Townhouse 8 at The Standard hotel is one of those places meant to feel exclusive without ever quite saying so. You take a lift requiring a key, pass through a door masquerading as a cupboard, and step into a soft-carpeted, mid-century-modern suite scented with cedarwood and dry cleaning, where a record collection sits untouched — more ornament than archive. Out on the wraparound terrace amidst manicured fatsias, a barbecue hissed into life. Sausages were tossed on. From up here, the view is mostly roofscape and scaffolding, London’s back teeth.
St Pancras Chambers loom sternly at one end, once famed for the “moving rooms” — the city’s earliest passenger lifts, where butlers waited on each landing with stems of sherry to calm the nerves of guests disembarking, unable to comprehend how they had risen without walking — while the cranes at the other end twitched like egrets in steel. But no one was here for the view. Today was about Highland Park, and about a man called Gordon Motion.
