The Balmoral Hotel by Rocco Forte Hotels

The Balmoral Hotel by Rocco Forte Hotels

At the east end of Princes Street, where the New Town gives way to Waverley Station, the Balmoral has been announcing Edinburgh's arrivals and departures since 1902, when it opened as the North British Station Hotel, built by the North British Railway Company to the designs of architect William Hamilton Beattie. The clock tower above the entrance was set three minutes fast for over a century, a courtesy to travellers running for trains, corrected to the true time only on Hogmanay 2017. Sir Rocco Forte bought the hotel in 1988 and reopened it as the Balmoral in 1991, with his sister Olga Polizzi overseeing the interiors, and the family still runs it today, alongside their hotels in Rome, Florence and Berlin. There are 188 rooms and suites, including the Scott Suite and the Rowling Suite, where J.K. Rowling finished writing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 2007, and the Royal Suite, the largest hotel suite in Scotland, with its own private entrance and a view straight up to the Castle. Polizzi's renovation kept the Edwardian bones, the marble stair, the ornate plasterwork, the scale of the public rooms, and layered in tartan, tweed and contemporary Scottish art without tipping into pastiche. Number One, the hotel's Michelin-starred restaurant, occupies a low-ceilinged, red-lacquered room below street level and has built its reputation on Scottish produce, Orkney scallops, Borders venison, langoustine from the west coast, under a kitchen long shaped by Jeff Bland's tenure as the group's director of food. Hadrian's Brasserie does the more informal, all-day version of the same larder. The Palm Court, under its glass cupola, is where the hotel does afternoon tea, with a harpist most afternoons and a whisky list that runs to some of the rarer Highland and Speyside bottlings. There's a Guerlain spa with a 15-metre pool in the old station's original vaulted ceiling, and a whisky bar, Scotch, with over 500 whiskies behind the counter. It feels less like a boutique hotel and more like a small, well-run institution, one that has hosted the Concorde crew who used to stay here between flights and the Fringe crowd who fill it every August, and the staff carry that history without making a production of it. The rooms facing Princes Street get the castle view and the tourist noise below; the quieter ones look over Waverley's glass roof, which has its own appeal if you like trains. This is a hotel for people who want to be in the middle of Edinburgh, not adjacent to it, walking distance from the Royal Mile, the National Gallery and Princes Street Gardens, and who don't mind paying for that address. You should not come if you want quiet minimalism or a design hotel that photographs like nowhere else, the Balmoral is grand rather than editorial, and it knows it. You should come if you want a proper Edinburgh institution with a Michelin-starred kitchen, one of the more serious whisky collections in the city, and a location that puts the whole of the Old and New Town within a short walk. The short version: An Edwardian railway hotel on Princes Street, built in 1902 by William Hamilton Beattie, with 188 rooms, a Michelin-starred restaurant, a Guerlain spa in the old station vaults, and a clock that used to lie to travellers by three minutes.