A very large hotel on a very quiet street
It fills a great Victorian block between Whitehall and the river. It opened in the 1880s as a hotel, spent much of the twentieth century as government offices, and was restored and reopened in 2011. From the outside it is enormous, pale and ornate, the kind of building that looks like a ministry because for a long time it was one. Inside, the lobby lounge is dominated by a vast crystal chandelier, and the rooms above are generous by the standards of the middle of London.
What matters most for an evening, though, is not the building but the street it faces. The front door is on Whitehall Place, a short side street between Whitehall and Northumberland Avenue, lined with offices, a members' club and very little else. By day it carries civil servants. After about eight it carries almost nobody, and after ten it is one of the quietest addresses in the whole of Westminster.
The approach, and why it is so calm
Cars turn off Whitehall Place into the hotel's own forecourt, and the entrance sits back from the pavement rather than opening straight on to it. There is no bar spilling on to the street outside, no queue for a restaurant, no theatre crowd, and nothing to pass on the way in except the doorman. For somebody arriving at eleven at night, the contrast with a hotel on the Strand or in Leicester Square could hardly be sharper.
It also means there is nobody much to notice an arrival at all. The desk has always said that no hotel on this site is connected to it in any way, and that she crosses the lobby as your guest like anybody else. After ten that lobby is spacious, softly lit and nearly empty, and the walk from the door to the lifts is the least eventful minute of the evening.
Honest walking times
Embankment is the nearest station, on the Bakerloo, Circle, District and Northern lines, and the walk is about five minutes: out towards the river, past the Playhouse Theatre, up Northumberland Avenue and into Whitehall Place. Charing Cross, for the Northern and Bakerloo lines and the mainline trains, is six or seven minutes, across the bottom of Trafalgar Square and down either Northumberland Avenue or Whitehall itself.
Westminster is about ten minutes, straight up Whitehall past the Cenotaph and the gates of Downing Street, a walk that is grand in the dark and very quiet. From St James's it is around a quarter of an hour through the park or along Pall Mall, and from the piazza in Covent Garden a little less, down to the Strand and across. These are the figures the desk works from when it quotes an arrival, and after ten they rarely need adjusting for traffic.
A night that starts late
SW1A 2BD suits the late start better than almost anywhere else in SW1, which is why it comes up so often for the ten hour night. A dinner elsewhere, a walk back along the river, and a start at the hotel at ten or eleven; ten hours from there runs through to breakfast, which is counted inside the hours rather than added afterwards. The figure is £1,800, handed over to her in person in the first minute.
The shape of the night is deliberately unplanned beyond its two ends. The start and the finish are agreed in writing, along with whether breakfast is coming to the room or being taken downstairs, because that decides what she packs. Everything between is yours. A day or two of notice is genuinely useful for a night this long, since a diary has to be cleared for it rather than simply slotted.
The walk worth taking at midnight
Five minutes from the door is the Victoria Embankment, and at midnight few walks in the city are better. The river is wide and dark, the London Eye is lit on the far bank, and the footbridges beside Hungerford Bridge carry you over to the South Bank and back in a quarter of an hour. Coming back, Whitehall is almost silent, with Horse Guards on one side, the Banqueting House on the other and hardly a car on the road.
It is worth building into the evening, particularly if you have eaten well. It also gives a first meeting an easy shape: a drink downstairs, a slow walk by the water, and back to the hotel without having had to decide anything at all. For a hotel built the opposite way, where the last stretch has to be walked whether you like it or not, see the note on hotels a car cannot quite reach.
Company for a long night in SW1
A grand hotel and a long night reward company that is formal at the door and relaxed by midnight. Violetta is exactly that: reserved on arrival, very dry by the second hour, and fond of walks by the river, which from that door are five minutes away. Michelle is the natural host of the list, the one who notices your glass before the waiter does, and she holds strong opinions on hotel breakfasts that she will share over one. Stacy is watchful for the first twenty minutes and very good company for the rest of the night.
All three are on the statuesque page of the index, between 173 and 178 centimetres, which suits a lobby built on the scale of this one. Say in your message that it is Whitehall Place and a late start, and the reply will say who is free and how long each of them takes to reach Whitehall Place at that hour.
Cross filed: most of the names in this piece also sit under statuesque in the the index.