Whitbread appoints contractor for new Vauxhall hotel

Best News

Travel

Whitbread appoints contractor for new Vauxhall hotel

admin

September 22, 2026

Whitbread has announced the appointment of contractor Legendre UK to convert an 80,000 sq ft vacant office building in Vauxhall into a 180-bedroom Premier Inn hotel.

Construction work at Phoenix House, a 10-storey former office opposite Vauxhall Station, is scheduled to begin later this year, with completion expected by the end of 2027.

The hospitality business has signed a 30-year lease with Lambeth Council, which acquired the property in 2004 and retains the head lease. The building was used for council offices until 2019.

Whitbread said the project would retain the building’s existing structure, convert office space into hotel bedrooms and upgrade the mezzanine to create a guest restaurant and reception area.

The development forms part of Whitbread’s central London expansion plans. The company said it operates more than 100 hotels within the M25 and has identified 40 potential growth locations.

The completed hotel is expected to create around 25 permanent jobs. Legendre UK is also developing a 171-room hotel at Grove House in Hammersmith and a 429-room scheme at Park Royal.

Sam Murphy, project and programme manager at Whitbread, said: “Phoenix House is a fantastic opportunity to bring Premier Inn to the heart of Vauxhall for the first time. Working alongside Lambeth Council, we have moved quickly from securing the site and achieving planning consent to starting the transformation of the vacant office building into a modern, high-quality Premier Inn.

“The project demonstrates how former office buildings can be successfully repurposed into Premier Inn hotels and I’m looking forward to working with Legendre UK to deliver the next phase of the development and help bring another excellent Premier Inn location to Central London.”

Thomas Vandecasteele, managing director of Legendre UK, said: “We are delighted to be working with Whitbread to give Phoenix House a new lease of life as a Premier Inn. The project draws on our experience delivering complex refurbishment and conversion projects in London.

“This is our first project with Whitbread and an exciting first step in what we hope will be a successful long-term relationship. We look forward to working closely with the wider project team to deliver a high-quality hotel for Vauxhall.”

Vauxhall turns Whitbread’s office pipeline into a building programme

News Analysis

The route to Vauxhall runs through a repeatable leasehold-led opening programme. In January 2025, Whitbread said its annual additions had passed 1,000 rooms. The programme relied entirely on leased developments and included several vacant-office conversions. That history makes the present project an extension of a delivery model already producing openings: Whitbread supplies the covenant and hotel operation, while property partners supply buildings whose former use has run out.

Whitbread broadened that model as it assembled the London pipeline. It bought Red Lion Square freehold in February 2025, then acquired Dorset House in May 2025, using ownership where central sites were available while accepting different tenure elsewhere. The sequence established a flexible property strategy, with tenure subordinate to control and location. Its common requirement was an obsolete office on the London network plan; the form of the property deal could vary.

That flexibility quickly became a capital programme. By December 2025, Whitbread had assembled four central London office conversions, with Vauxhall the leasehold element alongside sites it had bought. The programme had moved beyond scouting isolated opportunities and into deploying capital across a defined group of buildings. Whitbread committed more than £100m and placed close to 1,000 rooms into its secured pipeline.

Source link

Whitbread has announced the appointment of contractor Legendre UK to convert an 80,000 sq ft vacant office building in Vauxhall into a 180-bedroom Premier Inn hotel.

Construction work at Phoenix House, a 10-storey former office opposite Vauxhall Station, is scheduled to begin later this year, with completion expected by the end of 2027.

The hospitality business has signed a 30-year lease with Lambeth Council, which acquired the property in 2004 and retains the head lease. The building was used for council offices until 2019.

Whitbread said the project would retain the building’s existing structure, convert office space into hotel bedrooms and upgrade the mezzanine to create a guest restaurant and reception area.

The development forms part of Whitbread’s central London expansion plans. The company said it operates more than 100 hotels within the M25 and has identified 40 potential growth locations.

The completed hotel is expected to create around 25 permanent jobs. Legendre UK is also developing a 171-room hotel at Grove House in Hammersmith and a 429-room scheme at Park Royal.

Vauxhall turns Whitbread’s office pipeline into a building programme

News Analysis

Source link

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy.

The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making

The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy.