Club Quarters St. Paul’s – Review of the 4-star hotel near St. Paul's Cathedral

Photo: Craig Cross

Craig’s review… I quite liked this hotel when I first entered the room, but I’ve cooled on it now that I’ve been here a while. But I don’t want to start this review on a downer because there’s still plenty to recommend it, so let me tell you about all the good stuff first.

The best thing about this hotel is definitely its location. When you step outside the front door you can see the front steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral sixty-seconds up the street. (And I really do mean sixty-seconds exactly, because I timed it on my phone!)

Inside the room and ensuite bathroom

Photo: Craig Cross

The second best thing about this hotel is the size of my room. It’s quite large for a London hotel, and you also get a big desk (bigger than my desk at home), stocked with a few books like the Oxford English Dictionary & Thesaurus and Philip’s Encyclopedia.

Photo: Craig Cross

Now comes the bad stuff (and remember that this is supposed to be a 4-star hotel). My room doesn’t have a safe in it. There’s no iron either. No minibar. Not even a bar downstairs – just a lounge with a tea machine. They only give you two teabags in your room plus a flimsy little toothpick spoon that bends and softens when you put it in your cup.

A lot of the other things that you’d normally expect to find in a 4-star room have to be collected from a utility closet down the hall. That’s where you’ll find the iron and ironing board. So every time you want to iron something you have to traipse through the maze of hallways and carry them back to your room.

They’ve also got a self-service launderette and vending machine in there, plus some more tiny plastic spoons in case your other one melts. It’s quite a handy thing to have I suppose, but it’s not the kind of thing I would expect to find in a 4-star hotel – it reminds me of living in a student dorm. They should just put an iron in each room and stop being so tight.

Hotel restaurant

The restaurant is also very nice, but technically it’s just a high street restaurant tacked on to the side. Hotel guests can go in there and order off the menu and charge the cost to their room. And because it’s a high street restaurant they do everything – buffet breakfast, cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner, the whole lot.

Don’t be too put off by my complaints though, because the location is amazing, the room is nice and big, and if they called themselves a 3-star then I’d probably recommend it without hesitation. But I’ve slept in enough 4s by now to know it’s not one of them.

Worth a stay? ★★☆Value for money? ★★★Nice rooms? ★★☆Good location? ★★★

The author Craig Cross owns city-guide.london and has spent the last decade reviewing the capital’s landmarks, attractions and hotels. His guidebook London Squire is available from Amazon. This review was updated on 1st September 2023