Tues, 8 March 2016, 11:55 am: Here is room 206 at the Mad Hatter Hotel on Stamford Street in London as it was waiting for me on the morning I checked in. You saw it in the video in yesterday’s post; these are still shots taken at the same time.
I wrote yesterday the lengthiest positive review you’ve ever seen on Trip Advisor. I praised many aspects of this hotel, and the few slightly negative impressions I included were cushioned in subtlety. My assessment is 7,050 characters long when the minimum character requirement is 200.
No place is perfect, but pound for pound (pun intended), my decade’s worth of London travel experience says that for the type of trip I take, you can’t beat the Mad Hatter. Let me know when you decide you’re coming with me on an English adventure; I’ll include your room in my pitch to the manager for a multi-room Matt discount.
Here now is the “director’s cut” of the Mad Hatter Hotel review I submitted to Trip Advisor. It includes a few chunks that do not appear on that website.
If you enjoy it, I’d sure appreciate a “this review was helpful” vote on the Trip Advisor site. Simply type “Mad Hatter Hotel London” in the “what are you looking for?” box on the homepage. Click to the hotel’s page, then scroll down till you reach my review. It’s titled “You’ve found it.” At the bottom of it, click the thumbs up to “thank” me.
“I’ve made a temporary home at the Mad Hatter on two occasions, and I’m already looking forward to a third.
What you get at the Hatter is a prime location, an authentic British vibe, fantastic service from well-traveled employees, and more value for money than you’re likely to find anywhere else in the city.
This is London. You’re going to pay for London. If you struggle to scrimp and save, you’re not going to enjoy yourself much in London.
For my recent two and a half weeks in the UK and Europe, a full third of my budget went to the Mad Hatter for my room. My transatlantic round-trip flight cost less than my six nights here. That’s not a slam on their prices; that’s just London. You can spend a bit less, if you don’t mind a cookie cutter room at a faceless chain establishment with no British personality whatsoever. You can spend substantially less, and you’ll be unhappy with what you get.
The Hatter’s online room rate page is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Not only does the stated price per room fluctuate from night to night, but the rates are liable to rise and fall dramatically between website visits. In January I was looking at room prices for March and April. One day there was an entire week for which the rooms were listed at 300 pounds each. I checked a few days later, and that same week the rooms were priced between 127 and 200 pounds each. Fuller’s must have an algorithm in play to rival the airlines.’ (The booking page used to also display how many rooms of each type remained available, so if you were seeking a double room for August 3 it would tell you if there were four available that night or only one left. That feature was disabled during my recent research.)
Be sure to email the hotel directly a couple of months in advance if you are a repeat customer. Management is likely to take your loyalty into account when quoting you a room rate.
In my experience— a decade of frequent returns to London— no hotel beats the Hatter’s location.
The walk south from Blackfriars train station to the front door of the Hatter is five minutes; you can shave a minute off of that if you’re not dragging luggage. Come from Waterloo train station and you’ll walk east maybe ten minutes. Both strolls are straight shots. Two blocks south of the hotel is an ATM; three blocks further south are my favorite café and a couple of food stalls. Southwark Tube station is also in that stretch.
Your friend wants to meet in front of St. Paul’s or Shakespeare’s Globe? Queue up two tracks from hometown standard bearers Pet Shop Boys’ new album on your mp3 player and you can jog to either iconic site before the second song fades out. Another cut (Bowie this time; long will he be missed) and an aim west will power you and your sneakers to the Southbank Centre. A fourth song (The Smiths, perhaps, or New Order to buy an extra minute) will get you to the London Eye. Whichever direction you head in, it seems London is prone at your feet.
The rooms at the Mad Hatter are well-maintained and always thoroughly cleaned. Joanna and the other ladies and gentlemen of the housekeeping team are courteous, offering cheerful hellos if you pass them in the corridors, and they’re generous with fresh towels and replenished mini-bottles of body wash, shampoo, and lotion every day.
The week I was in residence, the housekeeping crew was audible from about 8:00 am. Perhaps management reasons that all the early morning heavy construction in the neighborhood has probably already stirred guests from their slumber. Although it would’ve been nice if the cart and door noise had started an hour or two later, let’s look at it this way: we tourists didn’t fly all this way and spend all this money to doze our days away, did we? Sleep in later. London now!
Windows in each room cannot be opened all the way, but they can be adjusted enough to release a bit of heat or allow a bit of cool.
In the winter, the metal towel racks in the bathroom generate so much heat that your whole room will grow toasty warm if you leave the bathroom door open with the racks turned on. In the summer, staff will provide an electric fan.
I can’t express passionately enough how convenient it is to have a high quality full service bar and restaurant built into your hotel. If you’re traveling alone and miss your friends, a spontaneous conversation with a happy beer-loving stranger is never more than an elevator ride away. On those afternoons when sudden rain interferes with your plans to hunt down some restaurants on foot (What? It rains in London? I hadn’t heard.), you’ve got a good place to eat without getting wet.
And for the benefit of my American cohorts who may never have seen such an animal in the flesh, let me emphasize: it looks and feels like a real British pub, the pubs of our youthful US imaginations. The kind we saw growing up in the movies! The kind where some of the beer is warm and (to our palates) tastes flat but you dig it, anyway! The kind that nowadays is rapidly being bought up by corporate chains and converted to McBar’s. Okay, yes, Fuller’s is itself a corporate chain, but at least they’re keeping an authentic look to their franchise pubs.
The pub will happily charge drinks or full meals to your room. This is extremely handy when you want to hold onto your cash for spending elsewhere. Rather than outlaying five pounds for this beer and eight pounds for that round of snacks, you can pay for all your Mad Hatter expenditures with one credit card swipe at checkout.
Nikolett at the front desk is enthusiastic and will happily answer any questions. More than once I witnessed her patiently drawing maps, printing emails, or explaining invoices for guests.
I prefer exploring local cafes rather than relying on the hotel for breakfast (the best value and heartiest fare is found at Café Pronto five blocks directly behind the Hatter; please tell Alina that Matt in Florida says hello), but I do have coffee in the pub before I head out. This beats continuing to try to figure out how to operate the coffee/tea maker in my room. The bar isn’t manned prior to 11:00 am, but someone from the adjoining breakfast room’s staff invariably pops her head in before long. I take a London guidebook to skim while I wait to be noticed, reinforcing my plans for the day ahead.
This area of London seems to operate under a strict curfew. Even the loudest, most crowded pubs go from busy to what Leonard Cohen proclaimed “dead as Heaven on a Saturday night” much earlier than we visiting Americans expect. The Mad Hatter locks its front door promptly at 11:00 pm. Return from an outing later than that and you’ll need to ring the buzzer. Sometimes an attendant is manning the front desk and you’ll be inside within seconds. Other times, you’ll be glad your mobile still has a charge because you’ll need to call the posted phone number to rouse somebody inside.
London is a city in perpetual transition. There’s usually someone fun with whom to strike up a chat in the pub, but it likely won’t be the same person twice. I made a handful of entertaining friends during my week’s stay in the summer of 2014, people who considered the Hatter their “local.” Part of why I was excited to stay at the Hatter again was to raise a pint with those familiar faces. Not a single one of them was to be seen during my week’s visit this time.
Not even the bar staff was the same. Last time I became pals with two employees from Poland (an extraordinary country you should visit at soonest opportunity) and one from Ireland. Having a round in the pub quickly became a chance to hang out with the convivial Hatter crew, who tend to hail from all over the world. This time I didn’t encounter any of those fine folks from 2014. I believe the woman who served me a cup of coffee in the breakfast room was on duty two years ago, and I saw one behind-the-scenes lady exiting the building one morning who I recognized from last time. That’s it.
So while I enjoyed the comfort of familiar surroundings, the place itself was the only constant. In London, people come and people go. The staff members this visit were hard-working and attentive. I hope I see them again next time I come, but turnover appears to be high. Luckily the standard is set high for those employed here, so whoever greets me next time will no doubt be of superior quality.
Book the Mad Hatter, and enjoy a Fuller’s Honey Dew for me. Cheers!”
