Why you should experience The Grand Hotel Trafalgar in London, England.
The Grand Hotel Trafalgar is a commanding Victorian hotel where Westminster's imperial-era ambition, railway-age hospitality, decorative craftsmanship and ceremonial urbanism converge at the gateway between Trafalgar Square and Northumberland Avenue.
Set along Northumberland Avenue near Whitehall and just steps from Trafalgar Square, the hotel occupies the former Grand Hotel built between 1882 and 1887 on land once belonging to Northumberland House, the centuries-old London residence of the Percy family. Architects F. amp; H. Francis and James Ebenezer Saunders conceived a seven-storey hotel containing 500 rooms and a large ballroom, giving the newly created avenue one of the enormous hospitality palaces envisioned for late Victorian London. Venetian artist Antonio Salviati supplied elaborate mosaics for the interiors, connecting the building with the celebrated glassmaker and mosaicist whose international commissions extended from Venice across major European interiors. The result is a hotel where F. amp; H. Francis, James Ebenezer Saunders and Antonio Salviati embedded Victorian architecture and Venetian decorative art into the ceremonial approach to Trafalgar Square.
What you should know about The Grand Hotel Trafalgar.
The Grand Hotel Trafalgar is best known for originating within the great hotel-building campaign that followed the creation of Northumberland Avenue, opening from a vast 1880s complex conceived by F. amp; H. Francis and James Ebenezer Saunders with seven floors, 500 rooms, a ballroom and extensive Antonio Salviati mosaics. The building's hospitality career was interrupted during the First World War when the British government requisitioned the Grand Hotel to accommodate military officers, placing one of London's largest Victorian hotels directly within the machinery of wartime Westminster. A second reinvention followed during the 1930s when the former hotel became a retail headquarters, ending its original hospitality era while preserving the immense architectural shell at the meeting point of Charing Cross and Northumberland Avenue. The Grand Hotel eventually returned to hospitality, allowing a building conceived during the high Victorian expansion of London's grand-hotel culture to resume the purpose for which Francis, Saunders and Salviati had created it more than a century earlier.
Northumberland House provides the deeper historical foundation beneath the hotel, having served for generations as the London seat of the Percy family before its demolition enabled Northumberland Avenue to be driven between Trafalgar Square and the Thames during the 1870s. The Metropolitan Board of Works created the new avenue between 1874 and 1876, opening a prestigious corridor subsequently populated by the Grand Hotel, Hotel Victoria and Hotel Metropole as large-scale hospitality became part of the street's defining purpose. The Percy family's former estate passed through a striking sequence from aristocratic residence to metropolitan boulevard to one of Victorian London's largest concentrations of grand hotels, with The Grand Hotel Trafalgar occupying the most prominent western gateway. The Percy family, Northumberland House, the Metropolitan Board of Works and the Francis-Saunders hotel together give The Grand Hotel Trafalgar an architectural lineage inseparable from the nineteenth-century remaking of Central London.
How to fold The Grand Hotel Trafalgar into your trip.
The Grand Hotel Trafalgar works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing portraiture, royal equestrian culture and Britain's political relationship with war through the ceremonial core of Westminster.
Begin at National Portrait Gallery, founded in 1856 after sustained advocacy by Philip Henry Stanhope and opened with a collection devoted to portraits of historically significant British figures before moving into Ewan Christian's purpose-built St. Martin's Place building in 1896. Continue to Horse Guards, where William Kent's Palladian building was constructed between 1750 and 1759 on the site of an earlier guard house, creating the formal headquarters associated with the Household Cavalry and the ceremonial passage between Whitehall and Horse Guards Parade. Conclude at Churchill War Rooms, where the underground Cabinet War Rooms became operational shortly before Britain entered the Second World War in 1939 and provided Winston Churchill and the British government with a protected command center during the conflict. The progression moves from Britain's tradition of commemorating individuals through portraiture into the ceremonial world of the Household Cavalry and finally Churchill's subterranean wartime government, revealing the political, military and institutional histories surrounding The Grand Hotel Trafalgar.
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