Grosvenor House Hotel

Luxury hotel Grosvenor House stands on Park Lane in Mayfair, facing Hyde Park. It replaced the 19th-century Grosvenor House, the London home of the Dukes of Westminster. Arthur Octavius Edwards planned and built the hotel in the 1920s and opened it in 1929. The building was protected during the Second World War with ten thousand sandbags and five miles of blackout material. Generals Eisenhower and Patton visited the hotel while it served as an officers’ mess. The hotel’s Great Room is one of Europe’s largest ballrooms, seating two thousand at tables or eleven hundred in theatre style. It began as an ice-rink where Princess Elizabeth learnt to skate at the age of seven. Famous skaters such as Sonja Henie and Cecilia Colledge performed there, and international ice hockey matches were held on the rink. The space was converted into a banquet hall in 1935 and now hosts major awards evenings and charity balls seen on British television. Inside, the hotel offers 494 guest rooms and suites, each with its own bathroom and lobby. Victorian-style Turkish baths, a swimming pool, squash courts and a gymnasium were among the original facilities. The resident orchestra broadcast dance music across the country from 1929, led first by Jack Harris and later by Sydney Lipton until 1967. Richard Corrigan’s restaurant Corrigan’s Mayfair occupies space within the hotel.