In this guide
At a glance
- Vibe
- A village high street hidden one street back from Oxford Street
- Time needed
- Half a day
- Best day
- Sunday for the farmers' market; any weekday for the shops
- Travel zone
- 1
- Walkability
- 5/5
- Typical spend
- ££
Best for
Nearest stations
- Baker StreetBakerlooJubileeCircleMetropolitanHammersmith & City
- Bond StreetElizabeth lineCentralJubilee
- MaryleboneBakerlooNational Rail
Marylebone runs parallel to Oxford Street about four minutes north, and it is the opposite of it in almost every way: low-rise Georgian, largely independent, and quiet enough to hear yourself.
It also holds one of the best free museums in London — a townhouse full of Old Masters and armour that most visitors have never heard of — and backs directly onto Regent’s Park.
Marylebone has its own share of the commemorative plaques marking where notable people lived or worked - see them on our interactive map.
Why visit — and who should skip it
Come here if Oxford Street has worn you down. Marylebone High Street is a genuine village street of independent shops, cheesemongers and bookshops, and the Wallace Collection nearby is free, world-class and almost empty.
Skip it if you are hunting landmarks. Apart from the queue outside the Sherlock Holmes Museum there is very little here to photograph. Marylebone is for browsing and eating.
Top sights and activities
- The Wallace Collection — Free, in a Manchester Square townhouse. The Laughing Cavalier, Titian, Rembrandt, Velázquez, and one of Europe’s great armour collections. Astonishingly quiet for what it holds.
- Marylebone High Street — The spine. Independent shops, delis, a cheesemonger and cafes with pavement tables.
- Daunt Books — An Edwardian shop with oak galleries and a stained-glass window, its main room arranged by country rather than genre. Free to browse.
- Marylebone Farmers’ Market — Sundays, 10:00 to 14:00, in the Cramer Street car park. Producers only.
- Regent’s Park — Ten minutes north. Queen Mary’s rose garden, the boating lake, the open-air theatre and London Zoo at the top.
- Wigmore Hall — A 1901 chamber music hall with near-perfect acoustics. Sunday morning coffee concerts are cheap and excellent.
- The Sherlock Holmes Museum and Madame Tussauds — Both on Baker Street, both ticketed, both usually with a queue. Manage expectations.
The Sherlock Holmes Museum, signed 221B by special arrangement - the building actually sits between numbers 237 and 241.
The Wallace Collection’s armoury. The whole museum was left to the nation on the condition that nothing ever leaves it. Photo: gruntzooki, Public Domain Mark.
Key streets and micro-districts
Marylebone High Street
The centre, and the street Londoners actually recommend — low-rise, largely independent, and the opposite of Oxford Street four minutes south.
Daunt Books is the anchor: an Edwardian bookshop with a galleried oak room and a stained-glass skylight, shelved by country rather than genre, which is the reason it is famous. La Fromagerie, Cadenhead’s whisky shop and a run of delis fill the rest.
A farmers’ market runs behind it on Sundays, which is the one day the street is genuinely busy. Ordinary shop hours otherwise, and about eight minutes from Bond Street.
Marylebone Lane
Marylebone Lane keeps the curve of the old Tyburn riverbed, which is why it wanders while everything around it runs straight.
A curving lane that bends oddly against the Georgian grid around it, because it follows the course of the buried River Tyburn — the street is medieval and the grid was laid out around it two centuries later.
Small shops and pubs line it, and it is one of the few streets in central London where the shape tells you something about what is underneath.
Two minutes end to end, running parallel to the high street, and the better of the two on a busy Sunday.
Manchester Square
A garden square two minutes east of the high street, holding the Wallace Collection — a national museum in a townhouse, with Old Masters, French furniture and one of the finest collections of arms and armour in Europe.
Frans Hals’s Laughing Cavalier is here, along with Fragonard’s The Swing.
It is free, it is never crowded, and it has a glazed courtyard restaurant — which together make it the best wet-afternoon option in Marylebone by a distance. Closed only on a handful of days a year.
Baker Street and Marylebone Road
North, and the least pleasant part of Marylebone — a four-lane road, constant traffic, and the two attractions that generate the longest queues in the area.
The Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221B and Madame Tussauds are both here. Tussauds in particular queues badly without a pre-booked timed ticket, and the Baker Street pavement outside 221B is often blocked.
Book ahead or skip both. If you want Baker Street itself, the statue outside the station takes thirty seconds and costs nothing.
Chiltern Street
The best-looking street in Marylebone — a run of red-brick Victorian gothic, built as model dwellings and mansion flats, and unlike anything around it.
The shops are unusually specific: bridal boutiques, and instrument dealers selling violins and cellos. The Chiltern Firehouse occupies a Victorian fire station at the northern end.
A five-minute walk and free, and a better use of the time than Baker Street one block west. Baker Street station is three minutes away.
Daunt Books, an Edwardian shop built for a bookseller and still one. The travel section is arranged by country. Photo: Ewan-M, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Where to eat and drink
The Barley Mow on Dorset Street, trading since 1791 and claiming the title of Marylebone’s oldest pub.
| Spot | Style | Price | Why go |
|---|---|---|---|
| La Fromagerie | Cheese shop and cafe | ££ | Walk-in cheese room; excellent for lunch |
| The Golden Hind | Fish and chips | £ | Marylebone Lane, since 1914, bring your own wine |
| Monocle Cafe | Coffee | £ | Small, on Chiltern Street, good for an hour with a book |
| The Ivy Cafe | Modern European | ££ | High Street; reliable and open all day |
| Marylebone Farmers’ Market | Market | £ | Sundays only, and the best-value eating here |
| The Wallace Restaurant | Brasserie | £££ | In the museum’s glazed courtyard |
See all 33 places to eat and drink in Marylebone
Getting there
By Tube. Baker Street (five lines) is best for the north end and Regent’s Park. Bond Street (Elizabeth line, Central, Jubilee) is best for the south end and is only four minutes’ walk from the high street.
Best exit. From Bond Street, take the Marylebone Lane exit and walk north — it drops you straight into the village rather than onto Oxford Street.
On foot. Ten minutes to Regent’s Park, twelve to Mayfair, twenty to Soho.
How long to spend, and when to go
| If you have | Do this |
|---|---|
| Two hours | Marylebone High Street, Daunt Books and lunch |
| Half a day | Add the Wallace Collection |
| A full day | Add Regent’s Park and the zoo, or a Wigmore Hall concert |
Best time: Sunday morning for the farmers’ market, then the Wallace Collection when it opens.
Note: The high street is largely shut by early evening. Marylebone is a daytime area.
Map of Marylebone
Open the map50 places: 30 places to eat · 10 things to do · 7 hidden spots · 3 places to stay
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Eat & drinkThings to doHidden LondonStay
What's on in Marylebone
Limited runs and the annual fixtures. Anything already finished is removed automatically.Links marked ad are affiliate links. If you book through one we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. It never affects what goes on this list.
Winston Churchill: The Painter
Not open yetThe side of Churchill almost nobody associates with him, in a townhouse museum that rarely runs ticketed shows at all.
The permanent Wallace Collection around it stays free.
Things to do in Marylebone
Beyond eating and drinking. Free things are listed first.Links marked ad are affiliate links. If you book through one we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. It never affects what goes on this list.
Daunt Books Marylebone
FreeA purpose-built Edwardian bookshop with oak galleries, a long skylight and a conservatory at the back, where the travel section is shelved by country rather than by genre.
Free to walk into and the back room is the photograph everyone comes for. Genuinely a working bookshop, so browse rather than treating it as a set.
Regent's Park and Queen Mary's Gardens
FreeNearly 400 acres, with Queen Mary's Gardens holding over 12,000 roses in 85 beds - the largest rose collection in London and free to walk into.
Free. The roses peak from late May to July and are worth timing a visit around; outside that window the gardens are pleasant rather than remarkable.
The Wallace Collection
FreeFrans Hals's Laughing Cavalier, Fragonard's The Swing, and one of the best armour collections in Europe, in the townhouse they were assembled in - and free.
Free, no booking, and consistently the least crowded major collection in central London. The glazed courtyard restaurant is one of the nicest rooms in Marylebone.
Boating on Regent's Park Lake
SeasonalRowing boats and pedalos on a heron-covered lake with the Nash terraces behind it, hired by the half hour, and much quieter than the Serpentine.
Seasonal and weather-dependent - reduced or closed in winter. There is a separate small children's boating pond nearby, which is not the same thing.
Frameless
Forty-two paintings - Monet, Van Gogh, Dalí, Rembrandt - blown up across four rooms of floor-to-ceiling projection, with mirrored floors and motion sensors that let you push the pictures around.
Timed tickets, step-free throughout, and the UK's largest permanent venue of its kind. It is a projection experience, not a collection - there are no actual paintings in the building.
Madame Tussauds London
Open on Marylebone Road since 1835 and still the busiest paid attraction in the area - wax figures, a Marvel section and a black-cab ride through London history.
Book a timed slot online; walk-up prices are much higher and the queue is long. Peak school holidays are genuinely crowded rather than merely busy.
Regent Street Cinema
Where the Lumière brothers' Cinematographe had its first British showing in 1896 - the birthplace of cinema in this country, still running with Super 8, 16mm and 35mm projectors.
Inside the University of Westminster, so the entrance reads as a university building rather than a cinema. Built as a theatre in 1848.
Swingers West End
18+ in the eveningThree crazy golf courses done as a 1920s British seaside, with five bars, five street food traders and a roof terrace, a minute off Oxford Circus.
Over-18 in the evening; there are limited family sessions. Street food is from named traders rather than a single kitchen.
The Sherlock Holmes Museum
A Georgian house done out exactly as Conan Doyle described 221b, with the study, the chemistry bench and the view over Baker Street from the first floor.
Steep narrow stairs and no lift. Cash-free, ticketed at the shop next door, and the queue on the pavement is often longer than the visit.
Wigmore Hall
A 545-seat hall from 1901 with acoustics regularly called the best in Europe for chamber music, under a cupola painted with the Soul of Music gazing at the Genius of Harmony.
The SUNDAY MORNING COFFEE CONCERTS are the way in - world-class players, a fraction of the evening price, and coffee included. Already named in the Marylebone guide.
Book Madame Tussauds Londonad
Hidden Marylebone
Free, self-guided and easy to walk past without knowing it's there.
Banksy's "Despair Ends, Tactics Begin"
Street artA 2019 piece near Marble Arch
Appeared in April 2019 near Marble Arch, at the junction of Oxford Street and Park Lane - one of the older pieces on this list to have survived this long in place.
Street-level, out in the open at a very high-footfall junction.
Clarence Gate Gardens
Filming locationMatch Point (2005) - Nola's flat, and the murder
The red-brick mansion block used for Nola's flat and for the film's central crime. Edwardian, enormous and anonymous, which is exactly what the plot requires.
Private flats - exterior only, from a public street. Free and always visible, two minutes from Baker Street, on the way to Regent's Park.
Devonshire Mews West
Hidden gemA quiet, ivy-clad Marylebone mews, essentially tourist-free
One of Marylebone's best-kept mews streets - cobbles, climbing ivy, converted coach houses - a couple of minutes off the high street but with almost none of its foot traffic.
A private residential street; walkable and photographable, but treat it as someone's front door, not an attraction.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Home
Blue plaqueElizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), poet
Browning lived here before her secret marriage to Robert Browning and elopement to Italy - the house her father is said to have locked her into is a short walk from Marylebone High Street.
A private residential building - viewable from the street only.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson's Home
Blue plaqueElizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836–1917), first woman to qualify as a doctor in Britain
Garrett Anderson forced open the medical profession to women in Britain, later founding what became the New Hospital for Women - a plaque marking a genuine first.
A private residential building - viewable from the street only.
John Lennon's Flat
Blue plaqueJohn Lennon (1940–1980), musician
Lennon and Yoko Ono lived here - Ono herself unveiled the plaque, a rare case of the commemorated person's own partner doing the honours.
A private residential building - viewable from the street only.
Michael Faraday's Birthplace Area
Blue plaqueMichael Faraday (1791–1867), scientist
Faraday's work on electromagnetism underpins the electric motor and generator - a genuinely foundational scientist commemorated on a quiet Marylebone street.
A private residential building - viewable from the street only.
Selfridges
Filming locationLove Actually (2003) - Harry buys the necklace
The jewellery counter where Rowan Atkinson gift-wraps a necklace with such elaborate slowness that Alan Rickman nearly gets caught. It is the funniest scene in the film and it happens in a real shop you can walk into.
A department store, free to enter, open daily. Bond Street or Marble Arch. Christmas is the thematically correct time and by far the worst time for crowds.
Wilkie Collins's Home
Blue plaqueWilkie Collins (1824–1889), novelist
Collins wrote here as one of the pioneers of the detective novel - The Moonstone and The Woman in White both date from his years on this street.
A private residential building - viewable from the street only.
Where to stay
Central, calm and well connected, with the Elizabeth line at Bond Street four minutes away.
- Marylebone Village — Small hotels and townhouse conversions around the high street.
- Baker Street and Marylebone Road — Larger hotels, cheaper, noisier, handy for Regent’s Park.
- Paddington — Twenty minutes west, better value again, and direct to Heathrow.
Cheapest first. Prices are a typical starting rate per night, not a quote.
The Zetter Townhouse Marylebone
£££TownhouseA Georgian townhouse decorated like an eccentric relative's home - taxidermy, clashing prints, and a cocktail lounge that is a destination in its own right.
Small and stair-heavy in places despite the lift. The ground-floor bar gets busy with non-residents, which is either the charm or the problem.
Treehouse Hotel London
£££BoutiqueAccessible roomsOccupies the top floors next to BBC Broadcasting House, so every room has a panorama - and the rooms come with magic 8 balls, cuckoo clocks and Paddington Bears without tipping into gimmick.
Time Out gave it FIVE out of five, calling it everything you could want from a sustainable yet high-end hotel in London's busiest district. The rooftop bar is open to non-residents.
The Langham, London
££££HotelAccessible roomsOpened 1865 as Europe's first grand hotel, opposite BBC Broadcasting House, and the place afternoon tea in Britain was arguably formalised.
The Palm Court claims to be the birthplace of afternoon tea and books out well ahead. Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde both dined here.
Make a day of it
Combine Marylebone with
Walking times are from the centre of Marylebone. Each of these works as an afternoon once you have finished here.
Regent's Park and London Zoo
10 min walkNorth across Marylebone Road for the rose gardens, the boating lake and the zoo.
Mayfair
12 min walkSouth across Oxford Street for Bond Street, the arcades and the Royal Academy.
Paddington
20 min walkWest for Little Venice and the canal, or the Heathrow trains.
Fitzrovia
12 min walkEast across Great Portland Street for Charlotte Street and the BT Tower.
Suggested half-day route
- Start: Bond Street station, Marylebone Lane exit.
- Marylebone Lane: North along the curving lane to the high street.
- Daunt Books: The galleried main room.
- Marylebone High Street: North past the delis and cafes.
- The Wallace Collection: East to Manchester Square. Free.
- Finish: North to Regent’s Park, or a concert at Wigmore Hall.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Missing the Wallace Collection. Free, world-class and quiet — the best-value hour in the area.
- Judging Marylebone by Marylebone Road. That is a traffic artery. The village is two streets south.
- Queuing for the Sherlock Holmes Museum without knowing what it is. Small, ticketed and heavily themed.
- Coming in the evening. Most of the high street closes by 18:00.
- Expecting Madame Tussauds to be a Marylebone experience. It is a standalone attraction on a busy road.
- Walking up from Oxford Circus. Bond Street is closer and less unpleasant.
Common questions
Is the Wallace Collection free?
Yes, entirely free, including the permanent collection. It sits in Hertford House on Manchester Square, a townhouse kept much as its owners left it. It holds Frans Hals's *The Laughing Cavalier*, work by Titian, Rembrandt and Velázquez, and one of the finest armour collections in Europe. It is rarely busy, which is the remarkable part.
Is 221B Baker Street a real address?
It was not when Conan Doyle wrote the stories — Baker Street numbers did not reach that high. The Sherlock Holmes Museum now occupies the site and is signed 221B by special arrangement, though the building sits physically between 237 and 241. It is ticketed, small, and there is usually a queue outside.
When is Marylebone Farmers' Market?
Sunday mornings, roughly 10:00 to 14:00, in the Cramer Street car park just off Marylebone High Street. It is one of the largest genuine farmers' markets in London — producers only, no resellers.
Is Marylebone worth visiting?
Yes, if you like independent shops and a slower pace. Marylebone High Street runs parallel to Oxford Street a few minutes north and is its complete opposite: low-rise, largely independent and calm. Add the free Wallace Collection and Regent's Park at the top and it is an easy, pleasant half day.
What is Daunt Books?
A bookshop on Marylebone High Street in an Edwardian building with oak galleries, skylights and a long stained-glass window at the back. Its main room is arranged by country rather than genre, so travel writing, fiction and history for each place sit together. Free to browse and one of the most photographed shop interiors in London.
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