Charing Cross Hotel

The Charing Cross Hotel is a former railway terminus hotel built for the Charing Cross Railway, an offshoot of the South Eastern Railway, between 1863 and 1864 to the designs of E.M. Barry. Construction was carried out by the Lucas brothers. The building suffered bomb damage in 1941, and the two upper floors were reconstructed around 1953 by F.J. Wills and Son. The hotel underwent extensive refurbishment in the late 20th century. A bridge over Villiers Street connects the hotel to an extension built between 1877 and 1881 to the designs of John Fish; this extension is excluded from the listing.

Materials

The hotel is constructed of yellow stock brick with dressings and facings of artificial stone and extensive terracotta, manufactured by Blanchards. The terracotta is used principally in balustrades, cornice brackets and pilaster capitals.

Plan

The building is L-shaped in plan, with the principal range running south-west to north-east parallel with The Strand, and a wing extending part way southwards down Villiers Street. The hotel reception is located at ground floor level in the pavilion at the east end of the principal range. To the west of the entrance are arched openings, mostly now (as of 2019) infilled with glazed retail units, though some remain open to provide access to the station concourse at the rear.

Internally, the main access to the hotel floors is via a grand staircase in the wing, with back stairs providing service access. The first floor contains former reception rooms including the ballroom, dining room and conference rooms. Bedrooms occupy the storeys above, accessed by axial corridors on each floor.

Exterior

The hotel is supported on a substructure of original brick arches, double-height under the front of the hotel and reportedly up to three levels deep in places. The building has five storeys, with arched openings at ground floor level into the main station, and two attic storeys above.

The principal entrance faces The Strand and is a richly detailed composition in the Second Empire and mixed Renaissance style. The palatial front features a profusion of aedicules across the elevation, recalling the original French pavilion roofs and their attic windows. Three window-wide pavilions flank the central range of twelve windows. The ground floor is arcaded across the main range beneath an altered, balustraded canopy with pierced floral panels. The arcade openings have smooth, rendered arches, mostly infilled with modern glazed shop fronts, though some provide access to the station concourse beyond. Light brown and black scagliola panels are visible in some access routes, but whether these are original is unclear.

The hotel entrance is in the east pavilion: a 20th-century glazed structure flanked by granite columns with ornate capitals and a Classical entablature with panels featuring the Charing Cross symbol and the word HOTEL. The flanking brickwork here, and along the Villiers Street elevation, has bands of nail-head decoration. The west end pavilion, formerly the cab exit, retains its open arched entrance to the station with a porch comprising a Classical pediment supported by scrolled brackets on granite columns with ornate capitals. The entablature and pediment include carved representations of the Charing Cross symbol.

The pavilions have glazed, timber, barrel-vaulted 'winter garden' loggias over both entrances. The upper floors have tripartite pilastered or columned loggia screens in front of deeply set windows, channelled quoin piers and enriched entablatures. The principal elevation has a pierced, enriched balustrade to the first floor balcony with vases capping dies, entablatures with pseudo-parapets to the floors above with ornamental stone balconettes and pierced work or cast iron balustrades. Heavy storey cornices and courses of nail-head detailing run across the principal elevation. The window openings are richly detailed in the form of aedicules on all floors, with pilasters, capitals and heavily moulded entablatures. Windows are single arched on the first floor, coupled lights on the second and fourth floors (the latter semi-circular arched), and replacement square-paned with rectangular top-lights on the third floor. The top attic storeys are plain brick and recessed, with multi-paned sash windows.

The Villiers Street (east) elevation has an additional understorey due to the steeply falling ground southwards. It is also a balanced design with three-bay ends, a single-bay projection and a twelve-bay centre. There is extensive artificial stone decoration with aprons on brackets, heavy friezes and cornices, and window surrounds at all levels, with engaged Corinthian columns on two floors at either end. The centrepiece at first floor level has a full-width glazed balcony projecting on brackets. The side pavilions are framed by rusticated pilasters. A bridge with a nine-bay glazed arcade leads over Villiers Street to the annexe of 1877-1881, which accommodates 90 additional rooms (this extension is not included in the listing). The south end of the Villiers Street wing is treated similarly but is largely obscured by the station rebuilding of 1988-1992. It is five bays wide and framed by massive chimneys which rise above the two 1951 storeys.

The much shorter Craven Street (west) wing is largely hidden and much less elaborately decorated, but has four storeys of pilastered windows and two storeys of plain 1953 design above a heavy cornice. A weatherboarded extension at the level of the station concourse is a 20th-century addition to provide extra accommodation for retail units.

The rear elevation (south), which forms the backdrop to the station concourse, originally had three storeys of windows and a blind storey with a central clock visible within the arched roof of the 1864 Hawkshaw roof, but the present much lower roof fits closely over the two windowed storeys. The ground floor has a large arch to the west, once the cab-road exit, flanked to the east by a late 20th-century entrance to the underground, and twelve smaller arches, all faced in render, which contain modern retail businesses in glazed units. The five central arches are framed by brick pilasters and the upper floor has thirteen arched windows, the central five fronted by a balcony with a quatrefoil parapet topped by vases and supported on five large shaped brackets. The return on the east wing has a pedimented door, once an entrance into the hotel and buffet room, with three bulls-eye openings above and stepped arched windows lighting a staircase above, one of which is a large, blocked, arched opening.

Interior

The ground floor of the hotel building is heavily altered in two principal areas: the former railway facilities and spaces now occupied by retail units and openings leading to the station concourse, and the reception area of the hotel at the east end of the principal range. Both were extensively remodelled in the 20th century and are of lesser interest.

Within the functioning space of the hotel, however, axial corridors on all floors are richly detailed. Some have arched coffered ceilings supported on pilasters and heavy cornices, others have a series of vaulted ceilings lit by Diocletian windows. The main, sweeping grand staircase is located in the wing, lit by arched windows at the half-landings. The panelled open well has decorative plasterwork and Corinthian columns at each landing. The stairs have stone treads with a wooden banister atop decorative pierced iron panels.

On the first floor of the wing is the ballroom (named as such in 2019), the former coffee room. This is a richly decorated room square in plan with broad recesses on each side and splayed angles across the corners, with a plainer, shallow later extension to the south side. The room has full-height panelling with heavy and deep entablatures, treated with a Corinthian order expressed in brown and light purple scagliola-covered columns and pilasters. Large winged female half figures in plaster adorn the consoles which buttress the arches to the recesses. Saint (1986) speculates that the figures could be by Raffaele Monti. Above the cornices, rich plasterwork arches and panels support the gently-dished ceiling with corner discs and small-scale details and symbols including that of the Charing Cross and South Eastern railway companies.

The current (2019) dining room and bar area, formerly the lounge, faces The Strand on the first floor. This room has an elaborate plaster, coffered ceiling, decorative plaster wall panels and a large marble fireplace. Other former 'public' rooms now serve as conference facilities; they have panelled walls but are relatively plain. The hotel bedrooms have been modernised with ensuite facilities.

The service areas to the hotel were not inspected in 2019.