Notting Hill for a night out: the pubs, the bars and the way home

What zone is Notting Hill?

Zones 1 and 2. Three Underground stations serve the area [1]:

Westbourne Park and Latimer Road, also in Zone 2 on the Circle and Hammersmith & City lines, sit about 260 and 330 metres outside the zone [1][3].

The names have moved. Ladbroke Grove station opened in 1864 as Notting Hill. It was renamed Notting Hill & Ladbroke Grove in 1880, Ladbroke Grove (North Kensington) in 1919 and Ladbroke Grove in 1938, to avoid confusion with Notting Hill Gate, which opened in 1868 [6][7].

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 Notting Hill

Nobody is sure. An early form of the name, Knottynghull, appears in the Patent Rolls of 1356, and the first part is now thought likely to come from a Saxon personal name, Cnotta [8]. The hill itself is still there: its summit is on Ladbroke Grove, at the junction with Kensington Park Gardens [8].

Where the MYSOVA zone runs

The Notting Hill zone covers 1.6 square kilometres, about 1,070 metres from west to east and 1,720 metres from south to north [3]. Holland Park station sits inside it about 510 metres south of its centre, and Ladbroke Grove station about 130 metres inside its north-western edge [1][3].

All 12 venues on the map inside the zone lie within about 700 metres of Ladbroke Grove, Holland Park or Notting Hill Gate station, and 8 of them within 500 metres [1][4]. By their nearest postcode, 11 are in W11 and 1 in W8; 11 are in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and 1 in the City of Westminster [9]. Kensington's zone, also at 1.1×, starts about 180 metres to the south; the next nearest, Mayfair's, is about 3.1 kilometres away [3].

What kind of places are there?

MYSOVA gives each venue one category. Of the 12 venues inside the zone on the map [4]:

Pubs make up 7 of the 12. The map's two cocktail bars are Trailer Happiness and The Little Yellow Door, both about 480 metres from Ladbroke Grove station [1][4]. Treat the table as a sample, because the map only holds venues we can place from open data [4]. The app's own catalogue is a separate list, and a venue placed in the wrong category would shift these counts.

Another 10 venues on the map sit within 300 metres outside the zone's edge, 7 of them pubs [3][4]. The Sun In Splendour is about 10 metres out. The server reads the zone from your phone's location when you clock in, so at venues just outside, the 1.1× applies only if you are standing inside the boundary [13].

This post gives no opening hours, so check with the venue before you go. To find how late a venue may serve, and how Kensington and Chelsea's licensing policy sets hours, see how London's licensing hours work. The Notting Hill zone page lists venues by name, and the London nightlife map shows where the zone runs.

The Tabernacle

The zone's live-music venue on the map is The Tabernacle on Powis Square, about 590 metres from Ladbroke Grove station [1][4]. It was built in 1887 as a church and is a Grade II listed building [10]. It became a community arts centre in the 1970s, carnival committees used it in the weeks before the Notting Hill Carnival, and in the 1990s The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd rehearsed there [10]. It reopened in 1998 after a £4 million refurbishment, with a new hall, studios, an art gallery and a bar [10].

Just outside the zone

Two more venues sit about 250 metres beyond the zone's south-eastern edge, near Notting Hill Gate station [3][4]. The Notting Hill Arts Club, on Notting Hill Gate itself, is a music and arts venue with a capacity of 218 [11]. The Churchill Arms, on Kensington Church Street, is managed by Fuller's; there has been a pub on its site since 1824, when it opened as the Bedford Arms [12].

Getting home

Night Tube. On Friday and Saturday nights the Central line runs all night between Ealing Broadway and Hainault or Loughton, and Holland Park and Notting Hill Gate are both on it [2]. Eastbound, the night trains call at Queensway, Marble Arch, Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road, Holborn, Bank and Liverpool Street on the way to Stratford; westbound, they run through Shepherd's Bush and White City to Ealing Broadway [2]. The Circle, District and Hammersmith & City lines are not on TfL's night network, so there is no all-night train from Ladbroke Grove [2]. Night fares are off-peak, and a Day Travelcard covers journeys that start before 04:30 the next day [2].

Night buses. TfL runs buses through the night on all seven nights, not only on Friday and Saturday [5][14]. Seven routes have a timetabled bus in every hour from 01:00 to 04:59, on all seven nights and in both directions, from stops inside the zone [5]:

Routes 23, 52, 94, 148 and 295 run around the clock; the N7 and N207 run only at night [5]. Three more night routes, the N27, N28 and N31, pass the same test at stops just outside the zone, by Notting Hill Gate station and on Chepstow Crescent, and all three also run through MYSOVA's Camden zone [3][5]. Journey Planner and the TfL Go app plan the trip, and TfL's website shows when the next bus is due at your stop [14].

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 [14]. Our Soho guide sets out the rest of TfL's rules.

Notting Hill on MYSOVA

MYSOVA is a London social passport: clock in at bars, pubs and clubs, earn XP and meet people where you go. Notting Hill's zone carries 1.1×, level with Canary Wharf and Kensington [3]. At most venues a clock-in on the Free plan starts from 25 XP; the zone makes it 27.5, which the server rounds to 28. The paid Explorer (£7.99 a month) and Icon (£14.99 a month) plans multiply it again [13]. How clocking in and XP work covers the rest of the sum, and Night Tube and night buses for 17 London areas covers the way home from the other zones.

Your first clock-in starts your passport.

Free · UK App Store and Google Play · 18+

Sources

All fetched or read on 3 November 2026, except the venue map, whose data is dated 20 October 2026, and the zones table, read on 21 October 2026.

1. TfL Unified API, StopPoint?lat=51.51173&lon=-0.20533&radius=2500&stopTypes=NaptanMetroStation,NaptanRailStation: fare zones, lines and positions for Ladbroke Grove (940GZZLULAD), Holland Park (940GZZLUHPK), Notting Hill Gate (940GZZLUNHG), Westbourne Park (940GZZLUWSP), Latimer Road (940GZZLULRD) and others. Distances in straight lines.
2. TfL Unified API, Line/central/Route/Sequence/outbound?serviceTypes=Night (the night calling pattern), the night requests for the Circle, District and Hammersmith & City lines, and Line/Mode/tube,overground,elizabeth-line,dlr/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 (data as of 20 October 2026): 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=51.51173&lon=-0.20533&radius=950&modes=bus (58 bus stops, 27 of them inside the zone); Line/{route}/Route for each route's end stops; Line/{route}/Timetable/{stop} for each route's timetable at each of those stops, in both directions.
6. Wikipedia, "Ladbroke Grove tube station" (revision 1364228849, 15 July 2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladbroke_Grove_tube_station.
7. Wikipedia, "Notting Hill Gate tube station" (revision 1360414536, 21 June 2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notting_Hill_Gate_tube_station.
8. Wikipedia, "Notting Hill" (revision 1374741900, 13 September 2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notting_Hill.
9. postcodes.io, reverse geocoding of each venue point to its nearest postcode and that postcode's local authority.
10. Wikipedia, "The Tabernacle, Notting Hill" (revision 1279962773, 11 March 2025): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tabernacle,_Notting_Hill.
11. Wikipedia, "Notting Hill Arts Club" (revision 1377008410, 27 September 2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notting_Hill_Arts_Club.
12. Wikipedia, "The Churchill Arms" (revision 1355683513, 23 May 2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Churchill_Arms.
13. The MYSOVA app's source at origin/main (195b072ea): 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.
14. Transport for London, "Safer travel at night": https://tfl.gov.uk/travel-information/your-safety-and-security/safer-travel-at-night.

Powered by TfL Open Data. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database rights 2016 and Geomni UK Map data © and database rights [2019]. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Venue data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence.