Harlingford Hotel

The Davies family has run the Harlingford Hotel on Cartwright Gardens since 1960, the third generation now managing a business first opened as a hotel in 1911. The building itself dates to 1807, built as three separate townhouses by the architect James Burton on a Georgian crescent in Bloomsbury; past occupants have included the publisher Andrew Chatto, of Chatto & Windus. Thirty-nine bedrooms are spread across the joined houses, each with modern plumbing and a kettle, but there is no lift and no air conditioning, a condition of keeping the original staircases and facades intact. A communal lounge with an open fire sits at the front of the building, used for breakfast overflow as much as for evening reading. Guests share the private garden square opposite with a nearby tennis and netball court, a rare amenity for a Bloomsbury hotel of this size.