Sea Containers London: Our Honest Review
A hotel’s lobby is its most important room. After the one where they keep all the shortbreads that go by the beds. It’s where you make a statement about your hotel. Where you tell your story about who you are and why people should want to come in. They can be cosy and welcoming, like the ones at Brown’s or The Connaught. Or grand and stately like The Dorchester’s or The Ritz. You can be greeted by the top-hatted doormen that clutter Piccadilly or by an iPad and a broken coffee machine at Travel Lodge. But nothing is like this one. And so turning up for my review at Sea Containers London I was wowed.
You enter the hotel from Upper Ground. It’s an aggressively dull South London street, serving mainly office blocks and operating as a rat-route for Knowledge-trained black cabbies to beat the non-analogue competition. You wouldn’t know there was a hotel here. And there wasn’t until 2014, before which it operated as corporate headquarters for Sea Containers Ltd. Now it’s one of London’s better luxury hotels and as you waft in through the revolving doors you can’t help some eye goggling. The entire reception desk and wall is seemingly fashioned out of the copper-bottom hull of an ocean-going ship. In the centre of the lobby is an artsy pair of links from the anchor chain of a vast vessel. The sort that Isambard Kingdom Brunel might like to lean up against. It’s fun, creative and, frankly, beats any amount of marble or top hats.
Friday evenings are clearly popular as a single harassed-looking desk clerk busily dealt with a growing queue of guests patiently waiting with their luggage. For me it was a rare moment of serenity, only broken by the sound of my children swarming over the giant chain links and ogling a scale model of a passenger liner. Disowning them I maintained zen until I got to the front of the line, whereupon I was efficiently checked in, handed my keycard and put in the care of a helpful staff member who shepherded us to our sixth (top) floor room.
It’s fun, creative and, frankly, beats any amount of marble or top hats…
Normally you walk into a hotel room and take in the various features. The size of the bed, whether the slippers are the kind you can steal, that kind of thing. Here all of that went straight out of my mind because the view is a showstopper. The hotel, right on the bank of the Thames, looks out onto the river and St Paul’s and you can see everything. It’s like a screensaver, not a window.
When the entire family had finished playing a prolonged game of ‘can you see… insert London landmarks ad nauseam’ I was able to take in the room itself. We were assigned a family room. The original plan had been to review one of Sea Containers’ new Cabin Suites, which I’ll mention later. However these aren’t child-friendly, for fear of grubby hands mauling the antique furniture. Most high-end hotels’ signature suites contain fine art and expensive furniture (the clue’s in the price) and manage to avoid creating an inadvertent soft play centre. But regardless, we were incredibly happy with the family suite.
The view is a showstopper…
These suites come in various sizes and guises. There are options to suit different families and price-points. These range from double doubles to a River View Suite with a king and sofabed. Or, our billet for the night, two superior rooms with an interconnecting door. My five and six year olds still seem to turn up our room, unbidden, most nights so sharing a suite from the outset wasn’t too appealing. This way they could enjoy a twin room and us a double, yet still be accessible.
The room itself is relatively simple, presumably allowing you to focus on the view though I assume that around half the rooms must face away from the river. Whitewashed walls and simple furnishings make for an unfussy experience, while cat-swinging opportunities are relatively limited. But the materials and fixtures are high quality and a quick double-sit-bounce, that time-tested quality control method, showed the bed was comfortable. Additionally, the bathrooms are nice and marbley with ‘rainfall showers’ and nice-smelling soaps. But Sea Containers London have clearly calculated that you’re not here for the room, what with all the hotel, not to mention London on your doorstep, has to offer.
There are various options to suit different families and price-points…
A shower and a couple of work emails later, we rode the lifts back down to the lobby. The copper hull structure, which dominates the lobby itself, carries round the corner and leads you to Sea Containers Restaurant. I really like this restaurant. In the centre stands a 360-degree bar, above which floats, in the hotels’s signature blend of nautical and whimsy, a ten-foot yellow submarine.
The food and service were great. There was a kids menu, with mains clocking in at a tenner each. One child had fish and chips, the other the grilled chicken. And then whined incessantly that she’d rather her sister’s cod.
Meanwhile the adult food is suitably grown-up, and I went a bit cow-heavy with steak tartare before a beef burger ever an adventurous eater. Starters are around the £15 to £20 mark and mains in the late twenties. Which isn’t wallet-friendly but was worth it, along with a bottle of £45 Malbec. And the atmosphere was great, with a buzzy Friday evening crowd. Looking out to the South Bank on a warm evening there was a distinct energy that everyone seemed to at once acknowledge and contribute to.
A vibe probably helped by pre-drinks at Lyaness, which was once named the world’s best bar and is the work of master mixologist Ryan Chetiyawardana. Having this is a real coup and yet another thing that justifies Sea Containers’s place on the map. However, we didn’t have a chance to pop in reasonably, it’s hardly five-year-old friendly. But there’s plenty to do even if you have smaller guests towing behind. Like the Curzon Cinema, which is a fabulous addition. Or the outdoor terrace.
But there’s plenty to do even if you have smaller guests towing behind…
Instead we headed upstairs to bed and a perfectly relaxed night deeply sunken into the room’s double bed. London’s nighttime skyline looks incredible, and is best taken in with a glass of wine exfiltrated from the restaurant while sitting up in bed.
The next morning breakfast was served back in Sea Containers restaurant as the sun streamed in and my review stay drew to an end. It’s a fairly standard hotel buffet affair, but the quality is high. And the coffees are so good there was no choice but to order a second in a takeaway cup for a stroll along the South Bank. And, like that, my time at Sea Containers was over. But certainly not forgotten not least because I didn’t remember to return their umbrella and it’s now become my usual.
But also because there’s something in its very essence that I really like about this hotel. The lobby, the restaurant, bar and so on epitomise the hotel’s character. It’s creative, fun and as whimsical as a city-adjacent hotel can afford to be without straying into madness. But this is all contained at ground level. The rooms themselves are less memorable. They’re nice, but a little reminiscent of a Habitat showroom when Habitat was actually Habitat, not the bit of Sainsbury’s before the veg. Though what the rooms perhaps lack in character they make up for in spades thanks to their views and pricing. At the time of writing there are plenty of sub-£200 rooms available. That’s no mean feat in a city where rates can be astronomical.
There’s something in its very essence that I really like about this hotel…
Conversely, the hotel has let themselves go with their Cabin Suites, which are lavishly themed around various decades there’s an Edwardian one, a mid-century one, one from the eighties and so on. But in terms of identity these also don’t quite match the coherence of the ground floor. Nevertheless, they do look fantastic for any child-free guests.
Would I come back to Sea Containers? Absolutely! I love the atmosphere, the staff, the restaurant and the location and views. And it all comes back to the entrance and the ground floor. They’ve got something special there that I instinctively want to be a part of.
