The Pelham has long stood apart from London’s flashier, more modern boutique hotels. This is the place for anyone who’d rather see tradition updated for a new century, rather than thrown right out the window — and, on a more practical note, anyone who’d prefer a row of townhouses in South Kensington to some converted warehouse in Shoreditch.

It takes some confidence to call a new hotel something like The Londoner; but it also takes some confidence to replace the old Odeon Cinema West End with a hotel that towers eight floors above Leicester Square, with a further six levels below ground. It’s conceived as a “super-boutique” hotel, which aims to marry the character and personalized service of a boutique with the large scale and extreme comforts of a high-end luxury operation.

You can’t talk about the Franklin without talking about Anouska Hempel, the hotelier and designer (and all-around character) who was responsible for some of London’s first wave of boutique hotels. Her latest design creation comes almost four decades after her first, with her role in the renovation and reopening of the Franklin, a row of Victorian townhouses on the ill-defined border between Knightsbridge and Chelsea — a properly posh address for an effortlessly luxe boutique hotel.

In London, the hotel world’s majorest of major leagues, even the big chains know which way the wind is blowing — away from that fusty manor-house look, and toward something altogether more clean-lined and contemporary. Nobody’s about to mistake the old May Fair for the Sanderson, but it’s plain they’ve learned some lessons from the new breed of design hotels.

Brutalist architecture is back in a big way — good news for London, which is practically swimming in the stuff. The old Seventies-era Camden Town Hall Annexe, just opposite St Pancras Station in King’s Cross, has lived long enough to evolve from an architectural pariah into something precious. After a number of developers came close to demolishing it, in swooped the Standard hotel group, who rightly saw a bit of their own aesthetic reflected in its orderly Modernist geometry. The Standard, London is the brand’s first outside of America, and it’s a perfect fit for this newly hip North London neighborhood.

The old Bow Street Magistrates’ Court has seen some history, including Oscar Wilde’s prosecution; only fitting, then, that the NoMad London, set in this venerable Covent Garden landmark, should pay tribute to the patron saint of dandies with vibrant, romantic, bohemian interiors by the design duo Roman and Williams.

The London hotel scene is something of a proving ground for new trends in the hotel business — but you’d have to look long and hard at 11 Cadogan Gardens to find any evidence of progress. This is a hotel that delights in keeping to the trailing edge rather than the cutting one, a small monument to old-fashioned hospitality and a reminder of a time long past.

London was among the birthplaces of the luxury hotel, and it was an early adopter of the boutique-hotel trend as well. But the most uniquely London form of hospitality just might be the member’s club. These meeting places have historically been approximately one part shared workspace to two parts secret society, and they’re exclusive by nature — not simply exclusive in the modern sense, meaning “expensive,” but truly selective about its clientele. Lately, though, a few of them, like Marylebone’s venerable Home House, have offered another path to (temporary) membership: if you can demonstrate that you’ve got the good taste to book a room for the night, then you’re a member for the duration of your stay.

Named for the section of a song where new, contrasting material is traditionally introduced, Middle Eight aims to do something similar for Covent Garden: adding something vibrant and memorable to the neighborhood that’s nevertheless recognizably a part of its surroundings. The immediate setting, Great Queen Street, lies just beyond the end of Long Acre, Covent Garden’s main drag, and places the hotel within walking distance of no end of shops, restaurants, bars, and theatres.

South Place Hotel offers a pitch-perfect lesson in some of the most exciting changes taking place in London — from its eastward-moving hotel scene to its most forward-thinking designers to its up-and-coming visual artists — but instead of some didactic bore, your instructor is a witty, über-savvy hotelier eager to show you a fantastic time. Of course if your hotel search has led you this far east on the map, you likely already know that the City of London and its surroundings are no longer just where Londoners work — home to one of the world’s great financial centers — but increasingly where they drink and dance and dine, far from the heavily trafficked circus of Piccadilly. And with a rooftop bar that was a coveted nightlife destination practically before it opened (LCD Soundsystem’s Nancy Whang dropped in for one of the initial DJ sessions alongside the house act), South Place knows how to play.

The Ampersand, a whimsical South Kensington hotel with a name to match, is so unabashedly, eccentrically British that it would risk self-parody if it weren’t so dashingly pulled together. Housed in an 1888 townhouse, the hotel takes the Victorian taste for eclecticism — curiosities and objets d’art abound — and gives it a thoroughly modern look. It’s a fitting style for a neighborhood whose shops run from indie boutiques to Stella McCartney to Harrods, and whose cultural institutions contain everything from the classic collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum to the irreverent pop-culture photography of the Proud Gallery.

One of London’s boldest luxury hotels takes its inspiration from across the Atlantic — the Beaumont Hotel is meant to evoke the glamour and the rush of a fictional Roaring Twenties New York member’s club. It’s in Mayfair, between Grosvenor Square and Selfridges, and despite its American accent, it’s about as Mayfair as a 21st-century hotel can get, right down to the brash, slightly puzzling piece of quasi-public art that adorns its Twenties Art Deco facade.

Long one of London’s favorite residential neighborhoods, Notting Hill has finally got a boutique hotel that’s perfectly suited to its setting. The Laslett’s 51 rooms and suites span a row of five Victorian townhouses, less than a minute’s walk from the Notting Hill Gate underground station, which means the rest of the city is convenient as can be — but while you’re here, you’re perfectly placed at the nexus of creative West London.

Located in Bethnal Green, Town Hall Hotel lies a short distance eastward of London’s traditional hospitality centers — a slight remove which, depending on your feelings about the touristic thrum of London’s traditional hospitality centers, may very well count as a merit. Bethnal Green these days, of course, has plenty to recommend it, and one shudders at the thought of what a night at Town Hall might cost were it located in the West End. A fifteen-minute Tube ride from central London is the non-pecuniary price you pay for rooms that are spacious, apartments that are downright sprawling, and services — not just a spa but an indoor pool as well — that would set you back thousands at the center of the city.

For years the City of London was a place to find the most flavorless luxury hotels imaginable; bankers and financiers, presumably, were thought to be allergic both to historical hotels and to memorable modern design. Those days, happily, are over, and it’s a good thing, because a hotel like Vintry & Mercer would have been unthinkable under the old rules.

The thought of a Spanish luxury chain moving into central London is the sort of thing that could ordinarily be counted on to attract a bit of criticism. But in point of fact, it’s hard to imagine a hotel that’s much more quintessentially English than ME London. It’s housed in a new building designed by Foster + Partners, and located at one end of the Strand’s central Aldwych Crescent, an iconic location if ever there was one.

If you know London’s Denmark Street there’s probably a musical connection. This West End street is where numerous musical publishers were headquartered, and where rock weeklies like Melody Maker and NME got their start. Later, it filled in with recording studios and guitar shops, as well as bars and cafés frequented by David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix, among others; the Stones recorded their first album here, and Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote some of their best-known songs in an office on Denmark Street. So if you expect Chateau Denmark to make something of this rock-and-roll heritage, you’re not at all wrong.

Grosvenor Square may seem like an unlikely location for a members’ club and boutique hotel aimed at the young and hip — Mayfair is ultra-luxe territory, inhabited largely by ambassadors and hedge funds. But the element of surprise is essential to any great hotel, and the Twenty Two is possessed of a vibrant playfulness that’s ordinarily found much further east.

The name is actually a charming bit of understatement — the Mayfair Townhouse is not one Georgian townhouse, but an entire row of them, fifteen in all, on the eye-wateringly posh Half Moon Street, adjacent to Green Park. And while certain other parts of Mayfair are far too rich to have a discernible personality, this hotel is up to its neck in colorful, memorable character, making much of its Oscar Wilde associations and packed with whimsical art and design objects, many featuring the fox motif that’s the hotel’s graphic mascot.

Named not for any Shakespearean connection but for its up-and-coming neighborhood in far East London, the Stratford occupies an ultra-modern tower adjacent to the Stratford International rail station. And it’s inspired not by Elizabethan England but by present-day New York, with loft-style rooms and modernist-inspired furniture and décor; the penthouse is in fact called the Manhattan Studio.

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