London/Chinatown

London's Chinatown is centrally located in Westminster, and is centred along and around Gerrard Street, spreading into Wardour Street at one end and Newport Place at the other. Chinatown is part of London's colourful West End, along with Covent Garden, Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus and other nearby districts. London's China town falls far, far short of San Francisco or Vancouver's China towns.

Get in

By Tube

Chinatown is a short walk from either of two main West End Underground stations:

• Piccadilly Circus (Piccadilly and Bakerloo Lines) - walk east along Shaftesbury Avenue, before turning right at Wardour Street - watch for the ornamental gates...
• Leicester Square (Piccadilly and Northern Lines)

See

The main sights to see in London's Chinatown are the expressions of Chinese culture and the Eastern ambience, and for a good Chinese meal. There are few souvenir shops for tourists, and no museums or temples. The shops of Chinatown primarily exist to serve the city's Chinese community.

However, the area does incorporates some entertaining combinations of British and Chinese culture - such as the phone booths with pagoda-style sloping roofs. The three ornamental Chinese arches or paifang - at each end of Gerrard Street, and at the entrance to Macclesfield Street - are also worth a look.

Do

The Chinese New Year festival in London is worth seeing, though Gerrard Street can get unbelievably crowded, as the dragon dancers pass along the street to collect goodies hung from windows above the shops. In recent years, the festival has expanded south into Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square to try to alleviate the congestion.

Eat

While London's Chinatown boasts some of the city's best Chinese food, quality and value vary enormously between individual restaurants. While some consistently win awards, others seem to be regularly being refurbished following visits from the local Environmental Health department. Unless you're on an extreme budget, it's worth paying a little more for quality food and service. Be careful especially with the common "all you can eat" deals...

• Lee Ho Fook, 15-16 Gerrard Street, tel 020 7492 1200 - the best known restaurant in Chinatown, as immortalised in Warren Zevon's song Werewolves of London. The restaurant plays on this tiny crumb of fame, displaying a much-faded image of the singer in its window. Meals here are relatively costly by local standards, and generally not reported to be outstandingly good.

• The Friendly Inn =>, 47 Gerrard Street, tel 020 7437 4170 -offers cheaper fare on the southern side of Gerrard Street. The restaurant lives up to its name with very enthusiastic serving staff, but unless you stick to the set menus, the cost of the meal can soon increase.

• China China, 3 Gerrard Street, tel 020 7439 7502 - at the budget end of the scale, China China at the eastern end of the north side of Gerrard Street offers Hong Kong diner style meals of cold meat on hot rice for around £3 to £5 for a generous portion.

• Wong Kei, 41-43 Wardour Street (opposite the western end of Gerrard Street), tel 020 7437 3071 - a popular choice for visitors and possibly the best value Chinese restaurant in the area. Spread across four floors, this restaurant is infamous for its surly, abrupt service. Depending on how drunk you look, the higher up the building you will be sent. Chinese tea is complimentary, though somewhat bland. Set meals present excellent value for money, most being under £5 - the sweet and sour pork is remarkably good.

• Tokyo, 2 Newport Place is a great Japanese restaurant, very cheap and just off Leicester Square. Near the Prince Charles Cinema. Opens 12-12 365 days a year.

• If you don't want Chinese food, but still yearn for something oriental, Tokyo Diner on Newport Place, at the eastern end of Wardour Street offers excellent and well-priced Japanese food - around £7-£9 for a main course.

Drink

There are relatively few places to drink in Chinatown itself. Visitors would do better to head north, further into Soho, for a better selection of bars and pubs. However, if your legs are weary, there are a number of convenient drinking places:

• brb in the centre of the south side of Gerrard Street, which is generally busy with trendy wannabes, and is reportedly slow to serve.

• Waxy's O'Connells on Wardour Street, is an Irish themed pub with a fibreglass tree inside it. It is almost invariably unbearably crowded. The smaller Waxy's Little Sister opposite it, however, is generally quieter and more relaxed.

• De Hems on Macclesfield Street (leads north from halfway along Gerrard Street) is a Dutch-themed pub with an excellent selection of beers. It is often crowded, but has a good atmosphere and a comedy club.

External links

The website of the UK Chinese community is located at: http://www.chinatown-online.co.uk/

This text of this article is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0. It has been slightly modified to fit the general design of this website. The authors of this document are Anonymous user(s) of Wikitravel, Evan Prodromou, sheridan, keith bassingthwaighte and the following WikiTravel users: Hkpatv, Huttite, MykReeve, Nzpcmad, Pjamescowie, Steeev. The original version of this article can be seen at http://wikitravel.org/en/London/Chinatown.