Fitzrovia is the block of streets between Oxford Street and Euston Road, with Tottenham Court Road on one side and Great Portland Street on the other. It has no major sight, which is exactly why it is useful: quiet Georgian squares, one of the best restaurant streets in London, several pubs with literary histories and a 177-metre telecommunications tower standing over the middle of it.
Most visitors cross it without noticing, because it lies between places they are going to: the shops of Oxford Street to the south, Bloomsbury and the British Museum to the east, Marylebone to the west. Five minutes' walk north of the crowds on Oxford Street, the pavements are almost empty.
The district is generally said to take its name from the Fitzroy Tavern on Charlotte Street, a pub that was the centre of the area's bohemian life between the wars. The name is unusual in being recent: nobody used it much before the 1930s, and it is still split administratively between two boroughs, Camden and Westminster.
Fitzrovia in brief
- Best for
- Restaurants, quiet Georgian streets, pubs with a history, an easy base
- Nearest stations
- Goodge Street, Warren Street, Great Portland Street, Tottenham Court Road, Oxford Circus
- Free to visit
- Fitzrovia Chapel; All Saints Margaret Street; Fitzroy Square
- Fitzrovia Chapel
- Most Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays 11:00–17:00, plus at least one Sunday a month 12:00–17:00
- All Saints Margaret Street
- Open daily 11:00–19:00 for visiting and private prayer
- A set lunch on Charlotte Street
- From £49.50 at Pied à Terre (September 2026)
- Time needed
- An hour to walk it; an evening to eat in it
Charlotte Street: the restaurant street
Charlotte Street runs north from Percy Street to Fitzroy Square and has been a restaurant street since the nineteenth century, first French and Italian, then Greek Cypriot, then everything. Tables spill onto the pavement in summer; the section between Percy Street and Goodge Street is pedestrian-friendly and closed to through traffic at busy times.
The range is unusually wide for one street. At the top end, Pied à Terre has cooked here for more than three decades and lists an anniversary lunch at £49.50 for an amuse-bouche, starter and main course, against £120 for three courses in the evening and £155 for a seven-course tasting menu. Our guide to Michelin-starred restaurants in London explains how to use set lunches like that one.
In the middle sit Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Indian restaurants at £25 to £45 a head, and at the cheap end Goodge Street and Tottenham Street have sandwich shops, bakeries and a long-established row of cafés. Charlotte Place, a narrow alley off Goodge Street, is one of the few genuinely quiet places to eat outdoors in this part of London.
Book Charlotte Street for a Monday. Fitzrovia's restaurants are full of media and advertising people from Tuesday to Thursday and much quieter at the start and end of the week. A Monday evening table is usually available the same day at places that are booked out on a Wednesday, and the kitchen is the same.
Photo: © User:Colin · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons · resized
The pubs with the literary ghosts
Fitzrovia's pubs are its unofficial museum. The Fitzroy Tavern at the corner of Charlotte Street and Windmill Street was the meeting place of a floating population of writers, artists and drinkers between the 1920s and the 1950s, among them Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Augustus John and the painter Nina Hamnett. The cellar bar keeps photographs and cuttings from the period.
The Newman Arms on Rathbone Street is a small two-storey pub with a first-floor dining room, and has appeared in films more than once. The Wheatsheaf on Rathbone Place and the Duke of York on Rathbone Street belonged to the same circuit; Londoners called the whole crawl "Fitzrovia" long before anyone put it on a map.
These are working pubs, not attractions: small rooms, no food in some of them, and full of local office workers from 17:30 on a weekday. Go at 16:00 on a weekday or in the early evening at a weekend if you want a seat. Our guide to historic pubs in London covers how these places work, and pub etiquette explains ordering and rounds.
The BT Tower, and what is happening to it
The cylindrical tower on Cleveland Street has stood over Fitzrovia since the 1960s and is visible from half of central London. It was built to carry microwave telecommunications links, had a revolving restaurant near the top that closed decades ago, and has been shut to the public ever since.
That may change. BT Group announced on 21 February 2024 that it had sold the tower to the American company MCR Hotels for £275 million, with payment spread over several years as BT's equipment is progressively removed and a final payment on completion. In May 2026 MCR showed emerging proposals for the building at a public exhibition for local residents, describing a hotel-led scheme with publicly accessible space, new walking routes through the site and access to the top of the tower.
No opening date has been published, and the equipment removal alone will take years. Treat the tower as something to look at rather than something to visit, and do not book a trip around it. For places you can actually go up, see our guide to the best free viewpoints in London.
Fitzroy Square and the Georgian grid
Fitzroy Square, at the northern end of Charlotte Street, is the architectural set piece: a square of Portland stone terraces, two sides designed by the Adam brothers in the 1790s, the rest completed in the 1820s. The central garden is private, but the square itself is pedestrianised, which makes it one of the quietest paved spaces in central London.
Blue plaques round the square record George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf, who lived at number 29 at different times, and Ford Madox Brown at number 37. The streets running off it — Fitzroy Street, Conway Street, Warren Street — keep long runs of plain brick Georgian houses that give an idea of what most of the West End looked like before the Victorians rebuilt it.
Walk south from the square down Cleveland Street and you pass the former Middlesex Hospital site, and then, in a courtyard behind it, the best interior in Fitzrovia.
The Fitzrovia Chapel
When the Middlesex Hospital was demolished in 2008, one small building was kept: its chapel, finished in 1891 and lined floor to ceiling in gold mosaic and fifteen kinds of marble. It now stands alone in Pearson Square, a pedestrian courtyard inside the Fitzroy Place development, and is run as a public space and venue.
Visiting is free and needs no booking. Outside exhibition periods the chapel opens most Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 11:00 to 17:00, and at least one Sunday a month from noon to 17:00; during exhibitions it is usually open daily. It is a small team in a historic building, so it sometimes closes for maintenance, and the opening dates are published on its own website.
Pearson Square is closed to vehicles and can be entered on foot from Mortimer Street on the south side, which is the main entrance, or from Riding House Street on the north. There is a donation box. It takes ten minutes to see and is one of the more surprising things in central London.
All Saints Margaret Street
At the south-western edge of Fitzrovia, in a courtyard off Margaret Street just north of Oxford Circus, stands All Saints, an Anglo-Catholic parish church completed in 1859 to a design by William Butterfield. From outside it is a tall brick tower squeezed into a gap between buildings; inside it is a riot of patterned brick, tile and marble in red, black and gold, and it is considered one of the most important Victorian buildings in England.
The church is open every day from 11:00 to 19:00 for visiting and private prayer, and entry is free. Mass is said daily at noon. The choir is one of the best in London and sings at the 11:00 High Mass on Sundays and at Evensong; our guide to classical music in London covers the city's choral tradition.
Shopping, and what has left
Tottenham Court Road, the eastern boundary, has been London's furniture and electronics street for a century. The furniture end, towards Goodge Street, still has the large design stores; the electronics end near the station has thinned considerably. Charlotte Street and Rathbone Place have small galleries, and Berwick Street and Soho's shops are a few minutes south.
One thing has gone and is still listed in older guidebooks. Pollock's Toy Museum, which occupied two connected houses on Scala Street for 53 years, closed there in January 2023 when it could not agree a sustainable future at the premises. Part of the collection has since been shown in Croydon and at Leadenhall Market. Do not go to Scala Street looking for it; our guide to London's best small museums lists what is currently open.
Fitzrovia's museums have a habit of moving. This is an area of short commercial leases, and several small collections have left in the past few years. Before travelling to a small museum anywhere in central London, open its own website and look for an opening time dated this year. A listing on a tourism site is not evidence that a place is still there.
Staying and getting around
Fitzrovia is one of the better parts of central London to sleep in. It is walkable to Oxford Street, Soho, Regent's Park and the British Museum; it has five Underground stations on its edges; and because it is mostly offices, the residential streets are quiet at night in a way Soho is not.
Goodge Street and Warren Street are on the Northern line, Great Portland Street on the Circle, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City lines, and Oxford Circus and Tottenham Court Road bracket the southern corners with the Central, Bakerloo, Victoria and Elizabeth lines. Nothing in Fitzrovia is more than eight minutes' walk from a station. Our guide to the Underground explains how the network fits together.
For hotels, the practical comparison is with Bloomsbury next door, which has more of them at lower prices; see staying in Bloomsbury. What Fitzrovia gives you instead is the restaurants.
A short walk through Fitzrovia
Start at Oxford Circus, walk north up Great Portland Street and east into Margaret Street for All Saints. Continue north to Mortimer Street and turn into Pearson Square for the Fitzrovia Chapel. Carry on north up Cleveland Street under the tower to Fitzroy Square, then south down Charlotte Street, past the restaurants, to the Fitzroy Tavern. It is about 2 km and takes an hour without stops.
From the bottom of Charlotte Street you are two minutes from Tottenham Court Road, five from Soho, seven from the British Museum and ten from the Wellcome Collection on Euston Road. In bad weather the same route works as a series of indoor stops; see our guide to London on a rainy day. And for a comparable district of studios and old institutions on the other side of the centre, see Clerkenwell.
Frequently asked questions
Where exactly is Fitzrovia?
Between Oxford Street to the south, Euston Road to the north, Tottenham Court Road to the east and Great Portland Street to the west. It straddles the boundary between the boroughs of Camden and Westminster, which is why its postcodes are a mixture of W1 and WC1.
Can you go up the BT Tower?
Not at present. The tower has been closed to the public for decades. BT sold it to MCR Hotels in February 2024 for £275 million, and the developer's proposals, shown at a public exhibition in May 2026, include access to the top as part of a hotel scheme. No opening date has been announced.
Is the Fitzrovia Chapel free to visit?
Yes, and you do not need to book. Outside exhibition periods it opens most Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 11:00 to 17:00 and at least one Sunday a month from noon to 17:00. Check its own website before travelling, because a small team sometimes has to close it.
Is Pollock's Toy Museum still on Scala Street?
No. It closed there in January 2023 after 53 years in Fitzrovia, when it could not secure a sustainable future at the premises. Parts of the collection have since been displayed elsewhere in London. Many guidebooks and websites have not been updated.
Is Fitzrovia a good area to stay in London?
Yes, if you want to be central and quiet at the same time. It is within walking distance of Oxford Street, Soho, Regent's Park and the British Museum, has five Underground stations on its edges, and is mostly commercial, so the streets are calm at night. Bloomsbury next door usually has cheaper hotels.
Sources
- The Fitzrovia Chapel - opening times, access and entrances (checked September 2026)
- All Saints Margaret Street - daily opening and services (checked September 2026)
- BT Group - sale of the BT Tower to MCR Hotels (checked September 2026)
- MCR Hotels - the BT Tower (checked September 2026)
- Pied à Terre, Charlotte Street - lunch and dinner prices (checked September 2026)
- Pollock's Toy Museum - history and the Fitzrovia closure (checked September 2026)