David Whitehouse

When the British Socialist Party held its annual conference in Bethnal Green Town Hall in 1920, it’s likely they didn’t talk much about the building one day becoming a luxury hotel. They had other things on their minds, like denouncing the party leaders as police spies. And they probably wouldn’t have been that into the whole hospitality idea anyway, what with it being a public space, and them being Marxists. I’m not saying the Town Hall Hotel, as it’s known today, would have changed their minds about all that. But I can’t help wonder, if they too had drunk Abacaxi Caipirinha in the wood-panelled council chamber, or eaten in a brilliant little Brazilian/Italian restaurant in what was possibly once the mayor’s office, if it might have given them pause for thought. Because for my money, The Town Hall Hotel offers a show of modest opulence seldom bettered in this city, one almost dizzyingly unique. Why Stay at Town Hall Hotel? A mad mixture of Edwardian architecture, art deco interiors, beguiling baroque corridors and memories of bygone bureaucracy, makes this is a hotel with that most meaningful of things - genuine, eccentric personality. Nothing here feels stretched for by stylists or led by committee. It’s like something Ken Adam might have designed to a Stanley Kubrick brief. A stay in the past of a different timeline, intoxicatingly charming, weird and special, before you even get to a fine roster of places to eat and drink, or your room. What are the rooms like at Town Hal