#11 in Top 20 London for Business · ★★★★★
Raffles London at the OWO
Whitehall, the Old War Office turned hotel — six restaurants for client variety, Spy Bar for the after.
Whitehall, the Old War Office turned hotel — six restaurants for client variety, Spy Bar for the after.
"Whitehall, the Old War Office turned hotel — six restaurants for client variety, Spy Bar for the after."
Raffles London at the OWO opened in 2023 in the restored Old War Office on Whitehall — the building from which Winston Churchill, Lord Kitchener, and the Special Operations Executive directed British military operations across two world wars. The £1.4-billion restoration (the most-expensive London hotel project of the past decade) preserved 1,100 historic rooms and converted the building into 120 hotel suites and 85 private residences. Every suite is a converted War Office room — the Churchill Suite occupies Churchill's actual wartime office, the Haldane Suite the original War Secretary's room. Six restaurants and bars under one roof — Mauro Colagreco's Saison (three Michelin stars), the Drawing Room afternoon tea, the Spy Bar (literally underground, in the original Special Operations Executive bunker), Lavery Lounge, the Guards Bar, and the Café Lapérouse. Raffles London is the right pick for the London business trip with policy-and-government clients (Whitehall is the working district, Number 10 is two minutes' walk, the Treasury is opposite the building, the Ministry of Defence is across the road), with media-and-broadcast clients producing London-from-Westminster content, and with the policy-cluster cross-Atlantic meeting where the address and the Churchillian provenance are the working asset.
Churchill Suite (converted from Churchill's actual wartime office) or Haldane Suite (the War Secretary's room). Granby Suite is the entry-level option.
The Spy Bar at 7pm is the after-meeting space — the underground bunker setting does part of the conversational work. Saison for the business dinner; the chef's table is reservation-only and books out two months ahead. The Drawing Room afternoon tea at 4pm is the working soft-meeting room.
Raffles London at the OWO sits within our broader Top 20 Hotels in London for Business list. It scored an aggregate 9.7/10 across the three editorial criteria — competitive against the field but, on business-specific factors, the angle above is what earned its rank. For the alternatives in the same London neighbourhood, see Whitehall, Westminster and adjacent. For a different city entirely, see the related lists below.
If you have already chosen the dates, our editor recommends booking the room twelve weeks ahead. The best suites with the right view orientation go first, and inventory for the popular months is quoted in months, not weeks. Suite-level rooms with private plunge pools or terraces — the ones that earn this rank — are typically the first to sell out.