question about London hotel, business, and fun and games

I was in London once...just once !

I stayed in a room that was so small, I could almost strech my hands out and touch the walls. (Let me put it this way...I have been in bigger one man jail holding cells.) The above picture probably has a bigger bathroom than the room I stayed in. So Old Mack can not speak about fancy hotels in London with any authority.

Mrs Pinz may well be passing through Aldgate tube station for we quite often get inquiries for the Tower Guoman hotel when the more convenient Tower Hill station is closed at weekends for planned engineering work. (This work is the bafflement and scourge of all visitors to London who cannot understand why the major public transport system of a world capital should go into this weekly hiberation.)

If she's staying a few days and using public transport, Mrs Pinz should invest in an Oyster card. If she uses it properly, touching in and out and the start and finish of every rail journey, she'll save a lot of money.

When the East London Line (my former workplace) closed for good the farewell staff shindig was held in the Tower Guoman hotel, which suggests no savoury reputation for the ELL was staffed with a strange assortment of reprobates and loonies. I missed the Guoman shindig myself, for I was laid low with the 'flu, so I've never actually crossed its threshold but I can report that a good time was reputedly had by all.

St Katherine's dock is very picturesque: a former working dock now populated with small craft, in the shadow of the always attractive Tower Bridge. Along the river a way, Wapping has a few good riverside pubs: the Prospect of Whitby, the Town of Ramsgate and the Captain Kidd.

The E1 London postcode area is Jack the Ripper country. Mrs Pinz will be able to take a guided walking tour of the murder sites from Tower Hill, Aldgate or Aldate East tube stations. At weekends, the numerous clubs of E1 play host to a motley assortment of chemically challenged yoof. Petticoat Lane, Spitalfields and Brick Lane street markets are quite close. Brick Lane is famous for Indian cuisine.

Mrs Pinz's stay in London will be overshadowed by this:


The Erotic Gherkin.

Mrs Pinz's hotel is almost next door to this famous London landmark:



Her Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress, more commonly known as the Tower of London, is a historic castle on the north bank of the River Thames in central London, England. It lies within the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, separated from the eastern edge of the City of London by the open space known as Tower Hill. It was founded towards the end of 1066 as part of the Norman Conquest of England. The White Tower, which gives the entire castle its name, was built by William the Conqueror in 1078, and was a resented symbol of oppression, inflicted upon London by the new ruling elite. The castle was used as a prison since at least 1100, although that was not its primary purpose. A grand palace early in its history, it served as a royal residence. As a whole, the Tower is a complex of several buildings set within two concentric rings of defensive walls and a moat. There were several phases of expansion, mainly under Kings Richard the Lionheart, Henry III, and Edward I in the 12th and 13th centuries. The general layout established by the late 13th century remains despite later activity on the site.

The Tower of London has played a prominent role in English history. It was besieged several times and controlling it has been important to controlling the country. The Tower has served variously as an armoury, a treasury, a menagerie, the home of the Royal Mint, a public records office, and the home of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. From the early 14th century until the reign of Charles II, a procession would be led from the Tower to Westminster Abbey on the coronation of a monarch. In the absence of the monarch, the Constable of the Tower is in charge of the castle. This was a powerful and trusted position in the medieval period. In the late 15th century the castle was the prison of the Princes in the Tower. Under the Tudors, the Tower became used less as a royal residence, and despite attempts to refortify and repair the castle its defences lagged behind developments to deal with artillery.

The peak period of the castle's use as a prison was the 16th and 17th centuries, when many figures who had fallen into disgrace, such as Elizabeth I before she became queen, were held within its walls. This use has led to the phrase "sent to the Tower". Despite its enduring reputation as a place of torture and death, popularised by 16th-century religious propagandists and 19th-century writers, only seven people were executed within the Tower before the World Wars of the 20th century. Executions were more commonly held on the notorious Tower Hill to the north of the castle, with 112 occurring there over a 400-year period. In the latter half of the 19th century, institutions such as the Royal Mint moved out of the castle to other locations, leaving many buildings empty. Anthony Salvin and John Taylor took the opportunity to restore the Tower to what was felt to be its medieval appearance, clearing out many of the vacant post-medieval structures. In the First and Second World Wars, the Tower was again used as a prison, and witnessed the executions of 12 men for espionage. After the Second World War, damage caused during the Blitz was repaired and the castle reopened to the public. Today the Tower of London is one of the country's most popular tourist attractions. It is cared for by the charity Historic Royal Palaces and is protected as a World Heritage Site.

(Wikipedia)

If Mrs Pinz has only a limited opportunity for sightseeing she'll save a lot of shoe leather by taking a riverboat tour from Tower pier:





Alternatively, open-topped tour buses call at Tower Hill:

Anyway, if Mrs Pinz does pass through Aldgate station I hope she says hello. I'm the tall bespectacled efficient one with the harassed expression.

The West End Front by Matthew Sweet - review

The wartime history of London's big hotels is full of rogues and chancers

Andrew Motion

guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 December 2011 10.00 GMT


A nurse at a first aid post in the Savoy Hotel in London during the second world war. Photograph: Felix Man/Getty Images

In the acknowledgments to The West End Front Matthew Sweet thanks his editor and agent for their "saintly patience as deadline after deadline expired". Confessions like this usually fill readers with dread: they suggest that a book has stewed for too long in its own juices, or gone rigid with delay. In this case it turns out that a long incubation has been nothing but beneficial. Although Sweet's attention is fixed on just one part of the home front, his relish for detail makes it seem emblematic of larger concerns. And although the pace of his narrative is leisured, his tone never loses its champagne sparkle. The book is very good fun, sympathetic to victims as well as bosses, and full of amusing peculiarities.


The West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London's Grand Hotels
by Matthew Sweet

The hotels that stand at its four corners are the Dorchester, the Ritz, the Savoy and Claridge's, and they are the theatres for most of its dramas. (A few others occur in less glamorous places: the Charing Cross Hotel, for instance, one of the least regarded buildings in central London.) But rather than let these buildings themselves provide the structure for his chapters, Sweet puts their inhabitants centre-stage, arranging them by type, background, income, allegiance and interest to create a portrait of "the cultural and political life" of the country as a whole. Such an approach, he acknowledges, "might seem an eccentric way of disrupting the customary narratives … But the public and private worlds underwent many strange and sudden revisions" in hotel rooms and corridors, "as did the social structures that shaped them".

Sweet's first task is to introduce us to César Ritz (the 13th child of a Swiss shepherd) and Georges Auguste Escoffier ("a blacksmith's son who wore high heels to enable him to see into the pans at the back of the ranges"): the two men who at the end of the 19th century played a crucial role in persuading "the plutocracy and the aristocracy to do something to which they were unaccustomed – eat, drink, smoke and dance in public".

As long as the age of deference survived, and old and new money flowed in sufficient quantities, the grand new palaces that were the West End hotels sailed through depressions and arms build-ups with the aquiline calm of Cunard liners slicing through the waves of the Atlantic. With the outbreak of the second world war, however, it looked as though their voyage might be over. In fact, with a mixture of expediency, stubbornness and good fortune (they weren't bombed to bits, which admittedly would have been difficult in the case of the iron-clad Dorchester), they quickly and ingeniously adapted to straitened times.

Their survival depended as much on clients as controllers, as Sweet enjoys showing. Appropriately (because it gives his book a more definite shape), controllers get first shout. The opening chapter, "Aliens", relates the history of Loreto Santarelli, the restaurant manager of the Savoy who had the reputation of going to quite extraordinary trouble for his diners (he once procured an Indian elephant festooned with purple and cream garlands to entertain the Maharaja of Rajpipla). None of his pains was proof against British xenophobia: he was arrested by Special Branch in the summer of 1939 on suspicion of being a spy.

Santarelli's story – and this is typical of Sweet's book as a whole – then veers away from the Savoy, to include an account of imprisonment, eventual release, subsequent breakdown and early death: it is a story of snobbism that makes the bright lights in the big city look distinctly garish. The same blend of revelry and resentment occurs in several later chapters: in fact it gives the book its tone, and becomes the reason why, for all its high jinks, it feels like serious history.

In "Reds", for instance, we hear about the communist Max Levitas (a councillor in Stepney after the war), who led a march on the Savoy in 1940 to complain about the poor provision of shelters for people living in the East End during the blitz, compared with those provided for the rich in the West End. When Basil Woon later wrote about the protest in Hell Came to London, he claimed the demonstrators dispersed "before they [could] make real inroads into the sandwiches". Levitas, interviewed by Sweet, remembers 20 marchers staying the night, and in the morning having tea at the hotel's expense. "Two eggs. Ham. Plenty tea. Plenty toast. I'd had a good night's kip there too. It was a good night's work."

A different sort of injustice emerges in "Brigades", where Sweet gives us a tour of the kitchens, and highlights the difference between what the diners saw above ground, and what happened out of sight. Clement Freud, who worked in the kitchens of the Dorchester in 1941, remembered "a hell-hole of a huge dark dank building built regardless of inconvenience to staff". Sweet ornaments this by adding with a characteristic flourish: "Here, apprentices were routinely locked inside fridges, store-rooms were used for assignations with waitresses, a full-time cockroach-killer slept under his desk by day and scooted about on kneepads at night, and the senior chef de legumes was an elderly French alcoholic who garnished vegetable dishes by stuffing his mouth with chopped parsley and spitting over them."

In later parts of the book, inequalities are more likely to emerge between family members, or groups of hotel clients. By and large, though, Sweet's eye for a good story means that genuinely painful encounters are rendered as funny or bizarre stories. As they accumulate, they create an impression of almost infinite variety – while simultaneously favouring rogues and chancers.

The swindler Sir Curtis Lampson, for example, whose life according to Sweet "was a project of intoxicating oddness" and involved a series of criminal misleadings as well as a sustained passion for factory girls, chambermaids, shop assistants and waitresses. "Close proximity to flannel drawers aroused intense excitement," he admits in his memoirs, "whereas a pair of frilly panties left me unmoved." Or the clients of a "subterranean cocktail trough" called the Pink Sink, which was handily located between the all-night Turkish baths of Jermyn Street, and the all-male bars of Soho, and included among its regular customers one Kim de la Taste Tickell, "doomed to be known by his school nickname, 'Testicle', who carried a respirator box that contained nothing but the Max Factor he used to maintain the tan he had cultivated on duty in north Africa". Or Stella Lonsdale, spy and double agent. Or …

You get the picture. Sweet's book is full of wonderful and awful creatures, whose individual lives are full of fascination, but who taken together comprise a group portrait that is significant as well as strange. Apart from anything else, it proves that an appetite for inequality is as resilient as an appetite for opulence – which probably explains why the great four hotels not only survived the stringencies of the war, but are still prosperous today while other less grand establishments have vanished.

• Andrew Motion's The Cinder Path is published by Faber.

That Tower of Babel. That'll be the Shard (or "Shard of Glass") at London Bridge, that will.



Going up at an alarming rate, I reckon.

pinhedz wrote:She reports there was a structure called "The Gherkin," which she daintily describes as resembling a "pine cone."

Before now, attractive French women with sexy accents have asked me to direct them to the Cucumber.

^ Yep, it was much further along than that the last time I saw it, ooh, about a month ago so I imagine it's even closer to being the "shard of glass" for which it's named.

^

The contractors have had to conduct a trial assembly of the pointy bit at the top in a field somewhere up north.

I think it's hideous, ruining the vista of St Paul's and much else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJLNf-5BUIs&feature=related
Hotel Chambermaid- Graham Parker & The Rumour.