Why you should experience Strand Palace in London, England.
Strand Palace is a storied grand hotel where Covent Garden's theatrical heritage, Edwardian hospitality, Art Deco design and West End cultural energy converge within an institution that has occupied the Strand since 1909.
Set along the Strand near Southampton Street and just steps from Covent Garden, the hotel was designed by architect W. J. Ancell for Strand Hotel Limited and opened in 1909 on the former site of Exeter Hall, introducing a large Edwardian hotel to the historic route connecting Westminster with the City. J. Lyons & Co became closely involved with the property during the 1920s, acquiring shares in the enterprise and purchasing neighboring Haxell's Family Hotel as Strand Palace expanded along the street. Designer Oliver Percy Bernard subsequently gave the hotel one of Britain's defining Art Deco interiors, including an entrance later acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum as an important surviving expression of interwar design. The result is a hotel where W. J. Ancell, J. Lyons & Co and Oliver Percy Bernard connect Covent Garden's hospitality culture with more than a century of architecture, entertainment and metropolitan reinvention.
What you should know about Strand Palace.
Strand Palace is best known for opening in 1909 after Strand Hotel Limited received permission for the new hotel in 1907, with architect W. J. Ancell creating the original Edwardian building before J. Lyons & Co became an influential shareholder in 1922 and neighboring Haxell's Family Hotel was acquired for expansion. Oliver Percy Bernard transformed the property during its interwar evolution after working for J. Lyons & Co and serving as technical director of the British Pavilion at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, the exhibition from which Art Deco derived its name. Bernard designed the Strand Palace entrance in 1929, and the ensemble became significant enough to enter the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection after its removal, preserving a major component of the hotel's interwar character outside the building itself. During the Second World War, Strand Palace accommodated American servicemen, accepted ration vouchers in its restaurants, sheltered guests in the basement during air raids and continued hosting dances, while figures associated with its wider history include Charlie Chaplin and Vivien Leigh. By 1958 every guestroom had acquired a private bathroom, and increasing hot-water demand finally retired coal-fired boilers salvaged from a First World War battleship, compressing Edwardian hotelkeeping, Art Deco design, wartime London and postwar modernization into the property's first half-century.
Strand Palace entered another architectural chapter through a comprehensive contemporary renovation completed in 2019, reworking the hotel while retaining its historical character on one of Central London's longest-established hospitality sites. UKinbound named Strand Palace Accommodation Provider of the Year in its 2024 Awards for Excellence, followed by Tripadvisor Travellers' Choice recognition for both 2024 and 2025 and Experts' Choice recognition for Best City Break in 2025. The property's cultural lineage remains inseparable from Oliver Percy Bernard, whose career stretched from theater design and First World War service as a Royal Engineers camouflage officer to the British Empire Exhibition, the 1925 Paris exposition and influential interiors for J. Lyons & Co. Together, W. J. Ancell, Oliver Percy Bernard, J. Lyons & Co and the Victoria and Albert Museum give Strand Palace an unusually complete design history extending from Edwardian grand-hotel architecture through the international emergence of Art Deco and into twenty-first-century London hospitality.
How to fold Strand Palace into your trip.
Strand Palace works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing theatrical performance, institutional collecting and artistic patronage through Covent Garden and the Strand.
Begin at Somerset House, whose great eighteenth-century complex was designed by Sir William Chambers after George III approved the rebuilding of the site, establishing an architectural composition that eventually accommodated institutions including the Royal Academy and learned societies. Continue to Courtauld Gallery, where Samuel Courtauld's collecting legacy anchors a collection particularly renowned for Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting within Chambers's Somerset House architecture. Conclude at Royal Opera House, where the present theater opened in 1858 to designs by Edward Middleton Barry after earlier theaters on the site were destroyed by fire, continuing a Covent Garden performance tradition reaching back to John Rich's first Theatre Royal in 1732. The progression moves from Chambers's institutional architecture through Samuel Courtauld's collecting culture into nearly three centuries of Covent Garden theater, revealing the artistic and performance history surrounding Strand Palace.
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