Welcome (back) to Claridge's! Mayfair's grandest dame gets back to business

But, then, of course, this spry 89-year-old has also danced with Nureyev, ­Baryshnikov and Astaire. Hollywood royalty apart, no actual royals are present in what is often referred to as this “annex to Buckingham Palace”. However, they gaze down at us from black and white pictures all about, along with Winston Churchill, Audrey ­Hepburn and Jackie K/O. We troop merrily into the dining room to feast on chef Martyn Nail’s truffle lobster risotto and chicken pie, surrounded by pom-pom dahlias by house florist McQueens.

David Downton gives a speech about this “cautious trip out to the world’s greatest hotel”, noting: “Claridge’s is Claridge’s and everywhere else is everywhere else.” After six months’ lockdown, Mayfair’s cathedral to art-deco elegance has never felt so vital to morale, the ultimate symbol of London’s post-pandemic revival.

In fact, the coronavirus crisis was the first time Brook Street’s finest had been closed since its four-year ­rebuilding in 1894 (having originally opened as Mivart’s – a venue where the Prince Regent and his cronies could pursue their intrigues – back in 1812). It remained open during Oswald Milne’s deco makeover in 1929, and throughout both wars, even during the Blitz. Indeed, the hotel played a crucial part in the Second World War, not merely socially or via its state-of-the-art air-raid shelter, but strategically. Grosvenor Square was known as “Little America”, Claridge’s “Little Europe”, acting as the capital of half a dozen countries, whose exiled leaders took up residence.

Claridge’s was a hotbed of intrigue, with an entire floor deployed as a base for intelligence agencies, suites regularly searched for hidden devices. The hotel was said to house more spies than sommeliers. Members of the American Office for Strategic Services (later the CIA) made it their headquarters, and it is believed that Generals Marshall and Eisenhower conceived the North African invasion while staying here in 1942, two soldiers posted outside suite 402.

In 1944, the crisis in Greek affairs was centred on two first-floor rooms, where King George of the Hellenes was busy sending out royal proclamations. Later, the Churchills moved in, homeless after the shock election result of 1945, meaning that it was at Claridge’s that he heard of the surrender of the Axis powers to end the war. The hotel also boasts a top-secret memorandum of a meeting of the Big Five held here in 1946.

Forced into lockdown with the rest of Britain on March 24, it was the hotel's determination that its Covid-19 response should be equally robust. As owner Paddy McKillen remarked: “We need to look after our community; Claridge’s has a duty to step up and support the people of London.” Within a week, minibars and housekeeping cupboards had been emptied of snacks, shampoo, toothbrushes and shaving kits, the contents driven to King’s College Hospital and St Mary’s, Paddington, to medical teams working through the night to save lives. From April 3, it hosted 40 key workers from St Mary’s, providing rooms, ­dinner and breakfast, supplying lunch to a further 500 NHS doctors and nurses from across the capital.

McQueens provided flowers in NHS hues, while, on VE Day, singer Natalie Rushdie sang We’ll Meet Again and Somewhere Over the Rainbow in its foyer, the assembled (masked and distanced) crowd in tears. As Paula Fitzherbert, head of communications and one of the great Claridge’s characters, tells me: “These men and women are forever part of our history and we will be inviting everyone who stayed back for champagne at Christmas.” Cab drivers and passers-by were rewarded with free coffee and croissants.

On Twitter, chicken supremos KFC applauded the hotel’s “bougie” decision to make bags of CFC – Claridge’s (cult) Fried Chicken – available to regulars who were missing it. While the hotel delivered breakfast to the chap who takes his daily brekker there. Towards the end of lockdown, former resident Mick Jagger got in touch to ask whether the Rolling Stones could shoot the new video for their track, Scarlet, in its premises. Under normal circumstances, this would have proved impossible. However, with its halls empty, the band was given free rein. Appropriately enough, the film’s star turned out to be Normal People leading light and lockdown lust object Paul Mescal.

The Emmy-nominated actor dances his way around the hotel, stripping down to his vest, swigging scotch, puffing on a cigarette, laughing, screaming, sobbing, and springing downstairs into the lobby, before crashing out on the floor. Recording took two days and nights, conducted under a veil of secrecy and strict Covid guidelines, the actor the only participant unmasked. 

Otherwise, the hotel continued with the multi-million-pound refurbishment which it has been engaged in during the last three years, which will see its basement become home to two swimming pools, a cinema, health club, and staff restaurant, and which the BBC is filming for an forthcoming documentary.

In terms of pandemic safety precautions, there is now a thermal imaging camera at its entrance, masks are worn in public areas, while air purifiers and bottles of Claridge’s sanitiser lie all about. The hotel’s corridors are conveniently wide as they were designed to be spacious enough for two ladies to pass in crinolines. It also benefits from two staircases: the sweeping main ­version leading down to the lobby, which ladies could descend escorted by gentlemen (and the location of its epic Christmas parties), and the back “­ladies’” staircase, which women were expected to use if unchaperoned.

Virus restrictions mean that four floors of suites and rooms will be available, roughly a quarter of its 200 rooms. Occupancy rates as of Sept 7 were at about 50 per cent during the week, up to almost 100 per cent on Saturday evenings, and ever-mounting. The hotel’s 456 staff (all paid as usual during lockdown) seem ecstatic to be back, Keeper of the Lift Ajjaz Khan positively hopping up and down.

For, in the end, it is not Claridge’s magnificence, nor its architecture that make it what it is, but the heady great warmth of its welcome; the people that make the place. There is glamour, of course, there is glamour. For the 20 years during which I have been privileged to be a guest, I have danced the foxtrot with my beloved under the gaze of its dance master; danced the Charleston in its ballroom in full 1920s regalia; and danced into the small hours with model David Gandy – me in a scarlet La Perla negligée, he in a Dolce & Gabbana smoking jacket – at the world’s most impeccably-dressed pyjama party.

There was a stage when I was so regularly installed in its reading room that staff promised to name a club sandwich after me, as there is an omelette Arnold Bennett. Joan Collins gave me a makeover in the Royal Suite, while she regaled me with tales of Bette Davis smoking up a storm, Marlon Brando playing the bongos, and poor, handsome “Jimmy” Dean.

I witnessed Sarah Jessica Parker scuttle downstairs in her pyjamas at 3am to examine the hotel’s glories ­unmobbed, and was consulted as to whether its shorts ban might be lifted to accommodate fashion’s lederhosen trend. Certainly, Nicky Haslam’s splendid jodhpurs were hotly admired when we compared notes at 2014’s David Downton exhibition, a photo that found its way into Hello! And then there was the time I was permitted to walk a ferret through its doors on a lead when A-listers had rendered the beasts modish, far preferring it had been a panther. Today, its doormen proffer water to my whippet.

For it’s the small, private acts of kindness that linger in the memory. When my appendix exploded, a Claridge’s delivery man managed to infiltrate my hospital room, bearing food and unguents. When my mother died, the first flowers to arrive were from my friends at the hotel, as they were the first people I could bear to be among when I re-emerged. Forced to spend a week reporting on nocturnal London, I’d head to Claridge’s for 6am where a 40-strong night shift had been busy shining shoes, baking bread and polishing its marble floor. Breakfast doesn’t start until 7am; however, the night manager fed me marmite on toast while the party animals departed and the creatures of the day laid claim.

To be part of the Claridge’s family is to be part of the luckiest clan in the world, the hotel a five-star Cheers, where everybody knows your name, even if you are very far from being some fabulous grand fromage. In a 1969 edition of Holiday magazine, Auberon Waugh celebrated an institution “more like a club than a hotel,” in which the staff are omniscient, the Hungarian orchestra forever greets you with “your” song, and Bing Crosby plays golf in the corridors, deploying the ­hotel’s ashtrays as holes. Waugh continues: “A guest on his first visit may receive the impression that every servant in the hotel knows not only his name but also the names of his grandparents… and whether he likes his scotch with soda or water or on the rocks. Not until his third visit does he come to realise that this impression is quite true.”

He also recalls an occasion on which former manager Mr Van Thuyne was forced to shield a visiting grand dame with his jacket after she emerged into the lobby having remembered her jewels, but not her clothes. Current GM Paul Jackson has provided me with similar services. Small wonder that around 80 per cent of its business is repeat.

Leslie Caron tells me that she has been coming to the hotel for so many decades she “daren’t count”. She first visited during the Second World War when breakfast meant powdered egg: “But even then it was served on the most beautiful polished silver. The war meant things looked dowdy, but Claridge’s was still where everyone wanted to be.” Virus or no virus, some things never change.

Double rooms from £520. Afternoon tea from £61.25. 

Read the full review: Claridge's

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