Moxy London Piccadilly Circus:
A Zone 1 Bargain Reviewed

There is a version of every London trip where you spend an hour on the train each way just to sleep somewhere you can afford, and a version where you fall out of a West End theatre, walk four minutes, and you're in bed. On our most recent trip we wanted the second version without paying Mayfair prices for it — and the brand-new Moxy London Piccadilly Circus turned out to be the answer. It opened in 2025 in the upper floors of the landmark Criterion Building, and per its developer it's the largest Moxy hotel in the world outside New York, with 532 rooms. We stayed two nights, shot our own photos, and this is the honest review.

Here's the one-line summary before we get into it: this is not a hotel you book for the room. It's a hotel you book for where the room is — and once you accept that trade, it becomes one of the smartest-value beds in central London, especially if you're paying with the right card or with Marriott Bonvoy points.

The Location: You Cannot Do Better

Let's start where the Moxy actually wins, because it's decisive. The hotel sits at 1 Jermyn Street, occupying the upper floors of the Criterion Building — the grand Victorian block right on Piccadilly Circus, the one with the Horses of Helios fountain built into it. Step out the door and you're standing under the famous curved billboards, next to the Underground entrance, with the statue of Eros a few metres away.

From there, essentially all of the West End is walkable in the time it takes to check a map: Soho and Chinatown are about five minutes north, Leicester Square and the big theatres are five minutes east, Regent Street and the shopping on Oxford Street run up to the north, and Trafalgar Square, St James's, and Green Park sit just to the south. Piccadilly Circus station is at the front door, putting the Piccadilly and Bakerloo lines directly under your feet — which is exactly why we treat a hotel like this as the reward at the end of the journey in from Heathrow. You get off the train, you're already home.

Over our two nights we barely touched the Tube again. We walked to dinner in Soho both evenings, wandered Chinatown after, and on the second night caught a West End play just a few minutes from the front door — then strolled back afterward without a single glance at the last-train timetable. That's the whole case for staying this central in one anecdote: the city becomes something you step into and out of at will, and the hotel stops being a place you commute to and becomes the middle of everything. Two nights was enough to use the location hard, and the short walk home after a late show is exactly the luxury you're really buying here.

For context on why that matters so much in London: the difference between a Zone 1 hotel and a "just outside the centre" hotel isn't only the commute. It's whether you can pop back to drop your bags before dinner, whether you can walk home after a show instead of hunting for a late Tube, and whether "let's just have one more" costs you a £30 cab. At the Moxy, all of that friction disappears. That's the real product.

The Room: Compact, but Clever

Now the part everyone worries about. Moxy rooms are famously small — the brand builds "small but smart" rooms of roughly 185 square feet, and Piccadilly Circus is no exception. If you're picturing a spacious suite, adjust now. What you actually get is a tightly designed room that uses the space better than most hotels twice its size.

Our room had a genuinely comfortable bed with a full wood headboard, integrated reading lights, and soft under-shelf lighting that made the whole room feel warmer than the square footage suggests. There's a wall-mounted TV, a floating wood desk-shelf, vertical storage instead of a bulky wardrobe, and a signature Moxy touch we always appreciate: a black SMEG kettle with proper cups on the tray, not a sad plastic one. The bathroom is a clean walk-in shower setup. Floors are a warm parquet, and the soundproofing held up better than we expected given how loud Piccadilly Circus is outside.

The honest caveats, because a review that only gushes isn't useful: some rooms here are dark, and a few have limited or interior-facing windows. Our room's lighting skewed moody rather than bright — lovely at night, less so if you want to work by daylight. If natural light matters to you, say so at check-in and ask specifically for a room with a proper external window. The desk-shelf is also more of a perch than a workstation, so this is not the room for a full day of laptop work. None of that surprised us for a Moxy; it's the brand's deliberate trade, and it's the right one if you're here to be out in the city.

The Bar & the Vibe

Moxy's whole design philosophy is to shrink the room and expand everything else — the bar, the lounge, the communal space — so you spend your downtime out among people rather than staring at four walls. At Piccadilly Circus they've leaned all the way in. The lobby bar, themed "House of Helios" after the fountain on the building, runs 24/7, so a late arrival or a post-theatre nightcap is never a problem. It's loud, colourful, and unapologetically high-energy — this is a hotel that matches the neighbourhood rather than trying to be a quiet retreat from it.

That's worth knowing before you book. If your idea of a hotel is hushed hallways and a spa, this isn't it, and you should look elsewhere. If your idea of a good London base is somewhere with a buzz that pours you into Soho and catches you on the way back, it's close to perfect. There's a buffet breakfast with full English and lighter options, mobile key entry, and self-service check-in kiosks that get you upstairs fast.

The Value: Cash, Points, and the Amex Angle

This is where the Moxy stops being just "a nice new hotel" and starts being a genuinely smart booking. Recent nightly cash rates have run roughly £176 to £287 depending on the date. That is not cheap in absolute terms — nothing in Zone 1 is — but for a brand-new Marriott hotel on Piccadilly Circus, it comfortably undercuts the full-service four- and five-star hotels within the same few blocks, which routinely ask £350 to £600 for a comparable date. You're paying a compact-room price for a five-star postcode.

On points, Marriott uses dynamic award pricing, so the number moves with demand — but on off-peak dates this is exactly the kind of property where a Marriott Bonvoy redemption shines. The way to sanity-check any Marriott award is to compare it against the cash rate using a realistic point value: The Points Guy's July 2026 valuations peg Marriott Bonvoy points at about 0.80 cents each. Run the cash rate divided by the points cost, and if you're clearing roughly that 0.8-cent bar, the redemption is a good one. For a night that's pricing at £250 in cash, you're getting strong value out of your points here. And if you want to see how the Moxy's math stacks up against every other program in Zone 1 — Hyatt, IHG, and Hilton included — we ran the full comparison in our guide to the best central London hotels for points and value.

Here's the lever most people miss, and it's the whole reason this stay over-delivers. Because the Moxy is a Marriott, your loyalty status actually does something — and you don't have to earn it the hard way. The American Express Platinum Card comes with complimentary Marriott Bonvoy Gold Elite status once you enroll, which brings 25% bonus Bonvoy points on eligible spend, enhanced room upgrades subject to availability, and 2 p.m. late checkout on qualifying rates. At a hotel where the base rooms are small and some lack a good window, an upgrade to a slightly larger or brighter room is exactly the perk that changes the stay — and a 2 p.m. checkout on your last day in London is worth its weight in gold.

The competitor delta — what other Moxy reviews get wrong

Most Moxy reviews you'll find were written about airport or suburban Moxys, and they treat the small room as the headline — "cute, but tiny, tolerate it to save money." That framing misses the entire point of this property. At an airport, a compact room with no view is just a compromise. On Piccadilly Circus, the compact room is the strategy: it's the mechanism that lets a Marriott exist on the single most central corner in London at a price mortals can pay. The correct question isn't "why is the room small?" It's "how did they get a room this well located to cost this little?" Judge the Moxy against other Zone 1 hotels you'd actually consider, not against a spacious Moxy in the suburbs, and it stops being a compromise and starts being the obvious pick.

The Verdict: Who It's For

After two nights here, we'd book it again without hesitation — for the right kind of trip. It's not a hotel for a slow, room-service-in-bed weekend, and it's not for anyone who needs a real desk or a quiet floor. It is close to ideal for the traveler who wants to be in the absolute centre of London, plans to be out most of the time, and would rather spend money on the trip than on square footage.

If that sounds like your kind of trip, the Moxy London Piccadilly Circus earns an easy recommendation. Pair it with a smart way into the city from Heathrow, book it on points or with a card that earns you something back, lean on your Marriott status for a better room, and you've got a central-London base that leaves more of your budget for the reason you came: the city itself. It's the hotel equivalent of a great points redemption — you're getting a location that should cost far more than it does.