The History of St. Ermin’s Hotel

St. Ermin’s hotel is a grade II listed building on Caxton Street in London, just opposite St. James’ Park underground station. It is tantalisingly close to Westminster Abbey, The Houses of Parliament and Buckingham palace. This four star hotel central London is a Victorian built building, and is one of the early mansion blocks to be built in the city. The hotel was originally a horseshoe shaped mansion block, and was built to the designs of E T Hall – mansion blocks of this kind were first seen in Victoria Street of London, and remain popular in the areas to this day. Hall originally plumped for a red-brick exterior in the style of Queen Anne, all grouped around a courtyard.

Built originally in 1887, it was turned into a hotel between 1896 and 1899 – when it was built Hall designed the courtyard which could be used for both carriages and for the residents to use as a garden.

In the hotel the two entrances in the side wings exist in their original form to this day, by 1894, before the block turned into a hotel it appears to have been extended towards St. Ermin’s hill. In 1896 it was purchased with the intention of turning it into a hotel, which was common with many buildings of such grandeur – however the apartments were offered without a kitchen, so servants were used to provide such facilities for the residents – but the facilities were provided including smoking rooms and reading rooms, for the use of a hotel.

The new owners on development into a hotel, made the courtyard into a neo-Baroque space, with veranda’s and a double staircase leading to a balcony at gallery level – there was also a double height ballroom put in place and a restaurant which is now The Cloisters, in which the
cove in contains is decorated in rococo plasterwork; all created by a theatre architect J P Briggs, who provided a sequence of public rooms, in great decoration and rich plasterwork. Since the hotel had its ownership changed in 2010, they have begun to restore the hotel to how Briggs designed it.

St. Ermin’s hotel has somewhat of an exciting history and something that other Westminster hotels don’t have, as it has been regularly used by the governments secret services. During the 1930’s the hotel and various other buildings in the estate were used by what we know now as MI6 to meet up with agents, and became the home of the Special Operations Executive working under cover. Throughout World War Two it had varying ties with all manner of secret services and even having a listening post for MI8, on the roof of what is now the passport office in the area. The hotel has even been used by MI5, and the Naval Intelligence Division – and shortly before the second world war, the hotel was used for guerrilla warfare classes run partly by MI6 and partly by others working for ‘King and Country’, which also contained two of the Cambridge Five spy ring, using the hotel as a base to meet their Russian Handlers.