London City Airport (LCY) Airport Guide 2026 — Five Miles From The City

Last verified: September 2026.

🏢 1. One Terminal, 15 Gates, and a Runway That Decides Everything

LCY is one building. Check-in desks on the ground floor, security above, and then 15 gates split across two wings: gates 2b to 14 on the West Pier, gates 21 to 24 on the East Pier. That is the entire airport. The airport’s own instruction is to arrive no more than two hours before departure, and the check-in desks do not open earlier than that anyway. At most airports “arrive no more than” is marketing. Here it is a fact about the building — there is nowhere to put you.

Learn this before you fly from LCY: it is a silent airport. The airport makes no announcements calling passengers to gates. Nobody will page you. After security you watch the flight information screens for your gate and your time, and if you are wearing headphones with your back to the screens you will miss your flight and it will be your fault. This is the single most common way people come unstuck here.

Bag drop is unusually good for an airport this size. Lufthansa and SWISS passengers use an Express Bag Drop in the middle of the terminal. British Airways has a self-service bag-tag area just inside the main entrance. Self-service kiosks sit outside the terminal, next to the DLR station, and LOT Polish Airlines passengers can print bag tags there. Best of all, British Airways, KLM and Luxair run an overnight bag drop — you can hand over your suitcase from 16:00 the day before for any flight departing by 10:00 the next morning, which turns a morning departure into walking to the DLR with nothing.

Now the runway, because it explains the fares. The UK aeronautical information published by NATS gives runway 09/27 as 1,508 m long and 30 m wide, grooved asphalt — and the declared take-off run available is only 1,199 m in either direction. Thirty metres is narrow. Twelve hundred metres of take-off run is very short.

The approach is the harder constraint. The CAA’s own steep-approach guidance is blunt about it: “Few aerodromes in Europe require a steep angle approach capability. The UK currently has only one such aerodrome, London City (LCY), and this will only accept aeroplanes approved for such operations.” The glideslope was originally 7½° and has been reduced to 5½°; anything of 4½° or more is a steep approach requiring specific approval, for the aircraft type and for the crew.

The practical consequence for you as a passenger is competition. Only a short list of types can legally land here — in practice the Embraer E-Jets and turboprops — so only a short list of airlines can serve LCY at all, and none of the big low-cost carriers can. Fewer bidders, thinner routes, higher fares. Aircraft movements in 2025 were 50,992, down from 84,753 in 2015 (CAA). That is an airport with room, not an airport with congestion, and the price you pay is not a scarcity of slots — it is a scarcity of operators.

Who flies here. The airport itself names British Airways (as BA CityFlyer), KLM, Lufthansa, SWISS, LOT Polish Airlines and Luxair in its own check-in guidance. The network is short-haul European and UK domestic: Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Zurich, Dublin, Madrid, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast, Luxembourg, plus a set of leisure and ski routes. Baggage allowances differ sharply between these carriers, and on a business-priced ticket it is easy to assume a hold bag is included when it is not — our British Airways, KLM, Lufthansa, SWISS, LOT and Luxair guides carry the current numbers, and the baggage checker puts them side by side.

🛂 2. The UK Border: an ETA, an eGate, and No Stamp in Your Passport

The United Kingdom operates its own entry system, entirely separate from anything the EU runs. Everything below comes from GOV.UK, read this month.

The Electronic Travel Authorisation. Most visitors who do not need a visa now need an ETA. It costs £20 (about €23 at the ECB reference rate of 4 September 2026, €1 ≈ £0.859), it is non-refundable, and it lasts two years or until your passport expires, whichever comes first. Within that window you can travel as many times as you like, staying up to six months per visit. Apply through the UK ETA app or on GOV.UK; the decision usually arrives by email within a day but can take up to three working days, so do not leave it to the airport. Every traveller needs their own, including babies. The ETA is linked to the passport you applied with, so at the border you show only the passport.

Two warnings worth £20 each. First, GOV.UK states plainly that other websites may charge more for the identical document — apply on GOV.UK or in the official app, nowhere else. Second, an ETA does not guarantee entry. If you have a criminal record or have been refused entry to the UK before, GOV.UK’s own advice is to apply for a Standard Visitor visa instead.

Who does not need one. British and Irish citizens; anyone with a UK visa or with permission to live, work or study in the UK, Jersey, Guernsey or the Isle of Man; British overseas territories citizen and British National (Overseas) passport holders; and anyone transiting airside without crossing the border. That last exemption rarely helps at LCY, because this is a point-to-point short-haul airport rather than a transfer hub. GOV.UK’s wording is that you need an ETA if you pass through border control before continuing your onward journey — so if you land here and connect onward, assume you need one, and check with your airline if you are unsure.

The eGates and the missing stamp. Britain does not stamp the passports of people who clear the border by eGate, and most short-stay visitors now do. GOV.UK lists the eligible nationalities as British citizens, nationals of EU countries, Australia, Canada, Iceland, Japan, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland and the USA, plus Registered Traveller members. The minimum age is 8, and 8- to 17-year-olds must be with an adult — from 8 July 2026 children aged 8 and 9 of eligible nationalities may use the gates if they are at least 120 cm tall and accompanied.

So: you will very likely walk into Britain with no evidence in your passport that you arrived. Keep your boarding pass and your booking confirmation. If you ever need to prove the date you entered — for a later visa application, an overstay query, or a tax residence question — the stamp that used to do that job no longer exists. If you specifically want one, GOV.UK’s instruction is to see a Border Force officer before you leave the port; afterwards is too late.

One document rule catches EU travellers out. Since 1 October 2021 most EU, EEA and Swiss citizens need a passport to enter the UK. National identity cards are no longer accepted, with narrow exceptions for people holding settled or pre-settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme. London City Airport publishes this on its own UK Border Force page because it keeps happening.

Money. The UK uses the pound sterling, not the euro. LCY is as close to a cashless airport as you will find — contactless is accepted on the DLR, in the terminal and in black cabs. Do not change money at an airport bureau; withdraw from a bank ATM or simply tap your card. When a card terminal offers to bill you in euros or dollars, decline it: that is dynamic currency conversion and the spread goes to the acquirer.

🚌 3. The DLR, and Why It Beats Every Other London Airport Train

This is the reason to fly from LCY, so be precise about it. London City Airport DLR station is in TfL fare Zone 3, it is step-free, and it is at the terminal — not a shuttle bus ride away, not a 1 km walk. Trains run every 4 to 10 minutes depending on destination.

TfL’s station page gives you the two directions: Platform 1 runs to Woolwich Arsenal; Platform 2 runs to Bank and to Stratford International. Bank is a direct ride into the City with no change at all, which is the trick no other London airport can perform.

For everywhere else, one change:

• Canary Wharf — change at Poplar (Zone 2) and take the DLR one stop, or change at Canning Town (Zone 2/3, lifts) onto the Jubilee line. The airport’s own door-to-door figure is 25 minutes.
• West End and the Underground network — Canning Town for the Jubilee line, or Bank for the Central, Northern, Waterloo & City and Circle/District lines.
• Elizabeth line — the airport signposts a connection; plan the exact interchange on tfl.gov.uk/plan-a-journey, which is what LCY itself links to.

The airport publishes its own journey times and they are honest ones. ExCeL London 17 minutes, The O2 21, Canary Wharf 25, Greenwich 27, Shoreditch 35, Tower Bridge 35, Covent Garden 44, Piccadilly 45, Westminster 45, Oxford Circus 50.

Fares: there is no airport premium, and that is the whole point. The DLR is ordinary TfL pay-as-you-go — tap in with a contactless card or phone. Heathrow Express charges a dedicated fare; the DLR does not. TfL’s published 2026 adult rates put the daily cap for Zones 1–3 at £10.50 (about €12.20), and unusually it is the same figure peak and off-peak, so an early Monday departure costs no more than a Sunday one. A Zone 3-only day is capped at the same £10.50.

Buses. Three routes serve the airport directly: 129 (Lewisham to Gallions Reach), 473 (North Woolwich to Stratford) and 474 (Canning Town to Manor Park), and the 474 runs 24 hours. These are local buses, not airport coaches — useful if you live along one of them, irrelevant otherwise.

Taxis. There is a black cab rank at the terminal. Black cabs are metered and take contactless, so there is no fare to negotiate. A cab into the City is not slow, but at rush hour the DLR will beat it, and the Blackwall Tunnel is not a place to sit with a flight to catch.

🛋️ 4. There Is No Lounge. None.

Say it plainly, because plenty of pages will not: London City Airport has no lounge. Not a British Airways lounge, not a Priority Pass lounge, not a pay-on-the-door lounge. If you hold a premium ticket or a lounge card, it buys you exactly nothing at LCY. An Aspire lounge — Swissport’s brand — has been announced as the airport’s first, with an opening targeted for 2027. It is not open now, so do not build a connection around it.

What the airport does provide, and provides decently, is ordinary space. There are large seating areas in the main departure lounge, including a desked area with plug sockets and USB chargers, and more seating with USB power at the gate areas along both the East and West Piers. Free airport-wide WiFi runs at around 16 Mb/s by the airport’s own estimate, which is enough for a call. There is a spa, bookable by appointment.

Here is the honest reframing. At a normal airport the lounge exists because you have two dead hours to kill. At LCY you do not. The airport tells you to arrive no more than two hours ahead, the terminal is one building with 15 gates, and the security queue at a 3.7-million-passenger airport running at a fraction of its movement peak is short. The absence of a lounge costs you far less here than it would at Gatwick. Take the desk with the plug socket, and stop paying for lounges you would only use for twenty minutes.

🍽️ 5. Food, Shopping, and the Case for Not Eating Here

The airport’s own description of its food offer is “a caffeine boost, fresh-to-go snacks or a leisurely lunch”, plus duty-free and essentials on the retail side. That is a fair summary of a small airport: coffee, a sandwich counter, a sit-down option, a shop for the toothbrush you forgot. It is not a destination and it does not pretend to be.

The specific outlets change and I am not going to print a list that will be wrong by winter — check the airport’s Shop, Eat & Relax pages on the day. What will not change is the shape of the offer: limited, priced for expense accounts, and concentrated airside.

The better plan is to eat before you arrive, and LCY is the one London airport where that is genuinely easy. You are 25 minutes from Canary Wharf, 35 from Shoreditch and 17 from ExCeL. Nobody at Stansted can pop into town for lunch. Here you can eat properly in Greenwich, in Canary Wharf’s covered market, or in the Royal Docks, and still be at the gate inside half an hour of finishing.

Two timing traps. The first is Saturday: the airport closes at 13:00, so everything airside closes with it, and there is no such thing as a late Saturday lunch at LCY. The second is Sunday morning: the airport does not open until 10:30, so a Sunday breakfast here does not exist either. On both days plan your food entirely off-airport.

Duty free is worth a sentence of realism. For flights within the UK there is no duty-free. For international departures the allowances are the UK’s, not the EU’s, and the arithmetic on spirits and tobacco is rarely as good as the signage implies. The one thing genuinely worth buying at a London airport is nothing at all.

💡 6. When LCY Is Worth the Premium — and When It Absolutely Is Not

LCY sells convenience and charges for it. Here is when the trade is good.

Take LCY when your destination in London is east or central. If you are going to the City, Canary Wharf, Shoreditch, Greenwich, the Docklands or ExCeL, nothing else in London is close. Bank is a single DLR ride. ExCeL is 17 minutes. Compare that with the same trip from Stansted or Gatwick, where the train fare alone is a multiple of the £10.50 you will spend on a whole day of TfL travel, and the airport-to-desk time is over an hour.

Take LCY when the terminal time is what you are buying. Arrive two hours ahead by instruction, walk through a building with 15 gates, and be at the aircraft in minutes. On a same-day return to Amsterdam or Zurich, LCY can save you a genuine two hours of life over Heathrow.

Do not take LCY when your destination in London is west. Heathrow is on the wrong side of the city from LCY and so is Paddington, Kensington and everything along the M4. Crossing London with luggage undoes the entire saving.

Do not take LCY when you are connecting long-haul. There are no long-haul flights here; the runway forbids them. The airport’s own answer is to sell you a short hop into a hub, and it is a reasonable one — it publishes flight times of 1h 10m to Amsterdam, 1h 20m to Dublin, 1h 25m to Frankfurt and 2h 20m to Madrid, with Zurich also in the set. The Dublin routing is the interesting one: Dublin has US preclearance, so you clear US immigration in Ireland and land in America as a domestic arrival. That is a real advantage on a US trip, and the airport says so itself. But a self-connection is your risk, not the airline’s, unless it is on one ticket.

Do not take LCY on a Saturday afternoon or a Sunday morning. This is the planning fact that catches people every single week. The published hours are Mon–Fri 04:45–22:00, Saturday 04:45–13:00, Sunday 10:30–22:00. Not “quiet”. Closed. The terminal will not let you wait inside outside those hours, so a Saturday-evening arrival into London is simply not available from LCY, and neither is an early Sunday departure. If your trip is a Friday-out, Sunday-morning-back weekend, LCY cannot do it and Gatwick can.

And do not take LCY on price alone. The steep-approach rule keeps the low-cost carriers out entirely, so the competitive pressure that pushes Stansted fares down does not exist here. On many routes the LCY fare is meaningfully higher than the same city pair from another London airport, and on some it is not. That is worth thirty seconds of checking rather than an assumption — run the route through our price checker before you book, because the honest answer varies by route and by week.

A note on the neighbourhood. The Royal Docks around the airport are a regeneration area rather than a place to spend an evening; the water is impressive and the amenities are thin. If you have hours to fill, go one stop the other way to Greenwich — 27 minutes on the DLR, with the Old Royal Naval College, the Cutty Sark and the Prime Meridian. It is the best hour available to anyone stranded near an airport in London.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

📊 2026 Summary Data Table