RAFFLES LONDON AT THE OWO UK

The Old War Office is reincarnated as the London hotel opening of the century. Lydia Bell checks in

- Lydia Bell

At the end of Skyfall, Daniel Craig's Bond, winded by the death of his beloved M, casts a crestfallen gaze over London's imperial skyline, next to a turret of the War Office. As an eau-de-Nil light washes over the city in the early hours. I can't sleep. So I climb the stairs, open the arched window of that same turret, and stare down at the very same view. The pale moon face of Big Ben, the crimson glow of double-deckers snailing down Whitehall and the grey-azure S-bend of St James's Park Lake, snaking west to the dawn-fuzzed façade of Buckingham Palace stare back at me.

The War Office is now The OWO, which consists of Raffles London at The OWO, some private residences, and restaurants. I was the first member of the public to stay in Raffles' Turret Suite. The duplex has a starlet-inspired bedroom dressed in silvery-blue botanical wallpaper and a curved staircase leading to this cupola-topped eyrie-and a view I will probably never see again.

In 1906, snagging was tied up on a trapezium-shaped behemoth in Portland stone: a "War Office" on Whitehall, over the road from the mounted troopers. It was an exercise in Edwardian baroque grandiosity, the new administrative HQ of the British army. Edward VII was on the throne, and the British Empire was at its apex.