MEET YOUR GUIDE
Here’s a fab interview with Andy Hotels Makes for a fascinating and illuminating backgrounder for this walk.
This is a standalone walk that can also be enjoyed before or after The Secrets of London’s Luxury Hotels.
LASHINGS OF LUXURY, LIBERALITY AND LICENTIOUSNESS – ROUND II
Andy Hotels has written two books on London’s luxury hotels – on The Savoy and on Brown’s (indeed, he’s the resident historian of Brown’s Hotel). So two completely different Secrets of London’s Luxury Hotels walks – well, it was meant to be. It was always on the cards – face cards all of them. The first Secrets of London’s Luxury Hotels Walk – Round I takes in The Savoy. This walk is Round II. We’ve christened it More Luxury Hotels – Their Stories & Secrets. It pays a visit to Browns (and Dukes, Claridge’s and the Connaught). The four Mayfair and St James’s aces. Different hotels, different neighbourhoods, different stories. Different secrets. Different walks.
They’re not prequel and sequel. They’re kith and kin but different. Two very different peas in the pod, as it were.
Join Andy Hotels on a walk featuring Dukes, Brown’s, Claridge’s, The Connaught and beyond. This is a stand-alone walk that takes off where its sibling left off. It reveals the glitter and the glamour, the tales and the tricks, the famous folk and the foibles of another handful of the capital’s most frightfully famous lodgings.
Find out where Ian Fleming was shaken and not stirred; the secret hotel tunnel used by royals; the wine cellar where the Yanks clubbed together during the war; the only American president to be married overseas; Mark Twain strolling down the street in his bathrobe to take a dip in the pool where Queen Elizabeth learned to swim; the hotel dining club where prime ministers and generals met behind closed doors; the public palace that became Yugoslavia for the day; and the five-star features of a fortress inspired by the Doge’s Palace in Venice. And much more besides!
This walk can be enjoyed on its own or as a tasty accompaniment to The Secrets of London’s Luxury Hotels – Round I.
Sue –
Starting at Dukes, is it too early for that Martini Mr Bond? What, not shaken and only two? Though St. James’s and into Mayfair, stomping ground of the great and good, all types of royalty, foreign heads of state, literary, political and artistic. When they travel to collect that honorary degree from Oxford, what do they need? A luxury hotel of course! The oldest hotel in London? The three point test, frequently reviewed to keep us on our toes. Claridges, art deco, Yugoslavia, high thread count. St George’s Hanover Square was woven in beautifully. There is a new Redwood to ponder in Grosvenor Square, more details to follow. Finish at The Duke, (Connaught) with a name change.
White vans, mobile cranes police sirens and fountains, so typical of London did not deter Andy. He is so sharp, he incorporates them into the walk effortlessly and with humour. There is also a useful tip about keeping an eye on the family silver, just brilliant!
Dr. Thomas A. Underwood –
After reading the London Walks profile of our “Untold Stories of London’s Luxury Hotels” guide — whose eponymous and comically Dickensian name is “Andy Hotels” – I was half expecting to meet the hotelier in Agatha Christie’s AT BERTRAM’S HOTEL, the mystery story set at Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair. As Andy’s biographical writeup identified him as the “Resident Historian” at Brown’s, I also wondered whether, silver spoon in his mouth, he was living permanently in their seven-thousand-pound-a-night Kipling suite. Yet, congregating outside the Green Park tube station, we were greeted neither by Christie’s character Mr. Humfries nor by billionaire Geoffrey Kent, the Abercrombie & Kent chairman who lived at the Ritz Hotel off and on for fourteen years. Andy is instead a down-to-earth historian with a gift for “Dad jokes” and a magnificent sense of timing, both as storyteller and as a punster. An author who specializes in hotel history, he is witty, unpretentious, and learned. Whether discoursing on the Vesper martinis Ian Fleming inspired at the Dukes Hotel bar or insinuating famed hotel guests such as Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin D. Roosevelt back into the Mayfair streetscape, Andy kept our group’s attention rapt as he accessed a mental Rolodex of historical figures. To bring his gripping narrative to a close, he had us face the Connaught Hotel and form a semicircle around “Silence,” the magnificent water sculpture designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando that, like Old Faithful, erupts at regular intervals. As Andy summoned the image of Charles de Gaulle savoring his Yorkshire pudding at the Connaught during the Blitz, the fountain did its thing and enveloped us in a surreal mist. Like Dr. Who heading back into his Tardis, Andy Hotels disappeared into the fog leaving behind one happy band of London Walkers!
Jane Usher –
I went on a walk today around the more luxury hotels of London! Andy Hotels is extremely knowledgeable and personably person he brought everything to life. A wonderful way to spend a couple of hours.