If you love Marylebone: London’s neighbourhoods and their international twins

Seven London neighbourhoods, from Marylebone to the South Bank, each paired with the districts in our other city guides that share its mood, its streets and its reasons to linger.

Every great city has a neighbourhood that feels like home the moment you arrive. If yours is Marylebone, Soho or Notting Hill, our other guides know where to find its twin abroad: a district with the same mood, the same kind of streets and the same reasons to linger.

Each pairing below comes from our own guides to those cities. Read what the two places share, then follow the links to each guide’s page for the area. No two neighbourhoods are alike, and that is part of the pleasure: the twin is a way into a new city, not a copy of an old one.

Marylebone

Marylebone grew up around the old village of St Marylebone, and its high street still keeps a village feel: independent shops, cafés and Daunt Books, with the Wallace Collection and Wigmore Hall for art and music. Its twins are neighbourhoods where people live as well as visit.

Gràcia, in Barcelona, was once a separate town and still feels like one: narrow streets open onto squares such as the Plaça del Sol, the neighbourhood’s living rooms, with independent shops and Gaudí’s Casa Vicens in the lanes. Visit Park Güell in the late afternoon, then come down into Gràcia for dinner.

Chamberí, in Madrid, is a residential district of 19th- and early-20th-century apartment buildings, with café terraces around the Plaza de Olavide and the Sorolla annexe on Calle de Zurbano. Its MICHELIN tables fill with locals, so book ahead.

Prenzlauer Berg, north of Mitte in Berlin, has restored 19th-century apartment buildings, leafy squares such as Kollwitzplatz and wide streets of cafés along Kastanienallee and Oderberger Strasse. Take the U2 to Eberswalder Strasse and walk.

Soho

Soho was home to French Huguenot refugees from the 17th century, then to Italian, Greek and other communities whose delis, cafés and restaurants gave it its cosmopolitan character. Artists, writers and musicians followed, its jazz clubs and pubs became legendary, and it is still London’s liveliest district by day and by night.

Greenwich Village, in New York, is Soho’s jazz twin: the Village Vanguard, the Blue Note and Smalls present jazz every night, and the White Horse Tavern has been a writers’ bar for generations. Washington Square Park is its heart, with the bars of the East Village next door.

Malasaña and Chueca, either side of Calle de Fuencarral north of Madrid’s Gran Vía, are a quarter of independent shops, cafés and cocktail bars, from Café Comercial to Museo Chicote. Wander first, then book dinner in Chueca.

Beyoğlu, around the Galata Tower and İstiklal Avenue, gathers Istanbul’s meyhanes, rooftop bars, jazz and cafés, with the best hotels of the European quarter.

The Bairro Alto, below the 19th-century palaces of Lisbon’s Príncipe Real, is quiet by day and alive by night, the same switch Soho makes once the theatres empty.

Mayfair

Mayfair was laid out by the great estates, above all the Grosvenor family’s, as squares and streets of elegant houses. Bond Street, Savile Row and Burlington Arcade have stood for luxury for two centuries, beside Claridge’s, The Connaught and The Dorchester. Its twins are the grand quarters of their own cities.

The Golden Triangle, between the Champs-Élysées and the Seine, has the couture houses of the avenue Montaigne and Paris’s palace hotels, among them the George V, the Plaza Athénée and Le Bristol. Book lunch rather than dinner at its three-star tables.

The Quadrilatero della Moda is Milan’s fashion district, along the Via Montenapoleone and the Via della Spiga, with house museums such as the Poldi Pezzoli among the boutiques and the Four Seasons and the Grand Hotel et de Milan close at hand. Take coffee at Cova’s counter between shops.

Salamanca, laid out in the 19th century as a grid of broad streets, keeps Madrid’s luxury flagships on Serrano and Ortega y Gasset, its restaurants on Jorge Juan and a collector’s house, the Museo Lázaro Galdiano. Many of the best shops are in the side streets off Serrano.

The Upper East Side, in New York, has Madison Avenue for its shopping, the Carlyle, the Mark and the Lowell for its hotels, and the Met, the Frick and the Guggenheim along Fifth Avenue.

Notting Hill

Notting Hill was built in the mid-19th century as stucco terraces around private communal gardens. Portobello Road’s market is famous for its Saturday antiques, the Carnival fills the streets each August Bank Holiday weekend, and Holland Park, to the south, has the Kyoto Garden and Victorian artists’ studio-houses.

The Jordaan, west of Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht, is a grid of small canals and lanes, almshouse courtyards and markets: the Noordermarkt, apple pie at Winkel 43 and the brown cafés ’t Smalle and ’t Papeneiland. Book the Anne Frank House, on its edge, six weeks ahead.

The twin is a way into a new city, not a copy of an old one.

Roma, in Mexico City, lines Álvaro Obregón and Colima with Belle Époque mansions and Art Nouveau houses, with bakeries, mezcal bars and galleries between them. Rosetta, Máximo and Expendio de Maíz hold MICHELIN stars.

Palermo, in Buenos Aires, pairs a great park with low streets of designers: the Bosques de Palermo and a Japanese Garden, to set beside Holland Park’s Kyoto Garden, and in Palermo Soho the designers, cafés and bars.

Shoreditch and Spitalfields

Huguenot silk weavers built the tall Georgian houses of Spitalfields in the late 17th century. Next door, Shoreditch was a district of furniture workshops and warehouses that became a centre of art, nightlife and technology from the 1990s, with street art on its walls and markets from Spitalfields to Columbia Road.

Wynwood’s warehouses, north of downtown Miami, once formed one of the largest garment districts in the United States. When the factories closed, galleries moved in, and since 2009 the Wynwood Walls have made its street art one of Miami’s great sights.

Woodstock and Salt River, just east of central Cape Town, are old industrial neighbourhoods where design studios, galleries and restaurants have moved into the warehouses. The Old Biscuit Mill on Albert Road is the heart of it, with its Saturday market; go by day and keep to the busy streets around it.

Poblenou was Barcelona’s industrial district. Its old factories, many with their chimneys kept, now hold the studios and offices of the 22@ district, and the Rambla del Poblenou runs down to the quieter beaches of Bogatell and Mar Bella.

Chelsea and the King’s Road

Chelsea was a riverside village of artists and writers: J.M.W. Turner and James McNeill Whistler worked along Cheyne Walk, and Thomas Carlyle lived nearby. In the 1960s and 1970s the King’s Road made it the centre of London fashion, from Mary Quant’s boutique to Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s shop at World’s End.

Saint-Germain-des-Prés, on the Left Bank in Paris, grew up around its abbey church. Its literary cafés, the Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, face Brasserie Lipp on the boulevard Saint-Germain, and Le Bon Marché leads its shopping.

Brera is Milan’s old artists’ quarter, its lanes, the Via Fiori Chiari among them, full of galleries, shops and small restaurants around the Pinacoteca. Come back in the evening, when the lanes fill for the aperitivo.

Montmartre is the hill of the Sacré-Cœur and of the painters who lived in its lanes, as Chelsea’s riverside was Turner’s and Whistler’s. Arrive by the Abbesses metro and climb.

The South Bank and Bankside

In 1951 the Festival of Britain transformed a bomb-damaged stretch of the Thames; its Royal Festival Hall became the heart of the Southbank Centre, joined by the National Theatre, the Hayward Gallery and the BFI. Further east, the old Bankside Power Station became Tate Modern in 2000.

Karaköy, where the Golden Horn meets the Bosphorus, was Istanbul’s port and banking quarter. Reborn, it has galleries in old banks, restaurants in old warehouses and Renzo Piano’s Istanbul Modern at the edge of the Galataport promenade.

Noord, across the IJ from Amsterdam’s Centraal Station by ferry, has the Eye Filmmuseum and A’DAM Lookout on the waterfront and the old NDSM shipyard further west, while the Muziekgebouw and the BIMHUIS face the water from the other bank.

West Kowloon, in Hong Kong, sets M+, the Hong Kong Palace Museum and the Xiqu Centre on the waterfront, and the ICC, the city’s tallest building, stands in the same district.

Our advice: use the twins as a way in. On your first night in a new city, stay or dine in the twin of the London neighbourhood you love, then explore outwards from there.