Patrick Comerford
I have been in London six or seven times already this year, and when I find myself in the Bloomsbury area I often stop in Russell Square to admire the former Hotel Russell, even though it has lost the name it was known by for more than a century and is now called the Kimpton Fitzroy London.
The hotel at 1-8 Russell Square is a Grade II* listed building and was designed by the architect Charles Fitzroy Doll (1850-1929), who was the surveyor of the Bedford Estate. It was built in 1892-1898 and opened in 1900.
It is built of red brick with terracotta dressings, distinctively clad in decorative thé-au-lait (‘tea with milk’) terracotta, and was modelled on the Château de Madrid near the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. Its roofs and turrets have striking green fish-scale tiles, and the tall Victorian chimney-stacks have horizontal brick and terracotta bands. The hotel originally had a central copper dome and lantern instead of its present tiled mansard roof, and once must have been a more impressive site.
The architect Charles Fitzroy Doll specialised in designing hotels. He also designed the dining room on the Titanic, basing it on his design for the dining room in the Hotel Russell, known until recently known as Fitzroy Doll’s.
Doll was educated in Germany, then trained as an architect under Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt, and he was involved with Wyatt in designing the India Office in London in 1866-1868.
Doll was appointed surveyor to the Bedford Estates in Bloomsbury and Covent Garden in 1885. When he designed the Hotel Russell with its distinctive cladding, Doll engaged the sculptor Henry Charles Fehr to model the four life-size statues of British queens who look down on Russell Square from above the main entrance.
Doll was a member of Holborn Borough Council, and was Mayor of Holborn in 1904-1905 and 1912-1913. He died in 1929 aged 79. His children included Christian Charles Tyler Doll (1880-1955), who was involved in the reconstruction of the grand staircase of the Palace of King Minos at Knossos in Crete, working alongside Arthur Evans. He also designed the Villa Ariadne, a residence for Evans at Knossos that now houses the Knossos Research Centre.
The style of the Hotel Russell is described in its listing as ‘flamboyant French Renaissance … derived from engravings of the Château de Madrid, with elaborate decorations.’ The architectural historians Bridget Cherry and Sir Nikolaus Pevsner call it ‘monumental’.
The hotel is known for its palatial design, and its fixtures and fittings included an ornate Pyrenean marble staircase and an interior sunken garden. Each room was fitted with an en-suite bathroom, quite an innovation at the time.
Doll’s façade also displays the coats of arms of the world’s nations as they were in 1898, incorporated in the spandrels of the first floor. At the centre of the principal façade facing Russell Square, above the main entrance, are life-size terracotta statues of four reigning queens – Elizabeth I, Mary II, Anne and Victoria – and columns decorated with putti, both surmounted with knights flanking floral decoration above the decorative foundation date ‘1898’.
The larger than life terracotta statues represent idealised versions of the four queens. Elizabeth I is readily identifiable because of her ruff,while Victoria is depicted as a very young woman. But there is some confusion over who is who when it comes to Mary II and Anne, while a fifth reigning English queen, Mary I, is noticeably absent.
The statues of the four queens are the work of the sculptor Henry Charles Fehr (1867-1940), also created the busts of four Prime Ministers – Lord Derby, Lord Salisbury, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli – on the Guilford Street façade of the hotel.
Fehr produced several notable public sculptures, war memorials and works for civic buildings, including sculptures for Middlesex Guildhall, Wakefield County Hall and Cardiff City Hall. His war memorials can be seen in for towns and cities throughout Britain and often feature detailed bronze statuary.
Doll also designed the Imperial Hotel (1905-1907) in Russell Square, described by the architectural historian Sir Niklaus Pevsner as a ‘vicious mixture of Art Nouveau Gothic and Art Nouveau Tudor’. The Imperial Hotel was demolished in 1967, and replaced by a contemporary, brutalist building designed by George Anthony Wilson Brandeth and where I stayed once when I was working with The Irish Times. Today it is known as the President Hotel.
Doll also designed the Flemish French-Gothic terrace of shops and apartments on the corner of Torrington Place and Gower Street. It was designed in 1907 and now includes the London University branch of Waterstones. The bookshop is in the heart of literary Bloomsbury and I, like many of my generation, still think of it as Dillon’s. Today, this branch of Waterstones claims it is the largest new and second-hand bookshop in Europe.
The Hotel Russell was one of the few hotels in this part of London not taken over by the War Office during World War II. It survived the war largely intact, but the magnificent dome was badly damaged in an air raid during the Blitz in 1941 and was never replaced.
The Hotel Russell continued to be known by that name for more than a century until 2018. After extensive renovations, the hotel reopened in 2018 as the Principal London. Three months later, it was bought by Covivio Hotels, which then transferred its management to InterContinental Hotels Group, and the hotel was renamed the Kimpton Fitzroy London later that year. The restaurant Doll designed was originally named after him but is now called Fitz’s.
The Russell Group of universities, which was formed in 1994, is named after Hotel Russell, where the first informal meetings took place, and thankfully it has not changed its name.
The Russell Group now brings together 24 British universities that are often seen as Britain’s best. Together, they receive over three-quarters of all university research grant and contract income in the UK, they award 60% of all doctorates gained in the UK, they account for 65% of all world-leading research conducted in the UK, and their research is judged overwhelmingly to be world-leading or internationally excellent. Their graduates hold 61% of all UK jobs that require a university degree, despite being only 17% of all higher education graduates.
The Russell Group first included 17 universities: Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Imperial College London, Leeds, Liverpool, London School of Economics, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford, Sheffield, Southampton, University College London and Warwick.
With the exception of Warwick, which was established in the 1960s, the founder members of the Russell Group were all universities or university colleges prior to World War I, and they included most of Britain’s ancient universities and ‘redbrick universities’. Cardiff University and King’s College London joined the Russell Group in 1998.
Queen’s University Belfast became the 20th member in 2006, and four more universities – Durham, Exeter, Queen Mary University of London, and York – joined the Russell Group in 2012.
The hotel may have changed its name in recent years, but the Russell and Bedford names continue in the streets and squares of Bloomsbury, and in some places there are memories too of the philosopher Bertrand Russell. But, perhaps, more about that in the days to come.
