April 24, 2026
Stay somewhere long enough to have a regular table, to recognise the face of the woman who has been arranging flowers for this neighbourhood for 15 years, to know which alley is the fastest cut through to Charlotte Street without following a phone screen — and the city stops being a backdrop and starts being yours.
Fitzrovia is particularly good for this. It is small enough to learn quickly and specific enough to reward the effort. A few days at The Newman is enough to slowly but surely find your place here.
The first morning: leave any plans at the door
Do not reach for your phone. Instead, walk left out of The Newman and head north up Newman Street until it gives way to the smaller, quieter streets that locals know better than any guidebook.
Kaffeine, on Great Titchfield Street, has been the neighbourhood’s coffee anchor since 2009 – an Australian-influenced independent that the Fitzrovia working crowd reliably returns to every weekday morning. Order at the bar, pull up a stool in the window, and enjoy some of the best people watching, all before 9am.
If you walk further up Newman Street towards Riding House Street, look out for Abdullah’s cobblers – one of the oldest family-run businesses still standing in Fitzrovia. Abdullah mends shoes by hand and is happy to show you how, if you ask. It is the kind of place that could easily have been left in a bygone decade, but makes today all the richer for still being here.
Then walk back via Newman Passage – the narrow cobbled lane, dating from 1746, that connects Newman Street with Rathbone Street. In just a couple of minutes, it feels like you’ve travelled through centuries. High walls, dark brick, the sense that something significant is sure to have happened here. The passage once housed a co-operative kitchen for Communist refugees, and has since served as a location for filmmakers seeking authentically Georgian atmosphere. It’s easy to miss, for those who aren’t looking.
The florist the neighbourhood keeps coming back to
Fitzrovia Flowers, near Goodge Street and Charlotte Street, is one of those independent shops that office workers and residents use with a quiet devotion that belongs only to somewhere properly local. The team sources seasonally, arranges by hand, remembers its regulars and delivers to each with the same care.
Walk in with no agenda. Tell them what you’re after in mood rather than flower names. Buy something you wouldn’t normally buy and take it back to your room. It is one of the most underrated hotel-stay rituals there is.
The pub that Orwell called his local
Two minutes’ walk from The Newman – through Newman Passage and across Rathbone Street – sits the Newman Arms at no. 23. Built in 1730 and licensed as a pub since 1860 (prior to which it served, among other things, as a tallow chandler, a picture framer, and a brothel), it is one of those Fitzrovia fixtures that has survived its own history rather than being undone by it. George Orwell drank here regularly when he worked nearby at the BBC, and used it as the model for the “Proles’ pub” in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Dylan Thomas was a regular too.
The ground floor is tiny and nautically panelled. Upstairs, the Pie Room – permanently packed, always worth booking – serves proper pies and well-made sides at prices that don’t make your eyes water. Book ahead.
The button shop that’s been here longer than anyone
On Great Titchfield Street (the same street as Kaffeine), you’ll find Taylor’s Buttons, run by Maureen, whose family has been here for over a century. The shop is only open for a few hours, a few days a week. Film costumiers come to her; so do private clients who’d rather repair a coat they love than replace it with one they won’t. If the door is open, do go in.
Lunch where the locals eat every week
Clipstone, on the corner of Clipstone Street and Bolsover Street, opened in 2016 with the stated ambition of being a great neighbourhood restaurant. Nearly a decade in, it has earned that description tenfold. The menu is written each day around the best available produce, the wine list is considered without being intimidating, and the room – bare boards, open kitchen, natural light – is where long lunches happen without anyone quite meaning them to.
Regulars have been calling it the restaurant they’d move to the area to make their local for years. On a clear afternoon, the outdoor terrace is where Fitzrovia’s creative and media professionals eat without their laptops; people watching, reading, catching up.
An afternoon on Percy Street
Gallery Different, at 14 Percy Street, presents contemporary painting, sculpture, photography and mixed media from British and international artists. It’s subtle, quietly occupying a townhouse on the short street that runs between Tottenham Court Road and Charlotte Street. On Thursday evenings it stays open late for private views, or walk in on a weekday afternoon and you will likely have it almost to yourself.
Percy Street also marks the edge of what the neighbourhood considers its own. Walk its length and you’ll follow in the footsteps of our photographer Rory Langdon-Down, who spent a year documenting for The Newman — portraits of the designers, café owners, craftspeople and committed eccentrics who make this corner of London distinct from those either side of it. His photographs now line our corridors and lift lobbies. Among them: Alan, a fellow photographer who has lived in the TJ Boulting building on nearby Riding House Street for decades and still steps out for a paper each morning; and Marsha, who has spent most of her life in Fitzrovia and is, by all accounts, never seen without a hat.
Time to pause and reset: the wellness floor
Come back to the hotel in the late afternoon to recharge on our wellness floor. This entire level of The Newman was developed in collaboration with Stockholm-based Raison d’Etre, the spa consultants behind nine global spa brands including Aman, Six Senses, and Borgo Egnazia.
Lind + Almond brought the design to life with the same Swedish Grace reference as the rest of the hotel: warm oak, bronze, textured glass, bespoke tapestries by Christabel Balfour. It reads more like a Nordic living room than a medical clinic. Start in the sauna, move to the steam room, then the ice lounge; the cold-air chamber makes makes a restorative counterpoint to the heat. There is also a halotherapy room, salt-walled and quiet; a hydrotherapy plunge pool; and experience showers that guarantee you’ll leave refreshed. There are no clocks here, which makes it all too easy to while away a couple of hours without even noticing.
The evening: Brasserie Angelica, then downstairs
Brasserie Angelica, our modern European brasserie at 49 Newman Street, works as well at 6pm with a glass of something and slow peruse of the menu as it does at a long Sunday lunch where nobody is in a hurry to leave. The kitchen cooks over live fire and shapes the dishes around what’s good that week. The bar or a corner table are some of our regulars favourite spots.
Another evening, take the short walk to July on Charlotte Street – run by head chefs Angelica and Holly, whom Rory photographed for our Fitzrovia people portraits – draws on the cooking of the Alsace region and is firmly on the neighbourhood’s list of places worth returning to.
And for that pre or post-dinner drink, head down the spiral staircase to Gambit Bar, a vaulted, copper-ceilinged room with a long bar, mirrored panels and a different pace from the street above. Expect chess nights, live music, DJ sets and the best atmosphere in town, even if we do say so ourselves.
Exploring in this leisurely and unhurried way means that by the end of your stay, Fitzrovia will start to feel like it belongs to you in small, specific ways: a cobbled passage you recognise the entrance to, the barista who knows your order, a button shop you found because the door was open, the cobbler who invited you in to watch him work, a corner table at Clipstone, another round at the Newman Arms, your favourite dish, followed by a cocktail back at the hotel bar. This neighbourhood, and The Newman, is what slow travel is all about.
Explore rooms and suites, Wellness at The Newman, and Brasserie Angelica at thenewman.com.
