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Brown's Hotel

In 1965 Agatha Christie's At Bertram's Hotel was published. In this book Miss Marple stays in the traditional surroundings of a fine London hotel. As one of the characters in At Bertram's Hotel puts it: "There are a lot of people who come from abroad at rare intervals and who expect this country to be - well, I won't go back as far as Dickens, but they've read Cranford and Henry James, and they don't want to find this country just the same as their own! So they go back home and say: 'There's a wonderful place in London; Bertram's Hotel, it's called. It's just like stepping back a hundred years. It just is old England." Bertram's was based on Brown's Hotel in Albermarle Street, which was originally established in 1837 by Lord Byron's valet James Brown.

Brown's might be a symbol of old England, but it was actually created as Britain entered the modern world. Hotels are a reflection of the industrial society in which they grew up. Generally speaking the former coaching inns tended to offer a fairly uniform standard of accommodation. The industrial age depended on aspiration, and in many industries a system developed where designers created gradations of product. This happened early in the hotel business, where people could translate their social aspirations into better rooms. Brown's is London's earliest example of the kind of hotel this new society would create. The great industrialist Henry Ford, who bought Brown's in 1889, was not an instinctive fan of aspiration. His Model T was only available in black, and aimed to provide a reliable mass produced standard car which could be cheaply sold to millions of people. After a period of denial in which competitors gained ground, Ford had to accept that he needed to regularly change his product, and produce a ladder of quality for his customers to climb. Perhaps he purchased Brown's in an instinctive bid to distance himself from this kind of new, constantly changing world. In fact, of course, modern society actually created Brown's. Brown's identifies itself with traditional old world values, when it could also describe itself as a milestone of modernity. It is an interesting coincidence that Alexander Graham Bell came to stay at the hotel in 1876, and demonstrated his new telephone here. The first successful telephone call was made from Brown's, which is nice to think about as you ring out on your mobile, or plug into the internet.

If you don't want to actually stay at Brown's, a good way of enjoying the hotel is by booking traditional afternoon tea, which is served in the English Tearoom, 3pm - 6pm Monday to Friday and 1pm - 6pm at weekends. In the original ceremony, afternoon tea would always be served at 5pm, so for a particularly authentic experience go at about that time. Ring ahead to reserve a table.

 

Address: 33 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BP

Directions: Brown's Hotel has entrances in Albermarle Street and Dover Street, just off Piccadilly, London. Click here for an interactive map centred on Brown's Hotel.

Contact:

telephone: 020 7493 6020

fax: 020 7493 9381

for afternoon tea reservations call: 020 7518 4155

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