Pubs with Rooms in Soho and the West End

Soho is a tight grid of narrow streets between Oxford Street, Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road, and it is built for evenings — theatres, live music, restaurants and bars, all within a few minutes of each other. The Spice of Life sits at Cambridge Circus right beside the Palace Theatre, a pub with a folk-club past that added twelve boutique rooms upstairs from early 2025. Covent Garden and Leicester Square are both within walking distance, which is most of the appeal.

North of Oxford Street the West End changes pace. Fitzrovia is quieter and more residential, with Georgian squares, Charlotte Street’s restaurants and the BT Tower overhead, and two older pubs have turned their upper floors into bedrooms: the Kings Arms, which dates from 1759, and the Grafton Arms, licensed in 1792 and now serving Pan-Asian food. The Kings Arms is within walking distance of Oxford Street and Regent’s Park, and the Grafton Arms says the British Museum is a short walk.

Staying above a working bar in the middle of London comes with trade-offs the big hotels don’t have: small rooms, stairs, and some noise from the bar and the street. In return you get a proper pub downstairs and a postcode that puts the whole of the West End on foot. None of the three publishes a room price in the places we checked, so ask the pub directly or check the dates on its booking page.

Soho’s reputation is built on drink. After the war the district had hundreds of afternoon drinking clubs, among them the Colony Room, which Muriel Belcher opened in 1948 with a private-club licence that let it pour from 3pm to 11pm, when pubs had to shut at 2.30pm; Francis Bacon was a founder-member and Lucian Freud and Jeffrey Bernard were regulars. Just north, the Fitzroy Tavern is widely credited with giving Fitzrovia its name, and its roll of bohemian regulars, Dylan Thomas, Augustus John and Nina Hamnett among them, is repeated in most guides, though the individual anecdotes are mostly pub lore. Further back, the 1854 cholera outbreak around the Broad Street pump, traced by Dr John Snow, is the district’s best-documented story. None of our three pubs has a famous drinking record of its own beyond what is told on their pages, but all three sit inside these streets.