The Londoner: can a dazzling £500m hotel save Leicester Square?

Leicester Square takes its name from Robert Sidney, the second Earl of Leicester, who built a large house in 1635 on four open, undeveloped acres north of Westminster. The common land in front of the house became known as Leicester Field; over the following century mansions grew up around it, formal gardens were laid out and field became square. Joshua Reynolds lived and painted at No. 47, on the border of what is now All Bar One and McDonald’s. At No. 30 (now TGI Friday’s) the artist and satirist William Hogarth drew Gin Lane, his depiction of the effects of binge drinking on London.

Three centuries later, large groups of English football fans needed somewhere to drink — and trash — during the European Football Championship. For much of July, they gravitated to Leicester Square. Much as he preferred beer, even Hogarth might have blanched at what unfolded. Revelry of the sort that has become synonymous with the square culminated in the the actions of a man who, having bared his bottom outside Burger King, rapidly became famous on social media as “arse-flare guy”.

For reasons I have set out to explore, an address that was once among the most desirable in London has today what might be categorised, in tourism terms, as “difficult heritage”. It’s something I raise tentatively during a tour of a £500m hotel that opens this week with bold talk of an upmarket “rebirth” for a troubled piazza.

The Londoner rises above the square’s south-west corner in a gleaming assembly of Portland Stone, bronze and blue-glazed terracotta tiles. An eight-storey tower in zinc and glass nods across the gardens to the black Art Deco turret of the giant Odeon cinema, which opened in 1937. There are eight further floors below ground level, including a ballroom and swimming pool, making up what the engineers claim is the deepest habitable commercial basement in London. Others have dubbed it the city’s first “iceberg hotel”.

The Londoner is perhaps the biggest — and costliest — expression of faith to land on Leicester Square since Sidney built his pile. For Jasminder Singh, the billionaire British owner of the Edwardian Hotels group, it also marks the culmination of a 40-year relationship with London’s West End. In 1988, Singh opened the Hampshire, in an old dental hospital on the south side of the square. The Londoner is different. Singh, 70, is not just adding an address to his 13-strong hotel group, which also includes the venerable May Fair, but a new flagship.

To succeed, the new hotel, where rooms start at £400 a night, will need to rise above the noise and tricky reputation of its surroundings. “We weren’t happy about that at all,” says Iype Abraham, Edwardian’s commercial development director, when I ask about the football fans’ antics this summer. “We have spoken to the police and council about the level of investment we are making here.”

As well as Abraham, I meet The Londoner’s architect, Rob Steul, and its chief engineer, Simon Nevill from Arup, who is prouder of the basement than I am of my children. As we look around just ahead of the opening, we’re joined by Krishma Singh Dear, head of design at Edwardian, which Jasminder — her father — founded in 1977.

“It’s actually great that you’re asking these questions because it’s what we were all questioning during the whole project as well,” Krishma says of the square’s mixed fortunes, despite its prime location between Soho and Covent Garden (the hotel pretty much backs on to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square). “How do we get people over that mindset?”

We start on the airy yet moodily lit ground floor. It includes space for the obligatory afternoon tea trade, as well as Whitcomb’s, an all-day, French-ish restaurant. Past a stage for live music, I walk up a grand gold staircase to a suspended mezzanine. Appearing to float inside a vast atrium, it houses a Y-shaped marble bar and progressively more intimate spaces. They lead eventually to a whisky den where regulars can keep their favoured tipples in little hardwood lockers.

Higher up, lacquered doors to the hotel’s rooms are reassuringly heavy. Resembling sexed-up versions of the grand entrances that once surrounded the square, they include chunky central knobs in Murano glass rather than brass. Like the showy reveal of a Savile Row suit, such details elevate interiors that could easily have fallen into metro-luxe cliché or bland internationalism.

The highest floors include 8 at The Londoner, where Japanese food will be served under a retractable roof with views south past Nelson’s Column. A sprawling penthouse suite offers an aerial view of Leicester Square — seen through a canopy of plane trees, it almost looks rather pleasant.

By the end of the 18th century, Leicester Square’s aristocratic connections were on the wane. Sidney’s mansion, Leicester House, was demolished in 1791. Thanks in part to its location, Leicester Square became a centre for tourism and entertainment, only some of it wholesome. Two grand theatres were built in the 19th century: the Empire survives today as a cinema and casino, the fabulously ornate Alhambra was replaced by the big Odeon. Hotels opened as early as 1800; the Hôtel Sablonnière et de Provence roughly occupied the current Burger King site.

But brothels and other attractions also proliferated and the gentry moved out, leaving the central gardens to ruin. Brief reprieve arrived in 1851 with Wyld’s Great Globe, a vast walk-in orb with the world’s geography rendered on the interior in plaster. It was a sensation but when it was dismantled, in 1861, the gardens became so neglected that feral cats ran wild. “The condition of Leicester Square was the great internal grievance of the metropolis,” an American journalist observed later, in 1874.

In that year, Albert Grant, a businessman and Conservative politician, donated the gardens to the city after buying and restoring them at great expense. The transformation included the Shakespeare statue and fountains that still make up the square’s heart. Within years, Grant was bankrupt and dead, having lost millions in a Utah silver mine fraud. But his gardens largely endured, despite the efforts of the Luftwaffe, a sometimes neglectful council and generations of very drunk people.

In 1979, a mountain of black bags strained against the railings opposite Angus Steakhouse: “Fester Square” had become a designated dump during a strike by refuse collectors. In the 1990s, bungling cleaners washed statues of former famous residents, which Grant had also installed, with acid, dissolving their faces. In 2000, the 16-year-old son of Tony Blair had to be scraped off the pavement by police, days after the prime minister had vowed to crack down on public drunkenness.

The last big attempted revival came 10 years ago. Gaudy railings went in and corroded statues, including one of Hogarth, were removed. A soulless glass building replaced the old Swiss Centre. Its famous bells were rescued and mounted on a post. On the day I visit, they chime above tourist portrait artists and a megaphone preacher.

The new building included a W Hotel above a four-storey M&M’s store. The store seemed to confirm Leicester Square’s status as London’s answer to Times Square in New York: a tacky tourist magnet that seemed to repel cynical Londoners, whom it largely served as a sticky-floored thoroughfare.

Nevertheless, Krishma, 33, has fond memories of childhood visits, including to the old Häagen-Dazs café next to the Empire. She saw The Mask four times at the big Odeon in 1994. She was born in the year her father opened the Hampshire. “Every half term we’d stay there and spend hours at the big windows just looking at the square,” she says as we look out from the Londoner’s penthouse.

Jasminder’s Indian-born father, Bal Mohinder Singh, had moved to London from Kenya. He ran a post office; Jasminder became an accountant. In 1976, Jasminder and four uncles bought the Edwardian, a hotel in Kensington, and Jasminder set about creating a small empire. Edwardian remains a family affair: Jasminder’s wife and two other children also have senior roles in the company. It has not always been easy. In 2014, Bal Mohinder lost a legal battle against Jasminder for a share of his son’s fortune. For part of the trial, London’s Royal Courts of Justice decamped to the May Fair because Singh senior was too frail to attend.

Krishma says her father always believed in Leicester Square’s location, despite its varied appeal. In 1994, he bought the Pastoria Hotel next to the Hampshire. The Pastoria shared an address with a smaller Odeon cinema, and was renamed the Leicester Square Hotel. The block — all of which was demolished to make way for The Londoner — also included offices and a little pub, which has been reborn as Joshua’s Tavern in Reynolds’ honour (a Hogarth gin bar would have been funnier).

By 2012, Jasminder had completed the purchase of the whole site to fulfil his dreams of a glorious flagship. To get planning permission, he had to agree to include a new two-screen cinema, which Odeon will operate. Unable to build higher than the square’s existing buildings, yet needing space for the screens and a viable hotel, Edwardian could only dig down.

Nevill took on the job, which also involved digging outwards; UK property owners typically have a legal claim to the subsoil to the centre of the road outside their plots. The subterranean land grab involved nudging a forest of under-street utilities out of the way. The basement also skirts a tunnel that brings high voltage cables into an electrical substation below the square.

Nevill brims with excitement as he shows me pictures of the 33-metre hole in which the Londoner now sits. It could have contained the water from 33 Olympic-sized swimming pools — or more than 500 London buses. “I did the South Stand at Twickenham and that was emotional because I’m a rugby fan, but this has been the most exciting, exhilarating and challenging piece of engineering I’ve ever done,” he says.

From the penthouse, we whizz down the lifts deep into the London clay. Nevill gazes up at the ballroom’s 20-metre ceiling trusses. Each weighs 60 tonnes and had to be trucked under nearby Admiralty Arch in a night-time convoy of steel. There is also a gym and spa, including a serene swimming pool.

Krishma was barely out of university, and switching careers from finance to interior design, when her father started on what he sees as his life’s key work. More than a decade later, the doors are finally swinging open. As tourists walk through them, the complete success of the Londoner and its mission to restore Leicester Square’s reputation after a turbulent four centuries will depend on perhaps the harder audience to convince: Londoners. This one believes the Singhs might just pull it off. 

Double rooms cost from £400 a night; for details see thelondoner.com

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