The Tower Bridge Hilton, London: to their credit, the chain has attempted to do something better here
I've named and shamed a few appallingly designed hotels today, but I could have listed plenty more. In fact, if you were feeling entrepreneurial, you could probably do a whole book of them along the lines of Crap Towns. So here's your chance: which are Britain's ugliest hotels? Not in terms of service - that would take something more along the lines of a new Domesday Book - purely in terms of external appearance.
Some of them are so bizarre I can't decide whether they're really deserving of the title. What's now the Renaissance Hotel at Heathrow, which I still think of as the Penta, is little more than a stack of boxes, but it's somehow a pleasing thing to see when you come to land at Heathrow. I see they're doing a plane spotter's deal as well.
Conversely, I can think of many architecturally amazing hotels, most of which I'll never be rich enough to stay in. The Lake Palace in Udaipur, for example, or the fantastically impractical Silken Hotel Puerta America in Madrid, which has whole floors designed by the likes of Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster and Arata Isozaki. I'm also looking forward to the opening of the beautiful Art Deco Midland Hotel in Morecambe next year, but from an architectural point of view, it would have to be the Hotel Le Corbusier inside his Unite d'Habitation in Marseille, which is at least affordable. And top of my fantasy list would be the Grand Hyatt at the top of SOM's Jin Mao tower in Shanghai, which gives you an incredible 87th floor view of the world's most dynamic city. Mind you, the interior looks hideous.
