Waterloo Station - safe at night?
 

We are planning to go to Paris for the day and the train leaves at 5:30 am and gets back 10:30 pm. These were the best priced tickets for our desired date of travel. We plan to take a cab to and from the station from our hotel located on the Aldwych. Is it safe to grab a cab from Waterloo Station at 10:30 pm? Thank you.

Of course it would. It would be equally safe to take the short walk across the Hungerford Bridge (what is its new name?) to your hotel. There will be lots of people around, what with Festival Hall and National Theatre events ending around that time, and people leaving west end theatres and cinemas and heading to Waterloo to catch trains.

Thank you for your quick response, Ron. I thought it would be, too, but this being our first trip to London, I wanted to be sure. Thanks again.

Did this same exact thing a couple of years ago. Eurostar to Paris, with late return the same night. We even went to so far as to take the tube back to Gloucester Road station. I was a little worried about the tube at that time of night, but was actually pleasantly surprised that the other passengers were more "up-scale" than other times. Seemed like more dressier, younger crowd on their way to clubbing for the night. Didn't get into Gloucester Station unti around 11 PM. Lots of people on the street even at that time of night.

It's undoubtedly safe, but unless you've got a lot of bags, cabbing this journey really is pretty pointless.

The walk to the Aldwych across Waterloo bridge is a couple of hundred yards. And the view up- and downstream at night is really splendid. Best of all, night's the time it's difficult to see the South Bank complex.

Hungerford Bridge - which They think we should call the Golden Jubilee bridges, but no-one does - is probably a bit of a roudabout way of getting there. Actually, most of us call it Charing Cross bridge anyway.

Thanks for the question and the replies. I will be doing approximately the same trip from about the same place (nr. Savoy).

It can be a minor pain negotiating your way from Waterloo Station to Waterloo Bridge, which would be the direct way to Aldwych - you either have to skirt the roundabout on the surface or go through the underpasses past the IMAX cinema. An option is to get a bus from the stops on Waterloo Road.

www.tfl.gov.uk has maps of bus routes - look for the 'spider' map of buses from Waterloo.