Ah, Covent Garden. Sure, the performers and pigeons still pervade the Piazza, and you have to navigate the people with maps and backpacks that stop suddenly in the middle of the street, but this West End hub – sandwiched between intellectual Bloomsbury, anarchic Soho, and the all-singing, all-dancing Theatreland – has had one hell of a glow-up.
From establishing itself as a foodie haunt to re-establishing itself as one of London’s best places to shop, the creative spirit that bolstered some of its longest-running institutions, such as the Flower Market and the Royal Opera House, is still clear to see – particularly in the businesses that choose to set up shop in this neighbourhood.
It’s a bit like London itself, though – you’ll have a completely different experience in each of its corners, from the corporate feel of Holborn to the residential vibe off either end of Maiden Lane. Here’s how to characterise your stay, with a hotel to suit every taste.
The best hotels in Covent Garden are:
- Best hotel for luxury: Rosewood London
- Best hotel for design: L’oscar
- Best hotel for groups: Amano
- Best hotel for business: The Henrietta Hotel
- Best hotel for music: Chateau Denmark
- Best hotel for rooftop views: Page8
- Best hotel for romance: The NoMad
- Best budget hotel: Hoxton Holborn
- Best hotel for location: The Covent Garden Hotel
Best hotel for luxury: Rosewood London
Location: High Holborn
If you look beyond the suits power-pacing up and down High Holborn, you might see a select few disappearing into an elegant courtyard set slightly back from the main fray. They know something most tourists don’t: the chaos just fades as you step into Rosewood Hotel’s rose-gilded London outpost.
It’s home to two of London’s non-negotiable foodie spots: Scarfes Bar, the oft-awarded cocktail bar, low-lit by Tiffany lamps, which takes its cue from an art gallery; and Holborn Dining Room, a seasonal brasserie made famous by its exemplary pastry chefs, known for some of the best pies in the country.
The best bit, though, is the hotel’s 44 bedrooms, which feel utterly palatial and impossibly refined. Think all cream tones and plush, spoiling textures – including monogrammed pillowcases – plus chic marble bathrooms that are some of the most spacious in London.
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Best hotel for design: L’oscar
Location: Southampton Row
‘Boudoir’ is, when it comes to the hospitality industry, often over-hyped and over-used as a term. Not so when it comes to this jewellery box of a place, tucked behind Lincoln’s Inn Fields – it feels a bit like reading a Jackie Collins novel while drinking Babycham on a velvet chaise longue. It quickly becomes apparent the hotel and its designer, Jacques Garcia (behind other boldly designed hotels, such as La Mamounia and The NoMads), took their cue from Oscar Wilde – among whose more postcard-worthy quotations include: “Nothing succeeds like excess.” And, honestly, you can’t help but love it.
Between the oak-panelled walls, wrought-iron fireplaces, 39 sumptuous rooms and a signature scent created by unapologetically lavish perfumier Roja Dove, you rarely see this sort of design-led decadence any more. It’s living its very best life, with no fear – as should we all.
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Best hotel for groups: Amano
Location: Russell Street
Contemporary German hotelier The Amano Group opened its first London outpost in May 2022, with predictably little pomp and circumstance. This skyscraper – with 141 affordable and comfortable bedrooms, on the corner of Drury Lane – can speak for itself.
With a focus on nightlife, there’s plenty here to keep you occupied: a seventh-floor rooftop bar and terrace with views over Covent Garden; a basement club with a weekend roster of DJs; five ‘Goldy’ rooms (characterised, as the name may suggest, by gold accents, including free-standing gold bathtubs); and a Spanish-Israeli fusion restaurant.
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Best hotel for business: The Henrietta Hotel
Location: Henrietta Street
When the group behind Paris’s famed Experimental Cocktail Club announced the opening of a bijou hotel – a London townhouse on a quiet street that would become the property’s namesake – it added another layer of lacquer to Covent Garden’s steady glow-up. This is the kind of independently minded place that corporate hoteliers often imitate but rarely replicate: the staff have personality; the stylish interiors feel liveable; and there’s a bar and restaurant that the city’s residents actually frequent.
But while the company’s avant-garde approach to mixology (as well as the bartenders’ choice of playlists, featuring anything from Euro house to 1990s hip-hop) keeps downstairs busy and buzzy, the 40 Deco-style bedrooms upstairs channel a private, old-world sort of glamour away from the mêlée.
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Best hotel for music: Chateau Denmark
Location: Denmark Street
If you fondly remember Soho and its surrounds for clubs, dive bars and punk rockers – rather than the modern iteration often characterised by members clubs – we may have just found your new favourite haunt. Chateau Denmark – named after the street between Soho and Covent Garden where it occupies no less than 16 buildings (and where everyone from the Stones to the Sex Pistols have stayed) – feels like it was made for musicians and music-lovers alike. With three live-music venues, a tricked-out recording studio and the world’s biggest hi-def screen on site, this hotel hits all the right notes. Each of the 55 rooms and apartments not only pays homage to Britain’s most influential musical genres (from punk to psychedelia) but comes with its own butler.
So, dust off those drum skills, because the area’s legendary rock ’n’ roll attitude looks like it’s coming back with a bang (and because some of the rooms actually have their own kits). Just don’t go throwing any TVs out the window.
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Best hotel for rooftop views: Page8
Location: St. Martin’s Place
Blink and you might miss the entrance to this cool, contemporary pad. On the southern end of St Martin’s Lane, where Covent Garden meets Trafalgar Square, most people are either rushing for their train from nearby Charing Cross, or they’re focused on the jewel of London’s tourist trail (mounting one of Nelson’s lions without getting caught by a copper). The canniest among us, though, are likely sipping rosé on a sofa at Bisushima, Page8’s rooftop Japanese restaurant, which has wrap-around views of London’s nearby landmarks, as well as one of the most comfortable al fresco bars in the city.
The 138 slickly designed rooms are comfortable, while a ground-floor café, serving everything from breakfast pastries to a decent coffee, helps keep unnecessary add-on costs to a minimum.
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Best hotel for romance: The NoMad
Location: Bow Street
New York meets London in this grade-II listed building opposite Covent Garden’s famous Royal Opera House. The former Bow Street Magistrates Court and Police Station has – under the direction of New York’s Sydell Group (known for its clutch of neighbourhood-centric hotels, including sceney sister NoMad properties in Manhattan, LA and Las Vegas) – transformed into one of London’s sexiest places to stay and play.
The 91 rooms and suites are Deco-inspired – some with chandeliers and free-standing baths – but overwhelmingly comfortable, while the Nomad restaurant is all about chic refinement under a soaring glass conservatory. To dial up the seduction, though, head for Side Hustle – where tequila flows and upscale Mexican small plates abound – before settling in for a more private nightcap in The Library, a residents-only snug where few people pay attention to the books.
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Best hotel for budget: Hoxton Holborn
Location: High Holborn
We get it: you wouldn’t guess ‘Covent Garden’ from the name of this popular pad. The combination of the Hoxton brand – paying homage to a hipster area between Shoreditch and Islington, with industrial roots – and its branch in a neighbourhood that’s known primarily as a corporate dead zone doesn’t exactly tally. But its savvy location – in a former factory at the flip side of Covent Garden’s eclectic Great Queen Street on High Holborn – helps keep the price down while being 10 minutes’ walk from the action.
Here, you’ll find 220 colourful rooms on a sliding scale of size and cost, as well an excellent mid-priced restaurant, Rondo, and a natural-wine bar on-site.
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Best hotel for location: The Covent Garden Hotel
Location: Monmouth Street
If we were playing a Covent Garden version of Monopoly, Monmouth Street would be the ultimate acquisition. As famous for its independently minded boutiques as the gold-standard coffee from the roastery that bears its name, this location – a stone’s throw from Neal Street and Covent Garden Piazza, as well as Seven Dials and Theatreland – is as good as it gets. And The Covent Garden Hotel, at number 10, is slap bang at the heart of the action.
One of the older siblings of Kit Kemp’s Firmdale Hotels brand (along with nearby sister properties in the Charlotte Street Hotel, Ham Yard and the Haymarket Hotel), you can expect the group’s colourful design – all artfully clashing textiles and kitschy toned furniture – to abound across all 58 rooms, as well as in the downstairs Brasserie Max.
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