Forty years ago I stood outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square with about 100,000 other people, shouting slogans against US nuclear weapons, against Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. As I write this, I am inside the now-former US embassy, gazing down on a statue of a slightly dim-looking Ronald Reagan from a room in The Chancery Rosewood, the new hotel that now occupies the huge old building, while holding a handwritten card that tells me I am Guest No 1.
It has been a long rebirth – a reported £1bn construction project (Rosewood is cagey about costs) that has seen most of the building, a midcentury monster of a structure, demolished and replaced, with its distinctive eagle-topped façade retained and expanded. And it has become a quite splendid hotel.
The hotel’s southern Mediterranean brasserie Serra
The embassy was a massive cold war statement, the physical manifestation of a new world order from across the Atlantic in which the US now called the shots: when it was commissioned in 1955 the Soviets were still building in the neoclassical socialist-realist style. It was originally designed by one of the most versatile architects of the modern era, the American-Finnish Eero Saarinen, whose buildings include The Gateway Arch in St Louis, the incredible concrete expressionism of the TWA Terminal at JFK – also now a hotel – and the terminal building at Dulles International Airport. (The TV series Severance used his Bell Laboratories in Holmdel as the Lumon HQ; suitably cool and sinister, exactly contemporary with The Chancery.)
