Although located a stone's throw from the bustle of Oxford Street, Marylebone has retained an understated charm that makes it unique, writes EMMA CULLINAN
HOTELS WILL tell you which famous people have stayed at their establishments, but only AFTER they’ve left. They don’t want to betray trust or have screaming fans outside their doors. So Garreth Walsh, general manager of the Kensington Hotel, can reel off the names of celebs who’ve stayed there. Recent visitors were Jedward. They surely left a mark, I say. Well, the room did look as if a whirlwind had gone through it, he said.
You can celeb hunt underneath the Kensington Hotel at the Brompton Club. It’s private. Royalty socialises here, we’re told. Walsh gets us in. It’s client-lite though: too early in the week and night. It’s dim – for famous faces to hide in. Expensive paintings on the wall stand as testament that the type of people who come here won’t nick them.
The Kensington is one of 11 Doyle Collection hotels in Ireland, the UK and the US, located in characterful central settings. Take its Marylebone Hotel, a corner building that completes a redbrick Edwardian block in the same hood as Harley Street. It looks as if something old and clay was knocked down to make way for an office block. That was then. It has since been reclad – and upgraded in splendour internally – to create a sleek hotel.
It is located in an extraordinary part of London. Oxford Street, in perpetual motion, shoots past just a few streets to the south. Yet all around the Marylebone Hotel is a civilised neighbourhood of quaint shops. Outside the hotel window is a pub on a small street where beer is calmly delivered by a man who passes the time of day with an older woman strolling by.
Opposite is a ribbon shop, called VV Rouleaux, which turns out to be world famous. When global hubs are as charming as this, it harks to times when “international” didn’t have to mean a network of industrial sheds, city-centre office blocks and employees being asked to perform like automatons. The words “haberdashery”, “ribbon”, “thread” and “passementerie” (trimmings) recall days when we stitched materials together.
And while you’re in the mood for le vieux France, head for the Wallace Collection museum, on Manchester Square. It is in an old townhouse where art, including French 18th-century paintings and old masters, hang from the walls of 25 opulent galleries (admission free, see wallace collection.org).
Nearby Marylebone High Street has set store by neat and sweet. The Oxfam bookshop is a serene scene where you can browse among tomes and sheets of music forever and the silence is only broken by regulars talking to staff. First-name terms in a busy capital.
Across the way is the Cancer Research UK shop which, being in a solidly heeled neighbourhood, has a smattering of designer labels (mainly upper end of high street stuff).
The same labels can be bought new in other shops on the street that cater for middle-class dames who like a decent cut, such as Whistles and Fenn Wright Manson which, when I visit, is having a pre-sale season sale. Everything is 25 per cent off. I find a dress that already had 75 per cent lopped of, and is now £36 (€41).
Back in Dublin the same dress is €89 in the “sale”. And, while I’m at it, the £5 Body Shop Body Butter at Stansted airport is selling for €10 on Grafton Street.
At the end of Marylebone High Street is the Cabbages and Frocks market every Saturday in the parish church, selling home-mades from salami to scarves and, er, cabbages to frocks (cabbagesandfrocks.co.uk).
For more cultivated frock shops (Hampstead Bazaar, Ghost, Marimekko and more) and cafes, a patisserie and restaurants in a quiet hub go to St Christopher’s Place between Marylebone and Oxford Street and, for good French food (this could really be old-time Paris, except for the London business clientele) eat at Bistrot de Luxe on Baker Street.
If all the sightseeing and shopping becomes too much, pop into Margaret Dabbs’ foot clinic, on New Cavendish Street. Your feet will be baby soft in no time (although it does involve emu oil: no, me neither, didn’t like to ask) even if the peds revert to their true age some time later.
Back at the Marylebone Hotel the new Third Space Health Club and Spa has a menu of ways to get in shape, from an 18-metre ozone-treated swimming pool, to a modern gym, and even an old-school gym complete with climbing ropes, beams and bars.
For the soft option head to the spa for a pampering. Hotel guests get all the exercising for free and locals can buy in too – making this lovely hotel another string to the bow of this bountiful, understated London locale.
- The Perfect Pamper package at the Marylebone Hotel costs from £240 (€275) for two (excluding VAT) and includes a deluxe bedroom, full English breakfast, £50 (€57) treatment voucher for spa@thethirdspace, use of the gym, sauna, steam room and pool. See thethirdspace.com and doylecollection.com.
- Emma Cullinan was a guest of the Doyle Collection and Aer Lingus (aerlingus.com). One-way fares start from €19.99 (to London Gatwick) and from €29.99 (to London Heathrow) including taxes and charges.