Hotel Gotham
100 King Street, Manchester M2 4WU
+44 161 413 0000 • hotelgotham.co.uk
This opulent, luxury hotel in the city’s conservation area, close to the Town Hall, Art Gallery, and Central Library, is another impressive example of Manchester’s ability to successfully reclaim a redundant Art Deco building (designed by Edward Lutyens in 1928 as the headquarters of the Midland Bank) and rework it as a glamorous, dashingly sophisticated, ultra-cool place to stay, drink, dine, and entertain. The playful, slightly cheeky theme that runs in every clever detail through all seven floors, from lobby to corridors to bedrooms, bars, and restaurants, is 1920s Hollywood allure and money. The moody, members-only bar on the seventh floor is called Brass, a famous, northern slang term for money; the Honey restaurant, one floor down, with awe-inspiring views over the city, refers to the cockney rhyming slang for money and features displays of bowler hats and banker-style chairs—and Manchester’s emblem is also the honey bee, a symbol of the city’s hard-working past. In the bedrooms, laundry goes into moneybags; biscuits in glass jars are shaped as little pigs, a reminder of childhood piggy banks; and staff wear pinstriped suits in true bank manager style.
While enjoying views out across the rooftops to the Pennine Hills beyond, take tea in the Honey restaurant and nibble genteelly on top-notch sandwiches filled with poached salmon with lemon crème fraîche, cucumber and cream cheese, egg and truffle, and chicken with rosemary mayonnaise. Then come plain and cranberry scones with thick Dorset clotted cream and seasonal fruit jam, along with a really pretty selection of small pastries. The gorgeous table wares are wonderful—deco style in white and shimmering bronze—and the choice of teas, described in beautiful detail on the menu, is presented in little jars inside a crimson-lined box. So, while sipping a cup of Lapsang, Earl Grey, or cinnamon-flavoured Ceylon, sit back and enjoy the clever mix of references to Manchester’s hard- won wealth and the stylish dazzle of 1920s Hollywood and New York.
Like all these different locations, Hotel Gotham weaves together so many threads that run through the city’s dense history and vigorous present. Taking afternoon tea against this backdrop throws into new focus the layered and absorbing story of tea’s past and present in Britain, its place at the heart of the industrial revolution and in our lives today, and Manchester’s similar talent for so successfully merging the old with the new.
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