A ghost at the feast: The LaLee at the Cadogan hotel, reviewed

The Cadogan hotel, Chelsea, is where Oscar Wilde was arrested for sodomy and gross indecency in 1895, in Room 118, which is now memorialised as the site of the arrest. Institutional homophobia is a weird thing to commemorate in fabrics, but everything is a tourist attraction these days.

The hotel is a tall red late-Victorian castle incorporating neighbouring houses, one of which belonged to the actress and mistress of Edward VII, Lillie Langtry. It was, then, a hotel for betrayal on the corner of Pont Street. John Betjeman mentions this in his poem ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’, and offers disaster PR of a timeless kind: ‘More hock, Robbie — where is the seltzer?/ Dear boy, pull again at the bell!/ They are all little better than cretins,/ Though this is the Cadogan Hotel.’

The Belmond group — who own the Manoir aux Quat’Saisons and the Orient Express, among others — have paid £35 million for a renovation, and the Cadogan is now beautiful. Of course it is: Belmond can make a train beautiful, and if that is not enough, they will arrange for you to watch a chef attack a lobster on a Paris station platform. I had a happy day on the Orient Express, even if our carriage was leased to the Nazis for almost the whole of the second world war, which I learned from a plaque by the loo. (Everything is a tourist attraction these days. Also — did they get slippers?)

The hotel has frescoes and mosaics, art deco chandeliers and paintings of aristocratic women with their eyes rubbed out. In the lobby, which shrinks under foliage, there is a clock naming the next Belmond train to depart: a British Pullman from Victoria station, which will wind through the suburbs taunting commuters.