Hatchett’s Hotel and Coffee House, Piccadilly, London

Posted in Architecture, Famous landmarks, Historical articles, History, London on Monday, 2 September 2013

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Hatchett in Piccadilly, picture, image, illustration

Hatchett's in Piccadilly, London

In Eighteenth-century London, Hatchett’s was a well established hotel and coffee house, and continued to serve as both long after coaching days were over. It was one of several inns and shops on the unfashionable south side of Piccadilly, which was given over to trade and commerce unlike the north side, which had become the most desirable location for many of London’s finest noblemen’s palaces. Hatchett’s later occupied the site of a famous inn called The White Horse Cellars, which in its heyday was the starting point for all London’s mail coaches bound for the distant West Country. In 1925 Hatchett’s itself privately published ‘Old Coaching Days and the White Horse Cellar’, being an illustrated souvenir in the form of a short history of this historic London establishment, which first opened in 1720 and was now owned by Hatchett’s Restaurant, the Twentieth-century survivor of the popular Georgian coffee house. In the late Twenties and Thirties it was second only to the Cafe de Paris as the top venue for dining and dancing, and had its own resident band, the Swingtette, with whom the young Stephane Grappelli made several recordings.

Many more pictures of Piccadilly can be found at the Look and Learn picture library.

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