Why you should experience The Stafford London in London, England.
The Stafford London is a clubby luxury hotel where St. James's aristocratic discretion, wartime camaraderie, equestrian heritage and centuries of private hospitality converge behind an almost hidden entrance near Green Park.
Set along St. James's Place near St. James's Street and just steps from Green Park, the hotel incorporates three seventeenth-century townhouses and a separate Grade II-listed Carriage House arranged around a cobbled courtyard, creating a collection of buildings that retains the proportions of private residences. Lord Francis Godolphin's former stables survive within the 380-year-old Carriage House, where ground-floor suites retain original stable doors and timber beams while the Main House carries the more formal character of the adjoining historic residences. The underground wine cellars descend even further into the property's early history, originating four centuries ago and preserving passages once connected with the neighboring royal precinct. The result is a hotel where Godolphin's equestrian world, seventeenth-century domestic architecture and an unusually secluded courtyard make The Stafford London feel inseparable from St. James's tradition of discreet private clubs and residences.
What you should know about The Stafford London.
The Stafford London is best known for opening as the Stafford Hotel in 1912 after Nos. 16, 17 and 18 St. James's Place were assembled from residences whose histories reach the seventeenth century, establishing a hotel that now spreads its accommodation across the Main House, Carriage House and Stafford Mews. The property currently contains 107 rooms and suites, while the £26 million Stafford Mews development introduced 26 suites in 2007 as a separate building with its own private lobby and a more contemporary residential character. The Carriage House preserves another accommodation character inside Lord Francis Godolphin's former stable block, and its multimillion-pound 2017 redesign retained original stable doors while recasting the rooms and suites around a contemporary English country-house vocabulary. Together, the Main House, 26-suite Stafford Mews and historic Carriage House allow one hotel to sustain three distinct architectural identities across a remarkably secluded St. James's compound.
The American Bar carries The Stafford London's twentieth-century history through a room whose name reflects the American-bar tradition that spread through West End hotels during the 1920s and 1930s and whose walls accumulated photographs, ties, military objects and other memorabilia donated by generations of patrons. American and Canadian officers made The Stafford a wartime gathering place during World War II, when the hotel's underground spaces served as air-raid shelters, creating the transatlantic association that the American Bar continued after 1945. Nancy Wake, the Special Operations Executive operative known as the White Mouse, later became closely associated with the bar through her longstanding visits, while Benoit Provost guided its cocktail character for decades and oversaw the menu accompanying its May 2018 refurbishment. Together, The American Bar, Nancy Wake, Benoit Provost and the Allied officers who gathered at The Stafford connect the property's wartime history with a living bar culture shaped by the people who repeatedly returned to St. James's Place.
How to fold The Stafford London into your trip.
The Stafford London works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing eighteenth-century collecting, Georgian intellectual culture and British art through the institutions surrounding St. James's.
Begin at Spencer House, commissioned in 1756 by John Spencer, later the 1st Earl Spencer, with John Vardy designing its Palladian exterior before James “Athenian” Stuart introduced interiors inspired by direct study of classical Greece, creating one of London's most ambitious surviving aristocratic houses. Continue to The London Library, where Thomas Carlyle's dissatisfaction with existing reference libraries inspired an independent lending institution founded in 1841, with early supporters including Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Charles Darwin and a collection that subsequently expanded across interconnected buildings on St. James's Square. Conclude at Royal Academy of Arts, founded in 1768 under the patronage of George III with Joshua Reynolds as its first president before moving to Burlington House in 1868, where generations of practicing artists and architects have continued governing the institution. The progression moves from Spencer and Stuart's eighteenth-century domestic classicism through Carlyle's independent intellectual institution into Reynolds and the Royal Academicians, revealing the unusually concentrated traditions of patronage, scholarship and artistic authorship surrounding The Stafford London.
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