Before the 19th century there were few if any large hotels in London.
British country landowners often lived in London for part of the year
but they usually rented a house, if they did not own one, rather than
staying in a hotel. Numbers of business and foreign visitors were very
small by modern standards. The accommodation available to them included
lodging houses and coaching inns. Lodging houses were more like private
homes with rooms to let than commercial hotels, and were often run by
widows. Coaching inns served passengers from the stage coaches which
were the main means of long-distance passenger transport before railways
began to develop in the 1830s. The last surviving galleried coaching
inn in London is the George Inn which now belongs to the National Trust.
A
few hotels of a more modern variety began to be built in the early 19th
century. For example Mivart's, the precursor of Claridge's, opened its
doors in 1812 but, up to the mid-19th century, London hotels were
generally small. In his travel book North America (1862), the novelist
Anthony Trollope remarked on how much larger American hotels were than
British ones. But by this time the railways had already begun to bring
far more short-term visitors to London, and the railway companies
themselves took the lead in accommodating them by building a series of
"railway hotels" near to their London termini. These buildings were seen
as status symbols by the railway companies, the largest businesses in
the country at the time, and some of them were very grand. They
included:
St. Pancras Renaissance London Hotel at St. Pancras
The Midland Grand Hotel at St. Pancras (closed from 1935-2011; now the St. Pancras Renaissance London Hotel.)
The Great Western Hotel at Paddington (now the Hilton London Paddington and the first of Britain's railway hotels)
The Great Northern Hotel at King's Cross (closed for High Speed 1 works and planned to be rebuilt as a boutique hotel)
The Great Eastern Hotel at Liverpool Street (Now the Andaz Liverpool Street)
The Charing Cross Hotel at Charing Cross station
The Great Central Hotel at Marylebone (now The Landmark London)
The Grosvenor Hotel at Victoria
Many
other large hotels were built in London in the Victorian period. The
Langham Hotel was the largest in the city when it opened in 1865. The
Savoy, perhaps London's most famous hotel, opened in 1889, the first
London hotel with en-suite bathrooms to every room. Nine years later
Claridge's was rebuilt in its current form. Another famous hotel, the
Ritz, based on its even more celebrated namesake in Paris, opened in
1906.
The upper end of the London hotel business
continued to flourish between the two World Wars, boosted by the fact
that many landowning families could no longer afford to maintain a
London house and therefore began to stay at hotels instead, and by an
increasing number of foreign visitors, especially Americans. Famous
hotels which opened their doors in this era include the Grosvenor House
Hotel and the Dorchester.
The rate of hotel
construction in London was fairly low in the quarter century after World
War II and the famous old names retained their dominance of the top end
of the market. The most notable hotel of this era was probably The
London Hilton on Park Lane, a controversial concrete tower overlooking
Hyde Park. Advances in air travel increased the number of overseas
visitors to London from 1.6 million in 1963 to 6 million in 1974. In
order to provide hotels to meet the extra demand a Hotel Development
Incentive Scheme was introduced and a building boom ensued. This led to
overcapacity in the London hotel market from the late 1970s to the mid
1980s. Construction then picked up again, but it was soon curtailed by
the recession of the early 1990s and the reduction in international
travel caused by the 1991 Gulf War.
The 1980s saw
London (along with New York) start the trend of smaller boutique-style
hotels. In the mid-1990s there was a major proliferation of new hotels
being opened, including hotels of many different types from
country-house-style hotels in Victorian houses to ultra-trendy
minimalist premises. At this time some of London's grandest
early-20th-century office buildings were converted into hotels because
their layouts, with long corridors and numerous separate offices, were
incompatible with the preference for open-plan working, but their listed
status made it hard to get permission to demolish them. This period
also saw the opening of the first five-star hotel in London south of the
River Thames, the Marriott County Hall Hotel, and the first two in East
London, the Four Seasons Canary Wharf and the Marriott West India Quay,
which is also close to the Canary Wharf development. For many years
there were no hotels at all in the City of London even though the
financial firms of the City were one of the London hotel sector's most
lucrative sources of custom. But in recent years over a thousand hotel
rooms have opened in the City. Budget hotel chains such as Travel Inn
and Travelodge have also been expanding rapidly in London since the
mid-1990s.
One of the most expensive hotels in London
is The Lanesborough. Originally a private address (Lanesborough House)
in 1733 it was converted into St George's Hospital and began life as a
hotel in 1991.