The Goring celebrates 100th birthday

The Queen Mother’s favourite and a piece of luxurious history for London, the Goring Hotel is a lovely mixture of English country-house and modern conveniences such as iPod players in every room, modern bathrooms and plugs everywhere for charging laptops. A touch of class.

The fourth generation Goring running the hotel is Jeremy, a colorful character and a hotelier with passion. This is the only hotel in London still owned by the family that built it and is now regarded as on of the best hotels in Britain and Europe. In a few days, Mr. Goring will be hosting his family hotel’s 100^th birthday with a party for 700. The Queen has graciously declined, however, it will still be a celebration of the great.

The hotel opened on March 2, 1910 and OR Goring charged seven shillings and sixpence for a room. He handed the hotel over to his son, OG, in 1926, and he established the hotel as the place for proper English food.

It was OG’s son George, however, who made the hotel one of London’s finest. He ran the hotel for 43 years, until 2005, when he turned it over to Jeremy. According to his son, OG was, “an instinctive hotelier, but most importantly, he inherited a three-star hotel and turned it into a five-star hotel.”

Jeremy has brought the hotel into the 21^st century. He is happy to say that Goring’s guests “have not completely given up fun in the name of political correctness. The boozy lunch is not dead – hooray! And thank God for that – please don’t breed all of the fun out of the system, Mr Brown; and some of our guests still come here on a Friday night and get a little hammered.”

“We spend millions on the building (he has spent around £10 million refurbishing the bedrooms, the public areas since taking over five years ago) and all the letters I get from clients are about the staff. How good they are. But that’s fine with me,” he says.

Close to Buckingham Palace, the 71-room hotel has for most of the century been a favourite of not only the Queen, but of other European royalty as well.