The Lanesborough Hotel, 1 Lanesborough Place, SW1
A frightfully exclusive luxury hotel. If you’re staying here, you certainly don’t need to know the nearest tube station. The hotel’s Royal Suite was used for the fraught over a game of pool meeting between Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack) in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
The huge complex, built in the 1830s by William Wilkins, the architect of the National Gallery, once housed St George's Hospital (established in 1733 in a country home constructed by Viscount Lanesborough). In 1980, the hospital had ‘outgrown’ the premises and moved south of the river to Tooting. Surely only a hardened cynic would suggest that such a prime piece of real estate was wasted housing the sick.
The vintage cars assemble at Hyde Park Corner for the race to Brighton at the opening of 1953 comedy classic, Genevieve, while villainous John Vernon walks here with his lawyer, Mel Ferrer, in the John Wayne action movie Brannigan.
Trivia: One of London’s lost locations once stood at Hyde Park Corner: Londonderry House was used as the house of Lady Bellaston (Joan Greenwood) in Tony Richardson’s 1963 film of Tom Jones.
Eyes Wide Shut (1999, dir: Stanley Kubrick)
Genevieve (1953, dir: Henry Cornelius)
Brannigan (1975, dir: Douglas Hickox)
Tom Jones (1963, dir: Tony Richardson)
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