Regent's Palace Hotel

The Regent's Palace Hotel on Glasshouse Street, just off Piccadilly Circus, was one of the largest hotels in Europe when it opened in 1915. For much of the mid-twentieth century its bar was one of the most reliable gay meeting places in central London.

The hotel was designed by Henry Tanner and built by J. Lyons & Co. – the same company that operated the Lilypond Corner House a short walk away on Coventry Street. With over a thousand rooms and a ground-floor bar open to non-residents, it offered the same useful quality as the Lilypond: crowds, anonymity, and the cover of ordinary commercial life.

Matt Houlbrook's Queer London (2005) places the Regent's Palace bar within the circuit of queer Piccadilly that gay men could work in an evening – the Criterion to the south, the Lilypond to the east, the Trocadero to the northeast, and the Regent's Palace to the north. Its bar attracted a mixed clientele, and the presence of gay men went largely unchallenged for decades. The hotel's size and transient population made sustained police attention difficult.

The Regent's Palace closed in 2005 after ninety years of operation and was subsequently redeveloped. The building's exterior on Glasshouse Street survives largely intact.