The Gore London

The Gore has stood at 189 and 190 Queen's Gate since 1892, two Victorian townhouses joined into one hotel a short walk from the Royal Albert Hall. Fifty individually decorated rooms sit above a run of ground-floor spaces that stay determinedly of their period: a mahogany-shelved Library behind three sash windows, oil portraits stacked up the stairwell, and a panelled Tapestry Room hung with French verdure tapestries between two stone fireplaces.

Bar 190 carries the better story of the two. Photographs from the Rolling Stones' 1968 launch party for Beggars Banquet, held downstairs in the Tapestry Room, still line its timber walls, and the bar has stayed a fixture for the after-party crowd since. Upstairs, the restaurant, 190 Queen's Gate, serves British cooking under Head Chef Frederick Forster, National Chef of the Year and one of only two British chefs to also hold the Roux Scholarship and Master of Culinary Arts, alongside a wine list built almost entirely around English producers.

For private hire, the ground floor offers a genuine spread: the Library and the Mulberry Room for something more contained, the Tapestry Room, reached down a sweeping staircase from the bar, for dinners and receptions up to around 120, and all three combined for a full buyout of the floor. A smaller option sits upstairs in the oak-beamed Tudor Suite, a former Tudor-revival banqueting hall with its minstrels' gallery still intact. Past bookings have run from London Fashion Week presentations to City AGMs; the rooms take both without much adjustment.