Boutique Hotels in London

Mayfair is the West End at its most quietly expensive: Georgian townhouses in plane-tree squares, the Bond Street auction houses, Berkeley Square, the embassies and gentlemen's clubs strung along Piccadilly. It repays walking — Mount Street's shopfronts, the Royal Academy, the arcades off Piccadilly — and it stays residential beneath the money.

Where to stay: Flemings Mayfair is a warren of thirteen Georgian townhouses on Half Moon Street, family-owned since 1851 and among the oldest hotels in London, where the building's long, room-by-room growth is the whole character. A few minutes away on Piccadilly, The Athenaeum faces Green Park behind its eight-storey living wall — a vertical garden of more than two hundred plant species — with rooms looking across the park to the palace beyond.

Belgravia is Mayfair's cream-stuccoed counterpart, laid out in the 1820s by Thomas Cubitt as the most ambitious residential scheme in London's history; the white terraces around Belgrave and Eaton squares still house embassies and old London families. Pimlico, on its southern edge, is quieter and more domestic — Regency garden squares, the antique shops of Pimlico Road, an easy walk to Tate Britain on the river.

Where to stay: The Goring sits on Beeston Place, a short walk from Buckingham Palace — family-owned since 1910, the last family-owned grand hotel in London and the only one in the world to hold its own Royal Warrant, with one of the largest private gardens of any hotel in the city. South in Pimlico, the Eccleston Square Hotel occupies an independent, adults-only pair of Georgian townhouses on its namesake square, with a key to the private garden and unusually clever in-room technology.

Chelsea has the longest literary inheritance of any London neighbourhood — Carlyle on Cheyne Row, Whistler and Rossetti by the river, Wilde on Tite Street until 1895. The King's Road runs its length from Sloane Square west, with Cadogan Gardens and Cheyne Walk facing the Thames and the Saatchi Gallery at the Duke of York's HQ.

Where to stay: The Chelsea Townhouse stands on Cadogan Gardens, three red-brick Victorian houses retaining their marble fireplaces and the residential feel of the street, with a rare guest key to the private garden square the hotel sits on.

Knightsbridge is Mayfair's southern cousin — stately, more international, organised around Harrods and the southern edge of Hyde Park. It is the address for serious shopping and for quick access to the park and the South Kensington museums.

Where to stay: The Capital sits on Basil Street, a few steps from Harrods, privately owned and credited as the first London hotel built from the start as a small, purpose-built luxury hotel when it opened in 1971 — a grand hotel in miniature, with interiors by Nina Campbell.

London is best walked in neighbourhood-sized pieces and stitched together by Underground; black cabs and contactless payment cover the rest. The central districts here are close enough to cross on foot in good weather — Mayfair to Belgravia in twenty minutes through Green Park — and all sit within a few minutes of a Tube station, with Heathrow forty-five minutes out by Elizabeth line and the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras a short ride north.