The third in Hazlitt’s Hotels bijou portfolio of London heritage townhouse hotels, the discreet East End beauty that is Batty Langley’s serves immaculate Georgian interiors and cosy, VIP members’ club vibes.
There’s an extra little frisson of decadence to checking in at a beautiful hotel, we discovered on arriving at Batty Langley’s, when it’s just a short walk from your house. Strolling, in golden late-afternoon sunshine, through the streets of London’s Spitalfields district, streets so familiar we’d stopped really seeing them years ago, we noticed anew how heroically handsome are their historic and immaculately kept brick Georgian townhouses, once refuges for 17th-Century Huguenot silk weavers fleeing religious persecution in their native France, and how loaded with history the time-smoothed cobblestones beneath our feet.
Although the shiny steel-and-glass corporate towers of London’s financial district have, growing ever taller, crept ever nearer Spitalfields’ pocket of East Central London, step through the discreet front door of Batty Langley’s boutique hotel and the encroachments of modernity melt away. The simple, subtly fragranced lobby and cosy communal rooms off it, furnished as they are with painstakingly sourced, museum-grade antiques, carefully cultivate a smart but low-key, private-home ambience that belies the hotel’s size – it has 29 generous rooms and suites, one of them adapted for guests with disabilities, and three with private terraces – and impeccable service standards, delivered with zero fuss.
A passion for local history and personality – delivered with a meticulous eye for detail, plus a mischievous, even slightly bawdy, sense of humour – are further trump cards. Each room is named for an 18th-century East London character, among them ‘Batty’ himself, the architect Bartholomew Langley, an advocate, like the hotel’s owners, for gracious Georgian design. We were chuffed to find ours, the William Godwin, was named for a notorious anarchist author, who married the trailblazing proto-feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and fathered Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein.
| Perfect for | Fly into | Right on time |
| The Insider | LHR / LGW / LCY | GMT |
| While you’re Out There |
| Long before immersive theatre trailblazers like Punchdrunk began wowing audiences worldwide, the queer Californian artist Dennis Severs turned his time-weathered Georgian townhouse into a richly atmospheric historical mise-en-scène for visitors to meander through. While Shoreditch hipsterism fizzes all around outside, Dennis Severs’ House evokes in sights, sounds and smells the lives of the refugee 18th-century Huguenot silk weavers who once lived there, as if they just went out for a walk. Magical. |
As is the case throughout the hotel, our room bristled with one-of-a-kind antiques, heavy damask fabrics, Farrow & Ball heritage paint colours and oil paintings (as well as quality tech, meticulously concealed behind mirrors and cabinetry). Attention to detail is consummate: our heavy mahogany wardrobe had been relined in a vintage fabric decorated with ye olde English pastoral scenes, while in our bathroom, mirrors that looked to have been salvaged from an ancient church revealed themselves, after a long shower, to have built-in anti-fog panels.
And while there’s no mistaking the hotel’s reverence for authentic, original interior design and craftmanship, it’s laced, too, with quirky, and quintessentially English wit – the flush handle on our loo, for example, repurposed a venerable antique brass door knocker shaped like a hand, while the Earl of Bolingbroke suite’s toilet is accessed by pressing the spine of a book in the room’s library. Meanwhile, the Kitty Fisher penthouse, named for a famed 18th-century courtesan, comes complete with an authentic, copper-canopied Victorian ‘bathing machine’ for a shower.
While the hotel has no restaurant (the neighbouring streets in any case throng with restaurants for every taste), there’s a small, 24/7 room-service menu of simple, well-executed dishes, and the ground-floor Tapestry Room has a self-serve honesty bar with a well-curated drinks selection and suggested cocktail recipes. Breakfast is taken seriously, and recommended to be taken in bed, although you can choose to be served in the cosy communal Library, Tapestry Room, or Parlour (we planned to take one of these options, but in the event found the allure of an extra hour in our four-poster, sniggering at dutiful desk drones we could see through nearby office-block windows, too much to resist). It’s ordered from a menu that includes Michelin-starred chef-preferred Secret Smokehouse smoked salmon and bagels from the legendary, salt-of-the-Earth Beigel Bake on nearby Brick Lane.
One of Hazlitt’s Hotels’ bijou portfolio of three London townhouse properties, Batty Langley’s shares with its sister establishments – Soho’s Hazlitt’s, and The Rookery in Clerkenwell – an intoxicating sense of cosy, cossetted privacy and privileged access to a vibrant neighbourhood that makes it no surprise the brand is a go-to for a certain kind of celebrity. And it feels no less true to describe this discreet Spitalfields gem as the late, great Anthony Bourdain did Hazlitt’s, when he said, “It’s like staying at a potty English uncle’s when he’s not at home”.
Photography courtesy of Hazlitt’s Hotels
