Best Restaurants, Bars and Things to Do in Fitzrovia, London

About Fitzrovia

Fitzrovia has one of the best ratios of good restaurants to street space in central London. Charlotte Street alone contains more worthwhile options than entire neighbourhoods elsewhere in the city, and the blocks running north, south and west of it extend that quality in almost every direction. It is a neighbourhood that works for lunch, for an after-work drink and for a proper dinner, often within the same street.

The area's character comes partly from its history as a centre of London's creative and media industries. Advertising agencies, publishers and broadcasters have occupied the surrounding streets for decades, and the restaurants and bars that developed to serve them reflect that sensibility — unpretentious but quality-conscious, with a premium on cooking that is genuinely good rather than merely fashionable. That tradition continues with the newer openings that arrive regularly without displacing what is already there.

Lets Discover creators who cover Fitzrovia know the area's full width, from the well-known Charlotte Street institutions to the quieter venues on the residential streets behind them. Their picks reflect a neighbourhood where the quality floor is unusually high.

Charlotte Street is the obvious starting point and contains one of the most varied collections of restaurants on any single street in London, running the full length from Goodge Street to the south up to Fitzroy Square to the north. Goodge Street itself and the blocks immediately around it have developed a strong independent cafe and restaurant culture, with several of London's better specialty coffee shops and neighbourhood lunch spots concentrated there. Percy Street and Rathbone Place, running parallel and to the west, contain their own clusters of well-regarded venues. The streets around Great Titchfield Street and Riding House Street have a slightly more residential character but contain some of Fitzrovia's better independent wine bars and modern European restaurants.

History and culture in Fitzrovia

Fitzrovia takes its name from the Fitzroy Tavern on Charlotte Street, a pub that became a gathering point for London's bohemian and literary community in the early 20th century. The neighbourhood was home to Dylan Thomas, Augustus John, George Orwell and numerous other writers and artists who drank and worked in the area between the wars, earning the district a reputation for creative nonconformity that has never entirely left it. The Fitzroy Tavern's rival, the Wheatsheaf on Rathbone Place, was another centre of this literary culture. The area was heavily bombed during the Second World War, which accounts for the mix of Victorian and postwar architecture in the streets around Charlotte Street. The BBC occupied premises in the neighbourhood for decades and remains a presence in the surrounding area, reinforcing Fitzrovia's association with the media and creative industries.