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Story time. History time.
And we’re off.
Here’s your daily London fix.
It’s August 6th, 2026.
On this day in 1889 London stepped into the future.
Not in Parliament.
Not at Buckingham Palace.
Not at the Bank of England.
No.
On the Strand.
When the Savoy Hotel opened its doors.
Now you might think, “Well, another grand hotel. Nice enough.”
But the Savoy wasn’t just another grand hotel.
It changed the way the world thought about hotels.
And, in a sense, it changed the way the world thought about luxury.
Its creator was Richard D’Oyly Carte.
That’s a name every Londoner ought to know.
Carte was an impresario.
The man behind Gilbert and Sullivan.
The astonishing success of operas like H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado made him a wealthy man.
Most people, having made that sort of fortune, would have bought a country estate.
Or a yacht.
Richard D’Oyly Carte had another idea.
He decided London deserved the finest hotel in the world.
So he built one.
And what a place it was.
Imagine arriving there in August 1889.
You step through the revolving doors.
Everywhere you look there’s electric light.
Not gaslight.
Electricity.
Nearly twelve hundred electric lamps.
No soot.
No smell.
No flickering flames.
Just brilliant, dazzling light.
For many guests it was the first time they’d ever experienced anything like it.
Then there were the lifts.
Electric lifts.
Victorians called them “rising rooms.”
What a marvellous phrase.
You pressed a button.
The doors closed.
Up you floated.
No trudging upstairs.
No puffing porters carrying trunks up endless flights of stairs.
The future had arrived.
And then there was your bedroom.
Today, when we book a hotel room, we take certain things for granted.
An en suite bathroom, for example.
In 1889, that was extraordinary.
The Savoy gave every guest something almost unheard of.
Their own bathroom.
With constant hot and cold running water.
It’s hard for us to appreciate just how revolutionary that was.
People didn’t merely come to stay at the Savoy.
They came to see it.
To marvel at it.
To experience tomorrow.
Richard D’Oyly Carte had created a hotel.
But he’d also created a demonstration of modern life.
Luxury wasn’t just chandeliers and marble.
Luxury was making life effortless.
Then came two extraordinary men.
César Ritz.
And Auguste Escoffier.
Ritz understood guests better than perhaps anyone before him.
Escoffier transformed cooking.
Between them they virtually invented the modern luxury hotel.
One looked after the front of house.
The other performed miracles in the kitchen.
It’s no accident that today we still use the word “Ritz” as shorthand for elegance.
The Savoy soon became the place to stay.
Royalty.
Statesmen.
Actors.
Writers.
Singers.
Anyone who mattered eventually passed through its revolving doors.
Claude Monet lived there while painting his glorious views of the Thames.
Imagine looking out from your window.
The river below.
Waterloo Bridge in the mist.
The changing London light.
Those paintings are now among the most celebrated London images ever created.
And then there’s the American Bar.
Despite its name, it’s one of London’s great institutions.
Its bartenders have been setting standards for the rest of the world for well over a century.
The famous Savoy Cocktail Book became a bible for generations of bartenders.
The Savoy wasn’t simply keeping up with fashion.
It was creating it.
One of our own London Walks guides knows this world particularly well.
Andy Williamson leads our wonderful Secrets of London’s Luxury Hotels walks.
He’ll tell you that these hotels are much more than places to spend the night.
They’re theatres.
Stages on which history has played out.
Deals have been struck.
Affairs begun.
Royal visits discreetly managed.
Stars celebrated.
Scandals quietly smoothed over.
The Savoy has witnessed all of it.
So today, on its anniversary, let’s raise a metaphorical glass to Richard D’Oyly Carte.
He took the profits from comic opera…
…and built a palace.
A palace where electricity sparkled.
Lifts glided.
Bathrooms astonished.
Chefs became legends.
Artists found inspiration.
And London announced to the world that it could do luxury every bit as well as Paris or New York.
The Savoy didn’t merely open its doors on this day in 1889.
It opened the door to the modern age.
And that’s London.
See you tomorrow.