BOAT Reviews: The Goring Hotel

Set in an elegant Georgian townhouse, The Goring hotel in London remains a royal favourite. Caroline White discovers why...

There are plenty of grand hotels in London, with towering lobbies topped with dazzling chandeliers. But perhaps the most illustrious bolthole in town and the closest to Buckingham Palace (literally and metaphorically), is on a far more restrained scale. The Goring is the only luxury hotel in the capital that is still owned and run by the family who built it. This elegant Georgian townhouse, tucked away on a leafy Belgravia street, is shot through with distinctive, colourful character: from the hand-painted wallpaper depicting English parkland (with animals that represent members of the Goring family) to the lighting options in rooms, which run from “cosy” to “oooh!”.

The cocktail bar offers vignettes of the hotel’s history via its tipples. Margaret Thatcher used to visit regularly for lunch, often entertaining world leaders, and would book under the acronym BLT (Barness Lady Thatcher) – and the cocktail of the same name blends King’s Ginger Liqueur, pear aperitif and chocolate bitters. The Churchill Manhattan is named for another weekly guest and spiked with flavours of banana and vanilla – since the hotel’s 1910 opening, every reigning English monarch and prime minister has visited. The citrussy George’s Martini, meanwhile, was “grandpa” Goring’s favourite breakfast drink. It certainly packs more punch than a flat white.

Décor is lavish and traditionally English, with roaring fires, cream panelling, ornate plasterwork, columns and a brass dial in the lift. The same hand-woven Gainsborough silks lined the first-class Dining Room of RMS Titanic as clads the walls of The Goring’s Royal Suite (in which Catherine, Princess of Wales spent the night before her wedding).
But perhaps the most glamorous appointments in the hotel occupy the recently refurbished dining room. Interiors by Russell Sage Studio (responsible for Café Murano, the Groucho Club and others) feature bespoke floral Fromental wallpaper in soft green that gives the space a fairytale quality, with plump corner sofas, bevelled mirrors and glimmering chandeliers.

Food, from executive chef Graham Squire, is fittingly decadent, from fresh, nutty brown bread, served warm with marmite butter, through Eggs Drumkilbo with Cornish crab, aged caviar and native lobster (the former Queen Mother’s favourite), to a spectacular longhorn beef Wellington. The theatrical and delicious rum baba flambé is an essential encore, served, as are champagne cocktails and other treats, via a glinting silver trolley.

Afternoon tea, here or in the sun-drenched veranda by the garden (the largest in central London), involves light-as-air scones and superlative sweet delicacies, a strength the hotel has long taken pride in: the Goring’s pastry chefs whipped up the cake for King Charles’s Christening in 1948.

Guests ready for bed are accommodated in one of just 69 individually designed bedrooms, with sink-in beds, Italian linens, marble bathrooms, and subtly integrated tech to ensure modern comfort behind the traditional aesthetic. They look out over either the sprawling garden or peaceful Beeston Place. For guests to London by boat via the nearby Thames, or those flying into Battersea Heliport, The Goring offers the most distinctively English experience available, unless you are staying a ten-minute stroll away at the palace.