Why you should experience Leicester House Hotel in London, England.
Leicester House Hotel is a cultured townhouse hotel where Soho's political exile, musical history, theatrical energy and centuries of cosmopolitan exchange converge within an intimate address at the edge of Leicester Square.
Set along Leicester Street near Lisle Street and just steps from Leicester Square, the building carries a history extending three centuries and became temporary home to Karl Marx and his family after their arrival in London following the European revolutions of 1848. Johann Strauss I had lodged at the same address during his first English visit in April 1838, part of a British tour encompassing 72 concerts and a performance during Queen Victoria's coronation festivities. The property later became associated with Manzi's, the seafood restaurant remembered for its long Soho dining history before Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver brought the St. John philosophy to the address. The result is a hotel where Karl Marx, Johann Strauss I, Manzi's, Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver compress political thought, nineteenth-century music and modern London restaurant culture into a single Soho building.
What you should know about Leicester House Hotel.
Leicester House Hotel is best known for becoming St. John Hotel under Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver, opening in 2011 as a 15-bedroom extension of the St. John restaurant culture before its dining room earned a MICHELIN star in 2012 under head chef Tom Harris and the business entered administration shortly afterward. Singaporean hotelier Loh Lik Peng acquired the property in January 2013 for Unlisted Collection, reopening it on May 1 as One Leicester Street with Tom Harris remaining Chef Patron, Universal Design Studio responsible for the interiors and A Practice for Everyday Life creating a character extending through typography, menu illustrations and staff uniforms. Unlisted Collection sold the 15-bedroom property to Honky Tonk in July 2014, initiating another change in an address whose hospitality history has repeatedly moved between restaurant and hotel concepts. The contemporary Leicester House Hotel contains 17 accommodations comprising 11 double rooms, three twin rooms and three named heritage suites, Karl Marx Suite, Johann Strauss Suite and Emille Suite, explicitly carrying two of the building's nineteenth-century associations into its present identity. The sequence from Henderson and Gulliver through Tom Harris, Loh Lik Peng, Universal Design Studio and Honky Tonk gives Leicester House Hotel an unusually concentrated modern hospitality genealogy for such a small Central London property.
Tom Harris supplies the most consequential culinary chapter in that genealogy, having served as Henderson's right-hand man before earning the MICHELIN star at St. John Chinatown and remaining at the stove when Loh Lik Peng transformed the operation into One Leicester Street. Harris carried forward a distinctly British repertoire encompassing smoked cod roe with devilled pig's skin, snails with duck hearts and lovage, lamb sweetbreads with artichokes and celery, and wild fennel ice cream with strawberries, maintaining continuity between the St. John years and Unlisted Collection's successor. The property later adopted a French-Vietnamese dining character centered on an open kitchen and Robata charcoal grill, with preparations including blackened squid with lime and chilli, scallops with mirin and seashore vegetables, smoked ribs with kaffir lime and coriander, and pork collar with crab wonton. Fergus Henderson, Trevor Gulliver, Tom Harris and Loh Lik Peng consequently make the building's recent history a compact chronicle of London's restaurant-with-rooms movement, moving from St. John's nose-to-tail philosophy through MICHELIN recognition and independent hotel design into another internationally inflected culinary chapter.
How to fold Leicester House Hotel into your trip.
Leicester House Hotel works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing independent cinema, nineteenth-century theater and British portraiture through Leicester Square and the West End.
Begin at Prince Charles Cinema, whose building opened as a theater in 1962 before evolving through film exhibition and entering its defining repertory era after Robins Cinemas took control in 1991, eventually becoming the last independent cinema operating in London's cinema-heavy West End. Continue to Garrick Theatre, opened in 1889 with financing from playwright W. S. Gilbert and architecture by Walter Emden with C. J. Phipps, its construction complicated by the discovery of an underground river before the auditorium developed a repertoire spanning melodrama and comedy. Conclude at National Portrait Gallery, founded in 1856 to collect portraits of significant figures in British history and now holding more than 215,000 portraits within a collection whose organizing principle places biography alongside the art of portraiture. The progression moves from Leicester Square's fiercely independent film culture through Gilbert and Emden's Victorian theater into a national collection built around the people who shaped British history, placing Leicester House Hotel amid the performance, cinema and cultural institutions that give this pocket of Soho its unusual density.
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