A town hall that outlived its borough
Bethnal Green got its town hall in 1910, a stone fronted building on Cambridge Heath Road put up by one of the poorest boroughs in London and built as though it were one of the richest. The main entrance is round the side on Patriot Square, which is also the hotel's address, and that small fact explains a good deal about how the place feels now. You arrive off a side square, not off the main road.
A second, larger wing was added in the late 1930s, in the flatter and cleaner manner of that decade. Then in 1965 Bethnal Green was folded into the new borough of Tower Hamlets, and a building designed for committees and rate collectors lost the job it was made for. It went on as offices for a while and then stood waiting for a use. The hotel that opened inside it in 2010 kept the building's manners rather than sanding them off, and that is the reason to stay.
What the conversion kept
The best things here are the ones a council paid for. A marble staircase built to be climbed slowly by aldermen. Long corridors with doors set at office intervals rather than hotel ones. Panelling in the rooms that used to matter, and the old council chamber itself, which survives as a room the hotel hires out for dinners and weddings rather than as somewhere anyone can wander in with a drink.
The 1930s wing brings its own furniture: terrazzo underfoot, curved corners, lettering in the style that was modern the year it went up. On the roof, the conversion added a new top storey wrapped in a patterned metal skin, which you notice from Cambridge Heath Road after dark and which holds some of the most contemporary rooms in the building. The two halves make no effort to match, and nobody who stays here wants them to.
Which rooms keep the municipal corridors
If the building is the point of the stay, ask for a room in the original Edwardian range. Those have the ceiling height and the tall windows of the offices they once were, and the walk to them runs along the corridors that give the hotel its character. Rooms in the later wing are calmer and squarer. The rooftop rooms are the least like a town hall of the lot, which suits some guests exactly and disappoints others.
A good share of the rooms are apartments rather than plain bedrooms, with a kitchen or at least somewhere to make a proper breakfast, and on a longer stay or an overnight that makes a real difference. The hotel will tell you which category sits in which part of the building when you book with it. This desk books nothing there, holds nothing there and has no arrangement of any kind with the hotel; what we know about the rooms comes from the guests who stay in them.
The quietest lobby in E2
The handsomest building in the postcode has the calmest front door, and there are three plain reasons for it. Patriot Square is a side square, so nobody walks through on the way to somewhere else. There is no rooftop bar or famous counter pulling a queue in off the street. And many of the guests are on longer stays in the apartments, which gives the place the pace of a residence rather than a party.
For a room call that makes the arrival about as simple as it gets in east London. She comes in, crosses a lobby that is usually close to empty, and goes up with the same unhurried walk as anyone coming back from dinner. The desk needs one message: the hotel, the room number, the name the room is held under, the hour and the length. Nell writes back with the minute she expects to be at your door.
Around Patriot Square after dark
Bethnal Green station is a few minutes south on foot, on the Central line, one stop from Liverpool Street. Cambridge Heath on the Overground is a short walk north, and beyond it the Regent's Canal passes under the road. Between the hotel and the Central line stand the Young V and A in its gardens and the Georgian terrace of Paradise Row facing Bethnal Green Gardens. York Hall, the old baths and boxing hall on Old Ford Road, is a short walk east.
On foot the hotel sits in the middle of things rather than on the edge of them. London Fields is fifteen minutes or so north through the terraces, with Hackney beyond it, and the Sunday flower market is a similar walk west, which is why so many guests here plan a morning around it. Our note on Columbia Road before nine explains how to see it before the crowd does.
Names who suit the building
Vanessa works the Cambridge Heath side of E2 and is the obvious first call: sandy hair, a straight back and a good eye for which table in a room is the right one. From the blondes shortlist, Nora is honey blonde, quick on her feet and very hard to rattle, and London Fields is no distance at all. Cindy is quiet on arrival and very funny an hour later, which is the right temperament for a building this calm.
Vanessa also appears on the statuesque shortlist at 173 cm, which suits the scale of that staircase. Everyone else on the board comes to Patriot Square on the same terms and at the same figures, and Nell will say honestly who can be there soonest on a given night.
Which length fits a night here
An hour at £250 is right for a late return, when dinner is already done and the point is the company. Three hours at £700 covers a table somewhere nearby and the walk back across the square. The building rewards staying in, though, and the ten hour overnight at £1,800 is the length that makes the most of an apartment with a kitchen: a late start, a proper sleep, and breakfast made rather than ordered.
Her journey is inside every figure on the rates ladder, and E2 is one of the quicker runs on this site once the evening traffic has thinned. The fee is handed to her in person once she has arrived, and what it pays for is her time and her company for the hours agreed, and nothing further.
Filed under: most of the names in this note also sit on the late twenties list in the shortlists.