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More ultra-short walks

Person walking in London The Savoy Hotel on the Strand in London, opposite the Strand Palace hotel

Strand

Savoy Hotel

A five minute walk from Covent Garden station

London ultra-short walk - 29

The entrance to the Savoy Hotel is tucked down the only road in London where cars drive on the wrong side.


It is the adjoining Savoy theatre that was built here before the hotel. The Victorian impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte, needed a modern, comfortable venue to show musical operas that he was promoting, by Gilbert and Sullivan, such as H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzance (1879), and The Mikado (1885). The shows were a great success and enabled Carte to fund the building of his luxurious hotel next door.


The Savoy name was chosen because of the riverside palace that once stood here belonging to a 13th-century nobleman from the western Alps, Peter II, Count of Savoy. There are plaques on the walls which detail some of the history, and the gilded statue on the canopy is of Count Peter himself.