Hotel Gotham

It has 60 bedrooms spread over seven floors. While there are five opulent inner-sanctum suites (where you can pay over £1000 per night), most of the rooms are the much more affordable standard Club rooms.

The standard Club bedrooms feature king-size double beds with massive black leather bed heads, bold black and white zig-zag carpets with an espresso machine, a flat-screen TV and an en suite shower. The average Club bedroom is 26 square metres.

The Executive and Director’s bedrooms are a step up from the Club bedrooms. The Executive rooms are slightly larger (30 square metres, rather than 26 square metres) and the Directors rooms have a partition between the sleeping and sitting areas.

There are three levels of suites at this hotel. The most expensive are the five inner sanctum suites, which have no natural light and instead of windows, they feature huge ‘wonderwall’ screens that display scenes of the Manchester skyline. While most hotels’ cheapest rooms are those with no windows, at the Hotel Gotham they use this space to create their most opulent hotel accommodation.

All the rooms have free Wi-Fi wireless internet access.

The hotel has two restaurants – the Honey restaurant on the sixth floor and a branch of Jamie Oliver’s Jamie’s Italian at street level (which isn’t technically a hotel restaurant) plus Club Brass, a private members’ bar on the top floor.

The fashionable Honey restaurant serves up modern classics and regional specialities such as lamb hotpot and Manchester tart and uses local ingredients like Cheshire ham and Lancashire cheese. The restaurant’s decor is a tasteful blend of 20th-century styles including Art Deco with parquetry floors and 1900s-style banker chairs and the sixth-floor position ensures lovely views over the city. Although the restaurant is open to the public, non-guests can’t come up to the sixth floor without a reservation.

The highlight of the hotel’s bars and restaurants is Club Brass on the top floor, which is an exclusive retreat accessible only to hotel guests and Club Brass members (who pay £750 per year for the privilege). The bar is modern yet cosy with lots of dark wood, tin-tiled walls and leather booths and there are also three outdoor terraces that are a lovely spot for drinks at sunset. Bar snacks include the likes of caviar and oysters although you can also get something less ostentatious like salads, sandwiches or pudding.

The Hotel Gotham is noted as a favourite of Manchester’s VIP crowd and it is a popular spot for celebrities visiting the city. Being home to the BBC, Manchester attracts a lot of film and television stars and they need to stay somewhere.

You are welcomed to the hotel by bell boys at the ground floor entrance hall, but only guests (as well as members of Club Brass and those with reservations for Honey) are allowed up to the main sixth-floor reception. This ensures a level of privacy for the hotel’s celebrity clientele but also means that non-guests can’t lounge in the hotel reception.

The Art Deco building on King Street was designed for the Midland Bank by Edwin Lutyens – a leading architect of the day, who was instrumental in designing New Delhi – and opened in 1935. The neoclassical Art Deco design is striking for Manchester, a city noted more for its Neolithic architecture. The building was home to the Midland Bank until the 1990s and home to HSBC until 2008 and opened as the Hotel Gotham in April 2015.

The plush decor is a clash of mid-century themes with fittings that remind you of the building’s banking history such as imitation gold ingots in the bathrooms, money bag laundry sacks in the bedrooms and vault doors to access Club Brass. Wherever possible the building’s original fixtures have been restored with brass handrails and terrazzo flooring. The clash of interior styles would look tacky anywhere else, but somehow it just looks right inside this solid Art Deco building. It’s what the Bat Cave would look like if Bruce Wayne took an interest in interior decoration rather than fighting crime.

The building’s unique decor has seen it used as a television set with a Coronation Street scene filmed in one of the bedrooms and scenes from the Real Housewives of Cheshire filmed in Club Brass.

The King Street location puts Hotel Gotham right in the heart of Manchester’s main shopping area with lots of restaurants and bars nearby. It is equidistant to Manchester Piccadilly, Victoria and Deansgate stations and also to Salford Central station; around a 15-minute walk to either railway station.