This is the only hotel in London where almost every Indian, from Prime Ministers to superstars like Amitabh Bachchan, has stayed in the last four decades. It is the most successful hotel venture ever undertaken by an Indian company in a western country. And yet most of us are unaware of the story of London’s St. James’s Court Hotel and its many trials and triumphs.
My earliest memories of the hotel are not pleasant ones. In 1982, I was returning to India from New York by Air India. In those days, Air India operated one flight daily from New York to Mumbai with a stopover in London. You had the option to break your trip into London and receive one or two free hotel nights in London, with certain categories of fares.
This was the option I chose and Air India said I could stay at the new Taj hotel called St. James. I stayed at the Taj-run Baileys Hotel in London a year ago and found it quite acceptable. I imagined that St. James’s, which had a better location than the Bailey, would be a similar establishment.
I was very wrong. The hotel was a complete dump; The kind of place that made Fawlty Towers the epitome of luxury. It looked like a two star property. The rooms were cheaply decorated and rarely serviced. The people present at the reception made it their mission to misbehave with the guests. There were dirty, dark, extremely long corridors on each floor and the staff were rude.
I had booked a taxi to Heathrow for an early morning flight to Mumbai. But when I came down to check, I was told that the car had not arrived. I called the cab service. He said that the driver came to the hotel but the bell desk sent him back saying that no one by my name was staying there.
I asked the guys at the bell desk what had happened and they shrugged their shoulders and denied having any knowledge of any taxis. As the minutes passed and I was in danger of missing my flight, a bell boy came and told me that there were no taxis in that area. Luckily, he said, a friend of his had a cab that could take me to the airport. But, of course, given the scarcity its cost will be very high.
I boarded my flight but complained to people I knew at Taj on reaching Mumbai. They were surprised when I told them I was staying at St. James’s. They have just acquired the hotel, he said, and intend to close it completely for two years, during which they will repair and renovate it. The existing staff (who were hired when Crest Hotels ran the property) will be dismissed and a new team will be hired when the hotel reopens.
This explains why the staff didn’t care about service when I stayed there. But it was such a disappointing hotel that I doubted Taj could do much about it and I told them so.
I’m not sure when it reopened as a full-fledged Taj hotel, but in 1987 when I couldn’t get a hotel room in London, I called the Taj and asked if they had a room. Yes, they said, and they would upgrade me to an apartment in St. James’s Court.
St. James’s Court? Yes. He had changed the name. apartment? Were there apartments in this dump? Actually, it happened.
I went to London, stayed in an apartment and ate ordinary pie. It was unrecognizable compared to the hotel I had stayed in five years earlier. I had a lovely apartment (with a working kitchen etc) which was not in the main hotel block, but in a renovated 19th-century town house overlooking a wonderful courtyard behind the main hotel.
The food was very good. The chef and manager of Delhi’s House of Ming was appointed to a Chinese restaurant called the Inn of the Sixth Happiness, and Jean André Chariel, chef-owner of Provence’s famous Baumanier restaurant (which held onto its three Michelin stars for years), ran the first restaurant his team ran out of the mother ship. (In those days, great chefs usually ran only one restaurant.)
Despite adverse circumstances, Taj made it happen.
It is difficult to explain to the new generation what a wonderful achievement this was. The only Indian hotel company to be successful abroad in that era was the Oberoi Group which had management contracts for various properties, most of them in the then emerging Middle East. No one in the West had succeeded, and certainly no Indian company had really had hotels of this scale abroad.
It was a struggle for any Indian company to do anything like this, especially because our laws were designed to treat anyone opening a business abroad as a potential criminal.
In those days, Indian Hotels (which owns the Taj) was not the large, highly profitable company it is today, and it was difficult for any Indian company to send money abroad. Therefore, the Taj approached private western investors and British banks to finance its investment which was not easy.
The Taj could not afford to buy a luxury property in the West. So, as I learned later, the aim was always to find a large, low-cost hotel in London, so that Indian architects, designers and engineers could do their best with the property and increase its value as a result of the renovation. In the case of St. James’s it was a long and complex process, but the Indian talent ultimately prevailed to such an extent that even JRD Tata, who was skeptical about the project from the beginning, admitted that the end result was a triumph. Eventually Taj got a luxury hotel in London.
The years that followed were not always easy. Wealthy Indians, who were the only people to regularly travel abroad in that era, saw no reason to leave their luxurious Park Lane hotels. The Taj did not have the international reservations network necessary to fill such a large hotel with Western guests. Nor did the idea of ​​Indian hospitality find much resonance with global luxury travelers. (It’s hard to believe now, but even three decades after the opening of St. James’s Court, Orient Express Hotels refused to cooperate with Taj, which had invested heavily in their company, on the grounds that its luxury customers would not be comfortable with a tie-up with an Indian hotel company.)
But gradually, the Court of St. James broke up. Bollywood crowd flocked after Amitabh Bachchan took the apartment for a long time. The Indian High Commission started booking visiting politicians at St. James’s Court. Many Indian Prime Ministers stayed there on official visits. More and more Indians began traveling abroad and the name Taj attracted them to St. James’s Court.
It took a little longer for international tourists to get into the hotel and – in my opinion – the Taj management made very poor decisions at that time. The hotel portion of the property (separate from the apartments) became the Crowne Plaza. Since the Crowne Plaza is a mid-market brand aimed at little more than a Holiday Inn (of which it was a part), it struck me as rejecting all the things Taj had hoped to do with the property. The F&B operation was partly outsourced to Bank, a London-based restaurant with no good reputation that was also aimed at a Crowne Plaza type of mid-market clientele. It seemed as if the Taj management had pulled out.
On the other hand, a welcome development was the conversion of the apartments into a separate brand called 51 Buckingham Gate, which remained a Crown-managed luxury operation. The result was that everyone flocked to 51 and pretended the Crown Plaza operation didn’t exist.
I don’t want to be too judgmental about these decisions because I don’t know what the financial pressures were, but the result was that, for many years, I was moved out of St James’s Court.
I’ve been back for a while now. The Crown Plaza arrangement, fortunately, was not renewed and the hotel portion of St. James’s Court has regained its status after being reopened as a Taj hotel. Disastrous decisions regarding F&B have also been revisited.
For a few years, the only place you could eat good food was the excellent Quilon, which is strangely outsourced: it is owned by a separate Tata company, which also owns a standalone restaurant called Bombay Brasserie and is not considered part of the hotel’s F&B operations, although it is part of the larger Taj group.
Quilon is still thriving but the banks and others are out. In a (perhaps unintentional) nod to the early visions, House of Ming is back, this time under its own name. The hotel has taken back the space leased to the bank and runs its own casual restaurant. There is a new bar and a chambers open.
However for me the highlight of the F&B operation are the South Indian breakfasts. I always get into trouble when I say this, but I believe they are better than the breakfasts served in Indian Taj hotels.
I know Indians who resist the allure of the St. James’s Court complex. The most common argument is that you meet a lot of high-profile Indians in the courtyard outside 51. This is probably true. (Although many see this as an advantage.) But these are the same kind of people you meet in the premium cabin of an Emirates flight to London. And I don’t know anyone who would want to travel on British Airways as a result.
I now live at 51 Buckingham Gate for two primary reasons. The first is that it offers personalized luxury service which would be difficult to manage in a country like the UK, where it does not have a very good service culture and has a lesser number of staff compared to Indian luxury hotels.
Secondly, the apartments are well designed with their own kitchens and comfortable bedrooms. I haven’t stayed in the hotel part for a while, but I liked the rooms there, except for some of the ‘small’ rooms (much cheaper than the regular rooms) which I found cramped.
I was back there last week and 51 was as good as ever. I have stayed in most of the hotels on Park Lane (Four Seasons, Intercontinental, Dorchester, Grosvenor House, etc.) and none of them provided as comfortable and enjoyable an experience as 51.
The buildings that make up St. James’s Court were built in the 1890s at around the same time as the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai. Sir Jamsetji Tata built the Taj to show the British, who did not allow Indians to enter their luxurious hotels in Mumbai, that we could do better than them. He succeeded and most of the British-only hotels in India went bankrupt and closed. But the Mumbai Taj remains the greatest hotel in South Asia.
Also in London, the original St. James Hotel faced hard days. Its beginnings as a venue for the smart set were gradually forgotten and it became a badly run, cheap hostel.
It is a true tribute to the spirit of modern India that Tata had to come to London to save the St. James Hotel. It was the British who razed it to the ground. And it was the Indians who revived it.
I will not pretend that I live in St. James’s Court merely out of patriotism. I stay there because it offers a great experience. But it is difficult to walk from Buckingham Palace, a short distance away, to St. James’s Court, without seeing the tricolor fluttering proudly on a grand 19th-century British building and not feeling a sense of national pride.
