, afternoon tea is served with views of the Household Cavalry at the official entrance to Buckingham Palace, and room rates start at four digits. But beyond this, it offers unprecedented public access to the building that w){kind=link}
The conversion of the Old War Office into a high-end hotel brings fresh insight into the world the great Prime Minister inhabited
You can almost feel his presence at the front door, even as the buses and taxis rumble down Whitehall behind you, backed up and concertinaed, mostly stop with the occasional start – hooting, grumbling and growling in that never-ending argument of London traffic.
Perhaps the echo is embellished by the figure, smartly uniformed, who greets you – although here, now, in the autumn of 2023, this is the doorman at an elegant London hotel rather than a government guard.
Still, the 10 decades of difference fall away as you step inside, and begin to climb the main staircase to the first floor, the marble solid beneath the red carpet. Is that a spectral cloud of cigar smoke you can smell as you reach the halfway point and turn left, your hand drifting across the cold stone of the balustrade?
It might be. Because Winston Churchill strode this way on many a morning, bound for his office, and the weighty issues of war and peace. He would have sensed the grandeur of the building around him, even as he contemplated a new day’s matters of life and death. Might the building, so long after the peril has passed, not sense his ghost in return?