Covent Garden Chauffeur Service

From Long Acre and Seven Dials down to the Strand runs Covent Garden, the market building and the piazza sitting at its centre with the opera house on Bow Street alongside. Few parts of central London are genuinely busy at every hour; this is one, and the theatres along Drury Lane, Aldwych and the Strand keep it so until well past eleven. Passengers are mostly here for a performance, for dinner beforehand, or for both in a tightly timed sequence.

Pedestrianised as the piazza is, the streets around it run narrow, heavily loaded and blocked more often than not by deliveries. Practical set-downs come from Wellington Street, Tavistock Street and Bow Street, while Southampton Street drops towards the Strand where a car can pull in. On a performance night, keep away from the streets immediately round the opera house at curtain-down, so we take up position on the Strand or Kingsway side instead. Covent Garden lies inside the congestion charge zone.

The reasons for coming here are unusually specific: the opera house on Bow Street, the theatres of Drury Lane and the Aldwych, dinner beforehand somewhere in the streets round Seven Dials, and by day the shops of Floral Street, Neal Street and Monmouth Street. Curtain-up allows no negotiation, so we build the journey backwards from it rather than forwards from your front door, with an allowance made for the Strand misbehaving on the night.

Leaving afterwards is what catches people out. Once a performance ends, the Strand and Aldwych clear slowly, so we route east towards the City or north by way of Kingsway, whichever your destination favours. Heathrow from Covent Garden generally takes 50 to 85 minutes, Gatwick 60 to 100. London City is near at hand, normally 30 to 55 minutes. St Pancras and the Eurostar sit ten to twenty minutes north, which suits an early continental departure nicely.