One street, three names, about forty minutes
There is a single line across the middle of Central London that almost everything else hangs from. It starts at Marble Arch, where Park Lane and the Edgware Road meet the top of Hyde Park, runs the length of Oxford Street to Centre Point, becomes New Oxford Street for a short and slightly forgotten stretch, and then turns into High Holborn and carries on to Chancery Lane. Underneath the whole of it, a few storeys down, runs the Central line, calling at six stations: Marble Arch, Bond Street, Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road, Holborn and Chancery Lane.
At an unhurried evening pace, the kind two people manage while talking, the walk end to end takes about forty minutes, and nearer fifty on a Saturday afternoon or in the weeks before Christmas. The train covers the same distance in around ten, but nobody travels only the train. There is the descent to the platform, the wait, the ride and the climb back to the street, and on short hops those extra minutes decide everything. The figures below are the desk's working estimates, leg by leg, and they are the ones it uses when it tells you how long an arrival will take.
Marble Arch to Bond Street: walk it
About eight minutes on foot. The western end of Oxford Street has the widest pavements on the whole route, and the only real landmark is Selfridges, which fills a whole block on the north side between the two stations. Marylebone lies to the left as you walk east and Mayfair to the right, and the side streets into both are short and quiet.
By train, the same hop means escalators down at Marble Arch, a wait, a ride of a couple of minutes and a long walk out at Bond Street, which has been rebuilt and is much larger underground than it looks from the pavement. Door to door it rarely comes in under ten minutes. On this leg, feet win.
Bond Street to Oxford Circus: the crowded stretch
Seven or eight minutes on foot in the evening, and considerably more on a busy weekend afternoon, when this is among the most crowded pavements in the country. Oxford Circus itself has the diagonal crossing that lets you cut straight across the junction, and it helps, but the pavements either side are where the time goes.
The train is not a clean answer either. Oxford Circus is one of the busiest stations on the network, and at its peaks the entrances are sometimes held shut for a few minutes while the platforms clear. There is a better trick: from Bond Street the Elizabeth line runs straight to Tottenham Court Road in a couple of minutes and does not stop at Oxford Circus at all. For anyone going beyond Oxford Circus, that skip is worth more than anything else on this page.
Oxford Circus to Tottenham Court Road: where the train starts to win
This is the longest leg, around ten minutes on foot, with Fitzrovia to the north and Soho to the south. After the shops close it thins out quickly and becomes a pleasant walk, but it is still ten minutes, and the Central line does it in two. Once your journey stretches across two legs or more, the train takes the lead and keeps it.
Tottenham Court Road is the hinge of the whole route. It is rebuilt and step free, with Elizabeth line platforms alongside the Central and Northern, and the new entrances bring you up almost at the foot of Centre Point. If a companion is travelling to you from the west of the zone, this is very often the station she comes up at.
New Oxford Street and High Holborn: feet win again
From Tottenham Court Road to Holborn is about nine minutes along New Oxford Street, with Bloomsbury and the British Museum a few minutes to the north. It is a calm stretch in the evening, wider than it is busy, and the train barely beats it, because the platforms at Holborn are deep and the escalators are long. Unless you are carrying something heavy, walk.
The last leg, Holborn to Chancery Lane, is six or seven minutes along High Holborn, past the carriage archway at WC1V 7EN and on towards the Tudor timber frontage of Staple Inn, which stands a few steps from Chancery Lane station and is the oldest looking thing on the entire route. Nobody should take the train for this one. The time spent going down and coming back up is longer than the walk.
What the timings mean for an arrival
The desk uses exactly this arithmetic when it quotes a minute rather than a window. If your hotel is one leg from where she starts, she will usually walk, because walking is predictable to the minute in a way the train is not. Two or more legs, and she takes the train and walks the end of it. That is why the arrival time in your confirmation sometimes looks oddly specific. It has been worked out from a real route, not rounded up from a guess.
It is also why the building matters more than the district. A room at the Chancery Lane end of High Holborn and a room near Bloomsbury Square are both loosely Holborn, and they are twelve minutes apart on foot. Hotel and flat arrivals run to the minute across the whole of this line, from £250 for the hour. If you are arriving with luggage rather than leaving with it, the note on step free stations in Zone One covers which of these six will take a suitcase without a stair.
Company that likes the walk
Some of the women on the list would rather walk the length of this route than take the train for any of it. Tina runs, boxes and will suggest a midnight walk and mean it. Nora cycles and climbs, reads architecture for pleasure, and turns the stretch past Staple Inn into a better tour than the guidebooks manage. Laura runs along the river most mornings and walks at a pace that makes forty minutes feel like twenty.
All three sit among the toned names on the index. Say in your message that you would like to walk part of the evening and the desk will suggest whoever enjoys it most, and whoever starts nearest the end of the line you are on.
Cross filed: most of the names in this piece also sit under toned and athletic in the the index.