Three London homes for stays measured in weeks, not nights

Start with the site, not the city

London is not a place you can book. It is thirty-two boroughs and a river, and the gap between the right home and the wrong one is an hour each way, twice a day, for six weeks. Nobody stays in "London". They stay near a hospital, a depot, a campus or a job number.

So the routing, plainly. Each home has its own page with the full facts, the drawbacks and a calculator that gives you an indicative total for your dates.

• North-west London and the M1 corridor — Brent Cross, Colindale, Barnet, Wembley: the Hendon NW4 two-bed. Two bedrooms, around 970 sq ft, sleeps six with four of those behind a bedroom door. Hendon Central on the Northern line is about a fifteen-minute walk, and that is fifteen minutes on foot to the station, not fifteen minutes on the train. No washing machine.
• East London — Stratford and the Olympic Park, Newham, the Royal Docks, the Romford Road corridor: the Forest Gate E7 two-bed. Two zip-link bedrooms, 871 sq ft, all on one level with no stairs, sleeps five. Forest Gate station is a nine-minute walk. One free unreserved space on the shared forecourt, and the only one of the three with a proper fold-down desk and a measured wifi speed.
• Inner north and central — King's Cross, Clerkenwell, the City, Islington: the studio off Caledonian Road, N1. A king bed and a sofa bed, sleeps four on paper and suits one or two in practice. Caledonian Road & Barnsbury on the Overground is a four-minute walk. Basement, no lift, no parking — read that page before you book it for anyone with heavy kit.
• South or west London: we have nothing, and no amount of routing fixes that. Send us the requirement anyway. We place what we can ourselves and put the rest to operators we work with.

How the price is built

Everyone booking a placement ends up asking the same question, and it is never "what is a night". It is what the whole thing comes to before someone signs it off.

The arithmetic, in order. A nightly rate, times the nights. A discount applies once the stay passes seven nights, and a larger one once it passes twenty-eight — and it comes off the whole stay, not only the nights beyond the threshold. Cleaning may be charged per stay depending on the home. On longer bookings we arrange a housekeeping visit and charge it as an added service rather than folding it into the rate, so it appears as its own line. Pets are extra where a home takes them at all.

You will not find a nightly figure on this page. Rates move with demand and with the length of the stay, and a number typed into a web page in September is wrong by November. The calculator on each home's page gives you an indicative whole-stay total so you can sanity-check a budget; the booking engine gives you the figure that actually applies to your dates, and that is the only one we will stand behind.

Six weeks, three people, and the hotel arithmetic

A hotel prices a room. A home prices a property. Most of the money sits in that one difference, and it is worth doing on paper before you commit to either.

The hotel side is rooms times nights times the rate on your dates, plus breakfast if it is not included, plus an evening meal bought out every night because there is no kitchen, plus a laundry charge per item. Three colleagues on the same job is three of everything, and the number scales with heads.

The home side is one whole-stay total with the long-stay discount already in it, divided by however many people are in the home. Hendon takes six, four of them in bedrooms and two on sofa beds in the living room. Forest Gate takes five across two zip-link bedrooms that split into twins for two colleagues sharing. The N1 studio takes four but is honestly a one-or-two-person flat. Cost per head falls with each person you add; a hotel's does not move at all.

We are not going to invent a hotel rate to beat. Put your own quote into it: rooms × nights × rate on one side, the booking engine's whole-stay total on the other, and add the driving charges below to both sides before you compare them.

The second bill: what the vehicle costs

A hotel quote in London hides nothing about the car, because there is no car in it. A six-week stay with a van attached has a second bill running alongside the first, and it is not small.

Three separate charges can apply and they stack. ULEZ, which covers every London borough with no exceptions. The Congestion Charge, inside the Inner Ring Road, Monday to Sunday on published hours. And the Blackwall and Silvertown tunnel charge if the job takes you across the river in the east. A non-compliant van doing a five-day week inside the ring road is paying both of the first two, every working day, for the whole placement.

The figures TfL publishes are set out under Driving and parking below. One thing we will not do is tell you which side of the Congestion Charge boundary your site falls on. The boundary is a ring road, it is not intuitive, and TfL runs a postcode checker that answers it properly. Use that, then budget.

What is the same in all three

The things that decide whether a long stay works, rather than the things that photograph well.

• The whole place to yourself. No shared hallway, no host in the next room, no other party in the building's corridor.
• A full kitchen with an oven, a hob and a fridge-freezer, plus pans, crockery and cutlery. Six weeks of eating out is both a cost and a health problem.
• Bills and wifi included. One price, no meter, no top-ups. Forest Gate is the only one where we have measured the speed — 100+ Mbps — so it is the only one where we will quote a number.
• Self check-in by lockbox from 4pm, check-out at 10am. Codes go out through the guest portal before you travel.
• Laundry in two of the three. Forest Gate has a washer/dryer in the kitchen; the N1 studio has a washing machine and a separate dryer. Hendon has neither, and for a stay of several weeks that is a launderette or a laundry service you should locate before you book.
• Professionally cleaned before every stay, with fresh linen and towels. Long stays are accepted, up to a year at Hendon.

Booking on behalf of someone else

Roughly half of these bookings are made by someone who will never sleep in the home — an office manager, a project coordinator, a relocation agent, an insurance claims handler. That is a different job from booking a holiday, and it needs different things.

One invoice, with payment terms by arrangement rather than a card at checkout. A named contact rather than a support queue, because when a placement changes at 6pm on a Friday you need a person. And extensions handled as extensions: placements run over, and we would far rather stretch a booking than make somebody move house mid-contract.

Tell us the dates, the head count and the postcode of the site. That is enough for us to say which of the three is right, or to say that none of them is.

Who works here

• Barts Health NHS Trust, which describes itself as the largest NHS trust in the country, runs St Bartholomew's, The Royal London, Newham, Whipps Cross and Mile End with around 20,000 staff. Newham Hospital in Plaistow alone has roughly 340 inpatient beds and over 1,700 staff, and it is in the same borough as the Forest Gate flat.
• Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust employs more than 17,000 staff from 120 countries across around 70 sites and serves over 1.6 million people, including Barnet Hospital, Chase Farm, North Middlesex University Hospital and the Royal Free itself. That is the north London footprint the Hendon flat and the N1 studio sit inside.
• Moorfields Eye Hospital is on City Road today. Its City Road services, Moorfields Private on Bath Street and the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology are all moving to Oriel, the Moorfields and UCL Centre for Eye Health at St Pancras, due to open to patients in summer 2027. Worth knowing if the placement is ophthalmology and runs into 2027, because the address changes.
• City St George's, University of London has its Clerkenwell campus at Northampton Square, between Islington and Shoreditch, alongside its Moorgate and Tooting sites.
• Middlesex University has consolidated all of its teaching and research at the Hendon campus on The Burroughs, NW4 4BT, having closed Cat Hill, Trent Park and Archway.
• Hendon Police College, the Peel Centre on Aerodrome Road, is the Metropolitan Police's principal training centre and the hub for initial recruit training on the two-year Police Constable Entry Programme, on a site of roughly 70 acres. It is in Colindale NW9, not Hendon NW4, about two miles from our Hendon flat. Almost every listing gets this wrong and it changes the commute.
• Brent Cross Cricklewood is, in Barnet Council's own words, the biggest redevelopment and growth programme the council has ever undertaken, and one of the Mayor of London's key growth projects. Brent Cross Town is set to deliver 6,700 homes, workspace for 25,000 people and a 592,000 sq ft extension of Brent Cross Shopping Centre.
• Brent Cross West station opened on 10 December 2023 on the Thameslink Midland Main Line, between Cricklewood and Hendon, with journeys to St Pancras from around twelve minutes and up to eight trains an hour at peak.
• East Bank on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is now largely open: London College of Fashion, UAL took staff and students in autumn 2023, UCL East is fully open with around 4,000 students, Sadler's Wells East has a 550-seat theatre, and V&A East Museum and V&A East Storehouse are open. BBC Music Studios is the final venue and opens in 2027.
• Forest Gate station is on the Elizabeth line's Shenfield branch: Stratford, Whitechapel, Liverpool Street, Farringdon, Tottenham Court Road, Bond Street, Paddington. Canary Wharf and Abbey Wood are on the other branch and need a change at Whitechapel. Anyone who tells you it is direct to Canary Wharf is wrong, and that includes one of our own pages until we correct it.
• HS2's Euston station remains mothballed. The Mace Dragados management team has gone from around 320 people to 150 and the labour force from 450 to 200, and the government has only begun sounding out private firms to build the station, with enabling and utility works continuing in the meantime. Every competitor page in this city sells Euston as a contractor boom. It is not one yet, and we would rather tell you that.

Driving and parking

• ULEZ covers every London borough. There is nowhere in the city it does not apply. A non-compliant vehicle pays £12.50 for any day it is driven in the zone, and a single short run to site costs exactly the same as a full day's work.
• The Congestion Charge is £18 if you pay on the day of travel or in advance, and £21 if you pay within three days after travel. It is entirely separate from ULEZ, and both can land on the same day for the same journey.
• Congestion Charge hours are 07:00 to 18:00 Monday to Friday, and 12:00 to 18:00 on Saturdays, Sundays and bank holidays. There is no charge from Christmas Day through to the New Year's Day bank holiday.
• The zone boundary is the London Inner Ring Road — Pentonville Road, City Road, Euston Road, Marylebone Road, Park Lane, Vauxhall Bridge Road and Tower Bridge Road among others — and the ring road itself is not part of the zone. Do not take our word for where your site sits. TfL publishes a postcode checker and that is the thing to use.
• From 1 March 2027 the 90% residents' Congestion Charge discount will only be open to new applicants with electric vehicles. It makes no difference to a stay with us either way: a guest is not a resident and does not qualify now.
• Silvertown Tunnel opened on 7 April 2025, and a user charge now applies to both Silvertown and Blackwall. It runs 06:00 to 22:00 every day except Christmas Day, and the crossing is free between 22:00 and 06:00.
• The off-peak Auto Pay rate for those two tunnels is £1.50 for cars, motorbikes and small vans. Peak rates apply northbound 06:00 to 10:00 and southbound 16:00 to 19:00, Monday to Friday only. If the site is south of the river and the shift is nights, the crossing costs nothing; a 07:30 start does.
• Forest Gate E7: one free space on the shared block-paved forecourt at the front. It is not a numbered or marked bay, so it works first come. If there is a car in it when you arrive, message us and we will point you to the nearest alternative. The surrounding streets are permit-controlled Monday to Saturday, with paid bays in some of them.
• Hendon NW4: paid street parking outside, through the PayByPhone app. There is no cash payment on site. Download the app before you drive up rather than setting up an account on the pavement next to a loaded van.
• Islington N1: no parking. None. Street bays on Caledonian Road are limited to two hours and there is a public car park nearby, but the honest answer is to arrive by tube or train and leave the car at home.
• Islington runs controlled parking zones with permits priced on vehicle CO2 emissions. Typical hours are 08:30 to 18:30 Monday to Friday, many zones add Saturday 08:30 to 13:30, and some operate 24 hours.
• Newham prices both resident and visitor parking permits by vehicle emissions inside its resident parking zones. That is why the free forecourt space at Forest Gate is a genuine saving over six weeks rather than a convenience.

Questions people ask

Need somewhere we don't have

If none of these fit, or the job is in a city we don't have a home in, send us the requirement. We place what we can ourselves and put the rest to the operators we work with.

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