Reviewed: St Pancras Renaissance Hotel

There's something simultaneously thrilling and unsettling about staying in a hotel in your own city. Thrilling because it feels utterly indulgent (you've got your own perfectly serviceable bed, right?) but also unsettling because you are, even if only play-acting, in some sense temporarily homeless.

In truth, I'd long fantasised about staying in that great wedding cake of a building, the restored high Gothic Midland Grand Hotel, next to St Pancras Station, in London. I say "long" because the building work going on tantalisingly behind a Berlin Wall of hoarding seemed to be lasting an infinity. Then, in May this year, this 19th-century architectural landmark was finally revealed in its latest incarnation as the St Pancras Renaissance London Hotel - a rather leaden corporate title that gives something away about the success or otherwise of this much trumpeted hotel revival.

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The first thing to be said is that the St Pancras Renaissance does not disappoint on the atmospheric-accommodation front. It's right next to the equally impressive train terminus, for a start, itself restored to something resembling its original Victorian splendour only a few years ago (although someone's still failed to do the decent thing and put that grotesquely kitsch new sculpture of a Brobdingnagian kissing couple out of its - and our - misery). You need merely enter St Pancras station to begin feeling the tingle of excitement of setting off on the Eurostar for somewhere stylish and Continental.

Signature attractions
Inside the hotel, too, you instantly get the sense that the hoteliers know which side their bread's buttered on in terms of standing out from the crowd. Much is deservedly made of the building's signature attractions. Foremost among those is the Grand Staircase, all wrought-iron ballustrading, polished dark wood and original gas fittings spiralling up three stories past gold-on-maroon fleur-de-lis wallpaper and hand-stencilled wall designs to the decidedly ecclesiastical vaulted ceiling. (The original architect, George Gilbert Scott, had built churches before he took on the Midland Grand.)

But once you make your way down the deliciously long, broad hallways (designed to be wide enough to allow to two ladies in ball dresses to pass one another - I felt like running along them) to your room? Well, it's as if the hotel couldn't quite drag the historical splendour out that far. Gone from my Chamber Suite (and this seems to apply to all but the grandest rooms) were the sorts of resplendent Victorian fittings from the original hotel I'd been half-hoping would still be in situ: walnut furniture with gold inlay, for example, and gold-leaf wallpaper, Gothic fanlights over the door and sweeping neo-classical murals. It's not exactly the current management's fault: with immense crassness, British Rail, which occupied the building for a good chunk of the last century, simply whitewashed over much of the original stencilling, perhaps fearing such luxurious touches might give its clerks ideas above their, ahem, station.

We can, however, be thankful for some changes to the 1870s masterplan. Recalling the possibly fictional quote attributed to Queen Victoria that "one bathes once a month, whether one needs it or not", the Midland Grand opened with a total of just five shared bathrooms, with nine baths between them, for its 300 rooms. That was one reason for the hotel's eventual demise in the early 20th century in the face of competition from establishments with more modern facilities (although it did wow its earlier Victorian guests with its flushing toilets: most hotels then still used chamber pots - yuck!). In the new hotel, bathrooms have been deposited, tardis-like, in the original rooms; the arrangement is quite successful although, without a window, mine of course lacked any natural light.

The rooms' interior decor does contain vague, art-deco-like period nods - sensually curving bedside light fittings, for example - and the imposing fireplaces have been restored. But, in general, the furnishing leans towards the uniform and bland - a slightly approved-by-committee feeling that is the perhaps inevitable consequence of having the kind of huge corporate owner - Marriott - that had the financial muscle to take on the restoration at all.

Irksome touches
A few modern touches were irksome. The hotel has a card entry system, unsurprisingly, but you need only waft your card past the sensor, rather than swiping it. Well, I say "need only": for me the system was self-defeating because I had to keep waving my card around, wand-like, until I got the trick right, impeding rather than hastening my entry to the room. Equally, I found the many-layered curtains (why do hotels insist on such infernally complicated mechanisms here?) impossible to close. And (did I mention I had checked in with my girlfriend?) a staff member knocked on the door to refill the minibar when the do-not-disturb button had very definitely been pressed.

On the plus side, it's a constant subject of amusement to me how keen hotels are to mention their in-room "tea- and coffee-making facilities", when these mundane and often ugly instruments are not worth mentioning. At the Renaissance, however, the Nespresso machine on the sideboard surprised me by producing an eminently drinkable espresso - surely an example for hotels the world over to follow.

Mixed sorts of experiences kept cropping up during my stay at the hotel. Dinner at the Booking Office, one of the two eateries, looked extremely promising. A pleasantly subtle light, perfect for an intimate, pre-departure meal, filled the vaulting, bare-brick, wood-floored space. But the table we were seated at, more suited to enjoying coffee and cake, was oddly low for a meal. And - one of the restaurant deadly sins - it wobbled.

Fresh off the Eurostar
The chicken parfait we began with was exceedingly tasty, as was my fish main - although the portion was so minuscule I half-expected to see a gaggle of anorexics queuing enthusiastically out the front. The service could best be described as ad hoc, a recurrent experience in the hotel. The youth of the staff, a mixed European bunch who might just have jumped off the Eurostar, was so stark it kept screaming at me: savings on the paypacket!

Some of them were exemplary, and surely had a great future in hospitality, but others were undertrained. At breakfast, for example, my enjoyment of the deliciously creamy scrambled eggs (some of the best I've eaten in a hotel, and your reviewer has eaten a lot of hotel breakfasts) was marred by having to fight for a table. Asking a question of the coffee-dispensing toreador whom we hoped would intervene was met with a response of admirable philosophical honesty in other contexts but one I don't like hearing in a hotel: "I don't know."

But such inexperience may have been mainly a teething problem - the hotel has still been open only a few months - of the kind that shouldn't stop you staying at the St Pancras Renaissance. Its grand Victorian atmosphere is highly memorable and the location - you'd be able to hear the peep! peep! of the departing steam engines if trains still ran on steam - is magnificent.

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Simon stayed at the St Pancras Renaissance couresy of the hotel. Last-minute rates in August start from £164 a night.