Hotel News Now’s parent company CoStar held its Christmas party Dec. 6 in the King’s Cross district of London.
There were pre-dinner drinks, a modern take on Christmas dinner and dancing.
It was held at a Marriott International-managed hotel, the St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel London, right next door to three major train stations serving the United Kingdom and Europe — St. Pancras, King’s Cross and Euston.
The celebrations were held in the hotel’s Hansom Hall, and one selling point — other than the chance to relax and cheer with friends and colleagues — was that the staircase adjacent to it was where pop sensation the Spice Girls shot the video for their smash hit “Wannabee.”
There was some teasing that a sizeable number of our colleagues had not been born by then.
Before the hotel’s current guise of life started in 2011, the property was the Midland Grand Hotel, and for a few years it was abandoned as a hotel and used as a movie set, including on movies such as “Batman Begins,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” with the exterior of the hotel doubling up as King’s Cross Station, where the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry train departed.
I read the three central characters of the Harry Potter movie ran up the staircase during a scene.
Not that I would get visual clues to those when I was at the party as I have not seen any of these blockbusters.
I do remember seeing and hearing the Spice Girls’ video and song, though, both of which were omnipresent in 1996 and 1997.
Hansom Hall’s architecture clearly has its origins in transportation, and the hotel itself was one of London’s great railway hotels, all of which, I seem to remember, were in bad states of disrepair when I first knew London.
The 245-room hotel today is very grand and imposing. It was designed by architect George Gilbert Scott and opened in 1876. He was a Gothic Revivalist in architectural preference, worked on Westminster Abbey and designed and built the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens.
The spires of the hotel certainly are of that architectural persuasion, and even all those years ago it contained gold leaf, expensive wallpaper coverings and spiral staircases, and it had state-of-the-art fixtures such as concrete floors and hydraulic elevators.
British Rail once owned it, and it wanted to knock the hotel down, but an architectural society rose up in protest and saved it so people could enjoy its wonders and CoStar could have a party.
The rail company bosses at the turn of the 19th Century really were the hoteliers of taste, discernment and progressiveness, but things change.
Goodness knows what “monstruous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend” it would have replaced the hotel with, to use the famous phrase Prince Charles, now King Charles of course, used in 1984 to describe the addition to the National Galley.
The hotel in 2023 definitely is a fine place to spend an evening, certainly in the George Restaurant, which has the longest bar in London at 21 meters (68.9 feet).
I sincerely wish all my readers a very happy holiday season wherever you are, and a fantastic New Year. I will see you in January.
The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Hotel News Now or CoStar Group and its affiliated companies. Bloggers published on this site are given the freedom to express views that may be controversial, but our goal is to provoke thought and constructive discussion within our reader community. Please feel free to contact an editor with any questions or concern.