Travels With Hannah: UK Glamour and Gentility of Time Gone By

Our mission was clear: nine days, two adults, two children under 7, one rental car, four hotels, and one trip across the pond. The details of our trip to England would be largely up to us. The last time I had visited the United Kingdom, cell phones still came equipped with T9 texting, Bill Clinton was still president, and it was still cool to go see Paul Oakenfold spin.

That was over 20 years ago, and I had traded in tube tops, flared black pants, and tall black boots with heels for sensible sweaters, stretchy leggings, and Wellies, the uniform of a parent who spends more time cleaning up messes than looking in the mirror.

On our first full day abroad, in London, I did have occasion to make myself up a bit. We dressed for a midday tea at the Game Bird, the restaurant within The Stafford London Hotel. Chairs upholstered with vibrant bird patterns greeted us, as did a mobile wine cart, topped with an enormous, gleaming bucket, overflowing with ice-cold sparkling wine bottles.

As my children sipped tea and hot chocolate, my husband and I sipped glasses of Nyetimber Blanc des Blancs British sparkling wine. To eat: a petite sandwich of truffled egg and watercress on brioche, crustless tea sandwiches, and then a quintet of desserts meant to sing the praises of local businesses, like the Foster & Sons chocolate shoehorn, Henry Poole & Co shortbread tuxedo, and Floris English strawberry and rosewater cupcake.

Fed like kings, we retired to the chic 172-room Mayfair Townhouse, right in the beating heart of London. At dinner in the Dandy Bar, our children amused themselves running toy cars up and down the banquettes and I ordered the Scotch egg and the cocktail of the month for February, a Caribbean blue Aqua Azure, made from vodka, blue Curacao, pineapple juice, gomme, lemon juice, and frothy egg white. The theatrical, cozy bar was exactly where we wanted to be before tumbling into bed.

In the cool, February morning, we drove two hours out of the city to another Iconic Luxury Hotels property, the 86-key Lygon Arms, which has held court in the town of Broadway since the 1300s. A weaving maze of fireplaces, beamed ceilings, stone passageways, and nooks and crannies made us feel instantly at home at the Lygon.

Across from the main hotel, we found our duplex cottage: one room downstairs for our two boys, and one on top for us. A garden, full of topiary and endless paths, was perfect for meandering in the cool, gray afternoon, but then, so was all of the Cotswolds, with its green-gray hills dotted with black-headed sheep. In the afternoons, we’d retire to the main hotel to sit by one of the many fires and drink tea or Laurent Perrier.

At the Grill, the high-ceilinged restaurant with a feature fireplace right in the center, my husband and I ordered a beef Wellington for two, along with thick, seared king trumpet mushrooms and traditional Yorkshire pudding in a savory gravy.

From the oolitic limestone hills of the Cotswolds, we drove east toward County Berkshire, to Cliveden House, a storied Relais & Chateaux property that was first built in 1666 by the 2nd Duke of Buckingham as a gift to his mistress, Anna Maria Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury.

The home, set on 376 acres of National Trust grounds, suffered two devastating fires, first in 1795 and again in 1849. The second fire essentially ruined the property, and the English Palladian-style home was reconstructed with the help of acclaimed architect Charles Barry. In the late 1800s, the American-British businessman William Waldorf Astor purchased the property, the pool of which became a major part of a political scandal in the 1960s known as the Profumo Affair.

We spent two languorous nights at the 47-room Cliveden, in the Buckingham suite, with its working fireplace and sweeping views of the Parterre, the manicured garden that stretches outward from the property’s rear. We walked through a maze made from trimmed yews and then along the jade-green Thames, where spring was beginning to break free from the grips of winter. In the dining room, we ordered pots of smoky oak tea, redolent of peat, while tiers of pastries, designed in a garden theme to celebrate King Charles III’s magnificent botanicals, arrived before us.

To stay at Cliveden, with its wood-paneled resident’s lounge with books and board games, its richly textured lobby, its acres of manicured gardens, is to walk back into the glamour and gentility of time gone by. It is hard to leave a place that feels like the best home you’ve ever known, but eventually it was time to pack up and move on, toward our final destination on our iconic tour.

Not an hour later, we were in Chelsea, in the middle of London’s fashion week, checked into 11 Cadogan Gardens, the 56-guest room Relais & Chateaux property built into Victorian town houses. We walked through the neighborhood, past Ottolenghi’s pastry shop, past the tony clothing stores that were packed with visiting and local fashionistas, all the way to Harrod’s, where we bought our sons the de rigueur teddy bears as proof that we had come and conquered.

Outside, it was rainy and cool, and so we retreated, for one last afternoon, to our suite, with its pocket doors and couch, where, over a knob of truffled cheese we had brought with us all the way from the Cotswolds, we watched the gray light turn pink. It was nearly time to go home, and we had enjoyed every last crumb.