London, the capital city of the United Kingdom, is a true melting pot. It is a city with people from diverse cultures and religious backgrounds. London is considered one of the global capitals of fashion, culture, finance, politics, and trade. The city will serve as home to the 2010 Summer Olympics, adding to its long list of cultural achievements. Walking the streets of the city provides a glimpse into both old and new architecture. London is a tourist's paradise that has something to satisfy the appetite of all travelers.
London’s Highlights:
Tower of London: Unravel the history of London by visiting the tower. The Tower of London is a fortress that symbolizes royalty. It is also known as Her Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress and is located on the River Thames.
The London Eye: Constructed by British Airways in 1999, the London Eye has quickly become a popular tourist spot. It resembles a giant wheel and is 135 meters tall and located close to the River Thames. A ride on the slow-moving eye offers a spectacular view of the city.
The British Museum: One of the many free admission museums located throughout the city, The British Museum houses the popular Rosetta Stone and boasts a comprehensive coin collection exhibit. Out of all the museums in London, this is a must-see.
Buckingham Palace: This is the place to witness the historic changing of the guard.
Harrods: The world famous Harrods department store is the most talked place in London. In addition the endless items for sale, it also features a memorial dedicated to Princess Diana.
Madam Tussaud's Wax Museum: The London location of this global attraction gives tourists the chance to mingle with wax statues of their famous celebrities.
Possibly the most theatrical and over-the-top hotel in London or anywhere else, Blakes nevertheless predates by two decades the current mania for individualist boutique hotels, and frankly outpaces them all, at least in terms of sheer eccentricity. It’s hard to imagine how shocking this place must have been when its doors opened in the lat ...
Haymarket Hotel is Firmdale group's most recent London creation. You may be wondering why we mention the group - or shall we call it a family? We’re disposed to think of Number Sixteen, the Knightsbridge, Soho Hotel and all the rest of the group's other London hotels as instant classics: luxury-hotel values on a boutique-hotel scal ...
The Knightsbridge Hotel is the perfect modestly-priced entrée into one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world. In fact the Knightsbridge is the ideal shopper’s hotel, a sort of junior version of its sisters, Covent Garden and Charlotte Street, with a correspondingly lower nightly rate, leaving plenty of room on the credit ...
Number Sixteen is either the coziest boutique hotel in London, or the most luxurious bed and breakfast—we’re still not sure. The location, down a sleepy side street in South Kensington, is fairly well hidden; just a row of nineteenth-century Victorian townhouses without so much as a sign to show the way. If you intend to bring the pa ...
The hotel business has of late become so fashion-oriented that it’s hard sometimes to remember there was life before the boutique hotel. But as the upstarts slowly move upscale, increasingly incorporating elements of old-world luxury alongside their trademark visual flash, one is reminded of the hotels that have always done luxury well; th ...
On a narrow side street in the bustling and chic Covent Garden district of London’s West End, this splendidly theatrical small hotel’s exclusive atmosphere and central location make it the perfect London pied-à-terre for visiting actors, professional shoppers, and savvy yet indulgent travelers. The opera house and the theatre ...
Think back, if you will, to the Bloomsbury set: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, EM Forster, Roger Fry — they lived the perfect bohemian life with houses in the city and the country, lofty aesthetic goals, not so much money as to lose their social consciousness but more than enough to afford a gardener. Enter Charlotte Street, ...
The old and rather serious Hyde Park Hotel is back after lengthy renovations as the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park; and like any Mandarin it’s astonishingly luxurious, impeccably staffed, and not at all hard on the eyes.
Budget travelers steer clear, as conspicuous consumption is the order of the day—not only does Mandari ...
The Berkeley does not boast the longest list of royal guests, the most storied history, or the richest collection of antiques and old master paintings. Nor does it have nightingales or a location in Berkeley Square. What it does have is comfort and under 200 rooms. It is not considered, by any means, to be the grandest or the most stylish hotel, ...
It doesn’t get much more picture-book English, much more posh turn-of-the-century London, than this: the Cadogan Hotel, on Sloane Square in Knightsbridge, just around the corner from Harrod’s, down the road from Harvey Nicks, and a (very muscular) stone’s throw from Hyde Park. This is where Oscar Wilde was arrested for indecenc ...
This Kensington boutique is something a bit different for the ultra-competitive London hotel scene — neither a chintz-laden country-house fantasy nor the deranged fantasy of an interior designer gone mad, the Rockwell is modern in a way that's sedate, restrained, maybe even a bit Scandinavian, behind that gleaming white Victorian facad ...
The London hotel scene these days is all flash interiors and decadent comforts, a sort of arms race of bold design and lavish luxuries. No hotel can compete in this market without designer-dressed staff, the obligatory Frette linens and whimsically outsize furniture, and a hotel without a happening bar scene is like a day without sunshine (thoug ...
Though a rated historical building, the sixties office block that housed the Sanderson fabrics company is not the most elegant facade for a stylish boutique hotel. Fortunately the interiors find Starck and Schrager in rare form, raising their game a bit to stand out in this most competitive of hotel markets. Though constrained a bit by the build ...
St Martins Lane was the first Ian Schrager/Philippe Starck collaboration on English shores, moving into Covent Garden a few months ahead of its younger sister, Soho’s Sanderson. The concept (at both hotels) is Urban Resort, and there’s no question guests walk into a different world upon entering, a world furnished with golden tooth-s ...
The very cool and very modern Zetter gets an expansion; and what’s the point of an expansion if it’s literally just more of the same? It’s a question that’ll remain rhetorical in the case of the Zetter Townhouse, as this early Georgian residence, just across St. Johns Square from its forebear, takes a decidedly different ...
Many of the world’s most stylish hotels are heavy on the public spaces, pouring money into lounges, libraries, drawing rooms, even private cinemas, while relegating the paying guests to cramped, uninspired rooms. How this works as a business proposition is quite beyond our understanding, but in this case it’s irrelevant—London& ...
It’s a testament to the power of a coat of paint and a bit of new furniture. Actually it took slightly more than that — but finally at the Parkcity there’s a hotel that’s worthy of its splendid Victorian-era building. The update leaves the Parkcity looking contemporary, while remaining true to its heritage — the cou ...
West London has never been short on top-flight luxury hotels, especially around Knightsbridge, Kensington and Hyde Park. What’s unique about the Baglioni is that it’s so, well, Italian — posh and decadent, almost comically over-the-top, yet without a shred of irony, marked by none of the whimsy and lightness you’ll find i ...
From April 2nd to the 27th, Hazlitt's is carrying out restoration on the rear of building. During this time scaffolding will be in place. Whilst the hotel hopes this work will not affect guests the work may take away from the Hazlitt’s experience. To reflect this they are offering special rates during this period.
Tucked ...
The Metropolitan is the apotheosis of the trendy boutique hotel concept—and we don’t mean ‘trendy’ in a pejorative sense, but rather as a simple statement of fact. Some hotels aim to impersonate down-home country charm, others old-money aristocracy; the Metropolitan, and the genre it stands for, aims to welcome guests int ...
Luxury Boutique hotels come and go, but a few of London’s top hotels have been in it for the long haul. At the end of the last century Brown’s, a fixture since 1837, was starting to show its age. But after a big-ticket renovation (the top-to-bottom Olga Polizzi treatment) it’s back in business, as grand, refined and quintessent ...
London’s Soho Hotel is impossibly glamorous and opulent, a luxury boutique that is at once classic and original—classic in the now-familiar London sense of overstated and outsized comfort, robust and enveloping furnishing and fixtures (as compared to the papier-mache set construction in lesser boutiques) and original in its avoidance ...
If you need a respite from the corporate efficiency of London’s modern mega-hotels, you’ll appreciate the uniquely English spirit of the Gore. This charming boutique hotel is packed with history, its six floors abloom with Victorian eccentricity.
Sisters Ada and Fanny Cooke opened the Gore on this scenic tree-lined str ...
The Pelham is a fine alternative to the flash and preciousness of some of London’s more overtly designed boutique hotels—it can be exhausting to spend time in a place that is striving so hard to be cool, and in contrast, it’s utterly refreshing to stay somewhere a little more restrained, a little more secure in itself.
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Claridge's may be one of the best hotels in London, and it is almost certainly the poshest. Even after its renovation, this Mayfair landmark—where the crowned heads of Europe came to wait out World War II—has remained splendidly and timelessly Art Deco. Stroll past the black awning into an entry foyer with Lalique vases, gilded c ...
Imagine the perfect apartment. If you were glamorous, talented, with piles of money and more aesthetic sense than you knew what to do with, yours would be rather like No. 5 Maddox Street. It’s not a conventional hotel, but a dozen or so very modern studios (complete with kitchens) in the heart of Mayfair. Okay, so maybe Mayfair is a slight ...
Prepare for a slight case of culture shock — the old Cox’s and King’s bank on the corner of Waterloo Place and Pall Mall, just around the corner from the Picadilly Circus tube station, is now the place to go in London for a little taste of Paris. Today owned by the French Sofitel chain, it’s had a makeover courtesy of des ...
Children under the age of 16 are not permitted in the May Fair Spa sauna or steam room.
In London, the hotel world’s majorest of major leagues, even the big chains know which way the wind is blowing — away from that fusty manor-house look, and toward something altogether more clean-lined and contemporary. Nobody’ ...
The Andaz Liverpool Street, London is a rare beast, a hip hotel right on top of Liverpool Station — one of just a handful of lodgings in the Square Mile, bucking the trend that generally sees City boys and girls (and their guests) flee for parts westward as soon as the closing bell rings. And despite its railway-hotel heritage, it’s ...
With just shy of a hundred and fifty rooms, it would be pushing it to call the Mandeville a “boutique” hotel. But more than many high-end hotels, it’s got an aesthetic all its own. Call it a design hotel, but one for fashion designers, not architects and other monochrome types. These pleasant pastels are immediately distinctive ...
Clerkenwell, neighboring on tony Soho, the buttoned-up City and art-damaged Shoreditch, is ground zero for London’s design and creative communities, chock full of imaging labs, ad agencies, and design firms. Many of our customers will have business in and around Clerkenwell, and now they have a convenient place to stay as well. Not that th ...
Naming a hotel after a neighborhood is a clear sign that your aim is to more or less sum the place up, and in that the Marylebone Hotel succeeds. Once an outlying village, now part of central London, Marylebone itself is an odd mix: its quiet, rather posh residential neighborhoods and its smallish, highly individual retail offerings lie within s ...
The outer frontier of London’s hospitality world moves inexorably eastward — we fully expect some future Tablet incarnation to beam news of a desperately hip boutique hotel somewhere in the North Sea directly to your cerebral cortex. That day’s a long way off, alas — for now Shoreditch, and Terence and Vicki Conran’ ...
Town Hall Hotel & Apartments — that sounds central, doesn’t it? Not quite; it’s in Bethnal Green, considerably eastward of London’s traditional hospitality centers. It’s a much less unlikely location than it would have been a few short years ago, however, and a conveniently placed Tube station assures easy acces ...
Many people find this hotel a strange way for Anouska Hempel to follow her celebrated Blakes Hotel. It isn't really. If Blakes represents how the West saw the Orient a hundred years ago—decadent, ornate, with long fingernails and opulent brocades—then the Hempel is how the West sees the Orient today: calm and pristine, with metic ...
Hard to believe, but there was a time in London's recent past when there was practically nowhere worth staying this far east — unfortunate indeed when one considers that there is in fact a world outside the West End. It's a situation that's since been remedied, and these days City financial types and the Clerkenwell/Hoxton art ...
London’s poor old Marble Arch must still be feeling the sting of its demotion; this stone monument used to mark the entry to Buckingham Palace, and now it marks a glorified bus stop at the west end of Oxford Street. Surely there’s some small consolation to be had, however, from the fact that the neighborhood is improving; a few block ...
The old song did say that if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere — and it’s a proposition that’s been confirmed again and again by the Manhattan-born Thompson hotel group. For their latest test they’ve chosen London, another big-league luxury-boutique town, and in the neighborhood of Belgravia a setting ...
If there’s an up side to the enormously overheated London hotel market, it’s the competition at the top end: the Connaught is just one of a fraternity of clubby old grand hotels, any one of which would be by some distance the top hotel in just about any other town.
In days past the Connaught was as old-school as can be ...
The London hotel scene is something of a proving ground for new trends in the hotel business — but you’d have to look long and hard at No. 11 London to find any evidence of progress. This is a hotel that delights in keeping to the trailing edge rather than the cutting one, a small monument to old-fashioned hospitality and a reminder ...
We’re not generally drawn to traditional hotels, and a Georgian townhouse hotel is about as traditional as it gets in London. But we make exceptions for conservatism in the name of something that’s worth conserving — and the old-school London luxury hotel is a tradition that’s worth hanging on to. And like so many of the ...
Obviously there are plenty of reasons to put up with central London’s overheated hotel market. In the name of geographic convenience we’re often moved to pay quite handsomely for a room that’s, at best, a step or two bigger than snug. But if you’re at all all flexible with your location — or, better yet, if business ...
If you’re looking for a window into an earlier era of British hospitality you could do a lot worse than the St. James’s Hotel and Club. This gorgeous bright red Victorian house stands at the end of a cul-de-sac off St. James’s Street, and it aims to recreate some of the atmosphere of the gentlemen’s clubs of the last cent ...
London is a lot of things to a lot of people, and it’s got a diversity of hotels to match. Mayfair in particular is, among other things, one of the hedge-fund capitals of the world. Put frankly, there’s quite a lot of money discreetly hidden discreetly away behind this neighborhood’s doors. And in 45 Park Lane the neighborhood& ...
The obvious thing to do, for an up-and-coming London hotelier, would be to stake out some distant, peripheral borough, in hope of riding a wave of gentrification. Then again, doing the obvious thing is rarely the path to memorable results. Restaurateurs Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver are more often associated with points easterly, thanks t ...
They don’t make rock’n’roll hotels quite like they used to. That’s probably a good thing — the Sunset Strip, for one, is a lot safer now that Mötley Crüe’s not chucking television sets out the windows of the Riot Hyatt anymore. Today’s rock’n’roll hotel is less about threats of inci ...
Harrods is an upmarket department store located in Brompton Road in Brompton, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London. The store occupies a 5-acre (20,000 m2) site and has over one million square feet (90,000 m2) of selling space in over 330 departments.
The Harrods motto is Omnia Omnibus Ubique&mdas ...
The epitome of elegant dining, Harrods Georgian Restaurant is as much of an institution as the store itself. Experience classic English fare with the expertly prepared buffet lunch or choose from a superb selection of seasonal à la carte dishes.
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The Georgian Buffet opens with a vast and colourful array of hors d'oeuvres, fol ...
Enjoy a commanding view of London in a mezzanine conservatory setting that borders the Georgian Restaurant at Harrods. Relaxed yet elegant, the Terrace Bar offers an innovative menu of breakfasts, light lunches and, of course, afternoon tea.
The menu at Terrace Bar at Harrods inspires the senses with an array of classic and c ...
Parisian tearoom Ladurée was established in 1862 and this breathtakingly chic venue is now loved internationally for its iconic macaroons.
Dining at Ladurée at Harrods lets you enjoy the surroundings of beautiful Knightsbridge. The restaurant is situated on Hans Road, complete with a spacious outdoor terrace for al f ...
A Venetian landmark at Harrods, Caffè Florian has been trading on the city's Piazza San Marco since 1720. Devotees have travelled from far and wide to experience its famous teas, coffees, chocolates and pastries, and now you can experience the house's gourmand excellence in the heart of London at Caffè Florian, Harrods ...
Frescobaldi is Italy's most established winemaking and gastronomic family. The Florentine house has been producing fine wines for over 700 years, supplying Italian Renaissance artist Donatello and even King Henry VIII.
The dei Frescobaldi restaurants are acclaimed for their exquisite food and wine pairings, and Frescobaldi on ...
The Veuve Clicquot Champagne Bar lets you enjoy the house's full selection of Champagnes from Yellow Label and Veuve Clicquot Rosé to the spectacular La Grande Dame. Our à la carte menu is specifically designed to complement Veuve Clicquot's fine Champagnes and is refreshed seasonally.
Set amongst the interna ...
As two of Britain's finest chefs, Chris and Jeff Galvin have over 50 years of cooking experience and a number of Michelin-starred restaurants to their name. In a new venture, the Galvin brothers are bringing their individual style of restaurant to Harrods, the fifth in their collection of fine French eateries.
From traditional ...
Located in our world-famous Food Halls, Pan Chai offers a Japanese-inspired menu of traditional delicacies.
Choose from a tantalising menu designed by executive chef Ian Pengelley, featuring sushi, sashimi, miso soup, rock shrimp tempura and chicken yakitori.
Opening hours: Monday to Saturday 10am - 8pm ...
Located in Sportswear on Harrods Fifth Floor, Lavazza Espression, offers a relaxed environment in which to enjoy Lavazza¹s widely celebrated rich, dark coffee, alongside a delicious selection of panini, salads, savoury tarts and scrumptious desserts from Harrods famous patisserie - the perfect pick-me-up after a hard day¹s shopping!
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Located next to our spectacular Urban Retreat Hair & Beauty Spa, the East Dulwich Deli is all about great tasting, nourishing and inspirational food made from quality, locally sourced ingredients wherever possible.
The East Dulwich Deli believes that good nutrition is about having a balance between eating healthily and eating ...
More than just a place to rest your feet, Ca'puccino is a barista's dream. The beverage menu alone presents an array of delights unparalleled by any coffee bar in town.
Mariano Semino is known for spiking espresso with playfully flavoured creams, like hazelnut, zabaione, marsala, or limoncino.He is also the recreator of fa ...
In association with Caviar House and Prunier, Harrods Caviar House Seafood Bar offers all of your marine favourites, served with a connoisseur's selection of wines and Champagnes.
Located at the heart of our Fish Hall, this is a convenient and relaxing way to enjoy only the very finest fruits de la mer.
Opening ...
The Sea Grill is Harrods take on fresh seafood and lets you enjoy the catch of the day after watching it expertly prepared before your very eyes.
Located in our Food Halls, this is a convenient and relaxing location to savour classic favourites and more innovative dishes, each served with our master chefs' signature flair.
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