In this guide
Most people get from Fitzrovia to Mayfair along Oxford Street, which is the worst way to do it. Behind it runs a chain of squares, churches and arcades that takes you from one to the other almost without touching a shopping street.
This route follows that chain north to south, from Fitzroy Square to Green Park: eleven numbered stops, 5.6km, about 75 minutes of walking and three to four hours with stops. Almost all of it is free.
The catch is the calendar. The Royal Academy is shut on Mondays, St George’s Hanover Square on Saturdays, and two of the three Savile Row tailors below at weekends, so the day you pick changes what you see.
For the rest of both areas, see the Fitzrovia area guide and the Mayfair area guide.
💡 The Short Version: Walk it Tuesday to Friday. On a Sunday, start by 10am, because St George’s shuts at noon. Burlington and Piccadilly arcades open seven days. The newest stop is Grosvenor Square, reopened in July 2026 as a wildlife garden with toilets and a café kiosk. The quietest is Mount Street Gardens, which almost nobody finds.
The route
Map of the walk, numbered in walking order
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Open the whole route in Google Maps → — all eleven stops in walking order, set to walking directions, which is the version to put on your phone.
| # | Stop | Cost | Open |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fitzroy Square | Free | Always |
| 2 | Charlotte Street & the BT Tower | Free to look | Always |
| 3 | All Saints, Margaret Street | Free | Daily, 11am–7pm |
| 4 | Hanover Square & St George’s | Free | Church shut Saturdays, Sun until noon |
| 5 | Savile Row | Free to look | Tailors mostly weekdays |
| 6 | Burlington Arcade & the Royal Academy | Free | Arcade daily; RA shut Mondays |
| 7 | Piccadilly Arcade & Jermyn Street | Free | Daily |
| 8 | Grosvenor Square | Free | Daily from 7am |
| 9 | Mount Street & Mount Street Gardens | Free | Daily |
| 10 | Shepherd Market | Pubs | Daily |
| 11 | Green Park | Free | 5am–midnight |
| + | Fitzrovia Chapel | Free | Mostly Mon–Wed |
1. Fitzroy Square
Fitzrovia’s one set piece. Robert Adam designed the east and south sides in Portland stone, and the square is pedestrianised, so it is quiet at any hour.
Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw both lived at number 29, in different decades. The garden in the middle is private; the pavements are not. More names are on our plaques map.
Number 29, where Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw both lived.
Leave by Fitzroy Street, heading south.
2. Charlotte Street and the BT Tower
The BT Tower from street level. You walk past its foot on the way south, and you cannot go up it.
Fitzroy Street runs past the foot of the BT Tower, London’s tallest building from 1964 to 1980 and closed to visitors for decades.
Charlotte Street is the reason Fitzrovia is on anyone’s list: the densest run of good restaurants in this part of London. The Fitzroy Tavern, where Orwell and Dylan Thomas drank, gave the area its name. At this hour it is a street to note for dinner rather than to stop in.
💡 The detour: the Fitzrovia Chapel. Two minutes off the route on Pearson Square, the last surviving piece of the Middlesex Hospital, with a ceiling of gold mosaic behind a plain brick front. Free, no booking, and open most Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 11am to 5pm, plus at least one Sunday a month. During exhibitions it usually opens daily.
The Fitzrovia Chapel’s ceiling of gold mosaic.
3. All Saints, Margaret Street
One of the most intensely decorated church interiors in London, thirty seconds from Oxford Street. William Butterfield’s Victorian Gothic church sits back from Margaret Street behind a small courtyard, which is why almost everyone walks past it.
Free, and open every day from 11am to 7pm. Mass is at noon on weekdays and 11am on Sundays, so time the visit around it.
Inside All Saints, one of the most intensely decorated church interiors in London.
Then cross Oxford Street at Oxford Circus and take Princes Street to Hanover Square.
4. Hanover Square and St George’s
Hanover Square is where the Elizabeth line’s eastern entrance to Bond Street station comes up, which makes it the natural halfway exit.
St George’s is a minute south on St George Street: built 1721–24 by John James, with a Last Supper painted for the church by William Kent in 1724 and early 16th-century Flemish glass. Handel worshipped here, and the London Handel Festival still is here.
⚠️ St George’s is closed on Saturdays, apart from weddings and services. On Sundays it opens only 8am to noon. Monday to Friday it opens 8.30am to 4pm, and until 6pm on Wednesdays.
Inside St George’s, with the Last Supper painted for the church by William Kent in 1724.
5. Savile Row
Along Conduit Street and turn right down Savile Row, the street that gave bespoke tailoring its address.
Huntsman at No. 11 supplied the Kingsman films with their premise. Gieves & Hawkes at No. 1 is at the far end. No. 3 is where the Beatles played their last live performance, on the roof, in January 1969.
⚠️ The tailors keep different weekends. Gieves & Hawkes opens every day, including Sunday 11am to 4pm. Huntsman opens Saturday 10am to 3pm and shuts on Sundays. Henry Poole opens Monday to Friday only.
Gieves & Hawkes at No. 1 Savile Row.
6. Burlington Arcade and the Royal Academy
Burlington Arcade, open since 1819. Photo: Reading Tom, CC BY 2.0.
Turn right along Burlington Gardens and enter Burlington Arcade from its north end. It opened in 1819 and is still patrolled by Beadles in top hats, who enforce the original rules: no running, no whistling, no singing and no opening umbrellas.
Open 8am to 7pm on weekdays, 9am to 7pm on Saturdays and 11am to 6pm on Sundays.
Out on Piccadilly, turn left into the courtyard of Burlington House, home of the Royal Academy. The courtyard and the John Madejski Fine Rooms are free; the main exhibitions are ticketed. Backpacks and large bags cannot go into the galleries.
⚠️ The RA is closed on Mondays. It opens Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm, and until 9pm on Fridays. The free Fine Rooms open Tuesday to Sunday, 11am to 4pm. The back entrance on Burlington Gardens is shut until spring 2027 while the Collection Gallery is expanded, so go in from Piccadilly.
7. Piccadilly Arcade and Jermyn Street
Directly opposite the RA, and quieter than Burlington. It runs through to Jermyn Street, the shirtmakers’ street, where a statue of Beau Brummell stands at the arcade’s end.
Open Monday to Thursday 9am to 6.30pm, Friday and Saturday until 8pm, and Sunday 10.30am to 6.30pm.
Piccadilly Arcade, quieter than Burlington and directly opposite the RA.
From here the route swings west. Follow Jermyn Street to St James’s Street, go up to Piccadilly and west past the Ritz, then turn right up Berkeley Street. Cross Berkeley Square, whose plane trees were planted in 1789, and follow Davies Street north. It is the longest link on the route, about fifteen minutes.
8. Grosvenor Square
Reopened on 20 July 2026 after a £25m redesign by the Grosvenor estate, only the fourth in the square’s 300 years. It is now a wildlife garden of 150,000 plants and bulbs around the reinstated 1720s oval. The memorials to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Eagle Squadrons and the victims of 9/11 have all stayed. The US Embassy stood on the west side until 2018.
Free, and open 7am to 9pm in summer and 7am to 6pm in winter. It is also the best-equipped stop on the route: toilets, drinking-water fountains, and a café kiosk run by London Wildlife Trust from 8am to 5pm daily (4pm in winter).
The Roosevelt memorial, one of several that stayed through the square’s redesign.
9. Mount Street and Mount Street Gardens
Leave by Carlos Place for Mount Street, a run of pink terracotta built by the Grosvenor estate in the 1880s. Walk west to The Audley on the corner, turn left down South Audley Street, and go into the gardens beside Grosvenor Chapel.
Mount Street Gardens was the burial ground of St George’s, stop four. Burials ended in 1854 and it has been a public garden since 1889: plane trees, lawns and benches, walled in by mansion blocks. Free, and the best place to sit down in W1.
Mount Street Gardens, walled in by mansion blocks on every side.
Leave by the Farm Street side, past the Jesuit Church of the Immaculate Conception. It is free and open daily: 7.30am to 6.30pm on weekdays, 10am to 7pm on Saturdays and 7.30am to 7pm on Sundays.
10. Shepherd Market
South to Curzon Street and through the passages into Shepherd Market, built on the site of the May Fair that named the district: narrow lanes, two-storey buildings and no chains.
One of Shepherd Market’s narrow lanes, with no chains among the shopfronts.
Ye Grapes at number 16 opened here in 1742 as the Market Coffee House and was rebuilt in its present form in 1882. It opens Monday to Saturday 11am to 11pm, and Sunday noon to 10.30pm.
Leave by White Horse Street to Piccadilly.
11. Green Park
Cross Piccadilly and you are in it. Charles II made the park in 1660 so he could walk between Hyde Park and St James’s Park without leaving royal land. There are no formal flowerbeds, just trees and grass, with the Canada Memorial at the eastern end and the Bomber Command Memorial at the west.
The Bomber Command Memorial, at the western end of the park.
The pedestrian gates open 5am to midnight. Buckingham Palace is across the park; Green Park station is at the north-east corner.
Where to eat
The three stops built for it:
- The Grosvenor Square kiosk (£) at stop eight — sandwiches, cakes, ice cream and barista coffee, 8am to 5pm daily (4pm in winter), with benches in the garden.
- The Audley (££) at stop nine — a restored Victorian pub, walk-ins only. Food runs Monday to Saturday noon to 10pm and Sunday noon to 9pm, with a roast on Sundays.
- Ye Grapes (£) at stop ten — food at weekday lunchtimes (noon to 3.30pm) and evenings, and noon to 9pm at weekends.
For dinner, the walk starts on the best street for it: the Fitzrovia guide’s table covers Charlotte Street, and the Mayfair guide the other end.
The best day to go
Tuesday to Friday, when everything is open.
| Day | What you get |
|---|---|
| Tue–Fri | Everything open. RA until 9pm and Piccadilly Arcade until 8pm on Fridays |
| Monday | RA closed. Everything else runs, and it is a Fitzrovia Chapel day |
| Saturday | St George’s closed. Henry Poole shut, Huntsman until 3pm |
| Sunday | St George’s until noon only. Huntsman and Henry Poole shut |
Sunday is better than it sounds. Both arcades open, so do Gieves & Hawkes and the RA’s Fine Rooms, and Mayfair’s streets are empty. Start at Fitzroy Square by 10am and you reach St George’s before it shuts.
What never closes: Fitzroy Square, Charlotte Street, Savile Row’s shopfronts and Mount Street. The gardens and Green Park keep their own hours, but all are open by 7am.
Getting there and back
Start: Warren Street (Northern, Victoria) or Great Portland Street (Circle, Hammersmith & City, Metropolitan), each a few minutes from Fitzroy Square. Finish: Green Park (Piccadilly, Victoria, Jubilee).
To cut it short, leave at Bond Street’s Elizabeth line entrance on Hanover Square (stop four), or at Green Park station after stop seven.
Walked in reverse it works equally well and finishes by Charlotte Street at dinner time, which is the argument for an afternoon start.
Carry on walking
- Baker Street to Marylebone through Regent’s Park — Fitzroy Square is a short walk from Park Crescent and Regent’s Park.
- Westminster — cross Green Park and St James’s Park to Westminster.
- Chelsea and Belgravia plaques — Belgravia starts at Hyde Park Corner, at the west end of Green Park.
What to do with the rest of the day
- The Mayfair area guide — Cork Street’s galleries, Handel Hendrix House, and where to eat.
- The Fitzrovia area guide — the restaurant list for the evening.
- The Westminster area guide — Buckingham Palace is on the far side of Green Park.
- Free things to do in London — every stop on this walk costs nothing to see.
Common questions
How long is the walk from Fitzrovia to Mayfair?
This route is 5.6km from Fitzroy Square to Green Park, about 75 minutes of actual walking. With time inside the churches, the arcades and the Royal Academy, allow three to four hours.
What is the best day to walk from Fitzrovia to Mayfair?
Tuesday to Friday, when everything on the route is open. The Royal Academy is closed on Mondays, St George's Hanover Square is closed on Saturdays and shuts at noon on Sundays, and Henry Poole on Savile Row opens on weekdays only.
Are the Savile Row tailors open at weekends?
Some are. Gieves & Hawkes at No. 1 opens every day, including Sundays from 11am to 4pm. Huntsman at No. 11 opens on Saturdays from 10am to 3pm and is closed on Sundays. Henry Poole opens Monday to Friday only.
Is Burlington Arcade open on Sundays?
Yes, from 11am to 6pm. On weekdays it opens 8am to 7pm and on Saturdays 9am to 7pm. Piccadilly Arcade, across the road, opens on Sundays from 10.30am to 6.30pm.
Is Grosvenor Square open again?
Yes. It reopened on 20 July 2026 after a £25m redesign into a wildlife garden. It is free, open 7am to 9pm in summer and 7am to 6pm in winter, and has toilets, drinking water and a café kiosk.
Is the Royal Academy free?
The courtyard and the John Madejski Fine Rooms are free; the main exhibitions are ticketed. The RA is closed on Mondays. The Fine Rooms open Tuesday to Sunday from 11am to 4pm, and until 9pm on Fridays.
