London: two sides of the city, and where to sleep for under CHF 400
Nobody does London in a weekend, so pick a side. The West End and the South Bank, or the East End's markets and canals. And the hotels we track that still come in under CHF 400 a night.
No one does London in a weekend. The honest way to see it is to pick a side and do that properly. There are two good choices: the old centre along the river, or the East End, which has been rebuilt since the 2012 Olympics into the liveliest part of town. We have walked both more times than we can count, and the photographs here are ours.
The hotels are the harder part. Central London is one of the most expensive places we track, and most of the famous names sit well above our CHF 600≈ €635 · $729 ceiling. A handful do not, and they are at the end of this article.
The centre, along the river
Start on the South Bank and walk the river path east from Westminster Bridge. You pass the London Eye, the theatres and the book stalls under Waterloo Bridge, and cross back over to the Victoria Embankment, where two bronze sphinxes guard Cleopatra's Needle.
Under the Embankment near Charing Cross, Gordon's has been pouring wine since 1890 and claims to be the oldest wine bar in the city. It is no secret, but it is the right place for an early glass. From there it is five minutes to Trafalgar Square.
- Tate Britain at Millbank, for British art from the Tudors to now. The permanent collection is free.
- Bloomsbury, the literary quarter. Dickens's house on Doughty Street is open to visitors, and the independent bookshops are the best in town.
- Soho and Chinatown for dinner. Chinatown has lost some old favourites in recent years, but Gerrard Street still feeds you well.
Jazz, cabaret and a French dinner in Soho
Ronnie Scott's on Frith Street has been Soho's jazz club since 1959, and it is still one of the great rooms in the world to hear live music: red lamps, black-and-white photographs of everyone who has played there, and the band close enough to touch. Book ahead for the evening sets. Our favourite is the Sunday lunch session, a proper roast with a live band.
Five minutes west, between Piccadilly Circus and the bottom of Carnaby Street, Brasserie Zédel serves French brasserie cooking in a vast gilded Art Deco dining room below the old Regent Palace Hotel. The prix-fixe menu is some of the best value in the West End. Downstairs, Crazy Coqs is its cabaret room: chanson, cabaret and jazz most evenings, Paris without the Eurostar.
Two museums the guides tend to skip and we would not: the Wallace Collection in Hertford House on Manchester Square, free and full of old masters, and Kensington Palace, where Queen Victoria grew up.
The East End
East London is at its best from May to September, when the whole of it moves outdoors. Plan the weekend around the markets:
- Saturday: Broadway Market in London Fields - street food from half the world, prints, flowers and a long queue for coffee.
- Sunday: Columbia Road Flower Market. Go early. By eleven you cannot move, and half the people on the Tube home are carrying a potted plant.
- Victoria Park and the Regent's Canal towpath join the two, and are the way the locals walk it.
- The Museum of the Home in Hoxton shows how Londoners have lived over four centuries. It is free.
- Kingsland Road, known locally as Pho Mile, for a bowl of Vietnamese noodles from one of the family kitchens, many of them opened by refugees.
- Autograph, a photography gallery in Shoreditch focused on identity and social justice.
- The Olympic Park in Stratford, which has turned into a cultural quarter of its own, with new outposts of the big museums and theatres.
For a Friday night, MOTH Club in Hackney is a music venue in an old ex-servicemen's hall that has kept the décor. Shoreditch has the restaurants.
On the way east you cross the City, the square mile of banks and towers that is packed on weekdays and eerily quiet at weekends. Wren rebuilt more than fifty of its churches after the Great Fire of 1666, and at night, with the offices dark, they are what you notice.
South of the river
Three stops from Victoria on the Victoria line, Brixton is one of the hearts of Black London, with a Caribbean community that has been there since the Windrush generation. The covered market is the place to eat, and the music scene is the reason to stay late.
Battersea Power Station, further west, has been turned into shops, flats and restaurants. You can ride a glass lift up one of the chimneys.
Our own additions
Four things that are not in the usual guides, from our own walks:
- Highgate Cemetery - Victorian catacombs, the Egyptian Avenue, and Karl Marx. Book the West Cemetery tour.
- Camden Market on a weekday, and the statue of Amy Winehouse in the Stables.
- Portobello Road on a Saturday morning, then a drink outside the Earl of Lonsdale.
- The Mercato Mayfair on North Audley Street, a food hall inside a deconsecrated church. Lunch under stained glass.
Where to sleep
London is moving back into the centre. For the last ten years the default London stay was a holiday rental in Paddington, Bayswater or Kensington: a flat found on Booking.com or Airbnb, a key box by a white stucco door, and a long walk or a Tube ride to everything you came to see. We notice more and more travellers giving that up for old-school hospitality in the historic centre - the City, Westminster, Bloomsbury - with a front desk, a bar downstairs and staff who know the neighbourhood. Part of it is the rules: a whole home in London can only be let short-term for 90 nights a year without planning permission, so the supply of flats is tightening. Part of it is price: the hotels near the offices have become real value at weekends, as our data below shows.
We track fourteen hotels in London. These are the ones that still come in under CHF 400≈ €423 · $486 a night on a good date. Prices are for two adults and come from the hotels' own booking pages.
For the City and the East End:
- Apex City of London Hotel from CHF 218 - on Seething Lane, a few minutes from the Tower. The cheapest hotel we track in London: from CHF 218≈ €231 · $265, usually about CHF 297≈ €314 · $361.
- Apex Temple Court Hotel from CHF 252 - off Fleet Street, halfway between the West End and the City. From CHF 252≈ €267 · $306, usually about CHF 307≈ €325 · $373. Its refundable "Save Now, Stay Later" rate is sometimes cheaper than its own non-refundable one, so check both.
For the West End and the museums:
- The Montague on the Gardens from CHF 261 - Bloomsbury, next to the British Museum. From CHF 261≈ €276 · $317, usually about CHF 378≈ €400 · $460.
- Dorset Square Hotel from CHF 348 - Marylebone, on the square where Thomas Lord laid out the first cricket ground. The steadiest price we see in London: usually about CHF 415≈ €439 · $505.
- St. Ermin's Hotel, Autograph Collection from CHF 355 - Westminster, a red-brick Victorian mansion with a spy history. From CHF 355≈ €376 · $432.
Worth watching:
- Knightsbridge Hotel from CHF 409, The Chesterfield Mayfair from CHF 339 and The Trafalgar St. James London, Curio Collection by Hilton from CHF 389 run from about CHF 340≈ €360 · $413 to 410 at their best, and well over our ceiling at their worst.
- One Hundred Shoreditch in the East End goes on our tracker this week. The Seed Library, a listening bar in its basement, is one of the reasons to go east in the evening.
- The Firmdale hotels in Soho and Covent Garden mostly price above CHF 600≈ €635 · $729. We keep tracking them to see how wide their seasonal swing is.
When to go
Weekends can be cheaper than midweek here. Our data shows this in London, and it is unusual: at the hotels near the offices, business travel fills the rooms Monday to Thursday, and a Thursday-to-Sunday stay often costs less. It is the opposite in the Alps and on the lakes.
For the East End, go between May and September. For the museums and the West End, November and January to March bring the lowest prices of the year.
Credit
The central London and East End sections draw on The New York Times: 36 Hours in London (December 2022) and 36 Hours in East London (June 2025, updated August 2026), both by Desiree Ibekwe. Prices and photographs are our own.
The rest of the roll
Everything else we came back with from this trip - ours, taken on the days described above. Click any of them to see it properly.
