The Langham, London

The design competition went in October 1862 to John Giles, a novice who was then pushed into partnership with James Murray for the interiors, and the two ended in court over who owned the drawings. The Earl of Shrewsbury laid the first stone the following July, and the Lucas Brothers had the building up by 1865 for £300,000. Two thousand people came to the opening that June, the Prince of Wales among them, to more than two hundred bedrooms served by thirty-six baths and around a hundred water closets, and a hydraulic lift that carried six people at a time. The water came from an artesian well, and the ground-floor bar is called Artesian after it.

The BBC arrived across Portland Place in 1928, considered buying the hotel in 1934, and enlarged Broadcasting House instead. Bombs took out the north-east corner in 1940 and flooded the rest, and the hotel closed. The corporation moved into the empty rooms, made the old dining room its reference library and the Palm Court a conference hall, and bought the building outright in 1965. It did not take guests again until 1991.

Of the 380 rooms, the Sterling Suite is the outer limit, a penthouse running to 450 square metres with a private media lounge and space for twelve, while the Infinity Suite is built around a semi-circular sitting room and an infinity bath. Executive rooms and suites carry the Langham Club on the third floor, where the breakfast, the champagne and the evening canapés are included. Dogs up to 20 kilos are welcome, one to a room.

Next door on Langham Place, the Wigmore occupies a former banking hall built for Barclays, with classrooms above it for the Regent Street Polytechnic. Martin Brudnizki's studio left the listed panelling where it was and put the furniture in mohair, the menu is overseen by Michel Roux, and the house beer is a saison. Downstairs, the sixteen-metre pool was the vault.