Public Transportation

The nearest underground stations to Bankside are Southwark (on the Jubilee line) and London Bridge (on the Jubilee and Northern lines).

To get to LSE, you can take the RV1 bus from Southwark Street. The RV1 takes a slightly weird loopy route along the south bank to the London eye before coming back, and going over Waterloo Bridge to Covent Garden – a 5 minute walk from LSE. However, you will save no time by taking the bus as opposed to walking.

You can also catch National Rail trains to various places from London Bridge, Waterloo and Blackfriars (although, due to renovation work, Blackfriars is currently closed at weekends).

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Paying for public transport

London’s public transport uses a contactless smart-card called the Oyster Card as its primary method of payment. Paper tickets are available but are considerably more expensive (usually double - e.g. single bus fare is £1 with Oyster, £2 for a paper ticket).

You can get weekly, monthly and annual tickets for unlimited public transport travel. However, these are not usually cost effective for Bankside residents as you do not need to use public transport to travel to LSE. If you do choose to get termly tickets however, you should get a Student Oyster Card which costs £5 and offers a discount of around a third on such tickets.

The best option for most Banksiders is to use the pay-as-you-go option, whereby you top-up the oyster card with cash and this is deducted from your balance each time you make a journey. Your daily spend is capped, meaning it will stop charging you once you have spent 50p less than the cost of buying a paper day Travelcard.

The Student Oyster Card does not offer any discount on daily fares, however if you are 25 or under you can attach a National Railcard (which costs £24 to buy, although NatWest bank’s student customers get one for free) to a normal (not student) Oyster Card and this will give you a 34% discount on the daily off-peak cap.