Hotels in London

London is not one hotel market but half a dozen, and the right one depends on what you are in town for. For theatre and the West End, the streets between Covent Garden, Soho and the Strand put most stages within a ten-minute walk, and you pay for that convenience. For a working week, the City and Canary Wharf are well served by business hotels that are noticeably cheaper on Friday and Saturday nights, when their regular guests have gone home. If you are arriving or leaving by train, staying near the terminus that serves you — King's Cross and St Pancras for the north and Eurostar, Paddington for the west and Heathrow Express, Waterloo and Victoria for the south — saves a cross-town journey with luggage at the worst possible hour. Early flights are the one case where the Heathrow hotel strip along the Bath Road is the sensible choice; for anything else it is a long way from the city.

Two things are worth knowing before you compare prices. First, London's prices move with the calendar more than most cities: a Saturday in late spring, a big match at Wembley or a major conference at ExCeL can double a room that is ordinary on the Tuesday either side, so if your dates are fixed, book a free-cancellation rate early and check back. Second, Zone 2 is not a compromise. Areas such as Clapham, Islington, Shoreditch, Greenwich and Ealing have good hotels, good restaurants and a twenty-minute journey to the centre, and the same money buys a markedly better room than it does in Zone 1. The neighbourhood guides below cover each area's character, its hotels and what is on nearby; the prices you see here are the total for the stay, with nothing added at checkout.