THE PICCADILLY HOTEL.
(Built on the site of St. James’s Hall)
The Arts have been, till recently, well represented in Piccadilly, for nearly opposite to Burlington House, to which we shall shortly come, is the building of the Institute of Painters in Water Colours, and close by was, till the other day, St. James’s Hall, where the best of good music was unable to wean the public from their fireside or their theatre stalls in sufficient numbers to make it pay; and so that star-bedizened ceiling and orientally decorated Hall is no more, but is now succeeded by the splendid front of the new “Piccadilly Hotel,” the latest, and architecturally the most interesting and original of the many fine hotels that have sprung up in London during the last few years. Indeed, “the Piccadilly,” as, I suppose, it will be familiarly called, is, both inside and out, a remarkable example of the palatial character which modern luxury seems to demand in the building and management of latter-day hotels. As I have said, some old land-marks had to make way for it; but what’s not destroyed by Time’s devouring hand?
QUARITCH’S.
Even Quaritch’s, the bookseller’s (now removed to Grafton Street), known as well to American and foreign bibliophiles as to ourselves, has been turned to other uses! Who that loves books didn’t know the great Quaritch and his top hat, as distinctive as Napoleon’s grey coat or Wellington’s duck trousers? Indeed, Quaritch was the Napoleon or Wellington, which you will, of booksellers, and Sotheby’s his chosen field of battle, where in great contests, he suffered no defeats. That hat, crushed on his head, and so old that it was not to be easily recognised as ever having been of silk, was one day placed beneath a glass flower-cover by a daughter wrought to despair at the inefficacy of repeated admonitions, and the conqueror recognised at last that it had become merely a relic!
With the disappearance of St. James’s Hall and Quaritch’s, Piccadilly would seem to be losing all touch with past times, did not Hatchard’s Book Shop, Fores’ Print Shop, Lincoln & Bennett’s, Denman’s,[3] and Stewart’s still remain to crystallise in their well-known names those past days of which, say what we will, we seem to be losing grip with every succeeding year.
THE ALBANY, PICCADILLY.
This fine old house, which has, since 1804, been divided into suites of apartments for single men, was designed by Chambers. In 1770, it was sold by the second Lord Holland to Lord Melbourne, who subsequently exchanged it with the Duke of York for Melbourne House, Whitehall. In Lord Holland’s time it was called Piccadilly House, and a previous mansion on the same site had been known as Sunderland House.
