London City Airport taxi | U Want Taxi
London City is the furthest of the five airports from our coverage area, tucked into the Docklands in east London, and mostly used for short-haul business travel rather than leisure flights.
The airport sits on the Royal Docks in Newham, with a short runway and a steeper approach than most UK airports, which is part of why it's mainly served by smaller aircraft and airlines like British Airways CityFlyer and KLM rather than the wide-body traffic you get at Heathrow.
Getting there from Burnham, Slough, Windsor, Maidenhead or Marlow means crossing London from west to east, which is a considerably longer and less predictable drive than any of our other airport routes — there's no single clean motorway run the way there is for Stansted or Luton, so the exact route depends on traffic across the city on the day.
As with Stansted and Luton, we don't publish a flat guide fare for London City, since the cross-London route varies too much by time of day to reduce to one number. The fare is worked out for your specific pickup and drop-off and fixed before you travel, so you still know the exact cost in advance.
The terminal itself is small and single-building, with the DLR's London City Airport station right next to it for anyone connecting onward by rail, and check-in to gate is generally quicker than at a bigger airport, which matters if we're timing a departure around a long cross-London drive.
Because most City Airport traffic is business travel, early morning and early evening are the busiest times, and that's also when the cross-London roads are at their worst, so if you're booking a London City run at either end of the working day we'd recommend building in extra time rather than cutting it fine.
On the return leg we track your flight rather than the scheduled time, which matters more here than on some routes, since a delayed landing followed by a long cross-London drive home is exactly when you don't want to also be waiting for a car.
The final stretch in runs past the Royal Docks and the ExCeL exhibition centre, which sits directly across the water from the terminal — worth knowing because a major event at ExCeL can add noticeable traffic to the roads around the airport even when the airport itself isn't especially busy. The Emirates Air Line cable car, linking the Royal Docks to the Greenwich Peninsula, is a nearby landmark some drivers use to orient themselves on the final approach.
Because the runway is short and the approach steep, City Airport also has more weather-related delays than some other London airports in poor visibility, which is another reason we track the actual flight status rather than assuming a landing will run to schedule.
The drive out typically threads through parts of Newham and Tower Hamlets before picking up a route back towards the M4 corridor, and depending on the time of day that can mean anything from the Blackwall Tunnel approach to a slower run through the Isle of Dogs, so we don't commit to a single fixed route the way we might for a simpler motorway journey — the driver picks whichever is actually moving on the day.
Because it's a smaller airport with fewer long-haul connections, most passengers using London City are on business rather than travelling with a lot of luggage, so pickups here tend to be quicker to load than at Heathrow or Gatwick, which helps offset some of the extra time the cross-London drive adds overall.