The Savoy

One of London’s most glorious hotels is The Savoy in the Strand. Its guests have included just about every Bold Faced Name of the 20th and 21st Centuries. Actor Richard Harris lived at the hotel for the last several years of his life and, while being carted out on a stretcher before he died, joked, "It was the food”. I stayed there years ago and the numerous faucets in the bathtub looked as if they’d been plucked from a Victorian submarine; my opulent suite looked out at a magnificent bend in the River Thames. The location itself is storied. In 1505, Henry VII planned a great hospital for "pouer, nedie people", leaving money and instructions for it in his will. It lasted for two centuries, but suffered from poor management and a 16th Century historian noted the hospital was being misused by "loiterers, vagabonds and strumpets". The great poet William Blake lived on the site when it was converted to flats, but it sat largely unused and unloved until 1880 when everything changed.