I have spent the better part of the last decade owning and operating bakeries, following a ten year stint as a travel blogger. It should therefore come as no surprise that I love bakeries, all things sweet, and take a particular interest in sourcing the best pastries on all of my travels. London is the best city in Europe to have this particular affliction.
This guide is organised by what you actually want to eat because in London, you really can have the best of everything. The city is a melting pot for culture and there is by no means a shortage of great bakeries on offer.
Last updated: August 2026
Contents
- The best bakeries in London overall
- The best croissants in London
- The best cinnamon buns in London
- The best sourdough bread in London
- The best pastel de nata in London
- The best hotel bakeries in London
- The best global and heritage bakeries in London
- Best for cake and celebration bakes
- Which London bakeries need pre-ordering
- How to plan a London bakery crawl
- Frequently asked questions
The best bakeries in London overall
Toad Bakery — Camberwell
Signature: cornbread croissant, “everything” croissant, saffron buns
Address: 44 Peckham Road, SE5 8PX · second site at St Paul’s House, Deptford High Street, SE8 4BX
Price: around £5 a pastry
Pre-order: no — bakes rotate and go straight from the oven, so go early
If you visit one bakery in London, this is it. Named London Bakery of the Year at the 2025 National Bakery Awards, and the single most-cited London bakery across every credible 2025–26 list. The cornbread croissant sounds like a gimmick and isn’t — the cornmeal changes the crumb, not just the flavour. Seating is limited and outdoors. It opened a second site in Deptford in June 2026, which is less busy.
It was called Frog Bakery until Adam Handling’s The Frog challenged the trademark.
The Dusty Knuckle — Dalston
Signature: potato sourdough, the cut-through focaccia sandwich, morning buns
Address: Abbot Street Car Park, E8 3DP · also 429 Green Lanes, N4 1HA
Pre-order: no, but weekend queues are real and the sandwiches sell out
Time Out’s best bakery in London for 2025, and a social enterprise that runs on-the-job training and mentorship for at-risk young people — which is the sort of thing that usually comes at the expense of the product and here doesn’t.
Pophams — Islington, London Fields, Victoria Park
Signature: the maple and bacon pastry
Address: 19 Prebend St, N1 8PF · 197 Richmond Road, E8 3NJ · 110A Lauriston Road, E9 7HA
Hours: Mon–Fri 7:30–4, Sat 8–4, Sun 8:30–4
Ranked first by The Infatuation. The maple and bacon is the one everyone photographs, and it earns it — the lamination holds up under a wet topping, which is technically much harder than it looks.
August Bakery — Battersea
Signature: miso sesame sourdough, kouign amann, ham-cheese-fennel swirl
Address: 4–6a Battersea Rise, SW11 1ED
Hours: Tue–Fri 7:30–16:00, Sat–Sun 8–16, closed Monday
Opened in 2025 by a husband-and-wife team and named the best artisan bakery in Britain in British Baker’s Bakers’ Dozen 2026. The best new opening in London and still, for now, gettable without a queue.
Chatsworth Bakehouse — Crystal Palace
Signature: stacked focaccia sandwiches, malted-milk maritozzi, grandma slices
Address: 116 Anerley Road (walk-in) and 120a Anerley Road (collections)
Hours: Wed–Fri 12:30–16:00, Sat 11–16
Pre-order: essential — order at order.chatsworthbakehouse.com, they sell out routinely
Third in Britain on British Baker’s 2026 list. Read the hours twice: this is an afternoon bakery, closed Sunday to Tuesday, and turning up on spec on a Saturday without an order is how people end up disappointed.
Quince Bakery — Islington
Signature: the brown butter bun, strawberry jammy dodgers, pies
Address: 267 New North Road, N1 7AA
Anna Higham, formerly head pastry chef at Lyle’s and Flor, which is the strongest chef pedigree of any independent bakery in the city. If you care about how something is made rather than how it photographs, come here, especially for the quintessential British classics.
Toklas Bakery — Temple
Signature: sweet and savoury escargots, Roman-style flatbread sandwiches
Address: 9 Surrey Street, WC2R 2ND
Hours: Mon–Fri 8–17, Sat 9–16, Sun 9–15
Pre-order: Saturday collections close Tuesday evening
Heritage-grain sourdough, Assembly coffee, and flatbread sandwiches from 11am. One of very few genuinely good bakeries in the middle of town rather than a bus ride out.
The best cinnamon buns in London
Fred — Oxford Circus
Signature: cinnamon buns baked fresh through the day; tiramisu and pistachio buns
Address: 52–53 Margaret Street, W1W 8SQ
Opened January 2026 and straight into the Good Food Guide’s London top ten. The important detail is baked throughout the day rather than once at 6am — a cinnamon bun four hours out of the oven is a different and much worse object. This is also the single most useful entry in this guide if you’re a visitor staying centrally.
Bageriet — Covent Garden
Signature: krämbulle, the cardamom cream bun; prinsesstårta
Address: 24 Rose Street, WC2E 9EA
Swedish, tiny, baked downstairs daily, and named the best Nordic bakery in London by Vittles. Closes for a summer holiday — check before travelling.
Bunhead Bakery — Herne Hill
Signature: rose and cardamom swirls, the knafeh bun
Address: 145 Dulwich Road, SE24 0NG
Hours: Thu–Fri 9–16, Sat–Sun 10–16 — and in their own words, “we close when we sell out, which is usually sooner rather than later”
Opposite Brockwell Park, ramp access, dog-friendly. Go before noon for the best chance to secure the goods (they sell out fast).
Buns from Home — Notting Hill and 20+ others
Signature: the croissant bun — cinnamon, cardamom, pistachio
Started in a mother’s kitchen in the first 2020 lockdown and is now a 21-site chain built almost entirely on one product. Most sites have no seating. It’s a genuinely impressive piece of specialisation, and the cardamom is the one to get.
The best sourdough bread in London
E5 Bakehouse — London Fields
Signature: Hackney Wild sourdough; heritage-flour croissants
Address: Arches 395–397 Mentmore Terrace, E8 3PH · Poplar Bakehouse, 8a Cotall Street, E14 6TL · e5 Storehouse at V&A East, Parkes Street, E20 3AX
Hours: Mon–Fri 7:30–17:00, Sat–Sun 8–17
Hackney Wild is one of the loaves that taught London what sourdough was supposed to be, and it’s still excellent. The new V&A East Storehouse site stays open until 10pm on Thursdays and Saturdays, which makes it the only late-opening good bakery in the city. [YOUR NOTE]
Maya’s Bakehouse — Tulse Hill
Signature: jalapeño, chilli and cheddar sourdough
Address: 37 Tulse Hill, SW2 2TJ
An all-female takeaway bakehouse named among the Telegraph’s top three in Britain in April 2026.
Sourdough Sophia — seven London shops
Address: Crouch End N8 8PR · Covent Garden, 16 Neal’s Yard WC2H 9DP · Essex Road N1 2SN · Highgate N6 6JS · Hampstead NW3 1QS · Primrose Hill NW1 8XL · Bermondsey SE16 4RP (Fri–Sat only)
The most convenient good sourdough in London — there is probably one near you and the owner, Sophia, is one of my favourite women bakers on the internet. She is incredibly deserving of all her success as a working mum whose passion for sourdough came to fruition through lockdowns.
The best pastel de nata in London
Santa Nata — Covent Garden, Borough, Battersea, Spitalfields
Signature: pastel de nata, baked through the day, cinnamon on top
Address: 7 New Row, WC2N 4LH (10:00–22:00 daily) · 17 Russell Street · Borough Market, 19 Dirty Lane · Battersea Power Station, Turbine Hall A · Spitalfields Market
Still the best in London for the thing it does, and it has expanded considerably since I first wrote this guide. New Row is open until 10pm, which makes it a rare after-dinner option. Eat it standing up, within a minute of it being handed to you — a nata that has sat for an hour is a tart, not a nata. [YOUR NOTE]
The best hotel bakeries in London
Hotel bakeries have replaced hotel bars as London’s prestige format, which is either a sign of a maturing food city or of what social media has done to all of us.
Claridge’s Bakery — Mayfair
Signature: jammie dodger tarts, Belgian buns, lardy cake, Marmite cheese straws
Address: Brook’s Mews, W1K 4HR
Price: around £5 for savoury bites
Opened January 2026 with Richard Hart — founder of Hart Bageri in Copenhagen — behind it, doing British nostalgia baking at a level nobody has bothered to apply to it before. He won the Bakery Innovation Award at La Liste’s 2026 Pastry Awards. The French fancies are not a joke. [YOUR NOTE]
Le Café by Nicolas Rouzaud — Burlington Arcade
Signature: ham-and-egg brioche with fondue sauce; brioche à tête with raspberry crémeux
Opened January 2026 and won Pastry & Bakery Opening of the Year at La Liste’s 2026 awards — Time Out called it the world’s best new bakery. Rouzaud’s original café continues at The Connaught, Carlos Place, W1K 2AL, where the trio au chocolat is £17.
Cédric Grolet at The Berkeley — Knightsbridge
Signature: trompe-l’œil fruit pastries; the wagyu croissant
Address: Wilton Place, SW1X 7RL
Price: Goûtea afternoon tea £130pp, Fri–Sun
The most technically extraordinary pastry in London and the most extraordinary queue. Grolet has around 14 million Instagram followers and the line outside is a fixed London landmark. Worth doing once. Note they cannot accommodate dietary requirements.
The classic standout bakeries in London
St. JOHN Bakery — Bermondsey and Covent Garden
Signature: the custard doughnut; Eccles cakes
Address: Bakery Arch, 72 Druid Street, SE1 2HQ (Fri–Sun only) · 6 Neal’s Yard, WC2H 9DP · 180 Borough High Street, SE1 1LH
The custard doughnut is a piece of London culinary history and still one of the best things you can eat while in town. To be honest, I’ve never had anything here I haven’t liked or love – it’s an institution that has well and truly earned its reputation.
Bread Ahead — Borough Market and six others
Signature: the doughnuts; sourdough; the baking school
Address: Borough Market, SE1 9DE · Leicester Square, 20–21 Leicester Sq, WC2H 7JX · King’s Cross Square, N1C 9AL · Pavilion Road, SW1X 0BP · South Kensington, 5–7 Pelham St, SW7 2ND · Wembley, HA9 0NP · Bromley, BR1 1DN
Note: the Soho branch on Beak Street has closed — if you’ve read an older version of this guide, including mine, that’s the correction. The Borough Market baking school has run since 2014 and is the best half-day you can spend in London if you want to learn to make bread properly.
Best for cake and celebration bakes
Included with a caveat: these are cake shops and cupcake specialists rather than bakeries in the craft sense, and none appears on a current critics’ list. If you want a beautiful cake or a photograph, they deliver. If you want the best pastry in London, everything above this section is better.
Peggy Porschen — Belgravia
Address: 116 Ebury Street, SW1W 9QQ · Mon–Thu 8:30–17:30, Fri–Sun 8:30–18:00
The pink corner shop that launched ten thousand identical photographs. The Chelsea branch closed in 2024, so Belgravia is the only site. Go for the sugar cookies and the front door, and know what you’re paying for.
Crumbs & Doilies — Carnaby
Address: 1 Kingly Court, W1B 5PW
Cupcake Jemma’s shop, with rotating flavours. Many moons ago I’d watch her Youtube videos regularly and aspire to one day own a bakery, so I still love stopping by whenever I’m in Soho for a dose of nostalgia. The cornflake brownie is a standout.
The Hummingbird Bakery — Notting Hill and South Kensington
Address: 133 Portobello Road · 47 Old Brompton Road
The brand that brought American cupcakes to London in 2004. Nostalgic, reliable, no longer surprising but still a tasty pitstop!
