No Rotten Tomatoes
So long ago. Back in 2011, we interviewed Harry Handelsman, the visionary replacing ossification with revivification at the majestic St Pancras Renaissance Hotel. Rewinding 14 years: a Polly Morgan taxidermy of a fox snuggled in a glass dome in the reception is a sign this is no ordinary office block. The Edison Building on Old Marylebone Road is named after the world’s most prolific inventor Thomas Edison. Its 1930s Art Deco exterior has been reinvented by architect David Adjaye who’s cloaked it in his trademark charcoal grey rendering. The client was Harry Handelsman of Manhattan Loft Corporation, the property developer who brought loft living to London before reinventing the Capital’s best Victorian railway hotel.
“This could have been a cool apartment building but I wanted to do something more exciting,” starts Harry. He’s clad in a charcoal grey suit, no tie, sitting in his charcoal grey top floor corner office. So far, so suave. Sliding doors open onto a huge decked terrace. “I called on my friend David. He designed an amazing transformation.” Adjaye Associates now occupy the ground floor of the Edison Building which has filled up with design companies. Munich born Harry worked as a financier in New York before arriving in London in 1984. He soon realised the potential for American style loft living in Britain. “Lofts are the concept behind giving buildings a new lease of life – they’re exciting and wonderful places,” Harry enthuses. He set up Manhattan Loft Corporation in 1992. To date around 1,000 apartments have been completed in the UK and Germany.
“We’ve no concerns about building something new though,” he adds. “Even our first scheme in London – Bankside Lofts next to what is now Tate Modern – was part newbuild. So much other new development seems too simplistic. It needs to be more energetic, more dramatic. We want to give our developments a bit of punch!” There’s nothing unenergetic or undramatic about St Pancras Renaissance Hotel. And it literally has punch – as we will discover later.
Two decades after he brought loft living to London, he’s also the best man to know what’s next in the residential development world of 2011. “High rise apartments. That’s the way things are going,” states Harry. “London is the most exciting city in the world. Development can make such a positive contribution. It’s not all about commerce. Each of our projects is different. An exciting thing is that we can make a positive difference to the cityscape. We are incredibly privileged. My team is second to none, combining creativity and commitment. I wish the planning regime would be simplified but any issues aren’t insurmountable. There’s enough appreciation of design quality. If it was all smooth sailing I wouldn’t have any grey hairs!”
Also in 2011, a busy year, we reviewed the hotel opening for Luxury Travel Magazine. Paris in two hours. Amsterdam in four hours. Lobby in 2.4 minutes. Those are the travel times from the First Class platform of the Eurostar train in London to St Pancras Renaissance Hotel … and so we continued, the excitement lifting off the screen. The motif of the hotel is the peacock which represents rejuvenation – and not just vanity (although with such architectural beauty that would be justifiable). When a peacock loses a feather it grows back perfectly. St Pancras is more like plume replacement. In 1865 Sir George Gilbert Scott won a competition held by Midland Railway to design a hotel for St Pancras Station. The client’s vision was for an understated building. The architect had other ideas.
A Gothic Revival extravaganza, his gargantuan fairytale confection of towers, turrets and terracotta tiles overwhelmed visitors when it opened in 1873, did once again in 2011, and still does in 2025. The verticality of a 72 metre high clocktower is balanced by the horizontality of a sweep of 150 metre wide frontage and the third of a kilometre depth including engineer William Barlow’s railway terminus behind the hotel. If the hotel is all about design and detailing, the terminus with its 800 cast iron columns and 2,000 wrought iron girders is a pure expression of structure and function – the sort of thundering modernity captured on canvas down the line in Joseph Turner’s 1844 Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway.
Sir George’s design incorporated all the latest fittings too: the first lift in a British hotel; the first revolving door in Britain; 40 centimetre thick fireproof walls. The latter was to contribute to its downfall. Time stands still for no architect or builder or hotelier. Not long after it opened, en suite bathrooms became all the rage for grand hotels. Thick internal walls did not adapt well to the insertion of bathrooms. The hotel eventually closed after just 62 years of operation and was downgraded to British Rail offices. It was even threatened with demolition in the 1960s before Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman successfully campaigned for its retention.
This Grade I Listed Building was finally saved by Harry Handelsman. A labour of love, albeit an expensive affair. His company Manhattan Loft Corporation spent £100 million converting the three upper floors to 67 apartments and a further £150 million rejuvenating the remainder of the building back to a hotel. It’s a physical embodiment of joie de vivre. The peacock’s feathers have truly regrown. Such rare and colourful plumage! The original entrance hall is now a bar with a polychromatic corniced ceiling, encaustic filed floors and walls dripping in gold leaf. Upstairs, the Renaissance inspired ceiling of the Ladies’ Smoking Room cost nearly £1 million to restore. It was the first place in Europe where females could acceptably smoke in public. This room now aptly leads onto a smoking terrace (or at least did until the boring ban was introduced).
The St Pancras Railway Terminus designed by engineer William Henry Barlow was – wait for it, another record breaker – the single largest railway structure of its time. The former taxi rank between the railway shed and original hotel (originally the pedestrian entrance to the railway platforms) has been converted into a cavernous glass roofed lobby lounge. The adjacent Booking Office is now a brasserie and bar serving traditional English delights such as quail’s eggs with anchovies. Victorian drinks like Garrick Club Punch and Moonlight White Tea are served on neverending bar. The grand staircase is the interior pièce de resistance. It’s a cathedral of colour with hand painted fleur de lys walls framed by Midland Stone arches and vaults. Exposed structural ironwork under the flights of stair fuses romance and technology. Harry’s workforce even aged the carpet on the dizzying array of fanciful flights of stairs. In 2011, we observed that the limestone pillared Gilbert Scott Restaurant looked positively restrained in comparison. Celebrity Chef Marcus Wareing’s team offered its own take on nostalgic classics such as Queen Anne’s Artichoke Tart and Mrs Beeton’s Snow Egg. The Gilbert Scott Restaurant was the setting of our first lunch with Dame Rosalind Savill, then Director of The Wallace Collection, London’s best museum.
Harry carved 38 bedrooms out of the old building and inserted 207 into a new sympathetically designed extension. Once more, the hotel caters for the demands of five star guests. A subterranean spa occupies the former steam kitchen. Our Luxury Travel Magazine 2011 article ended with Stairway to Seven (Facts). A double storey apartment is housed in the clocktower. English Heritage only allowed a 20 colour palette which includes Barlow Blue and Midland Red. The latter hue has a tomato tinge to it, an augury of our 2025 dinner. On Thursday nights in 2011, DJ Eloise rocked the Booking Office and on Friday nights it was the turn of DJ Zulu. The diamond shape is another motif of the hotel and 725 can be found in the Booking Office.
In 2018, Harry reminisced, “I always knew that St Pancras would be a challenge. The complexity of the structure and the Grade I Listing by English Heritage allowing only minimum intervention in the creation of a 21st century hotel was always going to be difficult. Many of my business compatriots thought that I was mad for undertaking such an ambitious project. At times I thought they were right. It was the sheer excitement and privilege of being given the opportunity and responsibility for this most fascinating building that kept me from desperation.”
That was then and this is now: 2025 to be precise. We’re staying in a modern bedroom of St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, dining in the restaurant and late night drinking in the hotel opposite. Bedroom furniture was graduated by wood when our hotel first opened. The best rooms on the first floor contained pieces made of oak or walnut. Second floor rooms had oak or teak furniture; third floor, mahogany; poor old fourth floor, ash. Decoration is more democratic this time round. Our fourth floor room is elegant simplicity: pattern free, clutter free, bad artwork free. The view is of the British Library, another vast red brick building (designed by Colin St John Wilson in the 1990s) although not quite so beloved as its neighbour. Our two paned rectangular window is set in a Gothic arch on the exterior: contemporary inside, traditional outside. Richard Griffiths’ architecture hits all the right notes. RHWL was the overseeing design practice of the development. Encaustic tiles on the floors of the long bedroom corridors draws the original hotel into the extension which fits neatly between the rear of the hotel and the side of the station.
The Gilbert Scott Restaurant closed in 2021. Two years later, The Midland Grand Dining Room by Patrick Powell (an Irish chef) opened before closing last year. And that brings us to The Midland Grand Dining Room by Victor Garvey (a mostly American chef). His CV includes working at two of the world’s most famous restaurants: El Bulli in Barcelona and Noma Copenhagen. Victor’s maternal grandmother was a personal chef for Charles de Gaulle so it makes sense the rebooted restaurant offers French haute cuisine even before you hop across the Channel on the Eurostar.
“There are only a few times in a chef’s life when they get handed a dining room,” says Victor, “and I’m extremely honoured and privileged and excited to be able to embark on this journey in something like this. The idea behind the menu here stems from respecting tradition but innovating and making it lighter and making it more streamlined and making it more concise and finding a way to tell the story of that incredibly deep French culinary heritage and respecting it but updating it. Old world, new ideas.” The sausage shaped Dining Room has a robust neoclassicism of the mid Victorian muscularity ilk befitting its original use as the Smoking Room. The Midland Grand isn’t the only French newcomer in town: a week later we will venture to the wildly popular Joséphine Bouchon in Fulham for cabillaud au beurre blanc à l’é chalote. Chef Claud Bossi of Bibendum South Kensington fame is once again putting the Lyon into lyonnaise in the English Capital.
Tick tock. It’s Pimm’s O’Clock on the Champagne Terrace (we’ve worked up a thirst strolling through the wetland habitat of Camley Street Park). One of London’s hidden gems, the Champagne Terrace is perched below the back of the hotel entrance tower and looked down on from the modern bedroom wing. Oysters are only to be consumed in months with an R and Pimm’s are only to be downed in months without an R. James Pimm’s recipe of liqueurs and herbs remains a warm weather winner 185 years after it was trademarked. In The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982), Peter York and Ann Barr order, “May: at the first sign of summer, Pimm’s.” But no accompanying oysters.
We’re all on for tenuously excused partying and it doesn’t come much better than the 5.05pm Punch Ritual in the Booking Office for guests to celebrate the 152nd anniversary of the original hotel opening. It’s a few days off the actual date (5 May) but we don’t fuss about detail. Historic fountain penned letters from the hotel’s archives are shared while the sommelier stirs his cauldron of elixir. We’ve barely ordered more drinks in the main hotel bar when we’re ushered to our window table in The Midland Grand Dining Room. Oh the anticipation! The à la carte caters for the carnivorous so our waitress suggests vegetarian alternatives. In between pretty amuse bouches and freshly baked bread we’re served a sliced tomato starter and a diced tomato main. We’re all on for retaining our Parisian waistlines. Minimalist plates in maximalist architecture. Pudding is l’Opéra which turns out to be a delightfully deconstructed coffee cake.
A quick dash across the road and we’re soon zooming up 11 storeys in the external lift of The Standard Hotel to Sweeties bar for Power Play cocktails (Belvedere Vodka, Dry Vermouth, Sweeties Savoury Brine). We skip the Bloody Marys: enough tomato for one day. Sure enough, against a darkening pink sky, St Pancras Renaissance Hotel looms in all its pinnacled silhouetted glory. But it’s not over till the fat lady sings or the slim girl walks: before stepping onto the First Class Eurostar to post paschal pastures anew in Paris we’re off to Lightroom (a Louboutin’s throw from the hotel and Central St Martin’s Art College) for a Vogue installation. A tomato red Mercedes roars up and the fashion artist Dame Mary Martin emerges to join us – from the hemline to the frontline of fashion. So now.
