Venues in Fitzrovia

Fitzrovia occupies the ground between Oxford Street and the Euston Road, urbanised through the eighteenth century on the former Manor of Tottenham Court. Charlotte Street, its spine, was built in 1787 and named for Queen Charlotte, and the Georgian Fitzroy Square anchors its northern end. The district took its name only in the late 1930s, from the Fitzroy Tavern on Charlotte Street, around which an artistic, bohemian circle gathered — Virginia Woolf, who lived at 29 Fitzroy Square between 1907 and 1911, with George Orwell and Dylan Thomas among them. That creative, literary reputation still colours the streets.

Fitzrovia’s event character is smaller in scale and more informal than Mayfair’s — a quarter of townhouses, restaurants and boutique hotels rather than grand ballrooms. Advertising, media and design firms fill its Georgian buildings, and their meeting rooms and private-hire spaces suit launches, dinners and receptions on a considered scale. Overhead stands the BT Tower on Cleveland Street, topped out in 1964 and opened by Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1965 — for decades one of London’s tallest structures and still the district’s landmark on the skyline.

Charlotte Street is the dining street, a run of restaurants and pavement tables that has drawn diners for generations, with Fitzroy Square and its garden providing a quiet Georgian set-piece nearby. The Fitzroy Tavern still trades on the corner it gave its name to. Access is among the easiest in central London: Tottenham Court Road brings the Elizabeth line and the Central and Northern lines to the southern edge, Goodge Street and Warren Street sit within the district, and the Euston Road termini — Euston, with King’s Cross St Pancras a little east — put national and international rail within reach.