Itaewon and Hannam: the International Quarter

For decades Itaewon was defined by the Yongsan Garrison, the US army base that sat immediately below it, and by the businesses that served it: tailors, bars, English signage and an openness that the rest of Seoul did not have. The base relocated south to Pyeongtaek over the 2010s and 2020s, and the district changed with it.

What replaced it is a more ordinary and more interesting neighbourhood. The main road still runs uphill from Itaewon station with restaurants down both sides — the concentration of foreign cuisines remains the highest in Korea — and the alleys above it hold small bars, tattoo studios and the city's most visible LGBT scene.

East of the station, Hannam-dong climbs towards the museums and the embassies and is quietly one of the most expensive addresses in the country: galleries, designer flagships and a coffee culture with prices to match. The two halves are ten minutes apart and feel like different cities.

On the evening of 29 October 2022 a crowd crush in a narrow sloping alley off the main food street killed 159 people, most of them young adults and 27 of them foreign nationals, who had come to the district for Halloween. It was the worst peacetime disaster in Seoul in decades and it changed how the city manages crowds.

The alley is now marked as a memorial, and it is treated as such by the neighbourhood — visitors leave flowers and notes, and it is not a photo stop.

The practical changes are visible every autumn. Police designate special crowd-management zones across the city, Itaewon and Hongdae among them, with several thousand officers deployed on the Halloween weekend; a barrier down the middle of the main food street enforces one-way pedestrian flow; and digital signboards at the alley entrances display live crowd density. Around Halloween the district is heavily policed and considerably calmer than it once was, and many businesses no longer treat the weekend as a party at all.

For an ordinary visit on an ordinary evening none of this is visible beyond the barriers. It belongs on the page because a guide that omits it is not being straight with you.

Two of Seoul's most significant collections sit within twenty minutes of Itaewon station, and neither is in a palace.

Leeum Museum of Art is up the hill in Hannam-dong: Korean antiquities in one building, contemporary art in another, in architecture by three different internationally known practices. It closes on Mondays, New Year's Day, Seollal and Chuseok.

The War Memorial of Korea is fifteen minutes west, opens 09:30 to 18:00 and closes on Mondays as well. It is free, it is enormous, and its treatment of the Korean War is the single best explanation available in English of why the DMZ is what it is. If you are doing a border tour, do this first.

The National Museum of Korea is two stops away in Yongsan and, unlike the other two, never takes a weekly day off.

Itaewon station on Line 6 serves the main road directly; Hangangjin one stop east is closer to Leeum and Hannam-dong, and Noksapyeong one stop west is the gateway to Haebangchon.

The district is genuinely hilly. The main road climbs, the side streets climb harder, and Haebangchon and Gyeongnidan-gil involve long flights of steps. Comfortable shoes matter here more than anywhere else in central Seoul.

Itaewon works as an evening rather than a day: quiet before 17:00, busy from eight, and thinning out after midnight when the metro stops. Prices sit above the city average — this is the one district where a beer regularly costs ₩8,000 — and the reason to accept that is the food you cannot get elsewhere in Korea.