The Goring is a tiny grand hotel near Victoria Station and the Queen’s garden wall. Victoria is not pleasant — traffic fumes —but this only makes the Goring more determined to be the grandest of all London’s tiny grand hotels. That it is in the wrong place — it should be in Mayfair in 1858 — makes it more histrionic. It is another daydream made of class anxiety; another hotel that voted for Brexit.
It was built in 1910, the first hotel, says the website, to be entirely ensuite. Did the Savoy use buckets? Its windows are fantastically clean, which must be agonising this close to Victoria Coach Station. It has two doormen dressed in red and gold, like Jewish sofas. The Goring is covered in bunting, like a fête that never stops. In the lobby there are mirrors and chequered marble floors, and cuddly sheep called Barbara. This is a family-run hotel. It is expected to be whimsical. There are weird murals of English forests and polar bears, and, near them, trippers paying £8,400 a night for the suite that contained Catherine Middleton the evening before her wedding. It should be a location for my unmade film Blue Blood, in which the royal family have been vampires since 1714, and Queen Victoria is undead and very angry. The Middletons requisitioned the Goring for the wedding. The Americans did the same in 1917 for the war. Both remain its target constituency.
The bar is insane: it is dedicated to the Queen Mother, who loved the Goring because it looks like her. It was her local pub, and the entire contents of her wardrobe are on the floors and the walls. Drink in the Goring and you spend more time in the Queen Mother than George VI did.
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