Corinthia London

Whitehall Place runs for 200 metres between Northumberland Avenue and the Victoria Embankment, and the stone block that fills its north side, with a turret on the corner, opened in 1885 as the Hotel Métropole. It is now the Corinthia London. For most of the 20th century it belonged to the government rather than to hotel guests, which is why its interiors had to be rebuilt rather than restored when Corinthia took it on.

History

Frederick Gordon's Gordon Hotels company, which had already built the Grand and the Victoria on Northumberland Avenue, opened the Métropole in 1885 as the largest and grandest of its London houses, with some 600 rooms and a ballroom that became a fixture of the Edwardian season. The Prince of Wales dined there, and the Métropole's name is on the first chapter of more than one Edwardian memoir. The War Office took over part of the hotel in the First World War, and in 1936 the government bought the whole building. It served the Air Ministry and then the Ministry of Defence as offices until 2004. In 2007 a consortium led by Corinthia Hotels of Malta bought the building, and after four years of work it reopened as a hotel in April 2011.

Architecture and design

The exterior of 1885, in Portland stone with a corner turret, was cleaned and kept. Inside, GA Design rebuilt the plan around a central lobby lounge, and David Collins Studio designed the restaurants and bars. The lobby is lit by the Full Moon chandelier, 1,001 Baccarat crystal spheres by Chafik Gasmi, which hangs under a glass dome. Ceiling heights on the lower floors run to six metres, and the suites on the top floors, the penthouses, have terraces looking over the Thames or towards Whitehall. The Royal Penthouse is the largest.

Rooms and suites

There are 283 rooms and suites, large by London standards, with the penthouses on the upper floors. Rooms on the Whitehall Place side look towards the Ministry of Defence building across the street; those at the back face the Embankment Gardens and the river.

Dining

Kerridge's Bar & Grill, Tom Kerridge's first London restaurant, opened in the hotel in 2018 on the Northumberland Avenue corner. The Lobby Lounge serves afternoon tea under the chandelier, and the bar off the lobby serves cocktails through the evening. The hotel's restaurants have changed hands since the opening; Kerridge's is the fixed point.

Wellness

ESPA Life at Corinthia occupies four floors below the lobby, with an indoor pool, a thermal floor of saunas, steam rooms and ice fountain, a sleep pod, treatment rooms, a gym and a hair salon. At its opening it was the largest hotel spa in central London.

Weddings and events

The Ballroom on the ground floor, with its own entrance from Whitehall Place, takes weddings, dinners and receptions, and a set of smaller rooms on the same floor serves for meetings and private dinners. Civil ceremonies are licensed in the hotel.

Location

Trafalgar Square is three minutes on foot, Embankment underground station two, Charing Cross station five. The National Gallery, Whitehall and the Houses of Parliament are all within 15 minutes on foot, and the South Bank is across the Hungerford footbridge. Heathrow is 45 minutes to an hour by car, London City airport about 40 minutes. Among the luxury hotels in London, the Corinthia is the one closest to Whitehall.