Why you should experience Hazlitt's in London, England.
Hazlitt's is a literary Georgian hotel where Soho's intellectual history, bohemian character, publishing culture and centuries of artistic sociability converge inside the former Frith Street home of essayist William Hazlitt.
Set along Frith Street near Soho Square and just steps from Soho Theatre, the hotel occupies interconnected Georgian townhouses dating to 1718, including No. 6, where William Hazlitt lived during the final years of a career that established him among the defining English essayists and critics of the Romantic period. Hazlitt died at the address in 1830, leaving the building with a direct biographical connection to a writer whose circle encompassed figures including Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. The contemporary hotel preserves that literary character through rooms named for writers and historical personalities associated with the houses, while more than 2,000 paintings, prints and sculptures extend the interiors into an unusually dense collection of historical objects. The result is a hotel where William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb and the surviving Georgian fabric of Frith Street preserve Soho's long relationship with writers, artists and unconventional intellectual life.
What you should know about Hazlitt's.
Hazlitt's is best known for opening as a hotel in 1986 under Peter McKay and Douglas Blain, who developed a deliberately intimate alternative to conventional London hotels within historic Georgian houses that now contain 30 individually named rooms. The property became the first expression of the hoteliers' distinctive approach to historically immersive hospitality, preceding their creation of The Rookery in Clerkenwell and Batty Langley's in Spitalfields and establishing a small independent collection centered on old London townhouses. Hazlitt's received The Good Hotel Guide's César Award for London Hotel of the Year in 2002, while its accommodation collection developed around names including Jonathan Swift, Baron Willoughby and the Duke of Monmouth, connecting individual rooms with literary and historical personalities. The two-storey Duke of Monmouth suite became the property's most elaborate composition, incorporating a private terrace beneath a retractable roof and a marble bath filled through the beak of a life-sized bronze eagle. The hotel's library developed another layer of literary provenance through a collection containing signed first editions left by guests, reinforcing the connection between the modern property and the writers who have continued to inhabit its cultural orbit.
Peter McKay and Douglas Blain extended the philosophy established at Hazlitt's into The Rookery and Batty Langley's, creating three London hotels whose identities are built around historically specific buildings and accumulated collections. Sir Godfrey, the resident cat named after painter Sir Godfrey Kneller, became another character within Hazlitt's literary mythology, inhabiting the library alongside its books, fireplace and signed editions. Anthony Bourdain later became closely associated with the hotel through stays in the Duke of Monmouth suite, adding one of the modern era's most recognizable travel writers and broadcasters to a guest culture long shaped by authors, actors and artists. Together, Peter McKay, Douglas Blain, William Hazlitt, Sir Godfrey Kneller and Anthony Bourdain give Hazlitt's an unusually coherent cultural genealogy, allowing an independent hotel founded in 1986 to function as a continuation of Soho's centuries-old literary and artistic identity.
How to fold Hazlitt's into your trip.
Hazlitt's works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing eighteenth-century domestic culture, twentieth-century photography and rebellious performance through Soho.
Begin at Handel Hendrix House, where George Frideric Handel lived at 25 Brook Street from 1723 until his death in 1759 and composed works including Messiah during his London career, while Jimi Hendrix occupied an adjoining flat at 23 Brook Street during 1968 and 1969, bringing two radically different musical lives into neighboring Georgian buildings. Continue to The Photographers' Gallery, founded by Sue Davies in 1971 as Britain's first independent gallery devoted entirely to photography and subsequently established on Ramillies Street as a major center for historical and contemporary photographic culture. Conclude at Soho Theatre, where a company founded in 1969 eventually established its Dean Street home as a platform for new theater, comedy and cabaret, extending Soho's history of unconventional performance into contemporary London. The progression moves from Handel and Hendrix's extraordinary shared geography through Sue Davies's photographic institution into Soho Theatre's culture of live experimentation, surrounding Hazlitt's with the musicians, artists and performers who have repeatedly made Soho a refuge for creative independence.
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