King's Cross for a night out: the zone, the way home and the 1990s clubs

What zone is King's Cross?

Zone 1. TfL puts King's Cross station, King's Cross St. Pancras Underground station and St Pancras International all in Zone 1 [1]. The Underground station serves the Circle, Hammersmith & City, Metropolitan, Northern, Piccadilly and Victoria lines [1].

TfL's fare zones set what you pay to travel. MYSOVA's zones are a separate map: areas where a clock-in in the app earns a multiplier.

Why it is called King's Cross

The area was once called Battle Bridge, after an old crossing of the River Fleet [6]. Its present name comes from a monument to King George IV that stood from 1830 to 1845 at the crossroads of New Road (now Euston Road), Gray's Inn Road and Pentonville Road [6]. King's Cross station, designed by Lewis Cubitt, opened by that junction in 1852 [6].

Where the MYSOVA zone runs

The King's Cross zone covers 0.75 square kilometres, about 890 metres from west to east and 1,050 metres from south to north [3]. King's Cross station and the Underground station are inside it, and St Pancras International sits just beyond its western edge, about 60 to 110 metres out [1][3].

North of the stations, the zone stops short of the canal-side redevelopment. Granary Square is about 110 metres outside its edge, and Coal Drops Yard about 230 metres [3][7].

The zone crosses the boundary between two boroughs. Of the 20 venues on the map inside it, 10 are in Camden and 10 in Islington, by their nearest postcode, so two councils license them [8]. Neighbouring zones are separate: Clerkenwell's, at 1.3×, starts about 200 metres to the south-east, and Islington's, also 1.3×, about 400 metres east [3].

What kind of places are there?

MYSOVA gives each venue one category. Of the 20 venues inside the zone on MYSOVA's open-data map [4]:

All 20 are within about 530 metres of the Underground station, and 16 of them within 400 metres [1][4]. Treat the table as a sample, because the map only holds venues we can place from open data [4].

Another 15 venues on the map sit within 300 metres outside the zone's edge [3][4]. The server reads the zone from your phone's location when you clock in, so at those venues the 1.3× applies only if you are standing inside the boundary [9].

MYSOVA does not publish opening or licensing hours on its website. To find how late a venue may serve, see how London's licensing hours work.

The goods-yard clubs

In the 1990s the railway goods yard north of the stations held clubs [6][7]. Bagley's opened officially in 1991 in a warehouse built in 1851 to store coal, later used by the glass-bottle makers Bagley, Wild and Company. It held 2,500 people and was renamed Canvas in 2003 [7]. Next to it, in railway arches, The Cross opened in 1993. Billy Reilly and his brother Keith started it, and Keith later founded Fabric [7]. A smaller after-party venue, The Key, opened nearby [7].

Bagley's closed in January 2008 after a last New Year's Eve party, and The Cross on New Year's Day 2008, with the land due for redevelopment as part of King's Cross Central [6][7]. The coal drops reopened in October 2018 as Coal Drops Yard, a shopping complex designed by Thomas Heatherwick, and a walkway on the old railway viaduct is named Bagley Walk [7]. By their Wikidata points, Bagley's and The Cross stood about 150 to 220 metres north of today's zone edge [3][7].

The Scala

Inside the zone, the Scala on Pentonville Road began as a cinema [10]. It was built to H Courtney Constantine's designs, was used to make aircraft parts during the First World War while still unfinished, and opened in April 1920 as the King's Cross Cinema [10]. Iggy and the Stooges played there in the summer of 1972, and Mick Rock's photographs from that night became the sleeve of Raw Power [10]. From July 1981 it was the Scala Cinema, until the club that ran it went into receivership in 1993 after losing a court case over a screening of A Clockwork Orange [10]. It reopened in March 1999 as a club and live-music venue, with two extra floors [10].

Getting home

Night Tube. On Friday and Saturday nights the Victoria and Piccadilly lines run all night through King's Cross St. Pancras [2]. The Victoria line runs between Brixton and Walthamstow Central, through Euston, Oxford Circus and Victoria; the Piccadilly runs between Heathrow Terminal 5 and Cockfosters, through Covent Garden, Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus and South Kensington [2]. The Northern line also stops at King's Cross St. Pancras, but its night trains run by the Charing Cross branch instead; the nearest night stop on it is Euston, one stop away on the Victoria line [2]. Night fares are off-peak, and a Day Travelcard covers journeys that start before 04:30 the next day [2].

Night buses. Six routes have a timetabled bus in every hour from 01:00 to 04:59, on all seven nights and in both directions, from stops within about 450 metres of the zone's centre [5]:

Routes 214 and 390 run around the clock; the four N routes run only at night [5]. TfL's website shows when the next bus is due at your stop [11].

Cabs. Hail only a black cab, and book any minicab in an app, by phone or at the operator's office. TfL calls an unbooked minicab illegal and uninsured for passengers [11]. Our Soho guide sets out the rest of TfL's rules.

King's Cross on MYSOVA

MYSOVA is a London social passport: clock in at bars, pubs and clubs, earn XP and meet people where you go. King's Cross's zone carries 1.3×, level with Bermondsey, Clerkenwell, Islington and Peckham [3]. At most venues a clock-in on the Free plan starts from 25 XP; the zone makes it 32.5, which the server rounds to 33. The paid Explorer (£7.99 a month) and Icon (£14.99 a month) plans multiply it again [9]. How clocking in and XP work covers the rest of the sum, the King's Cross zone page covers the zone, and the London nightlife map shows where it runs.

Your first clock-in starts your passport.

Free · UK App Store and Google Play · 18+

Sources

All fetched or read on 26 October 2026.

1. TfL Unified API, StopPoint?lat=51.53057&lon=-0.11944&radius=1200 for rail and Underground stations: fare zones, lines and positions for London King's Cross (910GKNGX), King's Cross St. Pancras Underground (940GZZLUKSX), London St Pancras International (910GSTPX, 910GSTPXBOX), Euston (940GZZLUEUS) and others. Distances in straight lines.
2. TfL Unified API, Line/{victoria,piccadilly,northern}/Route/Sequence/outbound?serviceTypes=Night and Line/Mode/tube,overground,elizabeth-line/Route?serviceTypes=Night; Transport for London, "The Night Tube": https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/tube/night-tube.
3. MYSOVA zones: the site's copy of the production zones table (id, multiplier, polygon), read on 21 October 2026. Area, extents and distances measured from the zone polygons, in straight lines.
4. MYSOVA open-data venue map, as published at /map-data/venues.json: 2,315 London venues placed from Overture Maps Places (CDLA-Permissive-2.0; Apache-2.0 for Foursquare; CC0-1.0 for AllThePlaces) and OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0), with the FSA Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (Open Government Licence v3.0) for outward postcodes. Categories are MYSOVA's own. Zone membership by point-in-polygon against source 3.
5. TfL Unified API: StopPoint?lat=51.53057&lon=-0.11944&radius=450&modes=bus (26 bus stops); Line/{route}/Route for each route's end stops; Line/{route}/Timetable/{stop} for each route's timetable at each of those stops.
6. Wikipedia, "King's Cross, London" (revision 1378852165, 6 October 2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Cross,_London.
7. Wikipedia, "Bagley's" (revision 1359013362), "The Cross (nightclub)" (revision 1366957728) and "Coal Drops Yard" (revision 1375383980): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagley%27s, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cross_(nightclub), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Drops_Yard. Positions from Wikidata (CC0): Q137653660, Q60749714, Q60750384 and Q5594142 (Granary Square).
8. postcodes.io, reverse geocoding of each venue point to its nearest postcode and that postcode's local authority.
9. The MYSOVA app's source at origin/main (585ae04cc): secure_checkin_v2_core_streak and quote_checkin_xp_v1 (supabase/migrations/20260729180000_event_bonus_display_tier.sql) for the zone lookup from your location, the 25 XP venue line, the rounding and the plan multipliers; plan prices from the shared tier constants.
10. Scala, "Building History": https://scala.co.uk/about/building-history/; Wikipedia, "Scala (club)" (revision 1372228782): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scala_(club).
11. Transport for London, "Safer travel at night": https://tfl.gov.uk/travel-information/your-safety-and-security/safer-travel-at-night.

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