How to Get to Paris from London

Discover Paris

Paris is the capital of France and one of the most visited cities in the world — a place that somehow manages to exceed its own reputation. Built in concentric arrondissements radiating out from the Île de la Cité in the middle of the Seine, the city is remarkably navigable on foot once you understand its logic. The Eiffel Tower, which most Parisians regarded as an eyesore when it was built for the 1889 World’s Fair, has become the single most recognisable structure on earth. It still stops people in their tracks on first sight. How far is Paris from me?

The City That Never Quite Lets You Go

The Left Bank — the Rive Gauche — has been the intellectual and artistic heartbeat of Paris for centuries. Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where Sartre and de Beauvoir argued philosophy over coffee at Café de Flore, still has literary bookshops and jazz clubs wedged between luxury fashion boutiques. The Latin Quarter, home to the Sorbonne, has been a university neighbourhood since the 12th century. Montparnasse, just south, was where Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Picasso drank through the 1920s and reshaped Western art and literature in the process.

The Right Bank holds the grand set pieces: the Louvre, the largest art museum in the world, which you could spend a week in and still not see properly; the Musée d’Orsay, housed in a Beaux-Arts railway station and holding the world’s greatest collection of Impressionist painting; and the Arc de Triomphe at the top of the Champs-Élysées, from whose roof you can see the geometry of Haussmann’s boulevards spreading out across the city. Le Marais, the old Jewish and now LGBTQ+ district, is arguably the best neighbourhood for walking — medieval streets, Hôtel de Ville, the Place des Vosges, and some of the city’s best falafel.

Notre-Dame Cathedral, which suffered a devastating fire in April 2019, reopened in December 2024 after a five-year restoration that drew on the skills of craftspeople from across France. The rebuilt spire and restored interior make it one of the most significant architectural revivals of the 21st century, and it is once again the single most-visited monument in Europe. If you haven’t been since before 2019, the restored interior is worth seeing as a before-and-after.

Practically speaking, Paris runs on the Métro — 16 lines covering almost every corner of the city, with trains every 2 to 4 minutes at peak times. A carnet of tickets or a weekly Navigo pass covers the Métro, RER, and buses. From London, the Eurostar arrives directly at Gare du Nord, which has Métro connections to every part of the city. If you fly into Charles de Gaulle, the RER B runs every 10–15 minutes into central Paris in about 35 minutes. Most of Paris’s major sights are concentrated in a walkable corridor along the Seine — arriving by train and staying centrally, you may not need public transit at all for the first day.