Staying above the shops: the one-street-back rule for a silent W1 night

What the street sounds like at three in the morning

At seven in the evening the shops start to close and the crowds thin, and visitors assume the noise leaves with them. It does not. Oxford Street is one of London's great bus corridors, and the night routes keep running long after the last till has closed. Before dawn come the delivery vans, the street sweepers and, a few times a year, the fitters who work through the night to change a department store's windows. Sirens heading for the Circus complete the soundtrack.

None of this matters if your room is in the right place. Plans to pedestrianise parts of the street have been announced, so the traffic may look different in a year or two; until then, assume the street keeps its own hours and choose a room that does not share them.

The rule, in five lines

Everything below follows from a single principle: sleep one street back from the shops, and face away from them. The rest is detail.

The north side, from Portman Square to Welbeck Street

The strongest cluster sits just north of the western shops, where Oxford Street meets the grid of Marylebone. Portman Square holds two large hotels: Nobu Hotel London Portman Square, whose restaurant draws its own evening crowd, and the Hyatt Regency London The Churchill. Both are a single block from Selfridges, and their rooms over the square look onto plane trees instead of buses.

A little further east, The Marylebone on Welbeck Street and The Mandeville on Mandeville Place sit in quieter residential streets, with Marylebone Lane and its restaurants on the doorstep. The Prince Akatoki, on Great Cumberland Place near the arch, is small, calm and minimalist. From any of them the shops are three or four minutes away on foot, and the loudest thing at midnight is a taxi dropping somebody off.

Berners Street to the east, Brown Hart Gardens to the south

At the eastern end, Berners Street runs north from Oxford Street into Fitzrovia and holds two of the most stylish hotels in W1. The London EDITION fills the old Berners Hotel, ornate plaster ceilings intact, with Berners Tavern as its dining room, and the Sanderson, a few doors along, has its long bar and a courtyard garden. Round the corner on Newman Street, The Mandrake goes for drama and low light. All three are within a couple of minutes of Tottenham Court Road, yet Berners Street itself is surprisingly calm after dark.

South of the street, in the Mayfair blocks behind Selfridges, The Beaumont faces Brown Hart Gardens, a raised public garden built on top of an electricity substation, one of the stranger and more peaceful spots in the West End. Bond Street station is a few minutes away, yet the garden feels much further from the shops than it is.

At the ends of the street: the arch and the crossroads

The big hotels at Marble Arch, The Cumberland, the London Marriott Hotel Marble Arch, The Montcalm, are convenient and well run, but they face some of the busiest junctions in London. If you stay there, ask for a room on the side away from the arch; a park view is lovely at breakfast and less restful at two in the morning. At the eastern crossroads by Tottenham Court Road, where the Elizabeth line now stops, the hotels are fewer and the Berners Street pair are the ones to know.

Elsewhere on this site, the townhouse hotels of Marylebone are quieter still, at the cost of a slightly longer walk to the shops.

The late visit, made simpler by a side street

A room one street back is also the easier address for a visit. Large stretches of Oxford Street are limited to buses, taxis and bicycles for much of the day, and a side street is where a car can actually stop. Your companion steps out at the door rather than at a bus lane, walks into a lobby that is calm rather than crowded, and is with you a minute later.

The hotel visit is priced from £250 for an hour, and on most evenings she arrives within the hour of confirmation. For the full night in a quiet room, ten hours for £1,800 is the overnight rung. Send Clementine the hotel and the time; the one check, name on the reservation and the room, is explained on the booking page.

Side streets, and who knows them

Laura walks in from the Marble Arch side and likes to start with a spritz on a hotel terrace near the arch. Nancy likes her sushi early and then a slow walk past the shop windows as they light up. Tina likes an evening that ends in a record bar and knows the short walk to one from Berners Street, and Lucy will take a clear night up to Primrose Hill to point out Jupiter. Laura and Tina both sit in our toned and athletic edit, and Nancy is one of our four blondes.