Great Scotland Yard Hotel

GSY is a 5-star hotel in London and part of the Hyatt Unbound Collection. Inspired by the historic significance of the address and the opportunity to do something different, the Dubai-based 21 Holdings commissioned Hollandridge Group to curate a significant new collection of paintings, sculpture and installations recalling the location’s past. The new owners wanted to define the Great Scotland Yard Hotel by its art, using the artworks to reveal the building’s distinctive, rich history, but not in a way that was predictable or themed.More »

Lobby - 'Service' by Nicola Green

In this work Nicola Green explores themes of leadership, race, gender, and religion. “Great Scotland Yard has a compelling history. The name alone has become synonymous with policing, and probably the most famous law enforcement agency in the world,” says Green. “This led me to so many stories – most of which are already in people’s consciousness – but I also wanted to tell the tales of the unsung heroes, the trailblazers who have fought for a fairer and more equal society.”More »

The Forty Elephants

The Forty Elephants bar gets its name from a rapacious female gang from Elephant and Castle. A striking portrait of The Bob Haired Bandit – another creation of Green’s – hangs over the fireplace. At first thought to be of the gang’s leader, Alice Diamond, investigation revealed that it is actually her accomplice Lillian Rose Goldstein.More »

Marcus Hodge

Contemporary abstract art also lends focus and colour to the Lobby, including a work by Marcus Hodge, which forms part of a series called Gateways signalling his transition from a figurative painter to abstraction following pivotal trip to India.

Koestler Arts Installation

We learned of the Trust’s work through an exhibition of prisoners’ art curated by Sir Antony Gormley. The installation includes a sad-looking, large-eared English Bull terrier, a giant matchstick made from matchsticks and a clock with bat wings entitled ‘Time Flies’. The incongruity of these artists’ creations ending up in Britain’s most famous former police station won’t be lost on anyone.

‘Knowing that their work can be displayed in public is a boost for our artists,’ says Fiona Curran, director of arts at The Koestler Arts. ‘Art changes prisoners’ lives and it can make a real difference.’

Funds were donated to Koestler Arts to support their art outreach programmes in prisons across the UK.

The Inquiry

Another notable name among the artists selected for the Great Scotland Yard project is Ann Carrington, a favourite of designer Paul Smith whose glorious Jubilee banner graced the Royal Barge for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

She brings alternative royalty to the hotel in the shape of large portraits of Queen Victoria and the present Queen, inspired by postage stamps but composed of the pearl buttons used by Pearly Kings and Queens. These will grace The Inquiry, the hotel’s reception.

The Parlour

The Parlour is presented as a Colonial tearoom where the origins of tea are celebrated in Breath the 2019 triptych created by Olivia Fraser. The hotel’s owners had connections with the Great East Indian Company and were keen for Percy-Davis to create an Indian vibe here. The imaginative result was worked up in collaboration with the Grosvenor Gallery, who helped arrange this commission.

The Síbín

The artistic pace changes again in The Síbín, a bar dedicated to the delights of all things whisky. This seemed the perfect opportunity to commission an artist, Alastair Mackie, to whom I was introduced by my business partner Alex Hammersley. We sat down and talked about what he could do – we already had oak panelling which refers to how the whisky’s aged – and we were keen to introduce the grain element. Mackie’s work, entitled 'Field, 2018', features an installation of corn dolls; tiny, individual sculptures created by weaving and plaiting grain stalks, an old rural craft used to appease the spirits of the crop at the end of the harvest.
Mackie says: “Growing up on a farm the harvest and, more broadly, our connections to and dependence on the natural world had early and profound influences on my interests as an artist.”

The Basement

Head to the basement, which houses the gym and meeting rooms among other facilities, and you will find images of the Kray twins presented as a cross between sculpture and mixed media collage on perspex, either side of a police box executed in acrylic paint and ink on paper which has been ingeniously slashed and twisted by the artist. Close by are Bourke’s highly coloured forged bank notes on brushed aluminium, whilst an alcove in the basement is filled in with a bookshelf series by British digital print maker Phil Shaw featuring crime novels; the authors and titles on the brightly coloured dust jackets merge and mix, forming unexpected connections so the viewer becomes the detective solving a riddle as they unpick titles by Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy L Sayers.

Andrzej Urbanski

An abstract triptych in the Basement by South African based Andrzej Urbanski stops you in your tracks; the hard-edged irregular shaped canvasses follow a considered composition of overlapping forms and colours. Urbanski’s intense application is clearly influenced by growing up in Berlin’s “grey zone’ after the fall of the wall where he immersed himself in the street art.

Julio Alan Lopez

All around the hotel you will find the show stopping and the quirky, such as contemporary depictions of Londoners by Julio Alan Lepez. His characters marry quintessential British icons with his Latin American roots: a secretary-like figure leaves Number 10 Downing Street, a guardsman takes a selfie and a tired bobby lounges in a floral wing chair.

The Bedrooms

Unusually for a hotel, there is individual art in the bedrooms, we commissioned works from Andy Malone, Nicola Green and Alexander Korzer-Robinson, among others.
The intricate and surreal collages by Korzer-Robinson, a German-born artist, tell stories through the medium of antiquarian books, cut page by page to reveal their illustrations. Leading names from the past are included too, in surprising ways. One collection of works in the bedrooms, for instance, features a series of artist-designed boxed scarves by giants of 20th Century Modern British Art, including David Bomberg, Victor Pasmore and Graham Sutherland.

Green has also produced a series of prints for the hotel bedrooms. In these works, she has transformed the historic Millbank Prison floor plans and police hats into pared down graphic patterns. These are embellished by hand with 24k Gold and metal leaf.

Inspired by the artist Richard Hamilton, we designed our own collage for the bedrooms based on Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop, the relief work printed on layered wood veneers, references London life, from the Kray twins driving a red Routemaster bus to the Gherkin protruding on the horizon. Even indie Rock band Florence + the Machine feature. We were trying to combine lots of different elements of the story in a playful way with a modern twist.