Go Wilde In The City

Having been a magnet for the great, the good, the bad and the ugly, Hotel Café Royal in the 21st century is modern opulence at its finest

- Simon O;Neill

It’s fair to say that Oscar Wilde loved London. It was, he exclaimed “entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what society should be.”

The epicentre of the Irish playwright and poet’s London life was the Café Royal, from where he held court in the Grill Room and famously set out on the illfated libel action that eventually led him to a conviction for gross indecency and jail.

How very Café Royal the whole sorry affair was. This was the place to go for celebrity, intrigue, triumph and tragedy. Wilde died in 1900 in Paris, aged 46 and penniless. And it was from the French capital that another bankrupt had embarked 37 years earlier to seek refuge in London and establish this iconic Regent Street institution two years later. He was wine merchant Daniel

Nicholas Thévenon, who arrived in London in 1863 with five pounds in his pocket, his wife by his side and a trail of angry creditors behind him in France.