The 1909 hotel whose Art Deco foyer is now in the V&A.
Thousands of people walk past the Strand Palace Hotel every day on their way between Trafalgar Square and Covent Garden. It looks like a busy, modern West End hotel — and it is. But it is also one of the great survivors of Edwardian London, with a past so glamorous that part of its old foyer now belongs to a national museum.
This is the story of how a hotel built for ordinary travellers became an Art Deco legend — and why a piece of it ended up in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The hotel stands on the site of Exeter Hall, a famous Victorian meeting hall demolished in 1907. To fund the new hotel, the Strand Hotel Ltd was set up in October 1907 with some 4,000 shareholders — a company created by the Salmon and Gluckstein families, the people behind J. Lyons, Britain’s best-known tea-room chain.
The Strand Palace welcomed its first guests in 1909, at 372 Strand. Its idea was simple and new: comfortable rooms at a price ordinary travellers could afford. A single room with breakfast cost five shillings and sixpence — about 27½p in today’s money. The new building even kept Exeter Hall’s imposing old entrance arch, and guests still walk in through it today.
In the 1920s the hotel grew, taking over the neighbouring Haxell’s Family Hotel. When it reopened in 1928 after a major redevelopment it had 980 bedrooms and a Winter Garden restaurant seating 500 guests, served by more than 100 staff. The main staircase built during that merger still survives.
Then came its most famous moment. Lyons gave its chief architect, Oliver Percy Bernard — a former set designer for theatre and opera in Britain and America — the job of redesigning the hotel in the new Art Deco style. His foyer of illuminated glass, light and polished metal made the Strand Palace one of the most celebrated hotel interiors in London, admired alongside the Savoy, Claridge’s and the Dorchester.
Fashions change. In 1969 Bernard’s Art Deco foyer was taken out of the hotel. Instead of being thrown away, it was rescued by the Victoria and Albert Museum and stored in its Battersea depot — where it stayed, largely forgotten, for decades.
In 2003 the V&A reconstructed it for its major exhibition Art Deco 1910–1939, and visitors from around the world saw the entrance that had once welcomed hotel guests on the Strand. The museum’s archives also hold the hotel’s 1920s revolving door — and a hotel room key recovered from a First World War trench in Normandy.
In 1976 Forte bought the lease from the Lyons hotel group. To celebrate its 100th birthday in 2009, the hotel gave away 100 rooms for 100p each. A refurbishment of all its guest rooms, public spaces and the façade was completed in 2020, bringing back Art Deco touches in a nod to Bernard — 1930s-style shutters, low Deco armchairs and a lobby that still glitters.
Its location is as good as it was in 1909: Covent Garden, the theatres of the West End, Trafalgar Square, the river and the Savoy are all a few minutes’ walk away.
Heathrow is about 50–75 minutes by car, Gatwick about 60–80 minutes, London City about 30–40 minutes. The train is fine if you travel light — but with luggage, children, a late flight or an arrival at Gatwick or London City, most guests prefer a private transfer straight to the door.
See your fixed price at the top of this page, or open the Heathrow to Strand Palace Hotel and Gatwick to Strand Palace Hotel pages.
More than a century after its first guests arrived, the Strand Palace is still doing what it was built for — welcoming travellers to the heart of London. Its most beautiful room may be in a museum now, but the story walks in through the same old archway every day.
Sources: Wikipedia · V&A Conservation Journal · Strand Palace — history
One fixed price for the car to Strand Palace Hotel, driver waiting inside arrivals with your name, flight tracked. Heathrow is about 50–75 minutes by car, Gatwick about 60–80 minutes, London City about 30–40 minutes.
Get my fixed price ↑Facts checked against the sources listed above, November 2026.
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