DoubleTree by Hilton Kingston upon Thames

This modern upmarket hotel has 146 air-conditioned guest bedrooms. Each room comes with a comfortable bed, a work desk, a flat-screen television, ironing facilities, tea and coffee making facilities and en-suite bathrooms with Crabtree & Evelyn toiletries. King Corner guest rooms are a little larger and have Illy coffee machines and the hotel’s suites are larger still with separate living and sleeping areas.

Some wheelchair-accessible rooms are available.

The rooms are tastefully decorated in a blue, brown and grey colour palette and feature floor-to-ceiling windows and the en suite bathrooms are decked out in black marble.

Hawkers Bar & Brasserie is the hotel’s in-house restaurant with a brasserie-style menu that includes burgers, deli sandwiches and pizza. The restaurant is named after Harry Hawker, the Australian aviation pioneer who was the chief test pilot for Sopwith and who went on to found the Kingston-based company that designed the Hawker Hurricane aircraft. There is a subtle aviation theme inside the restaurant, and elsewhere in the hotel, with an Art Deco style that is a nod to Hawker’s heyday in the 1920s.

Other hotel facilities include a business centre with copying and printing facilities and an on-site fitness centre.

All areas of the hotel have free Wi-Fi wireless internet access.

The hotel is in the centre of Kingston upon Thames, which is an affluent middle-class suburb next to the River Thames in southwest London. It is close to all the shops, cafes, restaurants and pubs of central Kingson including the lovely stretch of restaurants along Riverside Walk. It is only a 10-minute walk to a large complex of parkland, encompassing Bushy Park and Hampton Court Park, and a lovely 20-minute walk through the park to reach Hampton Court Palace.

If you would rather not walk all the way to Hampton Court, you can hop on bus routes 111, 216 or 411, which all go to Hampton Court Palace.

The hotel is close to Kingston railway station (in zone six), which has six trains per hour to London Waterloo with four running via Wimbledon and the other two going via Richmond and Twickenham. The journey time to Waterloo is around half an hour for trains running via Wimbledon and 47 minutes for trains running via Twickenham.

Although not particularly close to Heathrow Airport, there are direct bus connections between Kingston and Heathrow with bus route X26 running to Heathrow Airport every half hour. The trip to the airport takes around 45 minutes and only costs £1.60. There are also other direct buses to Heathrow, but the X26 is the quickest option.