Great Northern Hotel

Following a three-year, £14m makeover, the Great Northern Hotel – for years a handsome but dead and undernourished-looking Kings Cross icon – reopened in June 2013 as a modern-thinking, 90-room boutique establishment. Lewis Cubitt designed the hotel, which first opened in 1854 to serve those using the immediately adjacent, then two-year-old King's Cross railway station (now with several Underground lines beneath it). Jeremy Robson has tweaked it for the 21st century, with three categories of room to choose from, including the compact and creamy Couchette. Plus the Edwardian, Heritage and Victorian rooms (which have replaced the Cubitt and the Wainscot).The entire building forms a curve that sits neatly alongside the station, and the floors' wide corridors once accommodated extravagantly sized frocks of the era. Features include the dandy and detailed GNH Bar with high mirrored ceilings, the Snug Bar, and Plus + Spilt Milk – a restaurant named after the first dining car from King's Cross to Glasgow.