Some of the best hotels in Britain were never meant to be hotels.
They were banks, prisons, insurance offices and council chambers. Some of these buildings stood empty for years, with widespread agreement that their condition was “a real shame,” yet no one took action. Then someone with nerve, money and a decent team saw what the building could be, rather than all the reasons it couldn’t.
If you’re a developer looking at a listed building and thinking hotel, here’s the opinion this article is built on: listing isn’t the obstacle most people think it is. The listing is the brief. The features you’re not allowed to rip out are usually the reason anyone will pay £300 a night to sleep there.
Badly run heritage schemes don’t fail because of the listing. They fail because the numbers were done as if the building were a blank box, the team found out about the constraints too late, and the “awkward” bits were treated as problems to engineer away instead of assets to sell.
So let’s look at seven conversions that got it right and what each one teaches.
1. The Ned, London: the awkward bits are the product
Grade I | Former Midland Bank headquarters | Sir Edwin Lutyens
Lutyens designed the Midland Bank’s City headquarters in the 1920s. Midland was taken over by HSBC in the early 1990s and later vanished as a brand. For the best part of a decade the building stood empty. A huge Grade I listed bank, in the City, doing nothing.
Then Soho House and the Sydell Group took it on, and in 2017 it opened as The Ned, with around 250 bedrooms, a cluster of restaurants in the old banking hall, a rooftop pool and a members’ club.
Look at what they did with the bit any sensible developer would have dreaded: the vault. A reinforced strongroom behind a 20-tonne circular door, lined with thousands of safety deposit boxes. It’s impossible to convert into bedrooms and expensive to do anything with.
So they made it the bar, and now it’s the most talked-about room in the building.
The lesson: Every listed building has a space that doesn’t fit your room schedule: a vault, a chapel, a council chamber, a banking hall. Stop trying to squeeze bedrooms into it. That space is your restaurant, your bar, your wedding venue and your Instagram moment. In a heritage hotel, the space that “doesn’t work” is usually the one making the most money per square foot.
2. Raffles London at The OWO: mixed use pays for conservation
Grade II* | Former Old War Office, Whitehall | William Young
The Old War Office went up in the early 1900s. Churchill, Lloyd George and Kitchener all worked from it, and Ian Fleming’s time in intelligence is often linked to the building. Untouchable history, in other words.
It’s also more than a thousand government offices in a building no one had ever designed for anyone to sleep in. The Hinduja Group’s answer was to split the building: 120 hotel rooms and suites, plus 85 branded residences. The restoration took around eight years, and the hotel opened in September 2023.
The lesson: Don’t make the hotel carry the whole cost of conservation on its own. Big heritage buildings rarely work as a single use. Residential, branded residences, event space, food and drink and retail can all help fund the specialist repairs a listed building needs. Work out the mix early, because it changes your planning strategy, your listed building consent strategy and your funding strategy.
And note the timescale. Eight years. If your appraisal assumes an 18-month programme on a building like this, your appraisal is fiction.
3. St Pancras, London: put the volume next door
Grade I | Former Midland Grand Hotel | Sir George Gilbert Scott
This one was a hotel to begin with, but it’s on the list because of what happened next. The Midland Grand closed in 1935 and spent decades as railway offices. In the 1960s it faced demolition. A campaign led by John Betjeman helped win it Grade I status in 1967, and then it sat empty for years more, protected but unused.
In May 2011, 138 years after its initial opening, it reopened as a hotel. The clever part is this: much of the bedroom count sits in a new-build extension behind the historic range. The Gothic building holds the grand public rooms and the signature suites. The modern block significantly increases the number of available rooms.
The lesson: If an operator needs 200+ keys to make the model work and the listed building can only give you 60 good ones, don’t force it. Cramming standard bedrooms into a historic plan means chopped-up rooms, wrecked proportions and a fight with the conservation officer you’ll probably lose. Look for an extension, an adjacent plot or a sympathetic new wing. Let the heritage building do what it does best and let new build do the rest.
4. Malmaison Oxford: lean into the story
Grade II (within a Grade I / scheduled castle site) | Former HM Prison Oxford
There was a prison on the Oxford Castle site for centuries. The Victorian gaol buildings were still in use until the mid-1990s. Then Malmaison turned the cell blocks into a hotel.
They didn’t hide what it was. The galleried wings, iron staircases and heavy cell doors are all still there. Most bedrooms are made from knocking three cells together, so the plan of the old prison sets the room sizes.
Some people would call a prison a terrible starting point for a luxury hotel. Malmaison made it the selling point.
The lesson: The building’s past is your marketing budget. A former bank, war office or prison has a story no new-build Premier Inn can match. The more honestly you keep the evidence of that story, the more distinctive the product. There’s a practical lesson too: in a cellular building (cells, offices, dormitories), the existing structural rhythm sets your room module. Survey it properly and let the building set the grid, rather than drawing your ideal room and fighting the walls.
5. Kimpton Clocktower, Manchester: you’re designing for the next operator too
Grade II* | Former Refuge Assurance Building | Alfred Waterhouse
Waterhouse’s red-brick and terracotta landmark on Oxford Street was built in stages from the 1890s to the 1930s for the Refuge Assurance Company. When Refuge moved out in the late 1980s it became a hotel, and it has had several names since: the Palace, Le Méridien, The Principal, and since 2020, Kimpton Clocktower, with around 270 bedrooms making the most of the double- and triple-height ceilings.
That’s four or five flags on one building in about 30 years.
The lesson: Your conversion won’t be the last one. Brands change, operators come and go, and every one of them will want to refurbish. If your scheme relies on irreversible interventions (concrete floors poured over original structure, partitions fixed into decorative plasterwork, services chased through historic fabric), you’re storing up trouble for whoever comes next, and you’ll struggle to get consent anyway. Reversibility isn’t just a conservation buzzword. In hospitality it’s simply good asset management.
6. Lumley Castle, County Durham: the outbuildings are half the scheme
Grade I | Late 14th-century quadrangular castle
Here’s a North East example that proves heritage hotels aren’t only a London game. Lumley Castle, near Chester-le-Street, dates back to the late 1300s and has been a hotel since the 1970s, so it’s been trading for half a century. It has around 70 bedrooms spread across the castle itself and the former stable buildings.
That last bit matters. A medieval castle doesn’t give you 70 well-sized, en-suite, accessible bedrooms. The ancillary buildings do a lot of the work.
The lesson: When you assess a heritage hotel site, don’t just look at the main building. Stables, coach houses, walled gardens, lodges and service ranges are often easier to adapt, usually less sensitive, and can carry bedroom numbers, kitchens, plant and back-of-house space that would harm the principal building. The main house sells the dream. The outbuildings often pay for it.
7. Hotel Indigo Durham: get the right team in early
Grade II | Old Shire Hall, Old Elvet
The Old Shire Hall was built in the late 1890s as the headquarters of Durham County Council. Later it was used by Durham University, including as the vice-chancellor’s office, until it went quiet in 2012 and sat empty for several years.
It reopened in March 2018 as an 83-bedroom Hotel Indigo after a £15 million conversion designed by Durham practice Howarth Litchfield. The circular former council debating chamber, the room that was never going to be bedrooms, became a Marco Pierre White steakhouse. The Edwardian glazed tiling, marble columns, panelling and stained glass were kept, and an old safe even ended up in the coffee shop.
It’s a textbook example of everything above: the “difficult” room became the destination, the building’s story became the brand, and the room count followed the building rather than the other way round.
The lesson: None of that happens by accident. It happens because the design team understands both what the listing protects and what a hotel operator needs to make money, and because those two conversations start on day one, not after planning has been refused.
What developers should take from all this
Seven buildings, seven very different histories. The same handful of truths keeps coming up.
1. Read the listing as a brief, not a ban. Listing protects special interest. It doesn’t freeze a building in aspic. Most listed building consent applications are approved. What gets refused is the scheme that ignored what made the building special in the first place.
2. Count your rooms honestly. Your appraisal should start from a measured survey and a heritage assessment, not a target key count from an operator’s standard brief. If the numbers only work with 120 rooms and the building gives you 70, you need an extension, an outbuilding strategy or a different site. You don’t need a fight with the planners.
3. Your showpiece spaces are profit centres. Vaults, chambers, chapels and banking halls make the best restaurants, bars and event spaces in the country. Price them that way.
4. Plan for a long programme. Opening up historic fabric always throws up surprises: hidden decay, undocumented alterations, bats, asbestos, structure that isn’t what the drawings said. Build in contingency, both time and money, or the building will do it for you.
5. Design for reversibility. You won’t be the last operator. Light-touch, reversible interventions are easier to get consented and easier to refurbish later.
6. Use pre-application advice. Talk to the local planning authority’s conservation officer, and Historic England where they’re involved, before you commit to a layout. It costs far less than a refusal.
7. Get heritage specialists in before you buy, not after. The most expensive mistake in heritage hospitality is buying a building on the strength of an appraisal no conservation specialist has checked. Bring experienced UK heritage architects in at feasibility stage. They’ll tell you what the building can realistically take, where the value is hiding, and which bits of your wish list will never get past the conservation officer. And they’ll tell you before you’ve committed the money.
The bottom line
Britain is full of listed buildings that have lost their original purpose: banks no one banks in, offices no one works in, civic buildings the council has moved out of. A good number of them would make far better hotels than anything you could build new on the same site.
The developers who succeed with them aren’t the ones who find clever ways round the listing. They’re the ones who understand early that the listing is the reason the building is worth converting. Treat the building’s character as the asset and staff the project accordingly, and the heritage stops being a cost and becomes the product.