Everyone photographs Neal’s Yard. Far fewer people eat there – which is a mistake, because in the last year the courtyard has quietly turned into one of the better eating-and-drinking addresses in Covent Garden.
Neal’s Yard is a courtyard roughly the size of a tennis court, reached through two easily-missed alleys off Shorts Gardens and Monmouth Street in Covent Garden. The buildings around it are painted acid yellow, cobalt, hot pink and green, hung with window boxes and bicycles. It is, by some distance, the most photographed 30 square metres in the West End.
What gets lost in the photographs is that this courtyard was invented – deliberately, by one man, in 1976 – and that the businesses it spawned went on to become some of the most serious food names in Britain. Monmouth Coffee started here. So did Neal’s Yard Dairy, and Neal’s Yard Remedies. Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam had offices upstairs.
And the yard is changing again. In October 2025 St John moved its bakery across the courtyard into a two-floor site with a liquor licence, which means you can now sit in Neal’s Yard drinking St John rosé with oysters. That is not what Neal’s Yard was for in 1976. It’s very good all the same.
Two of the courtyard’s tenants, St John’s wine bar and 26 Grains, make our guide to the best breakfasts in London.
What to eat and drink in Neal’s Yard
Nine businesses trade around the courtyard. These are the ones worth planning around.
St John Neal’s Yard
6 Neal’s Yard, WC2H 9DP · stjohnrestaurant.com
St John had a tiny takeaway bakery hatch in the yard for years – famous for the custard doughnuts, permanently mobbed, nowhere to sit. In October 2025 it moved across the courtyard to number 6, into a space spread over two floors, and got a licence.
That changes the proposition entirely. The doughnuts and the bread are still there, but so are oysters, a short plate menu and St John’s own wines by the glass, and you can sit down with them. It is the single best reason to come to Neal’s Yard after dark now.
Come for the doughnut at eleven or the rosé at six. Both work. More of London’s best baking in our guide to the best bakeries in London.
Neal’s Yard Remedies
2 Neal’s Yard, WC2H 9DP · nealsyardremedies.com
The blue glass bottles you’ve seen in every bathroom in Britain started in this building. It opened here as Neal’s Yard Apothecary in 1981, and the flagship has never left the yard.
Inside, it’s part shop, part dispensary – loose dried herbs in jars behind the counter, practitioners who’ll actually talk you through what you’re buying rather than upselling a gift set. The therapy rooms next door do massage and facials, and they’re a genuine bolthole given what’s happening 200 metres away in Covent Garden Piazza.
If you’re after a proper treatment rather than a twenty-minute fix, our guide to the best massages in London has better options across town.
The Barbary
16 Neal’s Yard, WC2H 9DP · thebarbary.co.uk · walk-ins only at the counter
The Barbary is the reason a lot of Londoners come to Neal’s Yard at all. It’s a horseshoe counter seating around two dozen people, cooking food from the old Barbary Coast – North Africa, the Levant, Israel – over open fire, and it has been very hard to get into since it opened in 2016.
Order the naan – it comes off a rotating grill and arrives blistered – and the Jerusalem-style octopus. Sit at the corner of the horseshoe if you can; you get the whole kitchen.
It comes from Layo and Zoë Paskin, the team behind The Palomar, who also run Jacob the Angel a few doors down. Two of the yard’s best-known addresses belong to the same family.
Jacob the Angel
16½ Neal’s Yard, WC2H 9DP · jacobtheangel.co.uk
A narrow, dark-panelled coffee house from the Barbary team, opened in 2017 and named after a wine merchant’s sign. It does coffee properly, but the reason to queue is the babka – chocolate, dense, sold by the slab.
There are about six seats. Most people take it outside and sit on the yard’s steps, which is the correct approach in anything above 12 degrees.
More of the neighbourhood’s caffeine in our Covent Garden cafe guide.
26 Grains
1 Neal’s Yard, WC2H 9DP · 26grains.com
Porridge, done seriously, in a room the size of a generous shed. 26 Grains started as a market stall and has been in the yard since 2015, selling Scandi-leaning bowls of oats and grains with roasted rhubarb, nut butters and miso caramel.
It sounds like a gimmick and isn’t – it’s genuinely one of the best-value breakfasts in central London, and the lunch bowls have quietly become the better order.
Mornings are busy. Get there before nine or after eleven.
La Compagnie
8–10 Neal’s Yard, WC2H 9DP · compagniewinebar.com
Formerly Compagnie des Vins Surnaturels, now trading as La Compagnie under the Experimental Group – so if you’ve been before and the name looks wrong, that’s why.
It’s a proper wine bar: low light, a long list heavy on French growers, and staff who will find you something under £10 a glass if you ask them to. Small plates rather than dinner, though the cheese and charcuterie will do at a push.
The best seats are at the back. Our full list of the best wine bars in London has more in this vein.
Homeslice
13 Neal’s Yard, WC2H 9DP · homeslicepizza.co.uk
Twenty-inch pizzas, sold whole or by the slice, with toppings that range from plain margherita to the much-imitated salt beef and gherkin. It’s loud, it’s communal, and it is very good at what it does.
Worth knowing: Homeslice went through a company voluntary arrangement in 2025, closing its Marylebone site. Neal’s Yard survived and is one of two remaining branches – which makes it more of an institution than it was.
See how it stacks up in our guide to the best pizza in London.
Casanova & Daughters
Neal’s Yard, WC2H 9DP · casanovaanddaughters.com
A small Italian deli-counter operation doing focaccia sandwiches, cured meat and cheese to take away, plus a handful of stools. It’s the cheapest decent lunch in the yard and the queue at one o’clock proves the point.
Get the mortadella and pistachio. Eat it on the steps.
Walk In Backrub
9 Neal’s Yard, WC2H 9DP · walkinbackrub.co.uk
The most Neal’s Yard business in Neal’s Yard: no appointment, no oils, no spa music. You turn up, sit in a chair, and someone works on your back, neck and shoulders through your clothes for as long as you’ve paid for.
Fifteen or twenty minutes is enough to undo a morning of walking. It has been here for decades and it remains a much better idea than it sounds.
The £7,000 warehouse that started all of it
The yard takes its name from Thomas Neale, the 17th-century developer and Master of the Mint who carved up this patch of Covent Garden in the late 1600s – the same man responsible for the junction at Seven Dials, a two-minute walk away. For most of the three centuries after that, Neal’s Yard was working back-of-house: warehouses and yards serving the fruit and vegetable market.
Nicholas Saunders and the Whole Food Warehouse
By the mid-1970s the market had gone to Nine Elms and the courtyard was derelict and due for demolition. Nicholas Saunders – activist, author of Alternative London, a man whose whole project was showing people how to live well in the city without money – bought number 2 for £7,000.
It was a rat-infested former market warehouse. He wanted to live in it; the council said no. So he opened a bulk wholefood shop instead. Told he couldn’t do that either, he took legal advice, was told to build local support and force the council’s hand, and did exactly that. After three months of work the Whole Food Warehouse opened in November 1976 and did a roaring trade from the start.
What grew out of it
This is the part that actually matters. Saunders didn’t stop at one shop – he spun off a cluster of businesses under the Neal’s Yard name, and several of them outgrew the courtyard entirely:
- Monmouth Coffee Company – started in the yard in 1978, now one of the most influential coffee roasters in the country, with its shop round the corner on Monmouth Street.
- Neal’s Yard Dairy – opened 1979, now the name most responsible for the revival of British farmhouse cheese. Its Shorts Gardens shop is 30 seconds from the yard entrance, and it’s the first stop in our guide to the best cheese shops in London.
- Neal’s Yard Apothecary – which became Neal’s Yard Remedies, and is still trading on the same spot.
- Neal’s Yard Bakery – the one that didn’t make it, though St John has more than filled the gap.
It’s a genuinely unusual legacy for a single derelict building. Three of the businesses you’d name if asked about British artisan food in the last fifty years came out of the same 1970s experiment in one small courtyard.
The Monty Python years
In 1976 – the same year Saunders opened the warehouse – Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam took offices at 11 Neal’s Yard. Python was between the television series and Life of Brian, and for a stretch of the late Seventies the yard was simultaneously London’s wholefood headquarters and the address where some of the funniest work in British comedy was being put together upstairs.
There’s no plaque. There is, however, a certain pleasure in standing in a courtyard full of people queuing for porridge and knowing that.
How to find Neal’s Yard (and when to go)
The two entrances are easy to walk past, which is half the charm. From Shorts Gardens, look for the narrow gap between Neal’s Yard Dairy and the building next door. From Monmouth Street, it’s an unmarked alley almost opposite Mercer Street. Neither looks like it leads anywhere.
- Nearest tube: Covent Garden (Piccadilly) is closest at three minutes; Leicester Square and Tottenham Court Road are both under ten.
- Best time for photographs: weekday mornings before 10am. The yard faces roughly east-west and the light lands on the yellow and pink walls early. By noon on a Saturday you will be queuing to stand still.
- Best time to actually enjoy it: around 6pm on a weekday, when the day-trippers have gone and St John and La Compagnie are getting going.
- Cost: nothing to walk in. It’s one of the better entries on our list of free things to do in London.
- Accessibility: both alleys are narrow but step-free, and the courtyard itself is flat. Several of the businesses have steps at the door.
One honest warning: it’s small. If you’ve built it up from photographs into a hidden district, you’ll be standing in the whole thing within fifteen seconds. Treat it as one stop on a Seven Dials wander rather than a destination in itself and it delivers every time.
What else is nearby
Neal’s Yard sits inside the best pocket of central London for aimless walking. Seven Dials and its seven radiating streets are 90 seconds away, with Seven Dials Market underneath. Phoenix Garden – the last surviving community garden from the Covent Garden campaigns of the 1970s, and a direct contemporary of Saunders’ project – is a five-minute walk behind the Phoenix Theatre.
For eating beyond the yard, our guide to the best restaurants in Covent Garden covers the wider neighbourhood, and there are another 30-odd ideas in things to do in Covent Garden. Further afield, Neal’s Yard turns up on our lists of London’s hidden gems, quirky and unusual things to do and – inevitably – the city’s most Instagrammable places, where we make the case for going early and going south instead.
And if you like the idea of a brilliant collection hidden behind an unremarkable door, the Petrie Museum is the same trick in Bloomsbury.
Neal’s Yard: practical information
- Address: Neal’s Yard, London WC2H 9DP
- Entrances: off Shorts Gardens and off Monmouth Street
- Nearest tube: Covent Garden (3 mins), Leicester Square (6 mins), Tottenham Court Road (8 mins)
- Opening hours: the courtyard is public and open at all times; individual businesses vary, with most trading roughly 8am–6pm and St John and La Compagnie running later
- Price: free to visit
The London x London Take: Go on a weekday morning before ten. The yard is small enough that six people with cameras make it feel crowded, the light comes over the rooftops and hits the yellow wall, and you can get a table at 26 Grains without queueing. Then come back at six for wine – almost nobody does, and that’s when it’s at its best.
