Side by side Four Seasons Hotel London at Park Lane vs Four Seasons Hotel London at Tower Bridge

This is the hotel that put Four Seasons on the map outside North America, opened in 1970 as the Inn on the Park, and it still runs on the idea that comfort beats opulence. You're not paying for a jaw-dropping lobby. You're paying for a quiet street two minutes from Hyde Park, blackout curtains that actually work, and a staff that remembers your coffee order and your kid's name by the second morning. The location alone, tucked between Hyde Park and Green Park with Knightsbridge and Mayfair in walking distance, is hard to beat in this city.

The building itself splits opinion. Some love the residential warmth; others find the 1970s exterior flat and the renovated rooms oddly designed, with a doorless closet and a single light switch shared between the bathroom and the dressing area that means a 3am trip lights up the whole room. Breakfast is the other place it slips: the tasting menu at Pavyllon gets people genuinely excited, but the standard a la carte breakfast has produced repeated billing confusion, and one family's confirmed gluten-free order still arrived as regular bread, cold, on a birthday. Ask for a park-facing room; the rear rooms look onto a car park, not greenery.

Book it if you want London handled quietly and well: a hotel that solves jet lag and looks after kids without turning the stay into a production. Skip it if you're chasing the kind of history and drama you get at Claridge's or the Dorchester down the road, both of which trade some of this warmth for a grander sense of occasion. For a family wanting Hyde Park on foot and a bed that actually works after a long flight, this is still the one to book.

This is the former Port of London Authority building turned Four Seasons, and the scale of that conversion is most of the case: five-metre ceilings, hand-carved plasterwork, suites that run to 70 square metres with gas fireplaces and freestanding tubs. Base rooms face an internal courtyard rather than the Thames, but the trade-off is quiet, genuinely quiet, in a way few central London hotels manage. The building alone is worth the detour east.

The catch is location and food, and both are price-conditional rather than dealbreakers. Tower Bridge and the Tower of London are on the doorstep, and the tube is a minute away, but Mayfair and the West End are a 30-minute Uber, which matters if that's why you're in London. Afternoon tea is the recurring sore point: guests report 45-minute waits, cold scones, savoury portions that don't match the sweet course, and a kitchen unwilling to comp a top-up on a five-star bill. Breakfast is similarly hit-or-miss for a hotel at this level, while the Rotunda Bar's cocktails get named and praised repeatedly, with Trey behind the bar coming up on his own merits.

The spa is a genuine draw, an 18,000-square-foot basement space with a proper sauna and steam room, best visited early morning before the pool fills with children (there's a no-kids-after-11am window that regulars plan around). Book this for the room, the quiet, and a hotel that resolved a broken air conditioner at midnight by moving a guest into a better suite without fuss. Skip the tea, and if Mayfair proximity matters more than square footage, that's a fair reason to look elsewhere.