The 20 best things to do in Marylebone

The cult of St John is a powerful one. Since opening in an airy old smokehouse by Smithfield meat market in 1994, Fergus Henderson’s innately chic white-walled restaurant has become a byword for all that is good and decent about British fine dining. The latest addition to Henderson’s offaly empire, St John Marylebone is opposite the fabulous Golden Eagle boozer and far away enough from the main drag of Oxford Street to make you feel like you’ve stumbled across a secret, but close enough to make getting there easy. Unlike the other two restaurants, the menu here is small and seemingly ad hoc. Chalkboards explain the day’s offerings. There’s only a handful of starters and mains up for grabs. All are made for sharing, but by God you don’t have to if you don’t want to. The brevity of such a menu is never an issue though, because everything is exceptional. Word to the wise; if it comes on toast, order it!

Founded by American businessman Harry Gordon Selfridge in 1909, Selfridges department store is an institution. With its dozens of concession boutiques, store-wide themed events, ground floor pop-up space and collections from the hottest new brands, Selfridges remains a first port of call for one-stop shopping in the city centre. Most shoppers make a beeline for Selfridge’s fashion floors, which are chock-a-block with garbs from classic luxury labels, upcoming designers and small, local independent brands. There’s also 

Moving on to the rest of the building – the basement is full of home accessories, stylish kitchen equipment (think Alessi, Le Creuset and Kitchenaid), a wine shop, tech and books and magazines. The ground floor boasts the Wonder Room (around 1,900sq ft of fine jewellery and luxury watches), an accessories hall and a well-stocked beauty hall, complete with its own Nails Inc manicure station. The top floor of Selfridges is reserved for the kids. There you’ll find a toyshop, children’s clothing and a kids concierge. 

Built in 1776 and open to the public since 1900, this handsome house contains an exceptional array of eighteenth-century French furniture, paintings and objets d’art collected by the Marquesses of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace. Inside you’ll find room after grand room, containing Louis XIV and XV furnishings, Sèvres porcelain, and paintings by Titian, Velázquez, Fragonard, Gainsborough, Reynolds and Franz Hals. A trip to the Wallace Collection is a fantastic tour through centuries of art and design, with some of the finest examples of pre-modern painting anywhere in the world. 

In a huge win for W1, Peckham’s much-loved Kudu, a South African restaurant specialising in braai cooking, upped sticks last year and landed in Marylebone, bringing many of its beloved dishes to Moxon Street. Great flames roar from the grill at the buzzy open kitchen, and there’s a smoky smell in the air that tells you barbecuing is serious business. But as well as huge, hearty mains – think tender slabs of sirloin with a perfect mahogany crust, and monkfish swimming in a warming coconut curry – you really should fill up on bread. Kudu’s OTT take on bread and butter features a vat of liquid gold harbouring aromatic curry leaves and sweet curls of pickled shallot, into which you’re invited to dunk pillowy bone marrow brioche with abandon. Just be sure to leave a bit of room for the restaurant’s signature dessert, the Kudu KitKat; a bowl of hearty chocolate mousse topped with ice cream, sliced kumquat and airlight marshmallow, that gets kissed with a lump of charcoal from the barbecue right in front of your table.

Boasting perfect acoustics, art nouveau decor and an excellent basement restaurant, Wigmore Hall (or ‘the Wiggy to regulars!) is one of the world’s top chamber music venues, and currently hosts around 400 events a year, and has played host to the likes of Sergey Prokofiev and Andrés Segovia, Benjamin Britten. Programming leans on the classical and Romantic periods, and is often excellent value for money. This is particularly true of its Monday lunchtime recitals, which broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, and its Sunday morning coffee concerts. And under 35s can claim £5 tickets for most concerts; absolute bargain!

One of London’s most famous bookshops, Daunt Books was founded in 1990 by James Daunt on the beautiful Edwardian premises that formerly belonged to antiquarian booksellers, Francis Edwards. The building is supposedly the first custom-built bookshop in the world and has retained many of its original, gorgeous features. Inside you’ll find three storeys of oak balconies, viridian-green walls, conservatory ceilings and stained-glass windows – home to row upon row of books. Though its stock covers a huge variety of topics, Daunt specialises in travel writing, so you’ll find especially good collections of guidebooks, maps, language references, history books, travelogues and related fiction organised by country. Travel aside, Daunt is also a first-rate stop for literary fiction, biography, gardening and much more.

After a series of acclaimed pop-ups, heroic residencies and a saga of fallen-through venues, husband-and-wife team John and Desiree Chantarasak have finally found a forever home for their fine dining fusion food on Marylebone’s Seymour Place, where they’ve just been awarded a Michelin star mere months after opening. John is half Thai and half British, and AngloThai shares the same DNA, reimagining some of Thailand’s most celebrated dishes using mystical-sounding UK ingredients to mimic Thai food’s puckering sour notes. A pleasingly tart seabuckthorn margarita comes alongside an amuse-bouche of creamy, crabby broth offering the sweet and salty taste of seawater. A postcard-pretty snack of comice pear with candied beetroot is equally whimsical. A grilled flatbread slathered with shrimp butter, Cornish shellfish, a cloud of coriander and a hearty drizzle of lime, is bouncy and butch. Truly formidable is a single Carlingford oyster swimming in a vivid pool of fermented chilli and galangal, resulting in a euphorically numb mouth and full body sweats. Who needs raving until 5am when one of these yields the same result?

This chic little shop on Marylebone’s bougie Chiltern Street certainly isn’t your typical newsagents. Established in 1982, over the years it has evolved from your classic corner shop into a specialist magazine shop supplying an expertly-curated range of independent titles, with a particularly good selection of fashion and design magazines. Following an artful makeover in 2020, the shop now features an adjoining cafe serving hot drinks and pastries, and is partnered with Airmail News – a subscription-based digital weekly launched by former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and New York Times foreign correspondent Alessandra Stanley. Look out for its programme of live events, including magazine issue launches, book signings, exhibitions and fashion-forward collaborations with the likes of JW Anderson, Tracey Emin, Gilbert & George, Valentino, Burna Boy, Gucci and Taschen.

A proper Marylebone institution, this family-run café-cum-deli has been serving up homemade nourishment since 1900. Punters come in their droves for old-school sarnies made to order by white-coated servers who offer up more fillings than Pret could ever muster. Salt beef, tuna mayo, many, many kinds of cheese, they've got it all. Lately, its beef goulash has been making waves (and stains, dribbled down T-shirts from over-eager eating). It’s a rich, dense and smoky soup that’s so thick you could almost call it gravy, chock-full of hearty vegetables and tender chunks of beef. Order some for dunking your sarnie into, and scoff the lot at one of its fabulous formica tables surrounded by jars of jam. 

Independently owned boozers are hard to come by in central London these days, and this charming little corner pub is a particularly rare gem, with an atmosphere more akin to a country inn than a city centre boozer. There’s a real community feel about the place, thanks to live music nights, a weekly quiz on Tuesdays and a pretty competitive darts league dating back to the 1980s. On the bar you’ll find a decent range of commercial beers and more niche picks on draught, with a solid roster of cask offerings on rotation, from the likes of Adnams, 5 Points, Dark Star, St Austell’s, Timothy Taylor and Windsor & Eaton. Food-wise, it serves up Pieminster pies during the week, with roast pop-ups or ‘stout and oyster’ sessions on Sundays. 

Opened in 2022 just a few doors down from the flagship Monocle Café on Marylebon’s chi-chi Chiltern Street, this lifestyle store from the team behind current affairs and lifestyle magazine Monocle is popular with tourists and the fashion set. Alongside the magazine’s own travel guides, prints, coffee table books, branded stationery and other merchandise, you’ll find a homeware bits, travel accessories, menswear pieces and beauty products from a globe-trotting roster of chic lifestyle brands including Comme des Garçons, Beams, Collect Studio, Le Minor and Leuchtturm1917.

An atmospheric, noisy spot off Marylebone High Street, Alley Cats is an ideal place to indulge in those New York-style (as evinced by the wipe-clean gingham tablecloths), crispy crackly pizzas that are way lighter than their comparatively doughy Neopolitan cousins. The menu’s short, but who needs choice when the standard offerings are so effective? There are seven styles of pie on offer, all served at a hunger-busting size of 14”, including a fantastic pizza take on the classic penne alla vodka that’s every bit as moreish and comforting as the dish that inspired it. If you are in the market for starters, both the candied bacon and sauce-slathered meatballs should not be missed. A great addition to London’s varied and ever-evolving pizza scene.

Marylebone’s weekend Farmers’ Market has been running in a car park just off the high street since 2003. From 10am each Sunday morning, you’ll see Marylebone mums and dads aiming to get their weekly shop done before diving into a nearby cafe for a coffee and croissant. A lot of the items here are seasonal and organic and stalls change on a regular basis. It wraps up at around 2pm, meaning you’ve only got four hours to look around, so try and get down early to make the most of it.

There are many things to like about the Lita, a warm and inviting Spanish-ish bistro tucked away on the quiet Paddington Street. Branding itself as a ‘southern Mediterranean’ restaurant, chef Luke Ahearne’s first spot is all about fish and fire, and everything comes slicked with so much olive oil that the dishes are glossier than a Steely Dan outro. Think pan con tomate with huge, meaty anchovies, chopped Hereford beef with a wedge of Amalfi lemon and endlessly snackable, crunchy shoestring fries comes next, before honking great slabs of silky raw tuna, dotted with corno peppers, coriander, and capers, and hand-dived Orkney scallops complete the raw flesh extravaganza, sliced so thin they melt on the tongue. The place isn’t cheap –a flaky, creamy main of whole Cornish turbot is everything such a flashy fish should be but comes with a £130 price tag – but if you want to push the boat out, you certainly won’t be disappointed.

London might be one of the greenest capital cities in the world, but the city centre can still feel like a concrete jungle at times. Totalling around 2.5 acres, these two small public gardens on the site of a former burial ground for St Marylebone Parish Church are a tranquil little spot away from the hustle and bustle of the High Street. A few tombstones can still be seen around the edges of the gardens, while the South Garden features a Grade II-listed mausoleum alongside landscaped rosebeds, a bandstand and a children’s play area.

With succulents lining the wall, rattan lamps hanging from the ceiling and colourful alebrijes watching over, this low-lit spot under Michelin-starred Mexican restaurant Kol) emanates the mezcal bars of Oaxaca. Its cocktail menu is compact. Drinks come in twos, each pair attached to one of five flavour profiles, like corn and chamomile, sorrel and hop, or coffee and woodruff. For each, you can choose from a mezcal-based drink (negronis and old fashioneds are both given an agave twist) or one with other Mexican-made spirits like Abasolo corn whisky or Paranubes rum. To satisfy any ‘little cravings’, an antojitos menu serves standout small plates like wagyu beef tostada and churros with mezcal mousse and pork crackling. Our favourite drink? The ‘Hot and Cold’, a thick and caramelly concoction of Dangerous Don cafe mezcal topped with woodruff and white chocolate cream that’s perfect as a nightcap.

This museum dedicated to one of London’s most famous literary characters was founded in 1989, on a site as close to that described by Conan Doyle as possible (it’s technically at number 239). Visitors are ushered inside by a Victorian policeman, ascending the stairs to arrive in Holmes and Watson’s first-floor study. From here, guests can explore the pair’s bedrooms, their landlady Mrs Hudson’s quarters and a third-floor exhibition featuring a recreation of Conan Doyle’s writing room and a display dedicated to depictions of his famed detective on the screen. If you’re a fan of the books, this is a chance to properly immerse yourself in the stories; the museum features plenty of details lovingly recreated from Conan Doyle’s tales, from Watson’s writing desk to Sherlock’s chemistry set and bullet holes on the wall spelling out the initials VR.

A culty no-booking, no-choice spot with only one thing on the menu – impossibly addictive and tender entrecôte steak in a ‘secret sauce’ served with frites and salad – this Marylebone bistro offers a fabulously old-school experience. Part of a small global chain (with other branches in Mexico and New York), the menu has remained unchanged since it opened its flagship restaurant in 1959 in Paris. You might have to queue for a table, but with dinner for two here costing just £31, it’s very much worth the wait.

Founded in Aberdeen in 1842, Cadenhead’s is the oldest survivor of a very rare breed: the independent whisky bottler. That basically means that instead of distilling their own whisky, the company selects the very best barrels from distilleries all over Scotland, before ageing them independently and bottling them without filtration. It’s a method that results in some seriously tasty small-batch whiskies for the real ’heads. But you don’t have to shell out on a pricey bottle to enjoy their stuff. The shop also has a tasting room which hosts events several times a week. Standard tasting sessions cost £45 per head and allow guests to sample six drams of specially selected blends from across the Cadenhead’s range alongside a few nibbles, with an expert host on hand to answer any questions you have about the brand’s methods and processes.

For some healthy competition suitable for the whole family, this 8000-square-foot palace of crazy golf is a fun place to spend an afternoon. Based in the old Debenhams Department Store just off Oxford Street, Swingers West End features two fairground-themed nine-hole courses and a carnival area where you can play more than 30 old-school arcade games like whack-a-mole, skee-ball and ring toss.  And there’s also a variety of street food on offer, from Pizza Pilgrims’ Neapolitan pies to gourmet burgers from Patty & Bun, plus a huge menu of classic and signature cocktails from the bar.