Hotels in London

British country landowners often lived in London for part of the year but they usually rented a house, if the family did not have their own townhouse.

In his travel book North America (1862), the novelist Anthony Trollope remarked on how much larger American hotels were than British ones.

The upper end of the London hotel business continued to flourish between the two World Wars, boosted by the fact that many landowning families could no longer afford to maintain a London house and therefore began to stay at hotels instead, and by an increasing number of foreign visitors, especially Americans.

The rate of hotel construction in London was fairly low in the quarter-century after World War II and the famous old names retained their dominance of the top end of the market.

The most notable hotel of this era was probably the London Hilton, a controversial concrete tower overlooking Hyde Park.

Construction then picked up again, but it was soon curtailed by the recession of the early 1990s and the reduction in international travel caused by the 1991 Gulf War.

This period also saw the opening of the first five-star hotel in London south of the River Thames, the Marriott County Hall Hotel, and the first two in East London, the Four Seasons Canary Wharf and the Marriott West India Quay, which is also close to the Canary Wharf development.

Originally a private address (Lanesborough House), in 1733 it was converted into St George's Hospital, and began life as a hotel in 1991.

The main growth was a huge rise in the number of rooms within the City of London, while Kensington and Chelsea actually had a small fall.

November 2006 was also the month Dhiren Barot was sentenced by a British court to serve at least 40 years in prison for planning to cause explosions in London Hotels amongst a list of targets which also included the New York Stock Exchange and the World Bank.

January 2007 saw the first use anywhere in the world of Cryonite technology[10] to kill bed bugs (freezes pests using a patented carbon dioxide snow) at a top London Hotel (unnamed).

[13] The Langham received confirmation from Westminster Council that "everything was in good order" in May 2006, and the Dorchester disinfected their air conditioning system in response to legionella bacteria found in bedrooms.