Why you should experience Marlin Waterloo in London, England.
Marlin Waterloo is a metropolitan aparthotel where Waterloo's railway heritage, South Bank cultural energy, Victorian transport history and twenty-first-century regeneration converge within a contemporary Westminster Bridge Road address.
Set along Westminster Bridge Road near Lower Marsh and just steps from Lambeth North Station, the hotel replaced Costain House, a 1950s office block formerly associated with British engineering company Costain, as part of Marlin's expansion from serviced apartments into purpose-built aparthotels. Marlin Apartments had begun in 2003 with 96 newly constructed serviced apartments at Queen Street before developing Empire Square at London Bridge in 2006, Canary Wharf later that year, Limehouse in 2008 and Aldgate in 2009, creating a London portfolio that ultimately made Waterloo its seventh Central London location. The Westminster Bridge Road project placed that expansion beside the Grade II-listed former London Necropolis Railway station, whose history connects the street with the extraordinary railway created to carry the dead from London to Brookwood Cemetery beginning in the nineteenth century. The result is a hotel where Costain, Marlin Apartments and the London Necropolis Railway place contemporary accommodation within Waterloo's deeper culture of engineering, mobility and metropolitan reinvention.
What you should know about Marlin Waterloo.
Marlin Waterloo is best known for opening in 2017 after Marlin Apartments commissioned McAleer & Rushe to demolish Costain House and deliver a £28 million, 14,566-square-meter hotel-led development at 111 Westminster Bridge Road, marking the company's first adoption of the aparthotel model after more than a decade operating serviced apartments across London. The project was conceived with 218 aparthotel units, six office suites, a restaurant and retail space, with a seven-storey Westminster Bridge Road frontage rising to ten storeys at the rear and Portland stone and brick forming the principal external material vocabulary. Cantrell & Crowley developed the architectural scheme around the sensitive Lower Marsh setting, positioning the taller volume behind the street frontage and responding to the neighboring former Necropolis building at No. 121, while McAleer & Rushe executed the design-and-build program between July 2015 and May 2017. Marlin subsequently configured the completed property as 236 hotel-style rooms, studios and suites, significantly expanding the accommodation scale associated with the original development program. The 2017 opening represented a decisive evolution for Marlin, moving the company founded around Queen Street serviced apartments into a purpose-built hospitality format at one of its largest London properties.
Susan Cully, then managing director of Marlin Apartments, positioned the Waterloo project as the company's first deliberate diversification of its established serviced-apartment model across both corporate and leisure hospitality markets. Martin Magee, construction managing director at McAleer & Rushe, led the contractor relationship on a project whose £28 million contract became another collaboration between the two companies as Marlin simultaneously pursued expansion in London and Dublin. Marlin's wider chronology gives that decision greater significance: Queen Street opened in 2003, Empire Square followed in 2006 and grew from 60 apartments to 225 by summer 2008, Canary Wharf introduced another 81 apartments in 2006, and Waterloo ultimately translated that accumulated operating experience into a substantially different aparthotel concept. Marlin Hotel Dublin followed in late 2019 with nearly 300 rooms, making Waterloo the pivotal property between Marlin's original London serviced-apartment network and its subsequent development of larger hotel formats.
How to fold Marlin Waterloo into your trip.
Marlin Waterloo works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing medical reform, horticultural collecting and the cultural consequences of modern warfare through Lambeth.
Begin at Florence Nightingale Museum, where the collection developed from objects assembled by St. Thomas' Hospital matron Dame Alicia Lloyd Still from 1913 to 1937, passed to the Florence Nightingale Museum Trust in 1983 and entered its permanent museum home in 1989 on the site associated with Nightingale's 1860 Training School, whose first intake comprised 15 probationer nurses. Continue to Garden Museum, where Rosemary and John Nicholson founded the institution in 1977 to save the abandoned St. Mary-at-Lambeth Church, preserving a site containing John Tradescant's seventeenth-century tomb, Admiral William Bligh's burial place and a fourteenth-century tower that remains Lambeth's oldest surviving structure. Conclude at Imperial War Museum, carrying the sequence into the military and social histories that reshaped Britain across the twentieth century within the former Bethlem Royal Hospital complex on Lambeth Road. The progression moves from Florence Nightingale and Dame Alicia Lloyd Still's history of professional nursing through John Tradescant and the Nicholsons' preservation of British garden culture into the national memory of modern conflict, revealing the unusually dense institutional history surrounding Marlin Waterloo.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Experience premium editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
