London Hotels & Hostels (701)

Now tenanted in Baden Powell House, London HQ of the Scout Association and next to the Natural History Museum, this German-run ‘city hostel & hotel’ has 47 spotlessly clean room…

Its 30 rooms across three floors are quite generic, but the Mad Hatter feels slightly homier than most chain hotels – it belongs to the Fuller’s brewery group – thanks to its…

This budget-category hotel on a quiet street on the north side of Kensington Gardens offers excellent value for its location and class (three stars). A new lift offers a less stressful access to …

For a humble establishment, the 21-room Oxford sure tries hard with its sunny yellow walls and blue-checked bedspreads, although the swirly carpets in the breakfast room and dodgy stairs are a re…

Its less-than-inspired name notwithstanding, this stylish Conran-designed hotel was one of London’s first boutique hotels and still bears the classic boutique combination of colours (black…

You certainly get value for money at this small hotel. The 16 refurbished rooms are pretty in pink and yellow with candy-striped spreads, crown canopies and potted plants. All but four guestrooms…

Everyone will feel at home in this lovely terrace of 45 stylish and very affordable studios. Rooms all contain kitchenettes but otherwise differ wildly – ranging from a tiny but well-equip…

The attractive (and award-winning) Windermere has 20 small but individually designed and spotless rooms in a sparkling white mid-Victorian town house. There’s a reliable and reasonably pri…

Ever-popular, ever-expanding French chain has four apartment blocks in London, including a Holborn-Covent Garden branch.

This 60-room hotel has a lovely black-and-white tile exterior but rather ordinary guestrooms and public areas (who chose the tartan armchairs and that diamond-patterned carpet?). But it’s …

A charmer in lovely Little Venice, the Colonnade is the handsome Victorian structure where Sigmund Freud sheltered after he fled Vienna in June 1938. Apart from the three in the basement, the 43 …

This very stylish 220-room place hard by Shepherd’s Bush Green doesn’t look like much from the outside but step inside and you’ll encounter a world where dark wood and suede …

This 109-room place is hardly no-frills, but it’s got a long way to go before it features in Wallpaper magazine. Still, it’s at the southernmost end of Brick Lane so is well suited …

Royal Park’s vast open spaces are perfect for a run or powerwalk and there are sports ovals, netball and hockey stadiums, a golf course and tennis courts. The ever-popular Royal Melbourne …

Express by Holiday Inn is the most upmarket of the chains listed here, and is most notable for its clever locations. Of the two dozen or so properties in central London, for example, is the so-ca…

Tipping its cap fairly determinedly at the professional traveller, Kingsway nonetheless manages to provide 170 smart, comfortable and very central rooms for anyone with less business and more pla…

Two combined Regency town houses contain this enchanting 37-room hotel overlooking leafy Dorset Sq, where the very first cricket ground was laid in 1814 (which explains the cricket memorabilia in…

This sprawling 92-room hotel, just behind the Wallace Collection and excellently placed for Oxford St shopping, was once a country inn and still retains something of the feel of a gentlemanȁ…

This stunner of a boutique hotel, designer Anouska Hempel’s minimalist symphony in white and natural tones, still has the ability to impress a dozen years on. The 50 rooms and studios are …

There are some things that women travellers are almost guaranteed to experience when roaming away from home, and trying to put on make-up in a dimly lit hotel room is one of them. It might not be…

Charismatically kooky, this splendid 50-room hotel is a veritable palace of polished mahogany, oriental carpets, antique-style bathrooms, potted aspidistras, and portraits and prints (some 4500, …

This elegant 200-room hotel is famed for its fabulous close-up views of the Thames and the Houses of Parliament. It was formerly the headquarters of the Greater London Council; the atmosphere in …

This 64-room hotel is a wonderful hybrid, with two lower floors contemporary in style and the recently refurbished top two a wonderful vestige from Edwardian times, filled with polished oak panel…

'Elegant' and 'intimate' are two words constantly used to describe this well-located and recently renovated boutique hotel, which is pretty funny considering the proprietors also own the overblow…

This enormous 545-room hotel in a stylish white-tile art deco building is unsurprisingly popular with groups, and its rooms are rather on the flouncy side. But the location, just west of Regent&#…

This absolute charmer is a warren of 33 rooms that has been built within a row of 18th-century Georgian houses and fitted out with antique furniture (including a museum-piece collection of Victor…

For classic style (and celebrity spotting), one of your first choices in London should be Blakes: five Victorian houses cobbled into one hotel, painted an authoritative, very serious dark green a…

The demand for designer digs has become so strong in London that even the Hilton got in on the act with this tastefully minimalist hotel on the south side of Trafalgar Sq. Now it’s become …

You have to know this place is here. It’s wonderfully anonymous, though once through the doorway the grand circular lobby, which is furnished in a vaguely art deco style and covered with a…

One of London’s hippest hotels, the Soho is in a reconverted car park just off Dean St. All the hallmarks of the eclectically chic hoteliers and designers Tim and Kit Kemp have been writ l…

The chichi Halkin is for business travellers of a minimalist bent. Bedroom doors are hidden within curved wooden hallways, and the 41 rooms are filled with natural light, cream walls, burlwood pa…

Oscar Wilde, John Lennon and Mick Jagger all made appearances at this former magistrate’s court, now a 112-room luxury hotel just south of Oxford St. Special features include a spa and poo…

In the same stable as the Halkin, the 155-room Metropolitan is another minimalist hotel – ‘stripped of nonessentials’ (as they say) and decorated in shades of cream and burlw…

A slice of New York urban chic just a stone’s throw from Covent Garden, this Philippe Starck–designed hotel is so cool you’d hardly notice it was there. (‘What, in tha…

Don’t be deterred by the white aluminium and grey-green glass facade of a 1960s-era corporate HQ: this uberdesigned ‘urban spa’ – recognise Philippe Starck’s ha…

Housed in what were once art nouveau newspaper offices (1907), One Aldwych is a merry and upbeat hotel with 105 rooms and modern art everywhere (we love the bronze of a rower in the lobby). The s…

This luxury Italian hotel overlooking Kensington Gardens has raised an ostentatiously bejewelled finger to minimalism, with its baroque lobby (black glass chandeliers, a water feature in the lobb…

Another discreet choice, the former loud and proud Great Eastern Hotel is now a Hyatt branded property, the London flagship for its youth-oriented Andaz chain. There’s no reception here, j…

The glorious Edwardian splendour of this renovated old pile still lives on in the heritage-listed Palm Court. So thorough is the break from the past elsewhere, however, that the 299 rooms are now…

The £100 million face-lift was still going on at the time of writing, and the legendary hotel should be open by the time you read this. Built on the site of the old Savoy Palace in 1889, the…