No lockers at the stations
None of London's mainline stations — King's Cross, St Pancras, Euston, Paddington, Victoria, Waterloo, Liverpool Street, London Bridge — have coin-operated self-service lockers. What looks like left luggage inside them is a staffed counter, and every one of them is run by the same company, Excess Baggage Company, open roughly 7am to 11pm daily. The Underground has nothing at all: no locker rental, no left-luggage office, anywhere on the network. Where a Tube stop shares a building with a mainline station, the mainline counter is the only facility either way.
Booking a counter slot ahead online gets you a QR code; turning up on the day and paying at collection works just as well. Neither is obviously better — it's really a question of whether you want the transaction done before you arrive.
Why the counter costs more
Counter prices start from around £7.50 per item and climb with duration. At Gatwick's Excess Baggage desks the structure is banded rather than a flat daily rate — about £7.50 for up to three hours, rising to roughly £15 for anything between three and twenty-four hours — so a short wait can cost proportionally more per hour than a full day elsewhere. Across providers, station and airport left-luggage averages out at around £5 per bag per day, though that varies by site, and one guide puts app-based storage at often less than half the per-day cost of a station counter.
The honest cheapest answer
For most people passing through a mainline station, the nearest genuinely cheap option isn't the station's own counter — it's a partner shop or café a short walk away, booked through one of the app-based networks. That's the practical shift London's storage market has made: fewer staffed desks, more small businesses acting as drop-off points.
How the apps actually work
Four networks cover most of London: Radical Storage, Bounce, Stasher and LuggageHero. All four vet local shops, cafés and hotels as partners; you book a slot, show a QR code or confirmation on arrival, and the bag gets stored out of public sight until you collect it. Stasher, Bounce and Radical Storage price per bag per day at a flat rate regardless of size. LuggageHero is the outlier — it offers genuine hourly pricing on top of a daily rate, which suits a two- or three-hour wait far better than paying for a full day.
Guarantee cover differs by provider too: Stasher and Bounce both advertise up to £10,000 per booking, Radical Storage's stated cover is up to £3,000 per item, and LuggageHero's standard guarantee is £500 per bag, with paid upgrades available. None of this is a reason to avoid any of them — it's a reason to check the figure against what you're actually carrying.
What Radical Storage covers
Radical Storage's London network expanded substantially in October 2024, when it partnered with local cafés, shops and hotels to add points near King's Cross, Paddington, Covent Garden and Soho, on top of its existing coverage. The network now runs to roughly 760 points citywide, advertised from £1.90 a day with no size or weight restrictions and a security guarantee up to £3,000 per item included in every booking.
That £1.90 headline is a starting rate, not a promise for every point. Radical Storage's own Wembley Stadium page prices storage there at £5 a day, and a separate VisitLondon listing for the network quotes a flat £5 per day/item elsewhere with a small promo discount. Treat any single page's price as indicative and check the live figure for the exact location and date before assuming the citywide rate applies.
Wembley on event days
Wembley Stadium holds no bags of any kind, and its own bag policy only allows one small item roughly the size of a sheet of A4 paper — nothing larger gets through the turnstiles. On match or concert days the stadium runs a separate external bag drop at a flat £10 per item, which closes exactly two hours after the event ends. Wembley Stadium train station has no storage service either, official or otherwise. Anyone missing the official drop's closing window, or simply wanting to avoid its queue, needs a nearby partner point instead.
Airports without a counter
London City Airport has no left-luggage facility of any kind — not a locker, not a staffed desk. No pricing information exists for a left-luggage service at Luton either. Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted all have Excess Baggage counters; at Gatwick specifically, the South Terminal desk runs 24 hours, while the North Terminal one opens daily from 5am to 10pm.
Museums, shops and long stays
Plenty of London's museums and galleries run their own lockers or cloakrooms, and large shopping centres such as Westfield offer all-day storage — worth checking before booking anything separately if a gallery or mall is already on the day's itinerary. In Greenwich, the Tourist Information Centre holds left luggage, but only during its own opening hours, typically 10am to 4pm — not an option for an early train or a late one.
For storage measured in weeks rather than hours, conventional self-storage undercuts the daily bag-storage apps by a wide margin. One operator, Safestore, has quoted a small unit near Euston/St Pancras from around £14.25 for a full week — a fraction of what a week of daily app charges would add up to, though that figure reflects an introductory rate rather than a fixed price.
Booking ahead, and what to expect on arrival
At least one London-wide guide advises booking app-based points as far ahead as possible near busy stations and attractions, since slots can be taken at peak times. Victoria Coach Station's left-luggage arrangement has also moved on from an older manual system — it now runs through Stasher as the official digital booking provider, so guides describing the previous process are out of date.
A recurring note across reviews of these partner networks: the drop-off point is sometimes a barber shop, corner shop or café with no exterior signage rather than something that visibly says storage on the door. Staff are consistently described as fast and friendly once you've found the right entrance — the confirmation email or app screen is worth checking for exact wording before you start looking for a sign that isn't there.
