Wordsworth got the wrong bridge. When he composed the following lines on
Westminster Bridge he was in the wrong place: “Dull would he be of soul who
could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty.”
Ray Davies got it right — Waterloo Bridge is much better. An illuminated
Palace of Westminster to one side and St Paul’s to the other. That’s the
sight you want to hear in a cadence.
But now I discover that there is another candidate. Come out of the cold into
a remote-controlled temperature, spring up and down on an inordinately
bouncy sofa, fling open the flowery curtains, take in London’s finest
panorama and declaim the lines over the noise of the plasma TV and the iPod
dock, from behind the safety of double-glazed windows.
All you have to do is to book into the Tower Suite of the Royal Horseguards
Hotel.
I had expected the visit to turn me back into a politician, but in fact it
turned me into a poet, albeit one whose only poem is a cover version of
Wordsworth relocated half a mile downstream.
I have spent many nights in hotels, all over the place, with the former Prime
Minister Tony Blair. We would be up at the crack of dawn to turn a series of
scribbles on a page into a speech. I’d go into the PM’s suite, tiptoeing
through the discarded prime ministerial clothing, and offer a bleary-eyed
view on whether the time had come to stop talking about 18 years of Tory
misrule.
It’s now how I think of suites with a view. It’s me and a few others with the
PM and a speech. These days we would go easy on the minibar for fear that
the expense claims would go straight into the newspapers. The Royal
Horseguards is a political hotel, of which more later. But the politics
dissolved in contemplation of the view.
The Tower Suite is an orthogonal room on the riverbank. Start at the left-hand
side of the window and pan around: Terry Farrell’s Charing Cross station
façade, itself a cover version of the original; Somerset House; the amazing
Hungerford Bridge, transformed from an eyesore into a thing of beauty; St
Paul’s, refusing ever to allow its sighting to be less than uplifting;
across the Millennium Bridge, the illuminated tip of Tate Modern and back,
along the river, the Royal Festival Hall, no longer looking like a municipal
car park; and, finally, the eye rests on the old County Hall, suddenly
looking resplendent in the night, rather than pompous and fusty.
I will even concede that the ill-proportioned Ferris wheel that someone has
placed directly opposite doesn’t look entirely stupid.
My word, what a view. That’s why I live in London. That, and the cricket. Seen
at night, the evening doth wear the beauty like a garment. If ever a man is
tired of this view, he is tired of London. The plasma TV is great to have
and I love MasterChef as much as the next man, but I turned it off and
looked out the window instead.
The Royal Horseguards is, essentially, a business hotel, but don’t bank on
doing any work. There’s too much staring out of the window to be done.
That certainly kept me from too assiduously reading up on the political
history of the site, which was what I was meant to be doing. Fortunately,
the Times office overlooks a main road, a block of flats and a petrol
station, so I caught up on that stuff later.
The hotel occupies the site of Whitehall Court, which was built 125 years ago,
rather oddly as a pastiche of a French château. The right-hand side of the
building, seen from the river, is the home of the National Liberal Club.
In 1985, liberalism having had a hard time of it since its political zenith in
1906, part of the château became a hotel. It is this hotel that has just
reopened under the Guoman banner, all spruced and buffed up.
Pleasingly, the Liberal associations have been maintained. For readers seeking
a hotel with a close connection to the history of British Liberalism, this
is definitely the place.
The marble staircase that coils around the atrium is adorned with portraits of
prominent Liberals, not always a contradiction in terms. Indeed, the large
portrait of Churchill reminds us that he joined the Liberals in 1904, even
if he didn’t last long.
The original foundation stone was laid by Gladstone and you can still see it
in the Cellar. The Library and the adjacent Reading and Writing Room are all
still named after Gladstone.
These rooms are on the riverside of the building but lower down, and so have a
lovely but less sumptuous view than the Tower Suite — unless you really like
Ferris wheels, of course.
The only thing the library lacks — and it may seem like a big omission — is
books. The Gladstone Library is a collection of 30,000 books that are now,
reasonably enough, kept in trust at Bristol University. Every one of them,
though, has been painstakingly re-created with a wooden fascia in the exact
location of the original book.
It looks fabulous but, even after enjoying half an hour of the Ferris wheel
failing to go round, I couldn’t decide whether that was an inspired
compliment to the original or monumentally ridiculous. The library, I mean,
not the Ferris wheel. You know what I think about that.
There was another mystery here. It’s perhaps no coincidence that this was once
the site of Scotland Yard, the capital of detection, or that the eighth
floor was the headquarters of the Secret Service during the Second World
War, with standard-issue sliding doors and fake bookcases to confound the
baddies.
All sorts of intrigue took place on the other floors, too — the Russian
Embassy on the fifth floor, the American Embassy on the sixth and the Air
Training Corps on the seventh.
So perhaps it is true that in one of the wine vaults there is some brickwork
that really does conceal a passage leading to an underground network of
tunnels that finishes at the Ministry of Defence. I’m not sure what I think
of underground tunnels. Is it ridiculous to believe in them or naive not to?
It’s like asking whether the CIA bumps people off. I mean, does it?
But it is as a hotel that the Royal Horseguards needs to be judged, rather
than as a very good political museum. Given the view I would recommend the
Tower Suite even if the bed were a spike and the room smelt of cabbage. But,
of course, it wasn’t and it didn’t.
In two visits to the restaurant — called One Twenty One Two after the
telephone number of Scotland Yard — my Falstaffian companions did their
level best to sample everything up to and including the actual menu itself.
In our search for a single dish that was less than excellent, we failed.
There is no need to stay at the hotel to visit the restaurant and, in the
almost taste-free zone of Westminster, I’ll be going back.
I slept well in a bed so comfortable that I almost became part of it. I awoke
in time to watch the end of Wordsworth’s poem: “The river glideth at his own
sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart
is lying still!” The Ferris wheel had started going round, but this time I
could accept it with equanimity.
Getting there
The Royal Horseguards
hotel has double rooms from £190 a night, including breakfast. The Tower
Suite is from £540. Reservations: 0871 9711763,
Trooping the Colour takes place in Horse Guards Parade. The procession,
starting at 10am, can be watched from the Mall.
