Angleterre Hotel in St. Petersburg, History, Facts

Address: Malaya Morskaya Ulitsa, 24

Phone: 8 (812) 494-56-66

Angleterre hotel in St Petersburg

Angleterre is one of the most mysterious and mystical hotels in St. Petersburg. Many legends, rumors are associated with this name.

Story

The first hotel appeared in the Angleterra building in the 1940s. It was called "Napoleon", and one of its guests was Leo Tolstoy. To its current name, the hotel was a long time: it was renamed from “Napoleon” to “Schmidt-England” (by the name of the then owner Teresa Schmidt), then simply to “England”, and from 1911 to 1919, finally in Angleterre. On this, however, the leapfrog with the names did not end: Angleterre became Internationale, then again Angleterre, then Leningradskaya. Perestroika gave the hotel its historical name.

After the revolution, the hotel experienced difficult times. By 1928, nothing was left of its former luxury: nothing worked, including ventilation, there was only one telephone on the second floor, and the luxury restaurant was divided by partitions to the rooms. At the end of the fifties, the hotel was reconstructed, but very peculiar: in addition to standard rooms, there were 8-12 people (hostel Angleterre!) - however, in parallel with this were suites. Most of the rooms had no bathrooms, and in the whole hotel there was a restaurant. By the 1980s, the building was in such a state that it was declared unfit for habitation, and the hotel had to be closed.

New life

The times of perestroika “Angleterre” survived in the most literal sense of the word. In March 1987, the hotel was demolished (albeit with the preservation of the historic facade), and four years later they reopened - as part of the Astoria Hotel. The demolition of the hotel caused a lot of protest of protectors, round-the-clock pickets and rallies of many thousands.

Famous name

Angleterre has always attracted poets, writers, musicians and other creative intelligentsia. However, there is nothing particularly mystical about this: a fashionable hotel, one of the best in the city, St. Isaac's Square, two steps from Nevsky Prospect, a fashionable restaurant - where else can we stay as a bohemian, if not here? Anyway, the hotel's regular was Vasily Nemirovich-Danchenko, the guests were Alexander Kuprin, Andrey Bely and Osip Mandelstam. Famous foreigners also permanently stayed here: from the end of August 1917 to February 1918, for example, Angleter’s guest was the legendary American journalist John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World. And in the early twenties, Isadora Duncan settled here, who came to Russia to open her own dance school here.

Angleterre Hotel