The Londoner, by far the most ambitious, costly and notable hotel to debut in Central London in the last 25 years, opened today.

The development cost might be as high as 500 million pounds sterling ($688.9 million).

“It’s quite remarkable that no one had taken the name. It’s always been used for those from London, and of course in that song,” said Charles Oak, its hotel director, referring to the famous Hubert Gregg tune “Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner.”

Now, though, it's Oak and his team who are singing, albeit after many, many challenges.

Owned by Edwardian Hotels, the 350-room property on the southwest corner of Leicester Square is “the world’s largest excavation project. It is the sort of project one would expect to see in Dubai or in Southeast Asia," Oak said.

The hotel, wrapped in 15,000 glazed, blue tiles, was originally designed to soar 16 floors up into the sky, but an ordinance prohibiting building higher than the eyeline of the famous statue of Horatio Nelson in nearby Trafalgar Square meant development plans had to change.

“That rule, I am not sure when it changed, as there are building higher than his eyeline,” Oak said, speaking exclusively with Hotel News Now.

Instead, construction crews dug down. Oak said The Londoner now has eight of its 16 floors below ground level, two of which are double-height spaces. The subterranean facilities include a ballroom for banquets of up to 600 people, numerous meeting rooms, a gym with personal trainers and The Retreat spa with two treatment rooms and a pool. Some meeting rooms have glass window-walls that can retract completely to provide the feeling of more space.

“Digging down is twice as expensive as building up,” Oak said.

An array of restaurants and bars take inspiration from far and near, including a Japanese space, a French-Mediterranean restaurant, a whisky bar and three restaurants and bars in The Residence, open only to guests.

There also is a pub, Joshua’s, sitting opposite the former home of physicist Isaac Newton and features gin and craft beer. It has no hotel branding and is named for another famous nearby resident, 18th century artist Joshua Reynolds, and is priced to attract locals as well as hotel guests.

“We term the hotel ‘super-boutique,’ an ‘urban resort,’ for that is what it is,” Oak said, who added the design brief was not to be formal and instead have numerous light, airy spaces, wide corridors and stairways that create an easier sense of flow for guests.

Development came back with a 175-million pounds sterling debt facility from HSBC, the first for the United Kingdom hotel industry connected to the bank’s Green Revolving Credit Facility launched in July 2019, the year The Londoner was due to have opened.

“That is only given to those businesses that have fully adopted sustainable development. It is very credible, very important,” Oak said, adding that the hotel has the rating “excellent” from the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method.

“And it came about due to relationships. [Edwardian Hotels Chairman and CEO] Jasminder Singh was once on the bank’s board,” Oak added.

Development projects in the heart of world-class cities take time, but the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically extended The Londoner’s timeline and added numerous hurdles, Oak said.

Edwardian bought the hotel’s plot in 2007, with the design and idea for the hotel itself first conceived two years later. The excavation itself took two years to finish.

The site has housed a cinema, flats, a car park and a hotel in its time.

Oak, who came on board The Londoner in 2018, said by far the most difficult part was having to let all the staff go when the pandemic came.

“I did that twice. It was by the far the lowest point,” he said. “Especially as for some we did so a week before the [United Kingdom] government’s furlough scheme was announced.”

The hotel is fully staffed now.

“It is a luxury hotel. You have to have staff, even though it is a massive cash burn,” he said, “and we are again offering full hours and conditions.”

He added the hotel’s location and celebrity, even before it opened, has attracted the top hotel industry talent.

“Firstly, it is about our people. All [the hotel’s] beautiful stuff is meaningless without people,” Oak said.

Beautiful stuff is abundant, with pieces from artists such as as Tracey Emin, Carolina Mizrahi, Andrea Torres Balaguer and Frida Wannerberger. The Londoner has partnerships with famed London art galleries the National Gallery, Tate Modern, Royal Academy of Arts, Serpentine Gallery and Haywood Gallery, among others, which will loan art to the hotel. The Londoner's meeting rooms are named after these art galleries.

An art guide is available, as is a champagne bar in the lobby with live entertainment every day.

The buzz has extended to corporate and events business, Oak said, with “robust” bookings bucking the trend globally and certainly in London. The city has been hit hard by a lack of international travel and businesses having employees work from home since March 2020.

A trend The Londoner has shared with nearly all others is that booking lead times are short — very short.

“We had one booking made just a little more than two weeks out for 550 people,” Oak said.

“When I was at the May Fair [A Radisson Collection Hotel], we were never below 85% occupancy, and our numbers were always what we thought they would be, but that has changed for the moment,” he said, referring to another hotel he ran in the Edwardian Hotels’ portfolio.

“Pre-COVID, the standard luxury ratio [for guests] was 60% international, so we immediately lost 60% of our business, but it is only 2% of U.S. guests who are in the luxury category, who can afford 500 pounds [sterling] a night, but they are not all back yet. Urban-resort incentives have made up some of that,” Oak said.

The Londoner is being represented by independent marketing and distribution firm Preferred Hotels, not by Radisson, which Edwardian Hotels usually works with. The property is also part of Walpole, the membership organization representing and promoting the best of British luxury across numerous industries.