London Covent Garden Tourist Map

Covent Garden runs from Trafalgar Square to the edge of Holborn and holds more theatres, galleries and performance spaces than any other part of London. Its centre is the piazza and the Covent Garden Market building of 1830, once London's main fruit and vegetable market and now shops, cafés and licensed street performers. Everything here is within a 15-minute walk, so it is easy to combine a gallery by day with a show at night.

Start at Trafalgar Square, where Nelson's Column faces the National Gallery, home to Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Turner's Fighting Temeraire. Next door, the National Portrait Gallery reopened in 2023 after a three-year rebuild. Both are free. On the square's east side, St Martin-in-the-Fields holds regular lunchtime and evening concerts, and its crypt café sits beneath the church.

North of the Strand are the stages: the Royal Opera House, the London Coliseum for English National Opera, the Lyceum and the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, on a site used as a theatre since 1663. The London Transport Museum fills the old flower market with buses and Tube carriages. Seven Dials, where seven streets meet at a sundial pillar, has independent shops, while Somerset House has a riverside courtyard with fountains in summer and ice skating in winter.

When to go: galleries are calmest on weekday mornings; the piazza and its performers are at their best from late afternoon, before curtain-up around 7.30pm. Book theatre seats ahead for Friday and Saturday. Stations: Covent Garden (Piccadilly line), Leicester Square (Northern and Piccadilly), Charing Cross (Northern and Bakerloo), Embankment and Holborn. Covent Garden station has lifts only and queues at busy times, so Leicester Square is often quicker.