Seven British Hotels Worth the Journey

We've all had to suffer through staying in hotels that exists only to be adequate. Indistinguishable from the one before it, and forgotten by the time you get home. There have genuinely been times where I've forgotten I've stayed somewhere! I don't want to waste my pennies on something I am indifferent about.

The seven below are the opposite problem. Each one has a room in it you will still be thinking about months later. Three thousand square metres of Roman bathhouse hidden in Oxfordshire woodland, with five thermal pools under a marble hall. Original 1930s Art Deco suites in Mayfair that no amount of money could commission today. Four-poster beds and copper baths on Edinburgh's most disreputable street. A listed outdoor pool in 376 acres of Berkshire parkland. Bedrooms above the Thames that Monet painted from.

They range from the extremely grand to the frankly deranged, and the price range is wider than you would expect. Not all of them cost what Mayfair costs.

Claridge's, London

Brook Street, Mayfair

The guest list is the point. During the Second World War so many displaced monarchs were living at Claridge's that a caller asking to speak to the King is said to have been asked which one. The Kings of Greece, Norway and Yugoslavia were all in residence, along with the Queen of the Netherlands.

In July 1945 Churchill had Suite 212 declared Yugoslav territory for a day so that Crown Prince Alexander could be born on his own soil. The story goes that a clod of Yugoslav earth was placed beneath the bed.

Then Hollywood arrived. Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Bing Crosby, Yul Brynner. Spencer Tracy said that when he died he would rather go to Claridge's than heaven. And when Katharine Hepburn was told that the dress code required a skirt, she declined to change and used the staff entrance instead, which remains the correct response to a dress code you did not agree to.

Ask for: Anything in the Art Deco wing. The 1930s interiors are the reason to be there rather than anywhere else in London.

Worth knowing: You do not have to stay to use the building. The ArtSpace Café on Brook's Mews has its own street entrance and a free gallery downstairs.

Cliveden House, Berkshire

Taplow, forty minutes from London

Built in 1666 by the second Duke of Buckingham as a gift for his mistress, which sets the tone for the next three and a half centuries.

In 1893 the American millionaire William Waldorf Astor bought it, and the house became the seat of the Cliveden Set. Nancy Astor, the first woman to take her seat as an MP in Britain, ran her political career from these rooms and entertained Churchill, Roosevelt, Chaplin and George Bernard Shaw in them. She is also the source of one of the great exchanges in British public life, having reportedly told Churchill that if he were her husband she would poison his tea.

In 1961 Bill Astor installed an outdoor swimming pool. Within months it had become the most famous pool in British political history, after John Profumo, then Secretary of State for War, met nineteen-year-old Christine Keeler there at a summer party. Keeler was also involved with a Soviet naval attaché. Profumo lied to the House of Commons, resigned, and took a good deal of Macmillan's government down with him.

It is now the only listed outdoor pool in Britain, and you can swim in it.

Ask for: The Christine Keeler Suite, if you want the full weight of the place. The rooms overlooking the pool if you want the view.

Worth knowing: The house is set in 376 acres of National Trust gardens. Non-residents can visit the grounds, which is a very cheap way to see one of the great English landscapes.

Gleneagles, Perthshire

Auchterarder

Conceived in 1910 by Donald Matheson, general manager of the Caledonian Railway, who went on holiday in Strathearn, looked at the countryside, and decided to build a palace in it. The First World War stopped construction for eight years. It finally opened on 5 June 1924, with a white-tie ball two days later, and the press immediately christened it a Riviera in the Highlands.

It arrived with its own railway station, which is the detail that tells you everything about the age it was built for. Guests came north by train, in evening dress, for weeks at a time. James Braid, a five-time Open champion, laid out the golf courses by hand using horse and cart before the hotel itself was finished.

A century on it is 850 acres of falconry, shooting, riding, and ten places to eat. Whether that reads as heaven or as a great deal of effort is a matter of temperament.

Ask for: A room facing the Ochil Hills. The estate rooms are grander but the view is the asset.

Worth knowing: The train station is still there and still called Gleneagles. Arriving by rail is both cheaper and considerably more in keeping.

House of Gods, Edinburgh

233 Cowgate

Everything else on this list inherited its glamour. This one built its own from scratch, in a burnt-out building, on a street with a genuinely disreputable past.

The Cowgate is Edinburgh's second oldest street, originally a route for driving cattle. It was fashionable, then it was not, and by the eighteenth century it had settled into gambling, theft and prostitution. Number 233 was a shell left by the Cowgate fire of 2002 and later a student nightclub. Brothers Mike and Ross Baxter looked at it and saw something else.

They opened House of Gods in 2019 with a stated position that nobody needs another vanilla hotel, and with the phrase "democratised luxury" attached to the design brief, which in practice means the four-poster beds, velvet, copper baths and oak panelling of a much more expensive place, at a price a normal person can actually justify. Twenty-two rooms, no restaurant, three bars. The cocktail list at Lilith's Lounge is built around stories of hotel debauchery, which is either exactly your thing or exactly not.

It is the only hotel here where the whole point is the evening rather than the morning.

Ask for: The Cabin rooms if you want the Orient Express fantasy in a small space, the Classic rooms for a four-poster, the Suite for the copper bath.

Worth knowing: This is not a quiet hotel and does not pretend to be. If you want a restful night in Edinburgh, book elsewhere and come here for a drink.

The Savoy, London

Strand

Richard D'Oyly Carte built it in 1889 with the profits from staging Gilbert and Sullivan, and it changed what a hotel was. The Savoy was the first in Britain lit throughout by electricity, the first with electric lifts, the first to put private bathrooms in most of its rooms, and the first with constant hot and cold running water. Guest rooms had speaking tubes connecting them to the valet, the maid and the floor waiter.

Then Carte hired the two men who would define luxury hospitality for the next century. César Ritz ran the hotel; Auguste Escoffier ran the kitchens. Between them they invented the modern idea of what a grand hotel does and how it behaves, and Ritz went on to open his own place in Piccadilly seventeen years later. Escoffier created both Melba toast and peach Melba for the same singer, depending on whether or not she was dieting.

The building has a second life as a subject. Whistler painted eight views of the Thames from a top-floor room in 1896. Monet stayed three times between 1899 and 1901 and worked on Charing Cross Bridge, Waterloo Bridge and twenty-six pastels from his windows. In 1956 Marilyn Monroe held a press conference here and caused chaos in a black dress that showed her midriff.

Ask for: A river-facing room, which is what the rivals cannot offer. The nine Personality Suites are named for former guests, including one for Marlene Dietrich.

Worth knowing: The American Bar is one of the oldest cocktail bars in the world and does not take bookings for everything. Go early.

Estelle Manor, Oxfordshire

Eynsham Park, North Leigh, on the edge of the Cotswolds

The newest grand house in Britain, in a building that has been almost everything else first. It began in the 1770s as a Georgian country house, was rebuilt in 1908 by the architect Ernest George in full Jacobethan style with its own electric plant, waterworks and private telephone network, and then spent the twentieth century being useful rather than beautiful: a hunting retreat, a wartime maternity hospital, a rest house for American airmen, and finally a police training college.

Sharan Pasricha, who founded Ennismore and also owns Gleneagles, took it on with his wife Eiesha Bharti Pasricha as artistic director, and it reopened in May 2023 as Estelle Manor. It is the countryside sister to Maison Estelle, the Mayfair members' club. New York's Roman and Williams did the interiors, which is unusual for an English country house and works far better than it should.

The reason to go is Eynsham Baths. Roman villa ruins were found near the estate, and the spa was built in answer to them: three thousand square metres of neoclassical bathhouse deep in ancient woodland, with sculpted columns, carved marble, five thermal pools and a mezzanine tepidarium hall. It took five years. There is nothing else like it in the country.

Ask for: A woodland cottage if you want seclusion, a room in the Manor House if you want to be near the bar.

Worth knowing: It is a members' club as well as a hotel, but hotel guests get full use of the baths. Day passes to the spa are sometimes available without staying, which is the cheapest way in.

The Ritz, London

150 Piccadilly

César Ritz opened it in 1906 and it was fashionable within the week. It is the only hotel in the world to hold a Royal Warrant, and it did one genuinely radical thing at the outset: it was the first hotel in London where young unmarried women were permitted to arrive without a chaperone.

The rest is a parade. Anna Pavlova danced here. Chaplin needed forty policemen to get through the crowd in 1921. Churchill, Eisenhower and de Gaulle met upstairs in the Marie Antoinette Suite during the war. Noël Coward wrote a song called "Children of the Ritz". In 1951 Tallulah Bankhead held a press conference in the bar and drank champagne out of her slipper.

The dining room is Louis XVI, gilded and garlanded under a painted sky, with a view over Green Park, and on Friday and Saturday nights there is a band and a dance floor. Almost nowhere else in London still does this.

Ask for: A Green Park facing room, and a table on a dine-and-dance night.

Worth knowing: Jacket and tie is required in parts of the hotel and it is enforced. Check the current code before you pack.

The real rule

Two hotels on this list were made famous by women who behaved exactly as they wished in them and let the consequences arrive later. Keeler at the pool. Bankhead with the shoe. Hepburn walking in through the staff entrance rather than change her clothes for anybody.

None of them was invited to be memorable. They simply declined to be anything less.

Whichever room you end up in, the last hour of the evening is the one that matters. Rosenworth's Blenheim Robe was made for exactly that part, in a hotel or at home.