Hongdae: Buskers, Bars and Student Prices

The name is short for Hongik Daehakgyo, the art university whose campus sits at the top of the hill, and the district grew out of the studios and cheap rooms around it. That origin still shapes the place: the design shops, the live venues, the mural-covered walls and the fact that the best food is small, fast and inexpensive.

The centre of gravity is the pedestrianised area sometimes called the playground street, five minutes from Exit 9 of Hongik University station. On Friday and Saturday evenings it fills with buskers — dance crews, singers with portable amps, occasionally an entire band — and the crowds form and dissolve around them until well past midnight. It is free, it is genuinely good, and it is the single most reliable free entertainment in Seoul.

Around it, the district divides: live music venues and clubs to the south towards Sangsu, cafés and boutiques north towards Yeonnam, and the university itself uphill to the east.

Dinner first, and it should be cheap: pork belly on a table grill, chicken and beer, or a bowl of noodles for ₩8,000 to ₩15,000 a head. The barbecue places here charge noticeably less than the same meal in Gangnam.

Drinks run from ₩4,000 for a beer or a bottle of soju in a small bar to ₩10,000 for a cocktail in the better ones. Clubs charge entry, usually ₩10,000 to ₩20,000 including a drink, and they do not get busy until after midnight — a queue at 22:00 is a queue of people who came too early.

The budget for a full night, dinner included, sits at around ₩40,000 to ₩60,000 a head, which is why the district fills with people in their twenties. The practical warning is the last train: around midnight, and once it is gone your options are a taxi with a late-night surcharge or staying out until the system restarts about 05:30. Plenty of people choose the second.

During the day the district trades in second-hand clothes, small design shops and coffee. It is the best place in Seoul for vintage — several dedicated multi-floor stores sit within ten minutes of the station — and for the kind of stationery and craft shops that make sense in a university neighbourhood.

The Gyeongui Line Forest Park, built on a decommissioned railway, runs north from the station through Yeonnam-dong: a strip of grass with cafés down both sides that on a spring weekend is the most pleasant public space in western Seoul.

This is also where the city's café culture is most concentrated. Prices sit at ₩5,000 to ₩7,000 for coffee, the interiors are the product as much as the drink, and almost every one of them will let you sit for two hours with a laptop. More on the café scene.

Hongdae is the cheapest well-connected place to sleep in Seoul, and the AREX all-stop train from Incheon calls at Hongik University station, which makes the arrival easy — no changes, no taxi.

The cost is noise. Rooms within two hundred metres of the playground street hear it until three, and the district's guesthouses are aimed at people who intend to be part of that. If you want the location without the volume, look at Sangsu, Hapjeong or Yeonnam, all one stop or a ten-minute walk away, where prices are similar and the streets are residential.

Against Myeongdong, Hongdae is cheaper, younger and further from the palaces — about twenty-five minutes on Line 2 to the centre. The full district comparison is on the where to stay page.