The Hidden Gems of London is a website and community launched by two founders with a heartfelt passion for London : Cosmin Savenco and Florian Adrian Topeneanu. We both have decades of experience and living in London, during which we have searched far and wide to gather everything that you can find here. Hidden Gems of London seeks to provide you with all the best and most secret locations and spots, crazy good deals for popular and iconic locations and attractions, as well as hook you up with hotel deals and taxi services. Overall, it is your companion to exploring London.
You can use the site in any way you like depending on what you are looking for. There are 5 primary sections highlighted at the top of our website page that can help you, namely : Tours, The Gems, Attractions, Hotels and Taxis. Each section has it’s own instructions on how it works, and they all bring something to the table that aims to write another page about London in your book of great travel experiences, not only that, but we packed a ton of free and useful information everywhere we could, so we suggest you to take a look at all of the sections.
You may only need one service, or a handful, it all depends on what you want and need. For example, you may just want to book a table at a fancy, cozy and secret restaurant in London, in which case you go to The Gems section, find what you’re looking for, place a booking and voilà, that’s it. Or you may be a tourist and want to visit London for a week, in which case you can look at the London in 7 Days itinerary guide within the Tours section, you would also book a hotel room and purchase attraction tickets in advance, thus you’d go to Hotels and Attractions, then you may also consider that you’ll need a taxi to transport you from the airport to the hotel, in which case you may go to the Taxis section as well and book a taxi to make that trip. How you interact with what we offer is up to you, what you need, and what you desire from your experience of London.
The Hidden Gems of London was created by Londoners with Londoners in mind too, and for that reason we have invested a lot of our work into The Gems, it is the section that may interest you the most. It aims to reveal the most exciting and secret locations in London, most of them hidden and unknown to most Londoners. In fact, this entire website and community was borne out of the desire to share our knowledge with other Londoners, a knowledge of so many hidden gems, that we just cannot keep it to ourselves, this information is very valuable, and we decided to share it with everyone who comes across it. London is too big of a city for anyone to know everything about it, but it is possible to know a lot about it, by getting to know something more about it everyday. We’ve met many fellow Londoners who have asked us questions such as :
– “Where is a nice place to go for coffee?”
– “Where is a great bar or restaurant where I can take pictures for Instagram?”
– “Where can I take someone out on a romantic date?”
– “Where is a cool place to have a nice beer and chill out with my mates?”
– “What are the best nightclubs in London?”
– “Are there any places here that do something very unique and rare that I haven’t experienced before?”
– “I want to try something new, what do you recommend ?”
And our answer to all of them comes in the form of the Hidden Gems of London. Within The Gems section we have places that address all of those questions and more, you will find the places that you need, for any need that you may have. As a Londoner chances are you may not have much use of the other sections, except the Attractions if at some point you may be in the mood for some adventure, we also have plenty of free attractions listed there. But otherwise, take just The Gems and you have found a precious discovery worth the value of the entire website within just that one place. This is what we offer the most to our fellow Londoners.
No, we do not charge you any booking fees, or any other kinds of fees or taxes. For any service that you use, whether you book a table, buy attraction tickets, book a hotel room or a taxi, you’re not charged any additional money by us. We do earn an affiliate commission where it applies, but that is our fee that we charge from the companies we partner with, and is not money taken from you. Everything is operated at absolutely no additional cost to you.
As stated above, we do earn an affiliate commission, but we get that at no additional cost to you so you don’t need to worry about this. What we really enjoy from what we do is the satisfaction of knowing that we offer something meaningful, unique and valuable to everyone. It is the reason why we’re doing all of this, if you’re happy and have created beautiful memories in London with our help, then that puts a smile on our faces, and we would love to hear your story or testimony about this, you can share with us your testimony either by sending it to our email hiddengemsoflondon@gmail.com or by messaging us on our Instagram @thehiddengemsoflondon.
We also offer advice, tips and hints, free guides to exploring London and all kinds of useful information for tourists and Londoners alike. Most notably we have free London itineraries in the Tours section. We do have plans to expand in the future and take it even further, but we can’t announce anything in advance. Meanwhile, sign up to our Newsletter to be among the first ones to know when it does happen!
Although we refrain from discussing other websites and similarly modelled companies for various reasons and policies, we can say that there are many websites and communities that all aim to encourage the exploration of London in a similar way to what we do. And we like and respect what other websites and companies do too. So what do we do differently? Well, the quantity and quality of information that we have packed into everything that you see, and the fact that we left no stone unturned when looking for hidden gems.
The Gems, for example, contains a list of browsable categories that we haven’t seen elsewhere, with types of locations that rarely ever get mentioned. This is, to the best of our knowledge, for the very first time that all of these types of places show up in one, single and simplified section for you to take your pick at your leisure. There’s also the peculiar combination of popular spots alongside hidden gems that ensures you get the best out of both worlds. And even the quality of the partnering companies that we work with, which have been carefully selected in order to maximize your benefit from booking through them or purchasing tickets through them, you get the best deals, best conditions, within the best time-frames. Everything has been streamed to work towards your benefit, helping you have a fantastic and memorable experience of London. And we believe that’s something special.
We have taken steps to ensure it all works seamlessly and without any issues or concerns in order to prevent anything from spoiling your fun, so such situations are very unlikely. But in the case in which such unfortunate situations do happen, the first advice that we give is to contact the customer service team of the company through which you placed the booking/bought the attraction tickets from, and they will take care of the situation. Reaching them by phone is quicker and is advised, but you can also email them. In the case in which you are still having issues, you may Contact Us and, depending on the situation, we may be able to investigate it further.
We have associated our company and community with diamonds since the very beginning. When we first started, we thought that “Hidden Gems of London” would be such a great name for what we want to do, and immediately associated gems with diamonds in order to symbolize this name. So now it is a part of our branding and one of our defining symbolic traits. We use the diamond emoji quite often on social media as well. We perceive diamonds as being elegant, unique, and luxuriously valuable, and they need digging in order to uncover, and this is how we feel about everything that you discover here. Although, thankfully, the digging has already been done for you 🙂
We believe that those are concepts everyone experiences in fulfilling and joyous travels, you are enjoying yourself, discovering and experiencing something new, and creating beautiful memories you can look back on and tell their story. You can also read our story on About Us, which also goes over this briefly. At the end of the story we go on to mention the slogan and say : “All three of these mentioned concepts played a part from the very beginning of how Hidden Gems of London came to be, and if you mull over it a little, they ring true for all of your travels.” .
This’ll be a long story, if you want to know the story of how Cosmin and Florian met, you can read it here at About Us. But if you want to know how Hidden Gems of London itself got started, we had the first ideas and musings to create the Hidden Gems of London by the end of 2021, what we had in plan initially was very different from what you see here now. What you’re getting now is far, far better than what we originally planned. It wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t nowhere near as good as it is now, we first wanted to create an E-book with just The Gems and that was it, back then you could say that Hidden Gems of London was a diamond in the rough *pun intended* .
We realised later on with wise advice from a friend and associate of ours that our vision can take us much further, and he helped us to get there.
The whole journey took us around a year to fully put everything together, including compiling the locations into lists, sketching ideas, editing, customizing the brand, developing our social media, researching the industry, experiencing your journey by embarking on some attractions ourselves and visiting certain spots for the first time, building and developing our partnerships, but mostly – doing all of the hard-work needed to open up the website, in order for you to be here today.
We already knew a large amount of fascinating places before we started this journey, through deep digging and researches of our own that took place long before we thought about creating the Hidden Gems of London, but as we worked at it, our vision expanded, new things started showing up, more places caught our attention, and we have discovered increasingly more whilst working to reveal what we already knew. It was beautiful to discover more while aiming to reveal more, it was akin to learning whilst teaching.
We might, but sadly we cannot discuss anything in advance for various reasons. There is more to be seen, and although London is a very big part of the United Kingdom, there is, indeed, a lot more to it. But for now at least, our attention is focused exclusively on London.
Yes, gladly! We will share stories, reels and pictures tagging @Thehiddengemsoflondon on Instagram, and if you want to tag our personal accounts @cosmin.savenco and @healthy_food_and_story, we will share them there as well.
And alternatively, on Tik Tok you can tag us @Hiddengemsoflondon and on Facebook you can tag us @Thehiddengemsoflondon.
Please note, that by tagging us, you give your permission for us to share the content unless otherwise stated. If you don’t want us to share it, feel free to message us on our socials and let us know.
You can Contact Us, you can email us any questions you may have at Hiddengemsoflondon@gmail.com. We aim to get back to you as soon as we can, but please note that it may take a few days at most!