In this guide
Covent Garden is the most convenient base in central London, and you should know what that convenience costs before you book it.
Z Hotels runs twelve London hotels and publishes a from-rate for every one of them on the same website. A Z Double — 9 square metres, one window, the same bed and the same brand — is £100 at its Covent Garden hotel and £70 at Z Holborn, which Z’s own site describes as five minutes from Covent Garden. That is the dearest Z Double in London against the cheapest, and it is a nine-minute walk between the two front doors. For a family it is starker still: the four-person Z Family is £155 in Covent Garden and £95 in Holborn.
So the premium is real, it runs at roughly 40%, and what it buys is the walk home. Whether that is worth paying depends on your evenings. If you are going to the theatre it usually is: more than twenty West End houses are within a ten-minute walk of the piazza, and no other part of London is as well placed for them.
What Covent Garden sells cheaply is the compact-room format — 8 to 13 square metres, and some of those rooms have no window at all. What it sells expensively is very expensive indeed. That is the same building constraint as Soho: small plots, and ground floors worth more as restaurants than as hotel lobbies. If what you want is an ordinary double with a window and somewhere to hang a coat, it is worth pricing Holborn or Bloomsbury ten minutes out before you commit to the postcode.
💡 The Short Version: Strand Palacead is the sane answer at about £140 — 785 rooms, so it still has stock when everything else has sold out. The Z Hotel Covent Gardenad has the cheapest bed in the area at £70, but that grade has no window at all, and the first room here with one is £100. hub by Premier Inn on St Martin’s Lane is about £95 for 11 square metres, and it has windowless rooms too. The Savoyad and The Londoner stand a few hundred metres from both, at £700 and £450. And if the premium irritates you, Holborn is ten minutes east and £30 a night cheaper for the identical room.
Which part of Covent Garden
The name covers about half a mile, and its edges shade into other areas — so it is worth being specific about which part you are booking.
The Piazza and the market halls are the middle: the Apple Market, three licensed busking pitches, and the densest crowds in this guide between about eleven and seven. It also empties in the evening, because the crowd is shoppers and theatregoers and both go home.
Seven Dials and Monmouth Street, north-west, is the quiet, expensive, well-fed corner — independent shops, Neal’s Yard, the Donmar Warehouse. There are no hotels in this guide there, because the nicest streets in Covent Garden have almost none on them.
The Strand and the river edge, south, is where the large hotels are — Strand Palace, the Savoy, Wilde on Adam Street. It is a wide traffic road with buses through the night, and it is also two minutes from Waterloo Bridge.
St Martin’s Lane and the Charing Cross Road edge, west, is the loud side, and the noise comes from Soho, not Covent Garden. hub and the Londoner are both here. Leicester Square is thirty seconds away, which is useful for the Tube and less so at midnight.
Bow Street, Drury Lane and the Holborn edge, east, has the Royal Opera House and Theatre Royal Drury Lane on it, and room rates drop faster here than anywhere else in the area. That is the basis of the Holborn comparison below.
Do not plan around Covent Garden station. Platform access is by four lifts or an emergency spiral staircase of 193 steps, with no escalators at all, and a last flight of stairs down from the lifts means it is not step-free either. Leicester Square is 260 metres away — the shortest gap between any two adjacent stations on the Underground — and quicker in both directions.
The hotels
The Z Hotel Covent Garden — the cheapest bed here, and the window costs £30
£70 windowless, £100 with a window · 113 rooms · 31–33 Bedford Street, WC2E 9ED · Covent Garden 3 min · check pricesad
A hundred and thirteen compact rooms in a courtyard behind St Paul’s Church, which is a quiet address thirty seconds from the piazza. Z publishes the floor area of every grade, which few hotels at this price do, so read that list before you pick one.
Three of the seven grades have no window. A Z Inside Single is 8 sq m at £70, an Inside Double 9 sq m at £80, an Inside Queen 11 sq m at £90. The first room with daylight is the Z Double at £100 — the same 9 sq m as the Inside Double for £20 more. People book the Inside grades by accident constantly, because the booking page does not lead with the missing window.
Join Z Member before you book. It is free, and it adds complimentary evening cheese and wine plus 10% off food and drink — though not off breakfast. Do not confuse it with a Z Club room, which is a dearer grade that does include breakfast. Café Inigo downstairs does the buffet breakfast and small plates.
A room at the Z Hotel Covent Garden.
hub by Premier Inn London Covent Garden — eleven square metres on St Martin’s Lane
About £95 · 11 sq m standard rooms · 110 St Martin’s Lane, WC2N 4BA · Leicester Square 3 min · Hotels.com
Premier Inn’s compact format at an address that would cost triple under almost any other brand. The standard room is 11 sq m: a double bed, underbed storage, a slide-out desk, a 40-inch television and a touchscreen panel that runs the lighting and the heating without you getting out of bed. Same bed and the same housekeeping standard as a full-size Premier Inn, in roughly half the floor area, and reviewers are regularly caught out by that.
Read the brand’s own small print. The hub page carries a footnote stating that the estate “includes rooms that are window-free”, and sells them as “ambient rooms” — self-dimming backlit boxes and circadian light wells that mimic daylight rather than a window onto anything. It is the same limitation as the Z Inside grades, phrased more warmly. Ask which you are being given.
Breakfast is continental and charged separately, and there is no car park, which on St Martin’s Lane is no loss whatsoever.
Strand Palace — the one that still has rooms
About £140 · 785 rooms · 372 Strand, WC2R 0JJ · Breakfast £18 · check pricesad
Open since 1909, with nearly eight hundred rooms between the piazza and the river. Book it for the scale: when the small hotels are full, this one usually is not, and it does not reprice as sharply, because it has too many rooms to sell out in a weekend.
Grades are published by size and the bottom of the range is small. Classic Single 11 sq m, Classic Double 13 sq m, then Superior Queen 16, Superior Twin and King 18, and the Deluxe Studio Queen and King at 20 and 21. Two adults with cases should skip the Classic Double and pay for a Superior.
The Deluxe Studios are the family rooms and the only grades taking three adults, or two adults and two children under eight. Children under 12 stay free sharing existing bedding, and a cot is free.
Practical notes that decide bookings here: breakfast is £18 a head, the gym is free, luggage storage is free before and after but never overnight, the hotel takes no cash at all, and Haxells downstairs runs a pre-theatre menu from midday. Joe Allen, the New York brasserie the West End has drunk in since 1977, is in the same building, entered round the back on Burleigh Street.
A room at the Strand Palace.
Wilde Aparthotels Covent Garden — a kitchen, and a hard ceiling at three people
About £185 · Studios with full kitchens · 11 Adam Street, WC2N 6AA · Charing Cross 5 min · Hotels.comad
Studio apartments with fully fitted kitchens on Adam Street, an Adelphi side turning off the Strand with theatres literally across the road. The kitchen sets it apart. It removes the largest hidden cost of a London week — eating out three times a day — and this is the only property in this guide that offers one.
The ceiling is three people, and it catches families out. The unit list runs Wilde Bedroom, Studio, Twin Studio and Superior Studio, plus a Hideaway version of the first two, and the largest of them sleeps three. There is no two-bedroom apartment at this address. A family of four needs two units or a different hotel.
Housekeeping is weekly rather than daily. On a stay of a week or more the studio is cleaned on the fourth day and once a week after that; an extra clean is £20. Reception is staffed around the clock and check-in can be done online.
One booking trap: the building is sold twice on the booking sites, as Wilde Covent Garden and as Wilde by Staycity The Strand. Same address, two listings, two prices — compare both.
A studio at Wilde Aparthotels Covent Garden.
The Londoner — sixteen storeys, six of them underground
About £450 · 350 rooms and suites · 38 Leicester Square, WC2H 7DX · Pool, hydropool, sauna, steam
Strictly it is on Leicester Square rather than in Covent Garden, five minutes west of the piazza, but it is the only large modern luxury hotel within reach and it is the one to understand. Sixteen storeys, six of them below ground, 350 rooms, and basements holding a ballroom, a screening room and an entire wellness floor.
The entry-level King Room is 24 sq m, which is what makes it good value against Soho at the same price — a Standard at Broadwick Soho is 18 sq m. Deluxe Kings are 29, the Junior Suite 40, the Corner Suite 52.
The Retreat is what you are actually paying for. A pool and a hydropool, sauna, steam room and bookable poolside cabanas, open 6am to 10pm, with children restricted to set hours — roughly 10.30am to noon and 3.30pm to 5pm on weekdays. Very few central London hotels make a swim part of the stay rather than a rumour.
Your room key also opens The Residence: three guest-only rooms including a whisky parlour behind a hidden door with more than fifty bottles. Non-residents cannot get in, which is unusual here — most of the good rooms in this guide are open to anybody.
A room at the Londoner.
The Savoy — where the river view starts at suite level
About £700 · Strand, WC2R 0EZ · Pool, gym, three treatment rooms · Check-out noon
Britain’s first purpose-built luxury hotel, opened in 1889 by Richard D’Oyly Carte on the profits of Gilbert and Sullivan at the Savoy Theatre next door, and still the only true riverside hotel in central London — Monet painted the Thames from a window here. Savoy Court outside is the one stretch of road in the country where traffic drives on the right.
Before you spend £700, know that the river is not included. Work through the room list and every grade below suite level faces the city, the courtyard or the Embankment gardens: Superior Queen 27 sq m, Deluxe King 31, Luxury King and Luxury King Garden View 34, Luxury Double Double 39. The cheapest room with a river view is the Junior Suite River View. If you are booking for the Thames, you are booking a suite, and it is better to know that now.
There is a naturally lit pool, a gym, sauna, steam room and three treatment rooms, which is rare in a building this old; in-house guests swim free, and children from 9am to 5pm every day. Our guide to London hotels with a pool also covers One Aldwych’s 18-metre pool around the corner. Housekeeping is daily with evening turndown, and check-out is noon, not eleven.
The cheap way in is the archive tour. The hotel’s own archivist runs a guided tour once a month, finishing with a glass of champagne in the American Bar — that plus a drink in the Beaufort Bar shows you most of what the room rate is for.
A river-facing suite at the Savoy.
Where to stay just outside
The premium above is a real £30 to £60 a night, and the areas that undercut it are all within about ten minutes on foot.
If you have not settled on a part of London yet, our guide to the best areas to stay in London sorts the whole city by what the trip is for.
Holborn — ten minutes east, and £30 less for the identical room
The direct test of the entire premium, and it is not close. Z Hotel Holborn is at 75 Kingsway, which Z’s own site places five minutes from Covent Garden, and it sells the same rooms for markedly less: the Z Double at £70 against £100, the Z Queen at £75 against £105, and the four-person Z Family at £95 against £155. Same brand, same room names, same floor areas, published on the same website on the same day. Nothing about the product changes; only the postcode does.
A room at the Z Hotel Holborn.
What you give up is the piazza on the doorstep and a two-minute walk from the theatre. Kingsway is a wide, dull, well-lit road and the walk is nine minutes at any hour. What you gain is Holborn station, which adds the Central line to the Piccadilly — considerably faster for the City, Stratford and the east. The Hoxton Holbornad is up the road at about £190 if you want the design-hotel version, not the cheap one, and the British Museum is ten minutes north.
A room at the Hoxton Holborn.
The South Bank and Bankside — over the bridge, with a walk back
citizenM London Banksidead is about £160 and sells one room type only: a wall-to-wall window, a tablet that runs the blinds and the lights, and a bed that fills the width of the room. It is small and plain about being small. Premier Inn London County Hall is about £110, which is as central as £110 gets in this city. And St Christopher’s Villagead at London Bridge starts around £53 for a double capsule if the budget is the binding constraint — the only capsule address in London with a bar and a roof terrace attached, which our capsule hotels guide covers in full.
A room at citizenM London Bankside.
A room at Premier Inn London County Hall.
A dorm at St Christopher’s Village.
Waterloo Bridge is ten minutes from the piazza on foot and the view from the middle of it is the best free thing in central London. That is the case for staying south: you are not saving a fortune, you are swapping a nightly premium for a walk home along the river, not through Leicester Square.
The rest of the West End
Ten minutes north of the piazza the market changes completely, and it is covered in our Soho and West End guide rather than repeated here. Three things from it apply while you are pricing Covent Garden.
Zedwell Tottenham Court Roadad is a windowless room from £81, two minutes from the British Museum, and it undercut the brand’s Piccadilly flagship on every date we sampled — so if you were going to book a Z Inside grade anyway, price this one first. Generator Londonad on Tavistock Place is about £26 a bed and openly a party hostel, which is the right answer for some trips and a terrible one before an early flight. And if it was the theatre rather than the cobbles that drew you here, Treehouse Hotel Londonad is about £250 for a room on the top floors beside Broadcasting House, four minutes from Oxford Circus, with a panorama out of every window instead of a light well.
A dorm at Generator London.
A room at the Treehouse Hotel London.
The noise question, and why Covent Garden is not Soho
Both are West End districts and both are loud, in completely different shapes, which changes what you should book.
Covent Garden’s crowd has a finishing time. The piazza fills with shoppers and buskers by mid-morning and empties after the theatres turn out. By half past eleven the cobbles are quiet in a way Wardour Street never is. This is an underrated thing about staying here and it is why the area suits families and older travellers far better than Soho does.
The loud edge is the west, and it is Soho’s noise. St Martin’s Lane, Charing Cross Road and the Leicester Square end run late seven nights a week. If you want quiet, book east of the piazza — Bow Street, Drury Lane, the Holborn side — not west of it.
The Strand is a third case entirely. It is a wide traffic road with night buses, sirens and street cleaning, and the noise is mechanical rather than human. Ask for a room facing away from it, by name, at the point of booking, not at check-in.
What you are staying for
If you picked the area for the theatre, our London theatre guide covers day seats, returns and which houses are worth the balcony — and it is the best argument for paying the Covent Garden premium, because a five-minute walk home beats a night bus after a three-hour show.
For the area itself, the Covent Garden area guide covers the piazza, Seven Dials, Neal’s Yard and where to eat before curtain-up.
Getting in and out
Charing Cross is the one to book near if you are arriving by train from the south — Northern and Bakerloo lines plus mainline services, and about five minutes from the piazza.
Leicester Square is Piccadilly and Northern, and it is the station to use instead of Covent Garden in almost every circumstance.
Holborn adds the Central line, which is the fast route east to the City and Stratford.
Embankment is District, Circle, Bakerloo and Northern, and it is the quiet way in and out of the south of the area.
The Piccadilly line runs all night on Fridays and Saturdays, which is the fact that decides late evenings here: you can get back from Heathrow, or home from a show, without a taxi.
For Heathrow, walk the ten minutes to Tottenham Court Road and take the Elizabeth line. It beats the direct Piccadilly line from Covent Garden or Leicester Square by a clear margin even after the walk.
Room grades, floor areas and the Z Hotels and hub published rates were taken from each operator’s own website on 8 September 2026; the approximate figures elsewhere are typical nightly prices, not quotes. A from-rate is the cheapest night of the year rather than the night you want, and prices move nightly — always check your own dates.
Common questions
Is Covent Garden a good area to stay in London?
It is the most convenient base in central London and the best one in the city for theatre — more than twenty West End houses are inside a ten-minute walk, which means you can eat late and walk home rather than watching the clock through the second act. It is a weaker choice if your trip is museums and parks, because you are paying a theatre premium for something you are not using. And it is the wrong choice if you want space: the cheap rooms here are 8 to 13 square metres.
Is Covent Garden expensive to stay in?
Yes, and the size of the premium is measurable because one operator publishes it. Z Hotels sells the same room at twelve London hotels, and a Z Double — 9 sq m, one window — is £100 at its Covent Garden hotel against £70 at Z Holborn, which its own site describes as five minutes away. That is the dearest Z Double in London against the cheapest. For a family it is worse: the four-person Z Family is £155 in Covent Garden and £95 in Holborn.
Where should I stay near Covent Garden instead?
Holborn, a nine-minute walk east, which sells the same rooms for about £30 a night less and adds the Central line. Waterloo and Bankside are over the river, ten minutes on foot across Waterloo Bridge, and cheaper again. North of Oxford Street — Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia — is where the ordinary mid-priced double with a window actually exists, and our Soho and West End guide covers that.
Are the cheapest Covent Garden hotel rooms windowless?
Several are, and neither hotel leads with it. The Z Hotel Covent Garden sells three windowless Inside grades at £70, £80 and £90 before you reach a room with daylight at £100. Premier Inn's hub brand page carries a footnote saying its estate includes rooms that are window-free, and sells them as ambient rooms with circadian light wells instead of a window. Ask which grade you are being given before you pay.
Is Covent Garden noisy at night?
Less than its reputation, and the noise is not evenly spread. The piazza crowd is a daytime and early-evening one — shoppers, buskers, theatre — and it goes home after the curtain, unlike Soho, which works seven nights a week. The loud edge is the west: St Martin's Lane, Charing Cross Road and Leicester Square, where Soho's noise bleeds across. The Strand is different again, a wide traffic road with buses all night.
Which station should I use for Covent Garden?
Not Covent Garden. Platform access there is by four lifts or an emergency spiral staircase of 193 steps — no escalators — and a final flight down from the lifts means it is not wheelchair-accessible either. Leicester Square is 260 metres away, the shortest gap between adjacent stations on the whole network, and faster in both directions. Charing Cross, Embankment and Holborn are all within about ten minutes on foot and all better connected.
