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. 

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.