather than a doorstep one. Bermonds Locke is about eight minutes from the Tube, which is the furthest of the Locke sites from a station — it trades connectivity for space and quiet, and with children that is often the right trade.
Bermonds Lockead does desert-toned studios with kitchenettes on Tower Bridge Road. Bermondsey Square Hotelad is about £180 on the square that holds the Friday antiques market — ask for a room away from the square on market mornings. And Shangri-La The Shardad occupies floors 34 to 52 with a 52nd-floor infinity pool, at about £550, where a low-floor room defeats the entire point.
Greenwich — the one with a park, and the one with a DLR problem
£66–£160 · Zones 2–3 · No night service in the historic quarter · area guide
A maritime village with the Cutty Sark, the Old Royal Naval College, the National Maritime Museum and a hill with the Observatory on it — most of it free, all of it walkable, and a park to let children run in, which no Zone 1 base offers.
The catch is the way home. The DLR shuts every night, and Greenwich’s mainline station stops too. North Greenwich has a Jubilee night service but that is the O2, a bus or a DLR ride from the historic quarter, so a late night in town means a night bus or a taxi. If your evenings are in the West End, this is the wrong base; if your days are here, it is a good one.
Zedwell Greenwichad is £66 to £145 for a windowless Cocoon 2, and it is the steadiest-priced Zedwell — early check-in costs £25 here against £60 in the West End. DoubleTree Greenwichad is about £160 and, unlike the Peninsula hotels, is a fifteen-minute walk from all three of the big sights.
On a budget
The instinct is to move outwards. Usually that is wrong: the cheapest beds in London are in Zone 1, and they are cheap because the room is small, not because the postcode is bad. Go out only when the saving is large enough to survive the travel.
Bethnal Green — cheap capsules and a two-Michelin-star town hall
£42–£220 · Zone 2 · Central Night Tube
East London on the Central line, which is one of the five Night Tube lines, so you can get back at 3am on a Friday — unusual for a Zone 2 address at this price. Roman Road is a working market street rather than a tourist strip, Victoria Park is a short walk, and Brick Lane is about ten minutes away.
Read the arithmetic before you book the cheap one. The GreenHouse Capsulesad is £42 to £53 a capsule, and that price barely moves all year — which makes it dearer than a Zone 1 capsule on a quiet night (£42 against £33) and cheaper in December (£45 against £68). Its Zone 2 address buys you nothing most of the time. It is also tiny, at eight units, with no front desk and entry by code.
Town Hall Hotelad is the other end: about £220 for a 1910 town hall with the council chamber and marble staircases intact, a 14-metre pool and the two-Michelin-starred Da Terra in the building. Time Out has called it the best hotel in London, and it costs half what the equivalent would in Zone 1.
Canary Wharf — the area that discounts when everywhere else does not
About £160–£200 · Zone 2 · Jubilee Night Tube · area guide
A business district, and that is the whole strategy: it fills Monday to Thursday and empties at weekends, so it prices against the opposite pattern to the rest of London. If your trip is Friday to Sunday, check a Canary Wharf rate against a central one before assuming central is competitive.
It is genuinely dead at weekends, which is the trade and the point — no bars queueing outside your window, and also not much life. The Elizabeth line runs here direct from Heathrow in about 48 minutes, and the Jubilee goes straight to Bond Street and Green Park. But only the Jubilee runs at night: both the DLR and the Elizabeth line shut overnight, so check which entrance your hotel is nearest before a late one.
Novotel Canary Wharfad is about £160 and has Bokan, a rooftop restaurant with one of the better elevated views in east London, open to non-residents. London Marriott Canary Wharfad is about £200 on West India Quay with floor-to-ceiling windows over the dock, and a 24-hour gym and business centre, which tells you exactly who it is built for.
Wembley — only if the reason is Wembley
About £75–£120 · Zone 4 · Jubilee Night Tube at Wembley Park
The cheapest rooms in this guide, and the only outer-zone entry that earns its place — because on a stadium or arena night the argument is not price at all. You walk back to your room in five minutes instead of queueing for the Metropolitan line with sixty thousand other people.
Book the Wembley Park side, not Wembley Central. Wembley Park is on the Jubilee, which is a Night Tube line; Wembley Central is Bakerloo and Overground, and neither runs through the night. Getting that wrong costs you a taxi.
The rest of the time, be honest about the maths. It is Zone 4: the daily fare cap rises to £12.80 against £8.90 for Zones 1–2, and Wembley Park is ten Jubilee line stops from Bond Street, each way, every day. ibis London Wembleyad is about £75 and under a five-minute walk from the stadium. Novotel London Wembleyad is about £120 on Olympic Way, has parking, and sells out months ahead for the big events.
Quiet and residential
Where to stay if the trip is a long one, if you are a light sleeper, or if you have done the sights and now want a neighbourhood rather than an attraction.
Chelsea — the quietest streets with a Tube caveat
About £240–£450 · Zones 1–2 · No night service at Sloane Square · area guide
Low-rise, affluent, genuinely residential, and about as far from a nightlife district as Zone 1 gets. The King’s Road, the Physic Garden and the river walk are all here, and the streets behind them are silent by ten.
The trade is night transport and you should know it before booking. Sloane Square is on the District and Circle lines and neither runs through the night. The nearest Night Tube is Knightsbridge on the Piccadilly, about twelve minutes’ walk, or Victoria on the Victoria line, about fifteen. On a Friday night that walk is the difference between a train and a cab.
San Domenico Housead is about £240 with breakfast, seventeen rooms in an Italian-furnished townhouse off Sloane Square, with a roof terrace — and it books out well ahead. The Chelsea Townhousead is about £260 for 35 individually decorated rooms on a garden square; it was the Draycott until 2022, so older reviews are about the same building. The Cadoganad is about £450 on Sloane Street and one of the highest-rated hotels in the city.
Notting Hill — pastel streets and a Night Tube station
About £240–£260 · Zones 1–2 · Central Night Tube · area guide
Residential in a way almost nothing else this central is: garden squares, pastel terraces, Portobello Road, and an evening that is pubs and neighbourhood restaurants rather than crowds. Notting Hill Gate is on the Central line, so it has a night service on Fridays and Saturdays — unusual for somewhere this quiet, and it is five stops from Oxford Circus without changing.
Portobello is a Saturday proposition. The market is quiet midweek and enormous on Saturday, which is either the reason you booked or the morning you will want to be somewhere else. The Carnival, in late August, closes the area entirely for two days.
The Laslettad is about £240 right on Notting Hill Gate, with every room named after a local artist or writer, and it is the most convenient of the area’s boutiques for the Tube. The Portobello Hotelad is about £260 with breakfast, 21 rooms on a quiet garden square — no lift, and some rooms have round beds and baths in the bedroom, so ask what you are getting before you book.
Hampstead — 800 acres of heath and, improbably, a night train
About £130–£140 · Zones 2–3 · Northern Night Tube · area guide
A hilltop village with the Heath attached, swimming ponds, Kenwood House and views over the whole city — and the best-value quiet on this page, at roughly half what Chelsea costs. Hampstead and Belsize Park are both on the Northern line’s Charing Cross branch, which is the branch that runs all night, so you are eight stops from Tottenham Court Road and you can still get back at 2am on a Saturday.
It is a proper distance out and hilly with it. You are outside Zone 1 and the walk from the station up to the Heath is genuinely uphill; this is a base for a longer stay or a return trip, not a first three days.
NOX Hotels Belsize Parkad is about £130 in a converted pub, walkable to both the Heath and Primrose Hill, with rooms that keep some of the building’s pub-era character. La Gaffead is about £140 with breakfast, family-run for decades on Heath Street on the site of an 18th-century shepherd’s cottage, five minutes from the Heath — and there is no lift.
Arriving late, or leaving early
If a flight or a Eurostar bookends the trip, the base should be chosen around the station rather than the sights. One night in the right place is worth more than four in the wrong one.
Fitzrovia — one stop from Eurostar, and the best eating street in central London
About £150–£400 · Zone 1 · Northern, Victoria and Central Night Tube · area guide
Immediately north of Oxford Street and immediately west of Bloomsbury, which puts it about fifteen minutes’ walk from St Pancras, or two stops on the Victoria line from Warren Street. Eurostar ticket checks close 30 minutes before departure and the advice is to be there well before that, so a base you can leave forty-five minutes ahead of a train is worth real money in mornings you do not lose.
Charlotte Street is the densest run of restaurants in central London and the area is calm at night in a way Soho five minutes south is not. Warren Street and Goodge Street are on the Northern line’s night branch, and Oxford Circus adds the Central and the Victoria.
The Grafton Armsad is about £150 for eleven boutique rooms over a working pub with a roof terrace — no lift, and some noise from downstairs at weekends. Sanderson Londonad is about £280, a Philippe Starck interior around an eighty-foot Long Bar that draws a non-resident crowd. Charlotte Street Hotelad is about £400 with a private screening room, on the restaurant street itself.
Paddington — 15 minutes from Heathrow and nothing after midnight
About £150–£200 · Zone 1 · No Night Tube at all · area guide
The best airport base in London by a distance. Heathrow Express is 15 minutes non-stop to Paddington — £26 walk-up, or from £10 booked 30 or more days ahead — and the Elizabeth line does the same trip in 28 minutes for £15.50, which counts towards your daily fare cap where the Express does not. Our Heathrow transport guide has the full comparison.
And then the trap: Paddington has no Night Tube line. Bakerloo, Circle, District, Hammersmith & City and the Elizabeth line all stop overnight. It is the single best-connected London station by day and one of the worst at 1am, so treat it as a first-night and last-night base rather than a week-long one — the area itself is transport and canal rather than a night out.
The Pilgrmad is about £150 and genuinely under a minute’s walk from the station, which is the whole argument for an early flight. Hilton London Paddingtonad is about £200 and is the original Great Western Royal Hotel of 1854, built into the station — you walk from platform to lobby without going outside.
Mayfair — the best-connected night address in London
£90–£207 for the Zedwell · Zone 1 · Piccadilly, Victoria and Jubilee Night Tube · area guide
Green Park is the only station in London served by three Night Tube lines — Piccadilly, Victoria and Jubilee — which makes Mayfair the most reliable place in the city to be at one in the morning. Bond Street adds the Central and the Jubilee at night, and the Elizabeth line by day, which runs to Heathrow in about 35 minutes without a change.
It is expensive and it does not have an evening, in the sense that Mayfair’s restaurants are destinations rather than a scene and the streets are empty by eleven. That is a virtue if you are here to sleep between a late arrival and an early flight.
Zedwell Park Lanead is the anomaly: £90 to £207 for a windowless underground Cocoon 2 with a Park Lane address, one minute from Hyde Park Corner — within a pound of Knightsbridge on a quiet night and about £50 under it on an October Saturday. It is new enough to be barely reviewed. Native Mayfairad does apartments with kitchens on a mews off Grosvenor Square, three minutes from Bond Street.
The mistakes people make choosing a base
Five errors account for most of the regret, and all five are avoidable in ten minutes at the booking stage.
Booking Zone 3 to save £20 a night. The money argument barely exists — the daily fare cap is £10.50 for Zones 1–3 against £8.90 for Zones 1–2, a difference of £1.60 a person a day. What you are actually buying is twenty to twenty-five minutes each way, and on a sightseeing trip you make that journey two or three times a day because you come back to change or drop bags. Four days of that is most of a day underground. Save the money by taking a smaller room in Zone 1 instead — a capsule, a windowless room or a compact-format hotel. Our pod hotels guide and windowless rooms guide cover both, and both start under £70 a night in the West End.
Assuming Shoreditch is cheap. It is not, and has not been for years: about £110 at the bottom, £180 to £250 for most of it, against Bloomsbury and Covent Garden which are cheaper and more central. Stay in Shoreditch because you want the design hotels and the bars, not because you think you are saving.
Booking near a station that shuts. This is the expensive one. Old Street looks like a Northern line station and is, but the Night Tube runs via Charing Cross only, so the entire Bank branch is dark. Paddington has no night line at all. The DLR shuts every night, which strands Greenwich and half of Canary Wharf. Sloane Square and Aldgate East are District and Circle, which do not run either. Check the specific station against the Night Tube lines — Central, Jubilee, Northern via Charing Cross, Piccadilly, Victoria, Windrush — before you book, not after.
Booking where the sightseeing is. The area you most want to look at is frequently the worst one to sleep in, because the qualities are opposed. Westminster is magnificent and has almost nothing open in the evening. Soho is the best night out in Britain and the hardest place in it to sleep. Decide separately, then use the visiting guide for the daytime half.
Booking the cheapest room grade without reading what it is. Both Z Hotels here sell an “Inside” room with no window as their lead rate and people book it by accident every week. art’otel Hoxton charges about £56 for breakfast on top of a £230 room. Zedwell cleans every four days rather than daily and charges £15 a piece for luggage storage. None of these are scandals — they are the trade for the price — but they are all decided at the booking page, and none of them are on the headline.
And if you are staying more than four nights
The question changes. Beyond about the third or fourth night a kitchen starts to pay for itself, mostly through breakfast, and London’s aparthotels are the format for that — we have compared twenty-six of them. Locke, Native and Staycity all have addresses in the areas above, and the universal trade is that nobody cleans your room daily; weekly is the standard across every operator.
If you are not staying the night at all — a long layover, an evening flight, a bag and a shower — a day room is a cheaper answer than any of this.
Room rates are from our own sampling on Hotels.com and each operator’s own site, current at 7 September 2026; rates change nightly, so always check your own dates. Night Tube lines, station lists and fares checked against Transport for London on 8 September 2026. Eurostar check-in times from eurostar.com on the same date.
Common questions
Where should I stay in London for the first time?
Covent Garden, the South Bank or Bloomsbury. All three are Zone 1, all three put you inside walking distance of a large share of what you have come to see, and all three have a Tube station that runs through the night on Fridays and Saturdays. Bloomsbury is the cheapest of the three and the quietest; Covent Garden is the most convenient and the noisiest; the South Bank has the river and the free galleries on its doorstep.
What is the best area in London to stay on a budget?
Central London, counter-intuitively. A capsule at Zedwell Piccadilly Circus ran £33 to £68 a night across sampled dates and a hostel bed at Generator in Bloomsbury is about £26 — both Zone 1, both a walk from everything. Going out to Zone 2 or 3 for a private room saves real money at Bethnal Green or Wembley, but only Wembley saves enough to be worth the travel, and only if you are not going into town twice a day.
Is it worth paying more to stay in Zone 1?
Usually yes, and the reason is time rather than fares. The daily fare cap for Zones 1 to 3 is £10.50 against £8.90 for Zones 1 to 2, so the money difference is £1.60 a person a day. What you actually pay for an outer-zone room is the twenty to twenty-five minutes each way, two or three times a day, which on a four-day trip is most of a day underground.
Which London areas have a Tube that runs all night?
Only the ones on the five Night Tube lines — Central, Jubilee, Northern via Charing Cross, Piccadilly and Victoria — plus the Windrush line Overground, and only on Friday and Saturday nights. That covers Soho, Covent Garden, Bloomsbury, South Kensington, Mayfair, Notting Hill, Hampstead, the South Bank, Bermondsey, Bethnal Green, Canary Wharf and Wembley Park. It does not cover Paddington, Old Street or the Greenwich riverside at all.
Where should I stay in London with children?
South Kensington if the museums are the trip — a tiled Victorian tunnel runs from inside the station to the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the V&A, so you never go outside in the rain. Bermondsey if you want a kitchen and space, since the aparthotels there put a hob and a fridge in the room and breakfast for four in central London runs £60 to £80 a day. Greenwich if you want a park, a market and a hill.
Where should I stay before an early flight or a Eurostar?
Paddington for Heathrow, because the Heathrow Express takes 15 minutes and some hotels are attached to the station. Fitzrovia or Bloomsbury for Eurostar, because both are a walk or one stop from St Pancras and ticket checks close 30 minutes before departure. Mayfair works for either — Green Park is the only station in London on three Night Tube lines, and Bond Street puts you on the Elizabeth line to Heathrow without changing.
Is Shoreditch a cheap area to stay in?
No, and this is the most persistent myth in London accommodation. The cheapest room we have checked there is about £110 and most sit between £180 and £250, which is more than Bloomsbury or Covent Garden and both of those are more central. Shoreditch stopped being the bargain some years ago; what you are buying now is the best run of design hotels in the city and a lot of noise on a Saturday.
