HOTELS¹

¹. In taxi slang an upmarket hotel is referred to as a Rowton House.

The Berkeley

The original Berkeley hotel was built off Piccadilly on what had been the gardens of Devonshire House. In 1901 the Savoy Group acquired The Berkeley. The Berkeley (1972) in Wilton Place is the original hotel's successor.

Location: Wilton Place, SW1X 7RL (blue, brown)

Website: www.the-berkeley.co.uk

By Chance

The statuesque actress (Kerstin) Anita Ekberg (1931-2015) worked in Hollywood during the 1950s. Subsequently, Federico Fellini cast her to play what was essentially a version of herself in La Dolce Vita (1960). At the time, he had not written the script. The former Miss Sweden proved to be adept at generating publicity about herself. The year that the film was released she just happened to have a wardrobe malfunction in the lobby of The Berkeley when by chance a photographer was present.

Brown's Hotel

Brown's Hotel traces its origins back to 1666. The business relocated in 1837, at which time it was being run by James Brown, who had been Byron's butler.

St George's was located on Albemarle Street and Brown's on Dover Street. The two businesses combined in Albemarle Street to form Browns & St George s.

In 1876 London's first long-distance telephone call was made by Alexander Graham Bell from Brown's Hotel to Ravenscourt Park, which lies several miles to its west.

In 2008 Brown's occupied eleven townhouses.

Location: 33 Albemarle Street, W1S 4BP (red, pink)

Website: www.roccofortehotels/hotels-and-resorts/brown-s-hotel

The Cavendish Hotel

Mrs. Lewis was a gifted cook whose culinary skills were appreciated by King Edward VII. She was able to use her reputation to help set herself up as the proprietor of The Cavendish. Her reign over her somewhat Bohemian establishment lasted through the first half of the 20^thC.

Location: 81 Jermyn Street, SW1Y 6JF (blue, pink)

Website: www.thecavendish-london.co.uk

Claridges

William Claridge (d.1882) was a former butler who set himself up as a hotelier. His establishment developed an excellent reputation. In 1895 it was bought by the Savoy Group.

Because of the number of foreign royalty who stayed at Claridges, it became known as the annex of Buckingham Palace . There is a story that a caller once asked to speak to the King . The receptionist replied, Certainly, sir. With which king would you like to speak?

Since the Second World it has been customary for visiting monarchs and heads of state to invite the sovereign to dine at Claridges in thanks for her/his hospitality.

Location: 57 Brook Street, W1K 4HR (orange, blue)

Website: www.claridges.co.uk

The Columbia

The Virgin record label put up bands at The Columbia. The hotel became the London base for numerous out-of-town bands.

Location: 95-99 Lancaster Gate, W2 3NS (orange, blue)

Website: https://thecolumbia.co.uk

The Connaught Hotel

A hotel was founded in Charles Street at the start of the 19^thC. At the century's close Auguste Scorrier rebuilt it and renamed it The Coburg Hotel. During the First World War anti-German sentiment was rampant. As a result, the business's name was changed to The Connaught Hotel.

Location: 1 Carlos Place, W1K 2AL (purple, yellow)

Website: www.the-connaught.co.uk

Breakfast

The newspaper obituaries editor Hugh Massingberd adored food. If a waiter listed what was on offer for breakfast, the fellow would wait until the end and then nod his head. The attendant would then inquire what it was that he would like, to which the journalist would reply, All of them.

The obituaries that were written of Mr Massingberd have been run.

See Also: FOOD Breakfast; OBITUARIES

The Dilly¹

Location: 21 Piccadilly, W1J 0BH. (Now The Sheraton Grand London Park Lane.) (purple, grey)

Website: www.thedillylondon.com

¹. The former The Park Lane Hotel's popularity with Americans led to its being dubbed the American Workhouse in taxi slang.

The Dorchester Hotel

The Dorchester Hotel (1930) is a renowned hotel that took the name of a townhouse that stood upon the same site. The original Dorchester House had been the London home of the Earls of Dorchester. The money to buy the peers Dorset estates had been earned through money lending activities of a forebearer during the English Civil Wars.

In 1928 the construction magnate Sir Robert McAlpine paid 500,000 for the property. He demolished the house and built the hotel upon the site. At the time, the structure was noted for the use of concrete in its erection.

At one point, McAlpine was facing the prospect of going bankrupt. He needed a large loan from his bankers to give his business the chance of surviving. He offered his six sons as collateral.

Emerald Cunard's house was bombed. She moved into the seventh floor of The Dorchester Hotel. There, she ignored the Blitz and continued to entertain, declaring War is so vulgar.

Location: 53 Park Lane, W1K 1QA (blue, pink)

Website: www.dorchestercollection.com

Cheaper Than

The businessman Sir Ernest Harrison had been born the son of a docker and had trained as a chartered accountant. He kept a permanent suite at The Dorchester. There he entertained lavishly and sometimes hosted all night poker sessions. The bills for the suite were met by Racal Electronics, the Berkshire-based company that the knight was chairman of from 1966 to 2000. From time-to-time some of its shareholders would question the expense of the suite. Sir Ernest would respond by stating that the practice was cheaper than it would be to run a building in Central London to house an office.¹

¹. In 1982 Racal was granted one of Britain's two original radio-telephone licenses. In 1991 Vodafone was demerged from the company.

The Embassy Hotel

Richey Edwards (1967-2008) was the musically-limited rhythm guitarist in the band The Manic Streets. However, he was gifted at creating an image for the band and wrote most of the lyrics for the group s well-received third album The Holy Bible (1994). His lyrics were deeply influenced by Sylvia Plath and had clear hallmarks of the depression that had already hospitalised him. On 2 February 1995 he disappeared from his room in The Embassy Hotel. Fifteen days later the police discovered his car at Aust motorway services station near the Severn Bridge. No corpse was recovered from the river. He became noted for his Lord Lucanesque disappearance. Edwards was declared legally dead in 2008.

Location: The Embassy Hotel, 150 Bayswater Road, W2 4RT. Now a Double Tree by Hilton Hotel. (purple, red)

The Goring Hotel

In 1910 Otto Richard G ring, a German, opened a hotel in Beeston Place. It was the first one in the world to have a bathroom for every room or suite. When visiting London, Kaiser Wilhelm II preferred to stay in it rather than with his cousins in Buckingham Palace. During the First World War, the G ring family Anglicised their surname by dropping the umlaut from its ' '. Following the end of the conflict, the by-now ex-Kaiser did not avail himself of the hotel's facilities again.

In 1937 King George VI's coronation was held. The Crown Prince of Norway was one of the dignitaries who attended it. He chose to stay in Goring's rather than at Buckingham Palace. This was because in the palace he had to share a bath with five people. Here I have one to myself .

Location: 15 Beeston Place, SW1W 0JW (blue, yellow)

Website: www.thegoring.com

The Great Eastern Hotel

For many years The Great Eastern Hotel (1884) was the only hotel in the City.

Location: 40 Liverpool Street, EC2M 7QN. In 2023 the hotel was called Andaz London Liverpool Street. (red, brown)

Website: www.hyatt.com/en-US/england-united-kingdom/andaz-london-liverpool-street/longe

The Grosvenor House Hotel

After the First World War, domestic help became progressively more expensive to hire and thus the great townhouses of the West End became increasingly costly to run. Even the 2^nd Duke of Westminster moved out of Grosvenor House. In 1924 the property was sold to the soap tycoon Lord Leverhulme, who planned to use the building to house a public art gallery. However, he died before he could see the plan through to its completion.

His executors sold on Grosvenor House to a group of developers. The building was the first of the grand Mayfair mansions to be demolished. The Sir Edwin Lutyens-designed The Grosvenor House hotel (1928) was built upon its site. The British version of the board game Monopoly was launched during the 1930s. For the game's first players, the inclusion of Park Lane would have had had a particular resonance in view of what had been happening there.

Location: 86-90 Park Lane, W1K 7TN (orange, blue)

See Also: BOARD GAMES Monopoly

Website: www.marriott.co.uk/hotels/travel/longh-jw-marriott-grosvenor-house-london

The Lanesborough

The Lanesborough is a luxurious hotel that is located in the former St George s Hospital building.¹

Location: 1 Lanesborough Place, SW1X 7TA (red, orange)

Website: www.oetkercollection.com/hotels/the-lanesborough

¹. St George's Hospital in Tooting has a Lanesborough Wing.

The London Hilton

The London Hilton hotel (1963) was built upon the site of Londonderry House, a townhouse that had long been one of the most notable features of Park Lane.

Location: 22 Park Lane, W1K 1BE (blue, orange)

Website: www.hilton.com/en/hotels/lonhitw-london-hilton-on-park-lane

The Midland Grand Hotel

It cost 438,000 to build the St Pancras Station Hotel. The building was designed by the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott for the Midland Railway Company. The materials from which the building was constructed were mostly brought down from the Midlands along the enterprise s railway lines. The red colour of the hotel's exterior is a testimony to the baking of Middle England geology. Had it been built of London brick it would be a similar sandy colour to its neighbour King's Cross Railway Station. Cutbacks were implemented before its construction had been completed. On the exterior there are empty plinths that Scott had wished would be occupied by statues.

The building (1873) that houses Foreign & Commonwealth Office was created by Scott. In 1868 he won the competition to design the edifice with a Gothic-style plan that would have echoed Augustus Pugin's work on the Houses of Parliament. However, the then Prime Minister Lord Palmerston overruled the decision and insisted that if Scott wished to retain the contract he should create a Classical building, it being seen as a cheaper style in which to build than Gothic was. The architect did as he had been bid and produced the plan for the present Whitehall building. Concurrently, he was working on the creation of the St Pancras Station Hotel (1876) in King's Cross.

There is a story that Scott relieved his frustration over the matter of the Foreign Office by stressing the Gothic elements in the hotel's design. Unfortunately, this is probably not true. The 1866 financial crisis prompted the railway company to tell the architect to make the hotel less expensive to erect. He did this in two ways. He built it in two stages; after the first these opened it was able to generate revenue to help pay for the second portion. He also modified the design. He had intended that building should be heated by a central heating system, which at the time was an innovative technology. Instead, he used open fires. The changes that he made were to lead the building to age more quickly than it would have had he been free to build his original design.

In 1923 the Midland Railway merged with the Great Northern, which owned Euston Railway Station, to form the London Midland & Scottish Railway. The new company decided that its Euston hotel would be its principal London lodging establishment and so did not invest in the St Pancras Station Hotel, which had relatively few bathrooms. In 1935 it stopped taking paying guests.

In 1966 British Rail indicated that it was giving serious consideration to demolishing the hotel. The poet and architectural writer Sir John Betjeman led a campaign that defeated the proposal. The following year the building was granted listed status.

St Pancras Hotel was used as railway offices until the late 1980s. For a number of years the building was empty. It now functions as a hotel again.

Location: Euston Road, NW1 2AR. (Now the St Pancras Renaissance London Hotel.)

Website: www.themidlandhotel.co.uk

The Portobello Hotel

Tim and Cathy Herring, who had been bedsit landlords, moved into the hotel sector. They were also to own Julie's restaurant.

Virgin Records was closely associated with the Portobello Road. Richard Branson was the hotel's first customer. This led the hotel to become associated with the music industry.

Location: 22 Stanley Gardens, W11 2NG (red, yellow)

Website: www.portobellohotel.com

Railway Hotels

Railway hotels had a greater range of priced rooms than non-railway hotels did.

See Also: RAILWAYS

The Regent Palace Hotel

Location: The Regent Palace Hotel, 36 Glasshouse Street, W1B 5DL (pink, red)

The Ritz London

The Paris Ritz opened in 1898. The hotelier Cesar Ritz was able to finance its creation through the money that he had skimmed off from the profits of The Savoy in London while he had been managing it. The same year his larceny had been discovered by the latter hotel's owners and he had been sacked, along with the great chef Auguste Escoffier. The pair moved on to Mr Ritz's new London enterprise the Carlton Hotel.¹

The London Ritz was designed to the specifications of Ritz. He had retired from the hotels business by the time it opened in 1906. His professional nerve having been broken reputedly by the strains that had been imposed upon him first by arranging accommodation for dignitaries who were going to attend the planned coronation of King Edward VII, and then by the coronation being postponed for a year because the monarch had suffered a near fatal case of perityphlitis.

The hotels and the great private townhouses co-existed for a while. The Ritz's management inquired of the 2^nd Viscount Wimborne (1903-1967) whether he would be prepared to sell them a section of his garden because they were thinking of enlarging the hotel. The peer replied that he was contemplating extending his garden and would the company like to sell him their hotel. (The peer sold his property to an insurance company during the late 1940s.)

In 1978 the hotel's ballroom was converted into a casino.

Location: 150 Piccadilly, W1J 9BR (orange, blue)

Website: www.theritzhotel.com

¹. New Zealand House now occupies the site of what was the Carlton Hotel.

The Royal Lancaster Hotel

The Allman Brothers was an American band that had a number of pugnaciously-inclined members. Upon one occasion they picked a fight with a group that was also using The Royal Lancaster Hotel. The other guys happened to be the Metropolitan Police Boxing Club.

Location: Lancaster Terrace, W2 2TY (purple, white)

Website: www.royallancaster.com

The Savoy Hotel

During a trip that the impresario Richard d Oyly Carte made to the United States he was impressed by the material comfort of the hotels in which he had stayed. He decided to utilise The Savoy Theatre's profits to build the best hotel in London. In 1889 the Savoy Hotel opened. It was the first hotel in Britain to have fitted electric lights and to have such a high proportion of private bathrooms. During the 1920s the hotel enjoyed the patronage of numerous wealthy trans-Atlantic visitors, leading it to be dubbed the 49^th State .

The fashion designer Guccio Gucci (1881-1953) worked in the kitchen of The Savoy.

The Savoy named a smoked-haddock omelette after the writer Arnold Bennett.

The Savoy had its own power supply to ensure that it had an electricity supply 24 hours a day.

In 1923 the B.B.C. started to broadcast dance music performed by the Savoy Orpheans.

Location: Savoy Court, Strand, WC2R 0EZ (red, blue)

Website: www.thesavoylondon.com

¹. In taxi slang The Savoy known as The Saveloy .

The Departed and The Departing

The Kipper and The Corpse (1979), the tenth episode of Fawlty Towers, is centred upon the ramifications of a hotel guest dying. It was inspired by an incident that occurred to the future restaurateur Andrew Leeman while he was working as a graduate trainee at The Savoy. In the show the guest/corpse was given Mr Leeman's name.

There were a number of apartments in The Savoy complex that were permanently occupied by individuals. One of the residents was the actor Richard Harris. As he was dying, he was carried out to an ambulance that was parked outside the hotel. He is reputed to have proclaimed to a party of arriving tourists, It was the food!

Sea Containers London Hotel

Sea Containers House (1974) was designed by Warren Planter (1919-2006) to be a hotel. However, it was used as office. Its name was taken from its first principal client a shipping business. In 2014 part of the building finally became a hotel.

The Westbury Mayfair

The Westbury in Mayfair was popular with Americans. The musician Jerry Lee Lewis (1935-2022) was staying in the hotel when his child bride scandal erupted in 1958.

Location: 37 Conduit Street, W1S 2YF (purple, red)

Website: http://westbury-mayfair.londonhotelsuk.net

David Backhouse 2024

HOTELS1