London

The History

London's affair with the grand hotel began with the railways. When steam brought the world to the capital in the nineteenth century, a new kind of palace rose to receive it — The Savoy opened on the Strand in 1889 with electric light, hydraulic lifts and a chef named Escoffier, while César Ritz followed in 1906 with a Piccadilly address that turned his surname into a synonym for luxury itself.

Between the wars, Mayfair and Belgravia became the drawing rooms of empire. Claridge's hosted exiled monarchs so often it was dubbed an annexe to Buckingham Palace; afternoon tea hardened into ritual; and the concierge desk evolved into a quiet instrument of impossible requests. To stay at these houses was to borrow, for a night, the machinery of a great estate.

The modern chapter has only deepened the legend. Behind Georgian facades and Edwardian ballrooms, London's grand dames have been painstakingly restored — marble re-polished, ceilings re-gilded — while a new generation of suites looks out over the same rooftops that Churchill, Chaplin and Hepburn once called home.