Jolly Hotel St Ermin's, 2 Caxton Street, SW1
The Jolly St Ermin’s is the hotel where George (Bob Hoskins) turns up in the flash new gear appropriate to his new role as minder to high-class call-girl Simone (Cathy Tyson) in Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa.
The sinuously art nouveau interior of the St Ermin’s (it's a listed building) became the ‘American’ restaurant where editor Horace Whigham (George Plimpton) comes on to Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) in Warren Beatty’s 1981 epic Reds. Its ballroom was transformed into the dining room of the much-changed Savoy, circa 1890, for Oliver Parker’s misguided opening up of Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest.
It’s on the roof of the hotel (standing in for Bayswater’s Inverness Court) that Sid Vicious (Gary Oldman) and Nancy Spungen (Chloe Webb) enjoy a spot of gunplay in Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy. A risky scene to shoot atop a building which overlooks – erm – New Scotland Yard, home of the Metropolitan Police. “All of a sudden, about twenty armed police appeared on the roof”, says the film’s location manager Paul Raphael. The anti-terrorist squad, it seems, takes a keen interest in weapons brandished on central London rooftops.
Mona Lisa (1986, dir: Neil Jordan)
Reds (1981, dir: Warren Beatty)
The Importance Of Being Earnest (2002, dir: Oliver Parker)
Sid And Nancy (1986, dir: Alex Cox)
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