The Savoy

Claude Monet stayed three times, in 1899, 1900 and 1901, painting Waterloo Bridge and Charing Cross Bridge from his window each time, from the sixth floor in 1899 and the fifth floor after that, and the river front he worked from was refaced in artificial stone a decade later. He worked in pastel on the first visit, on materials bought on Charing Cross Road while his canvases and paints came over from France, and more than twenty five of those survive.

Richard D'Oyly Carte built the place beside his own Savoy Theatre, out of the profits of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas and on the American model, and Thomas Collcutt faced the blocks in Doulton's Carrara ware under green pantile roofs. The extension of 1903 to 1904 moved the front door round to Savoy Court, where the entrance stands between coupled Doric columns in polished black and buff stone. Howard Robertson covered the forecourt in 1929 with a latticework awning of bolted steel beams filled with glass, frosted lanterns hanging inside it. Traffic turning in off the Strand keeps to the right.

Two schemes sit alongside each other upstairs. The Edwardian half runs to 162 of the 263 rooms and suites, grey and tangerine carried through as far as the Nespresso machines, and some of those look over the water to the railway bridge into Charing Cross. The Art Deco rooms take the Strand side, geometric and highly polished, worked around the hotel's own green. A butler comes with the River View suites.

The American Bar first appears in the record in 1903, though a barman named Frank Wells was pouring American drinks at the hotel before that, and framed black and white photographs of past visitors hang on its cream walls. Ada Coleman came over from Claridge's the same year and made the Hanky-Panky for the actor Charles Hawtrey, still poured to her recipe; Harry Craddock, who replaced her when the bar reopened in 1926, gathered some 750 drinks into The Savoy Cocktail Book. Joe Gilmore mixed the Moonwalk in 1969 and sent it to the Apollo 11 crew. By his own account they drank it after leaving quarantine on 10 August, seventeen days after splashdown, and Armstrong wrote back to thank him.