Venues in South Kensington
South Kensington is museum London — grand institutional interiors and garden-square addresses, with dining rooms that draw on the collections next door.
South Kensington
Yashin Ocean House
Japanese Restaurant
Up to 70 guests
A modern Japanese sushi and omakase counter in a white-washed Edwardian building off Old Brompton Road, with two private dining rooms on the lower ground floor.
South Kensington
Cambio de Tercio
Spanish Restaurant
Up to 70 guests
A landmark South Kensington Spanish restaurant since 1995, its vivid ochre-and-red dining room backed by one of London's deepest Spanish wine cellars.
South Kensington
190 Queen's Gate
British Restaurant
Up to 40 guests
The Gore London's restaurant on Queen's Gate, with dark green walls, gilded mirrors and Frederick Forster's seasonal British cooking, let whole for up to 40 seated.
South Kensington
Ognisko
Polish Restaurant & Bar
Up to 250 guests
A Victorian townhouse on Exhibition Road, home to the Polish Hearth Club since 1940. Its first-floor Ballroom takes 180 for a reception; the whole venue goes to 250.
South Kensington
Town House
British Restaurant
Up to 50 guests
Three interconnecting drawing rooms with a private entrance on Manson Place, plus a wood-panelled study for smaller private dinners.
South Kensington
Bar 190
Cocktail Bar
Up to 70 guests
An oak-panelled Victorian bar on Queen's Gate hung with photographs from the Rolling Stones' 1968 Beggars Banquet party, let exclusively for up to 70 standing.
South Kensington
Bombay Brasserie
Indian Restaurant & Bar
Up to 300 guests
A South Kensington institution since 1982, its glass-roofed Conservatory and grand dining rooms host private dinners and receptions for up to 300.
South Kensington
Myrtos by Asimakis
Greek Restaurant
Up to 80 guests
Modern Greek cooking from Asimakis Chaniotis, who held Pied à Terre's MICHELIN star for seven years, in a South Kensington room built around a mature olive tree. Eighty covers, a fish counter, and a heated terrace on Brompton Road.
South Kensington
Restaurant Ours
Modern European Restaurant & Bar
Up to 350 guests
Tom Sellers' foliage-filled Brompton Cross restaurant with a late bar, Saturday DJ and flexible private spaces from a 20-seat dining room to full exclusive hire.
South Kensington
The Adria
Hotel
Up to 50 guests
An 1870 townhouse hotel on Queen's Gate whose ground-floor sitting rooms hire through their own private entrance, for up to 50 guests.
South Kensington
Science Museum
Event Space
Up to 1,500 guests
A national museum that hires its galleries after hours, from a 750-guest hall of engines and aircraft to a blank-canvas events floor with a city view.
South Kensington
Royal College of Music
Event Space
Up to 280 guests
A Victorian conservatoire on Prince Consort Road, whose 1901 concert hall takes 280 standing and sets 160 for dinner beneath its organ. Nine further spaces hire alongside it, from an Italianate opera theatre to a wood-panelled suite looking across at the Royal Albert Hall.
/ About South Kensington ▾
South Kensington owes its form to a single event: the Great Exhibition of 1851. Profits from that show funded the Royal Commission's purchase of land south of Hyde Park, on which Prince Albert's vision of a campus of museums, colleges and learned societies was steadily built — an ambition so tied to him that the quarter was nicknamed Albertopolis. Exhibition Road, its central spine, takes its name directly from the exhibition, and the surrounding streets fill out in stucco terraces and garden squares.
That founding purpose has left the area with a concentration of grand civic buildings found nowhere else in London. The Victoria and Albert Museum settled on the site from 1857; Alfred Waterhouse's Romanesque Natural History Museum opened to visitors in 1881; and the Science Museum took shape alongside them. The Royal Albert Hall, opened in 1871 in memory of the prince, remains the quarter's great domed set piece, with Imperial College and the Royal College of Music completing the academic ring around it.
Between the institutions run the garden squares and quieter residential streets that give South Kensington its measured, scholarly air. Exhibition Road itself was remade as a shared-surface boulevard linking the museums, and the smaller lanes off it — Bute Street and Thurloe Street among them — carry cafés and restaurants with a distinct French accent, a nod to the long-established community around the Lycée. Hyde Park lies immediately to the north, its green expanse a short walk from every museum door. South Kensington station serves the Piccadilly, District and Circle lines, connecting the quarter directly to the West End and, via the Piccadilly line, to Heathrow.