Park Plaza London Waterloo

Why you should experience Park Plaza London Waterloo in London, England.

Park Plaza London Waterloo is a metropolitan contemporary hotel where Lambeth's institutional history, South Bank cultural energy, postwar architecture and twenty-first-century hospitality reinvention converge within a former British government communications headquarters.

Set along Hercules Road near Westminster Bridge Road and just steps from Imperial War Museum, the hotel occupies the former Central Office of Information building, once home to the government agency created in 1946 as the successor to the wartime Ministry of Information. PPHE Hotel Group acquired the redundant Waterloo property in June 2013 before transforming it into a large-scale hotel through architecture and interior design practice Digital Space, which had previously worked on Park Plaza Westminster Bridge London. The redevelopment replaced an administrative workplace with a 13-floor hospitality environment whose curved façade and extensive glazing established a contemporary architectural presence between Waterloo and Lambeth North. The result is a hotel where the Central Office of Information, PPHE Hotel Group and Digital Space connect Lambeth's postwar institutional history with the South Bank's continuing evolution as a major cultural and hospitality district.

What you should know about Park Plaza London Waterloo.

Park Plaza London Waterloo is best known for officially opening on June 22, 2017 with 494 rooms after a soft opening at the end of 2016, becoming London's largest hotel opening of 2017 and completing a £125 million PPHE Hotel Group development whose total cost equated to £250,000 per room. The project converted the former Central Office of Information premises through Digital Space and introduced superior rooms, studios and one-bedroom suites across a building whose 494 accommodations extend over 13 floors. PPHE developed the property as part of a major expansion of its London portfolio under President and Chief Executive Officer Boris Ivesha, while Axel Krueger became the opening general manager after more than 20 years in hospitality and earlier senior positions at Park Plaza Westminster Bridge London, Park Plaza London Riverbank and Plaza on the River. Within weeks of the opening, PPHE completed a £161.5 million sale and 199-year leaseback in July 2017, following an independent CBRE Global Investors valuation of £250 million, £500,000 per room, creating one of the defining transactions in the group's development history. In March 2026 PPHE entered an agreement to repurchase the freehold for £147.9 million, bringing the property through a complete cycle of acquisition, development, sale-and-leaseback and renewed freehold ownership across thirteen years.

Florentine established the hotel's principal restaurant character at opening as an all-day dining room and bar, joining the property to PPHE's broader strategy of developing individually named food and beverage concepts within its London hotels. Boris Ivesha positioned Park Plaza London Waterloo alongside Park Plaza London Park Royal as part of a 2017 expansion that added 706 rooms to PPHE's London portfolio, while the group simultaneously completed a major extension at Park Plaza London Riverbank and continued strengthening its South Bank concentration. PPHE Hotel Group itself reached another corporate milestone during the hotel's opening year with the tenth anniversary of its London Stock Exchange listing, placing the Waterloo project within a period that also included the group taking a controlling interest in Arenaturist in Croatia and integrating its German and Hungarian operations with that business. Park Plaza London Waterloo consequently represents more than an isolated hotel opening within PPHE's history, concentrating Boris Ivesha's expansion strategy, the Park Plaza brand's growing South Bank presence and a major cycle of international portfolio development into one of the group's largest London projects.

How to fold Park Plaza London Waterloo into your trip.

Park Plaza London Waterloo works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing military memory, horticultural collecting and theatrical history through Lambeth and Waterloo.

Begin at Imperial War Museum, created after the Cabinet approved a National War Museum in 1917, formally established by Parliament in 1920 and opened by King George V at Crystal Palace on June 9 that year before moving in 1936 into the former Bethlem Royal Hospital building at Lambeth under the patronage of Lord Rothermere. Continue to Garden Museum, where Rosemary and John Nicholson founded the Museum of Garden History in 1977 to save the threatened medieval church of St. Mary-at-Lambeth, burial place of seventeenth-century plant collector John Tradescant, whose collection known as the Ark eventually became a foundation of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum in 1683. Conclude at The Old Vic, carrying the progression into Waterloo's longstanding performance culture and one of the institutions most closely identified with the district's theatrical history. The sequence moves from Britain's institutional preservation of wartime memory through John Tradescant's culture of collecting into Waterloo's stage tradition, revealing the unusually dense cultural landscape surrounding Park Plaza London Waterloo.

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