W2 2PS Westminster

Live postcode, introduced January 1980. Ward: Hyde Park. Region: London.

Streets

Council tax

What each band costs in Westminster in 2026-27: Band D £1,050 a year on average, including the police, fire and any county and parish charges.

ABCDEFGH
£700£816£933£1,050£1,283£1,516£1,749£2,099

Homes by band in the neighbourhood around this postcode: most are in band G (29% of about 960 homes).

Sources: Valuation Office Agency, Council Tax: stock of properties, homes at 31 March 2026 (counts rounded to the nearest 10; some small counts withheld), for the neighbourhood (census area of about 700 homes) around it, not just this postcode; Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, council tax levels 2026-27. Bands are charged as fixed shares of Band D; the actual bill depends on the parish and on discounts such as the single-person discount. Check a home's own band with the official council tax band checker.

Planning and heritage

  • Conservation area: yes, Bayswater (council page). Extensions, demolition, some windows and doors, and work on trees need consent.
  • Listed buildings within 100 m of this postcode: 2.
  • Article 4 direction (removing permitted development rights): Article 4 Basement Development Permitted Rights Removed.
  • Tree preservation orders: 7 protected trees within 100 m of this postcode.
  • Green belt: no.

Listed buildings

Brownfield land registered for housing within 1.0 km

Source: planning.data.gov.uk (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government), compiled from councils and, for listed buildings, Historic England's National Heritage List. Conservation areas, Article 4 directions, tree preservation areas and the green belt are checked at each postcode's centre. Listed buildings and protected trees are counted within 100 m of this postcode. Councils publish Article 4 directions, tree preservation orders and brownfield registers to different standards, and some not yet. Planning applications are not here: there is no national open record of them yet.

Flood risk

No address in this postcode is in an area at high, medium or low risk of flooding from rivers, the sea or surface water. The rest are in areas at very low risk: less than a 0.1% (1 in 1,000) chance a year.

Rivers and the sea alone: no home is in an area at risk.

High: 3.3% (1 in 30) or more chance of flooding a year. Medium: 1% to 3.3%. Low: 0.1% to 1%. Very low: under 0.1%. The rivers and sea figures allow for flood defences. Counts cover whole postcodes, which can include other streets.

Flood zone for planning: no postcode centre is in flood zone 2 or 3.

Sources: Environment Agency Flood risk: postcode search tool data (loaded 29 October 2026), Risk of Flooding from Rivers and Sea: postcodes in areas at risk (loaded 29 October 2026) and Flood Map for Planning (loaded 28 October 2026). Flood zones are checked at each postcode's centre point. These are models of areas, which their publishers say are not suitable for showing whether an individual property is at risk, and they do not cover flooding from sewers or drains. Check an address on the official long-term flood risk service.

Broadband

Superfast 100%, ultrafast 100%, gigabit 100% of premises; 0% cannot get 10 Mbit/s. Ofcom Connected Nations, data as at January 2026.

Getting around

Sources: Department for Transport, NaPTAN (every public transport stop), as at 31 October 2026; Office of Rail and Road, Estimates of station usage 2024–25 (which stations are on the National Rail network, and their journeys: entries and exits in the year to March); OurAirports (public domain, kept by volunteers); car parks and charging points from Overture Maps Foundation, release 2026-10-21.0, which gathers business listings from Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare and others: not an official register, so some will be missing, private or out of date. Distances are straight lines from the postcode's centre, not routes, and say nothing about how often anything runs. Stations opened since the end of ORR's year appear when ORR publishes the next one, each December; heritage railways are left out.

NearestDistance
Railway stationsLondon Paddington 70 million journeys in 2024–25560 m
London Marylebone 12 million journeys in 2024–25830 m
Bond Street 43 million journeys in 2024–251.5 km
Underground, metro or tramEdgware Road (Circle Line) Underground Station450 m
Edgware Road (Bakerloo) Underground Station520 m
Paddington Underground Station530 m
Bus stops14 stops within 400 m, 48 within 800 m; nearest Sussex Gardens Lisson Grove160 m
Bus or coach stationVictoria Station2.6 km
Ferry terminalLittle Venice Waterbus Stop1.2 km
Car parks9 within 800 m; nearest National Car Parks170 m
EV charging points50 within 1.6 km; nearest Shell Recharge90 m
Airport with scheduled flightsLondon City Airport LCY15.6 km
Nearest large airportLondon Heathrow Airport LHR20.9 km

Local services

Sources: NHS Organisation Data Service, as at 31 October 2026: GP practices, community pharmacies and dental practices with an NHS contract, open now, each placed at the centre of its postcode; hospitals are NHS trust and Welsh health board sites named as hospitals, and may not have an emergency department. Police stations and cash machines from Overture Maps Foundation, release 2026-10-21.0, which gathers business listings: not an official register, so some will be missing or out of date. Distances are straight lines from the postcode's centre. Nothing here says whether a practice is taking new patients or a dentist new NHS patients.

NearestDistance
GP surgeries11 practices within 1.6 km; nearest Connaught Square Practice340 m
Pharmacies39 pharmacies within 1.6 km; nearest Hogg & Son Pharmacy170 m
NHS dentists64 practices within 1.6 km; nearest Cambridge Court Dental Surgery230 m
HospitalSt Mary's Hospital400 m
Police stationLondon Police Jail410 m
Cash machines5 machines within 800 m; nearest M&S ATM420 m

Parks and green space

Source: Ordnance Survey, OS Open Greenspace, April 2026: public parks and gardens, play spaces, playing fields and allotments, with their entrances. Distances are straight lines from the postcode's centre to a site's nearest entrance (or its edge where none is recorded), not walking routes; sizes are the area OS maps for each site. Some sites, such as school playing fields, may not be open to the public.

NearestDistance
Park or garden19 within 800 m; nearest Unnamed 1,840 m²40 m
Largest park within 800 mHyde Park 130 ha390 m
Play area7 within 800 m; nearest Unnamed 170 m²250 m
Playing fieldPaddington Recreation Ground 11 ha2.1 km
AllotmentsUnnamed 1,320 m²1.8 km

Within 800 m: 19 parks and gardens, 246 hectares in all.

Air quality

Source: Defra, modelled background air pollution, annual means for 2024, for the 1 km square that holds the postcode's centre. These are background levels, away from the kerb: beside a busy road nitrogen dioxide in particular can be several times higher. UK limits are the legal annual limits for England and Wales; the World Health Organization's 2021 guidelines are much stricter, and most towns and cities are above them.

Annual means in µg/m³ (micrograms per cubic metre of air)
PollutantHereUK limitWHO guideline
Nitrogen dioxide (NO2)27.44010
Fine particles (PM2.5)10.0205
Particles (PM10)17.04015

All three are within the UK legal limits; all three are above the WHO guideline, as in most towns and cities.

Road and rail noise

Source: Defra, strategic noise mapping Round 4 (England), modelled for 2021 and published in December 2023: Lden, the average sound level over a whole day with extra weight for the evening and night, on a 10 m grid, read at each address. These are models of traffic on the roads and railways, not measurements; they leave out aircraft, industry and neighbours, and a room at the back of a house is often much quieter than the front. The World Health Organization's guidelines are 53 dB for road traffic and 54 dB for railways.

Noise figures are still being loaded.

People and work

Source: ONS Census 2021, taken on 21 March 2021, for the Output Area (a small census area of about 125 households) that this postcode is in: 306 residents in 110 households. The census was taken during a lockdown, so working from home is high and travel to work low compared with now. ONS swaps a few records between neighbouring areas and adds small amounts of noise to counts to protect privacy, so small differences mean little. Industry is not published for areas this small.

Who lives here

Around this postcodeEngland
Median age3140
Children under 1529%17%
Aged 65 and over10%18%

Homes

Around this postcodeEngland
Owned (outright or with a mortgage)33%61%
Owned outright21%33%
Shared ownership0%1%
Social rented4%17%
Private rented64%21%

Work and commuting

Around this postcodeEngland
Adults (16 and over) in work55%57%
Unemployment (of those working or looking for work)2%6%
Retired (of adults)10%22%
Long-term sick or disabled (of adults)2%4%
Work mainly from home (of those in work)55%32%
Travel to work by car or van13%48%
By train, Underground, metro or tram16%4%
By any public transport, including bus19%8%
On foot or by bicycle11%10%
Work within 10 km of home (of those who travel to work)84%65%
Work 30 km or more away9%8%

Education and languages

Around this postcodeEngland
Degree or other higher qualification, Level 4+ (of adults)73%34%
No qualifications6%18%
Apprenticeship as highest qualification3%5%
Main language English (aged 3 and over)74%91%
Cannot speak English well or at all3%2%

Deprivation

The neighbourhood around this postcode is in decile 4 of 10 on the English Indices of Deprivation 2025, where 1 is the most deprived tenth of England's 33,755 neighbourhoods and 10 the least.

Source: English Indices of Deprivation 2025 (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government), by LSOA (about 1,500 people), through the ONS Postcode Directory. The index combines income, employment, health, education, crime, housing and living environment; it ranks areas against each other and does not describe any one household. Ranks in England and Wales are worked out separately and cannot be compared.

The full dossier for this postcode's main street is on Cambridge Square.