London Gatwick Airport ground transport

Gatwick handled 42.8 million passengers in 2025 from two terminals and one runway, and the layout decides how you leave. The station is inside the South Terminal, five minutes from arrivals; if you land at North Terminal you ride the free shuttle transit first, which takes about two minutes and runs constantly. Four train companies then share the same platforms and they go to genuinely different places, so the right one depends on where in London you are staying. Gatwick Express is the non-stop run to Victoria — twice an hour, roughly half an hour, and the most expensive at £24.10 one way. Southern follows the same tracks but calls at East Croydon and Clapham Junction, which makes it slower by ten or fifteen minutes and noticeably cheaper, and it is also the operator that carries on south to Brighton and along the coast. Thameslink is the useful one for anybody not heading to Victoria: it tunnels straight under the capital to London Bridge, Blackfriars, Farringdon and St Pancras International, where the Eurostar leaves, and it also runs south to Brighton. Great Western takes a quieter westward path to Reading every thirty minutes for onward Thames Valley connections. Contactless and Oyster both work on the London corridor, so there is no need to queue for paper tickets. Away from the railway, National Express coaches link Gatwick to Heathrow, to Victoria Coach Station and down to Brighton, usually undercutting the train but taking longer. Licensed cabs come from Airport Cars Gatwick, the airport's official concession, whose white Skodas wait on the ground floor outside arrivals. One local warning: since 6 January 2026 the forecourt drop-off charge is £10 for ten minutes, so being collected by a friend is no longer free.