Inside The London Hotel For The Super Rich | Inside Claridges | Up Close

Claridge's is a 5-star hotel at the corner of Brook Street and Davies Street in Mayfair, London. The hotel is owned and managed by the Maybourne Hotel Group.

 

History

Founding

Claridge's traces its origins to Mivart's Hotel, which was founded in 1812 in a conventional London terraced house and grew by expanding into neighbouring houses. In 1854, the founder (the father of biologist St. George Jackson Mivart) sold the hotel to William and Marianne Claridge, who owned a smaller hotel next door. They combined the two operations, and after trading for a time as "Mivart's late Claridge's", they settled on the current name.

 

The reputation of the hotel was confirmed in 1860, when Empress Eugenie made an extended visit and entertained Queen Victoria at the hotel. In its first edition of 1878, Baedeker's London listed Claridge's as "The first hotel in London".

 

Acquisitions

Richard D'Oyly Carte, the theatrical impresario and founder of the rival Savoy Hotel, purchased Claridge's in 1893, as part of The Savoy Group, and shortly afterwards demolished the old buildings and replaced them with the present ones. This was prompted by the need to install modern facilities such as lifts and en suite bathrooms. From 1894 to 1901, Édouard Nignon was the hotel chef.

 

19th and 20th centuries

The new Claridge's, built by George Trollope & Sons, opened in 1898.[3] It is a Grade II listed building. The hotel has 203 rooms and suites and around 400 staff.

 

After the First World War, Claridge's flourished due to demand from aristocrats who no longer maintained a London house, and under the leadership of Carte's son, Rupert D'Oyly Carte, an extension was built in the 1920s. During the Second World War, it was the base of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia's government in exile and home of Peter II of Yugoslavia.

 

In 1996, the foyer was restored by architect Thierry Despont.

 

In 1998, the group of hotels—along with the later-added Connaught—was sold for $867 million to two American private-equity funds, Blackstone and Colony Capital.

 

21st century renovation and relaunch

In 2005, the private-equity owners sold The Savoy Group, including Claridge's, to a group of Irish investors led by Derek Quinlan. The investors later sold the Savoy Hotel and Savoy Theatre and renamed the group Maybourne Hotel Group.The Maybourne Hotel Group includes two other five-star hotels in London, The Berkeley and The Connaught.

 

Between 2016 and 2021, the hotel was renovated and expanded as part of a "relaunch" by co-owner Paddy McKillen. The top two floors were replaced by a four-storey, 14-bedroom extension that included a penthouse with swimming pool, gym, private lake, and 1,800 sq ft (170 m2) grand salon. A 22 m-deep (72 ft) excavation was dug beneath the Art Deco 1920s extension to create a five-level basement. Construction work was largely done by hand to avoid disturbing guests, and the hotel continued in operation throughout the building work. The project was recorded in a BBC documentary series, The Mayfair Hotel Megabuild.

 

Notable guests

Actors, directors, and entertainers who have used Claridge's include Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, regular visitor Alfred Hitchcock, Brad Pitt, Joan Collins, Mick Jagger, U2 and Whitney Houston.[citation needed] In his memoir The Moon's a Balloon, David Niven wrote that for film producer Alexander Korda, "Home was the penthouse at Claridge's". The hotel lobby and several guestrooms appear in Stephen Poliakoff's 2001 BBC television drama Perfect Strangers. Claridge's has hosted visiting royalty and guests of the Royal Family. The late King Hassan of Morocco travelled with his own mattress, but at the hotel he used a Savoy Mattress. Impressed by the quality, he ordered 24 identical mattresses from the Savoy for his palace.

 

King Peter II of Yugoslavia and his wife, Queen Alexandra, spent much of the Second World War in exile at Claridge's, and suite 212 was supposedly ceded by the United Kingdom to Yugoslavia for a single day (17 July 1945) to allow their heir, Crown Prince Alexander, to be born on Yugoslav soil, although no documentary evidence now exists to support the story.

 

At the end of the Second World War, when unexpectedly defeated in the general election of 1945, Winston Churchill was temporarily without a London home and took a suite at Claridge's.

 

In December 1951, West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer secretly met World Jewish Congress president Nahum Goldmann at Claridge's to begin negotiations on German reparations to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.

 

Restaurants and other facilities

Claridge's has been described as London's most "food centric hotel".It offers afternoon tea in The Foyer and Reading Room. There are three public ground floor bars; Claridge’s Bar acts as the main bar, when not being used for afternoon tea; The Fumoir, a former cigar bar until the smoking ban prohibited indoor smoking in 2007; and the Painter's Room, opened in 2021. A cafe at the back of the hotel opened in 2023 called The ArtSpace Café which has an extensive gallery space beneath it.

 

Davies and Brook, with head chef Daniel Humm, closed in 2021 after Humm proposed a vegan-only menu  similar to that of Eleven Madison Park, his three-star Michelin restaurant in New York. The hotel received criticism for "not moving with the times". In 2023, the hotel opened Claridge's Restaurant  in the same space.

 

For 12 years, the fine dining main restaurant was run by Gordon Ramsay, with various head chefs including Steve Allen and Mark Sargeant. Gordon Ramsay at Claridge's lost its Michelin status in January 2010. The restaurant closed in 2013 after having "lost its way". Harden's guide rated the restaurant second in London for "most disappointing cooking" and fourth for "most overpriced restaurant" in 2010.

 

Claridge's later replaced Ramsay's restaurant with Fera, meaning 'Wild' in Latin, run by chef Simon Rogan. Fera was awarded a Michelin star in 2015 and Rogan left the restaurant in May 2017, leaving the restaurant's head chef Matt Starling in charge. Following Rogan's departure, the restaurant closed in December 2018.

 

For 10 days in 2012, the hotel hosted the restaurant Noma, while the restaurant in Copenhagen was closed for refurbishment. Owner René Redzepi and his head chef and staff from Noma served a £195-per-head nine-course New Nordic Cuisine menu that included scones and clotted cream, Lancashire hotpot with British ingredients, and live ants foraged in Denmark and flown to London.

 

In 2021, Claridge's opened an art deco bar in the Painter's Room featuring art work by Annie Morris.

 

Artistic installations

Claridge's built an art gallery and started an artist in residence programme; illustrator David Downton became the first artist in residence in 2011.Downton created the Talking Heads Gallery, which displayed sketches from guests including Kristin Scott Thomas, Sarah Jessica Parker and Thandiwe Newton.

 

The hotel hired artist Damien Hirst, and over 200 of his prints were installed in guest rooms. During the Frieze Art Fair in 2019, Hirst's sculptures were displayed in the lobby. In 2021, a skylight designed by Hirst featuring butterflies was installed, and Claridge's Art Space opened and included an exhibition by Hirst and others. Since 2023, Claridge's rooftop penthouse suite has been housing 75 works by Hirst.

 

The Christmas tree in the lobby is designed annually by artists, designers or fashion houses; these have included Diane von Furstenberg, Karl Lagerfeld, Christian Louboutin, Jimmy Choo, Burberry and Dolce & Gabbana.In 2015, Christopher Bailey decorated the tree with around 100 umbrellas, and 77,000 lights triggered by passersby.

Lucy Foley introduces Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel / Release Date: The book is scheduled for publication on September 22, 2026.

 

The phrase "Miss Marple at Claridge's" refers to a high-profile literary launch event hosted by HarperCollins at the iconic London hotel to celebrate the character's first official full-length novel return in 50 years.

The luxury venue was chosen to mark the upcoming release of Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel, a continuation mystery penned by bestselling author Lucy Foley and fully authorized by the Agatha Christie Estate.

Key Facts About the Revival

• The Author: Crime novelist Lucy Foley, known for contemporary locked-room mysteries, was chosen to bring Miss Marple back.
• The Novel: The upcoming book is titled Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel.
• The Setting: Moving away from St. Mary Mead, this mystery takes place in a snowy, luxurious hotel high in the Swiss Alps.
• Release Date: The book is scheduled for publication on September 22, 2026.
• Historical Significance: The book marks exactly 50 years since Agatha Christie's final Miss Marple novel, Sleeping Murder, was published in 1976.

Connection to Claridge's Hotel

While the exclusive Claridge's media event hosted guests like Christie's great-grandson James Prichard, Claridge's also holds historical ties to Agatha Christie's original universe. Miss Marple occasionally dines there in the original series, and the hotel serves as a backdrop for various upper-class characters throughout other classic Christie novels like One, Two, Buckle My Shoe and Cat Among the Pigeons

 

Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel

Lucy Foley, Agatha Christie (Creator)

Not yet published

 Expected 22 Sep 26

4.09

140 ratings99 reviews

 

High in the Swiss Alps, accessible only by a single, winding railway, stands the luxurious Grand Alpine Hotel. With glorious mountain views and exclusive access to powdery slopes, it draws guests from far and wide.

The notorious actress.
The high-flying politician.
The society wife.
The reckless friend.
The shrewd doctor.

But not everyone is here for a winter holiday.

Beneath the champagne and furs, dark histories simmer; old grudges emerge like cracks in the ice.

And someone is watching from the shadows. A polite, unassuming woman with an extraordinary mind: Miss Marple.

When a body is found and a blizzard cuts off all escape, only Miss Marple can connect the clues before the killer strikes again. Because it isn’t a question of who has a motive, but who’s next…

How Burberry Lost Its Luxury Status

Her Life Was an Old-Money Dream. It Collapsed in a Moment.

 

Nonfiction

Her Life Was an Old-Money Dream. It Collapsed in a Moment.

 

Born into exceptional privilege, Belle Burden had it all: love, money, family. Then her marriage fell apart.

 

By Alex Kuczynski

Alex Kuczynski is the author of “Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/books/review/belle-burden-strangers-memoir-of-marriage.html

Published Jan. 11, 2026

Updated May 29, 2026

 

STRANGERS: A Memoir of Marriage, by Belle Burden

 

The story of “Strangers” is a cliché of well-to-do Manhattan: Husband makes gobs of money. Wife, despite her august educational pedigree, stays at home to raise the kids, relinquishing career and otherwise idling in the make-work realm of school boards and volunteering. Husband has an affair and walks out. Marriage and all the timeworn rituals of intact family life are functionally over.

 

Except. The author is Belle Burden, a Harvard-educated lawyer with deep roots in American society — and her 20-year marriage, which seemed idyllic, ended seemingly out of the blue and against the panicky backdrop of the first weeks of the pandemic.

 

Burden’s memoir, which springs from a widely read essay published in The New York Times, describes a fantasy land of wealth and success — perhaps most enviably, her stable and happy marriage. The world Burden inhabits with her husband, James (she has changed his name here, but apparently not much else), is one of Edenic privilege. They live in multimillion-dollar homes in New York and on Martha’s Vineyard, belong to private clubs, have keys to private beaches, kids in private schools.

 

The end of the marriage, when it comes, is quick and decisive: James asks for a divorce at dawn the day after she learns of an affair. One day, he is a man who loves his wife and has just bought a terrifically expensive mattress for their bed. The next he tells her, his eyes narrowing into a shape she had never seen before: “I thought I was happy but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life but I don’t.” He tells her she can have everything, including custody of the children. “I don’t want it,” he says. “I don’t want any of it.”

 

“I knew nothing,” she writes, “only the shock of his disappearance.” And that is total: James buys a two-bedroom apartment in the city — surprisingly small for a man with three kids. “I still thought he would want to make a home for his children, that he wouldn’t follow through on his decision to have no custody and no overnights,” she writes. But no. He converts the second bedroom into an office, assuring that his ghosting feels complete.

 

While “Strangers” is not necessarily about privilege and status, those are, inescapably, Burden’s worlds. Her father, Carter Burden Sr., was a handsome scion of the Vanderbilt dynasty. Burden’s mother is Amanda Burden, herself the offspring of Mortimers and Paleys, notable American families; her grandmother was Babe Paley, a Truman Capote swan and one of midcentury America’s most celebrated society figures.

 

It is striking in many ways how 1950s-housewife Burden’s story can seem. She and James, by her account, never discussed who would work and who would take care of the kids; it was an unspoken bargain. Once they have children, she hands over every aspect of their finances to him.

 

It all seems strangely dependent, especially for a woman so recently employed at a white-shoe Manhattan law firm. But that’s how life works inside the world of trust funds and family wealth offices, one gathers; there’s a degree of expectation that the world will automatically take care of you.

 

Burden’s prose reflects both her legal training and her exacting care with language, as if she is acutely aware of how closely her social universe will weigh each sentence. At moments, though, I laughed out loud, as when her soon-to-be ex, after telling two of their children about the divorce, asks her to make him a sandwich. Her hands shaking, she starts toasting bread and slicing avocado. “If I’m doing this, I’m going to do it well,” she tells herself. After all: “How could he leave a wife who made such good sandwiches?”

 

When her essay is first published, some friends — by now, I pray, mere acquaintances long in the rearview mirror — suggest that it’s about revenge. But “Strangers” is about something else: remaining seen after a marriage dissolves, and being present for children when the other parent functionally disappears.

 

There’s a real deftness and bravery to this refusal. It is as if Burden is offering her children a passport out of this stiff-upper-lip WASP universe and toward a place where people love one another openly, insist on intimacy and are unafraid of being deeply seen.

 

I know a woman, a successful writer, whose husband left her abruptly, and as he walked out the door he said with an eager, flashing little smile, “Someday you can write a whole book about me.” And she sat there and thought to herself: I wouldn’t waste a minute of my life honoring that man with my craft.

 

And so as I read “Strangers,” I felt occasionally disturbed: Would James feel celebrated by all her effort? But for Burden, the right decision was to not stay quiet. Their whole lives were too quiet. She has artfully loosed herself from the true stranger in their marriage, and we can merely wonder if he remains a stranger to himself.

Leah Greenblatt

Editor for the Book Review

 

Like a lot of Times readers, I was riveted by Belle Burden’s 2023 Modern Love column about the sudden dissolution of her marriage a week into the pandemic. So when “Strangers” came across my desk last year as an editor on The Book Review, I was intrigued but also skeptical; could her story sustain a whole memoir? Would a wider audience even relate to someone whose life was so rarified?

 

I picked it up, and didn’t stop until I turned the last page. But I didn’t anticipate what a phenomenon and a lightning rod it would become, or that the discourse around it would still be going so strong almost six months later.

 

A correction was made on Jan. 11, 2026: A headline with an earlier version of this review misidentified the author of the book. It is Belle Burden, not her mother, Amanda Burden.

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden

 

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage Paperback – 15 Jan. 2026

English edition  by Belle Burden (Author)

 

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2026 IN VOGUE, BBC, NEW YORK TIMES, W MAGAZINE, TOWN & COUNTRY

 

'A beautifully written eulogy for the loss of a relationship' Joyce Carol Oates

 

'Beautiful... devastating ... Strangers reads with all the momentum and colour of water-tight literary fiction' British Vogue

 

How do we go on when a loved one betrays us?

 

On a chilly day in March of 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, Belle Burden’s husband of twenty years announced, with no prior warning, that he was leaving her. His decision shocked Belle to her core: she believed he was a happy man, a committed partner, and a devoted father to their three children. She thought he was a man who had settled into the life he had always wanted: a successful career, summers spent at their beloved home on Martha’s Vineyard, lots of tennis. Overnight, he transformed from her steady companion into a stranger.

 

As she pieces her life together in the wake of a loss she had never imagined coming, she finds she is much stronger than she ever expected. Exploring the transformation of a shy, quiet girl, nicknamed ‘Belle the Good’ to a powerful, brave, determined woman who has learned to use her voice to expose the patriarchal structures that have forced women to be discreet and compliant for far too long, Strangers is a must-read memoir of self-discovery.

 

'Burden is an elegant writer … As Strangers and myriad tv shows attest, even the most intimate and long marriages can yield nasty surprises. In the end, how well do you really know the person who lies next to you in bed every night?' Economist

 

‘A compelling tale of marriage and deception… Strangers raises some serious questions about the nature of intimacy and what makes a “perfect” marriage … She weaves the narrative together deftly: I devoured Strangers in about two days, greedily absorbing every twist and painful turn … I loved it.’ Lucy Denyer, Telegraph

 

‘Examines how we view intimacy, how the people closest to us can change without us knowing, and how to move forward in the wake of devastation.’ W Magazine

 

‘Burden’s sharp, personal writing brings readers deep into her unthinkable circumstances and offers a promise to anyone suffering: you can make it to the other side.’ Town & Country

Mohamed Al-Fayed, the monster of Harrods

The Monster of Harrods: Al-Fayed and the secret, shameful history of a British institution Hardcover – September 23, 2025

by Alison Kervin (Author)

 

‘Sensational new book’ – MAIL ON SUNDAY

 

‘Bombshell book’ – THE SUN

 

‘Tell-all book’ – MAIL ON SUNDAY

 

'Explosive new book' – DAILY MAIL

 

AN UNFLINCHING EXPOSÉ OF MOHAMED AL-FAYED'S 25-YEAR REIGN OF TERROR AT HARRODS

 

DECADES OF ABUSE.

 

DOZENS OF VICTIMS.

 

NO CONSEQUENCES.

 

To the public, he was the eccentric owner of one of the world’s great department stores. But behind closed doors, Al-Fayed ruled with cruelty, humiliation and unchecked abuse.

 

Why were his crimes ignored?

Why did those in power look the other way?

 

This explosive investigation lays bare the power, corruption and complicity at the heart of an iconic British institution.

 

Drawing on firsthand interviews with former staff, allies, executives and police officers, The Monster of Harrods exposes chilling accounts of misconduct, many revealed here for the first time. Through court records, testimonies and unpublished material, the book uncovers:

 

The irreparable damage to victims’ lives

The NDAs, threats and systemic failures that kept them silent

The staggering indifference of those who knew but did nothing

 

This isn’t just about one man’s abuse of power – it’s about the culture that enabled him. The Monster of Harrods presents damning new evidence, and asks urgent questions of the people and institutions who stood by.

 

Ultimately, this is a book about courage – the courage of the survivors who have stepped forward to reclaim their narratives from a man who tried to reduce them to objects. Their testimony stands as both an indictment of the past and a warning for the future.

 

Their bravery demands nothing less than our complete attention.

 

'The extraordinary courage of these survivors, who, despite everything, were willing to relive their trauma in hope of finally being heard, should not be underestimated. Many have waited decades for acknowledgement, carrying their wounds in silence while their abuser was celebrated.'

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