underground

GETTING a budget hotel in the capital sometimes feels like trying to find a needle in a haystack, but now one of London’s most expensive areas has a cheap, yet underground, hotel.

Park Lane, sitting on the edge of Hyde Park, is known for being one of London‘s most exclusive areas.

In fact, a hotel in the area can often set you back hundreds per night.

For example, a night at the JW Marriott Grosvenor House London in January could set you back £390 or a night at 45 Park Lane would cost around £940.

But now, there is good news for those wanting a budget option as a brand new Zedwell hotel has opened up on the famous road.

And the twist is that the hotel is completely underground.

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The new Zedwell Underground Park Lane has 133 ‘cocoons’, each of which doesn’t have a window.

The rooms are soundproofed and have “ambient lighting, purified air and body-cushioning mattresses”, according to the hotel.

Each ‘cocoon’ also comes with free Wi-Fi and an en-suite, with a rainfall shower.

Just five-minutes from Marble Arch tube station, when guests arrive at the hotel they can also use automated, self check-in desks.

And for those who are staying and working in the city, there is even a co-working space overlooking Hyde Park.

A ‘cocoon’ costs from £67.68 per night, for two people – so £33.84 per person.

The hotel marks Zedwell’s second underground hotel, with its other destination being the first underground hotel in England and is located on Tottenham Court Road.

Halima Aziz, head of hotels at Criterion, commented: “Zedwell is built around one simple idea: delivering great sleep in unbeatable locations at an affordable price point, democratising access to city centres and luxury neighbourhoods like Mayfair.

“Zedwell Underground Park Lane exemplifies our brand values and our ability to unlock complex urban sites to create value in the heart of the city.

“This opening reinforces our commitment to high-quality design, operational excellence and exceptional customer service, while continuing to scale the Zedwell brand in prime destinations.”

Zedwell is known for offering budget accommodation and over the summer opened the world’s biggest capsule hotel in Piccadilly Circus, costing around £30 per night.

Travel writer, Helen Wright, stayed at the hotel and said: “Inside, decked out with a modern concrete and timber design, there are nearly 1,000 individual sleep capsules over five floors.

“It’s a twist on the traditional ‘dorm style’ hostel set up as each guest gets privacy and security of being tucked up in your capsule, with the ability to lock it from the inside.

“On first glance, the dorm rooms, which are minimalist and dimly-lit looked a bit like a car park or a storage locker.

“It’s nothing like you’d expect a hotel room to look, so it takes some getting used to.

“However, inside, I was surprised to find a cute little space, with mood lighting and welcoming interiors.

“Surprisingly, it didn’t feel as claustrophobic as I thought it would – as a 5’5 woman, I was able to sit up and easily stretch my legs.

“Even more surprisingly, I had a great night sleep, with no rowdy drunken people or loud talkers disturbing the peace.”

In other hotel news, Britain’s best hotels for 2026 have been named from seaside pubs to island B&Bs.

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When I first came to London from Yorkshire in the late 1980s, I found the tube replete with bizarre novelties. Among them was the way most trains required me to sit sideways to the direction of travel, as on a fairground waltzer. Directly opposite me was another person or an empty seat, and while I knew not to stare at people, I did stare at the seats – at their woollen coverings, called moquette. I have since written two books about them, the first nonfiction, Seats of London, and now a crime novel, The Moquette Mystery.

I was attracted to moquette firstly because it, like me, came from Yorkshire (most of it back then was woven in Halifax), and whereas many foreign metros have seats of plastic or steel, moquette made the tube cosy. Yet it seemed underappreciated. The index of the standard history of the tube, for instance, proceeds blithely from Moorgate to Morden.

A moquette might last a decade or more on a particular vehicle, coinciding with a Londoner’s formative years, the design evoking forever after those tube rides to triumphs and disasters. For generation Z, the resonant one is likely to be Barman, introduced in 2010 to replace a range of moquettes deemed too diffuse. Therefore, our two-hour moquette tour begins on one of the many lines to use Barman: the Northern line, from Leicester Square to Charing Cross.

Barman is named after Christian Barman, publicity officer to Frank Pick who, as vice-chair of London Transport in the 1930s, commissioned the roundel symbol, the tube map, Charles Holden’s subtly modernist station architecture and many posters and moquettes. Barman was designed by Wallace Sewell (Harriet Wallace-Jones and Emma Sewell) and, unusually for moquette, it’s figurative; but it’s also mysterious. The landmarks it depicts seem suffused in a haze of blue rain, and the harder you stare, the more the top of Big Ben becomes Battersea Power Station – and is that Southwark cathedral looming ghostly behind the dome of St Paul’s?

At Charing Cross, we change on to the Bakerloo, which has a darker version of Barman, the same landmarks at night, perhaps. The sombre black, grey and brown colour scheme suits the crepuscular mood of these elderly trains; it is also historically valid. In the early 1920s, the first moquette widely applied on the underground – called Lozenge – was the colour of dried mud, a capitulation to the dirtiness of clothes in those days before widespread dry-cleaning.

In the late 1930s, Frank Pick commissioned brighter moquettes from leading textile designers, including Enid Marx and Marion Dorn. He favoured red and green – red symbolising the town, green the country – and he considered green serene. My novel is set in this golden age of the underground, epitomised by the lambent glamour of Piccadilly Circus station concourse, which features a sort of shrine to Pick, showing his watchwords in brass on the marble wall. These range from “Utility” to “Beauty”, and moquette has usually been filed under the first word, but the second applies to the best of it.

We go from Picadilly Circus to Green Park on the Piccadilly line – Barman again, but with a richer blue than on the Northern line. It reflects the line colour and the dark blue of the Underground roundel bar, which a transport designer once described to me as “the reassuring colour of an old-fashioned police lamp”.

At Green Park, we take the Victoria line to Oxford Circus. This unnamed moquette uses multiple V-shapes, evoking she who was not amused. The Vs are white, which shows the dirt, but the radiated light suggests diamond facets and alleviates the claustrophobia of this line which never comes above ground.

At Oxford Circus, we observe some Central line trains, waiting for a lucky break. Most have Barman, but some refurbished trains have a new red, black and grey moquette called Tuppenny, the Central having once been “the Tuppenny Tube”. It is reminiscent of a Central line moquette of the late 80s, my “home” line back then, when the red and black seemed consoling, like a coal fire.

I suggested to Paul Marchant, head of product design at Transport for London, that Tuppenny was “retro”. “Yes,” he said, “I was on holiday when it was commissioned!” A joke (I think), but moquette is meant to keep pace with London; it is not supposed to be retro. Currently, only two Central line trains have Tuppenny, so the odds are against our sitting on it while heading west to our next stop, Bond Street.

Here, we board the Elizabeth line for Paddington. Most moquettes have four colours, but on the luxurious, hi-tech Lizzy line, it has about eight. The designers (Wallace Sewell) were briefed to incorporate royal purple, a strident shade unlikely to be “serene” if emphasised. So it’s subsumed here amid others, representing connecting lines and suggesting train movements digitally represented in some futuristic signal box.

At Paddington, we board a Circle or Hammersmith & City line train heading east. We are now on one of the “cut-and-cover” lines just below street level. If you don’t know which lines are sub-surface, the moquette on those trains tells you. The colours of the small rectangles set against a black background denote the Circle, H&C, District and Metropolitan lines.

Moquette has a pile – tufts – that can be left as loops or cut for a more vivid colour and a velvety texture, and this sub-surface one is entirely cut, so it is not as hard-wearing as others. The seats near the doors (the most popular ones) are badly worn, with the backing fabric “grinning through”, to use the technical term. I am assured there are “big plans” to address this.

At King’s Cross we head south on the Piccadilly line to Covent Garden and the London Transport Museum. In the cafe, we sip the museum’s excellent coffee while sitting on seats covered with their own special moquette, which is red and green in homage to Frank Pick. In the museum shop, moquettes past and present are for sale as bags, cushions, pouffes and so on. That Londoners are willing to pay to have a symbol of public transport in their homes is a tribute to the legacy of Pick. As the man himself said: “The quality of our surroundings contributes to the quality of our own lives.”

Andrew Martin’s novel, The Moquette Mystery, is published by Safe Haven. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply