Cheltenham, United Kingdom

No 131

Price per night from$162.85

Price information

If you haven’t entered any dates, the rate shown is provided directly by the hotel and represents the cheapest double room (inclusive of taxes and fees) available in the next 60 days.

Prices have been converted from the hotel’s local currency (GBP132.05), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.

No 131 Photos

Style

Mod-Georgian pad

Setting

Boutique boulevard

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Skirting the edge of Cheltenham’s Imperial Gardens, No 131 is the pride of The Promenade. Formed of several listed townhouses, this spirited stay splices Georgian heritage, mod-British design and contemporary art to spectacular effect. Most rooms are classically British, dressed with wooden panelling, tweed headboards and cosy woollen bedspreads. In the top two tiers, the designers doubled down on the decadence with Chinoiserie-style paintings, rakish sofas and throws the colour of gemstones. What underpins it all is a sense of informal elegance, which can be felt in the lively Asian-fusion restaurant and Gin & Juice bar, stocked with 400 varieties of its namesake spirit. On the subject of revelry, No 131 is no stranger to a knees up: from Thursday to Saturday, the cocktails flow freely and DJs spin in the bar until the early hours.

Smith Extra

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A bottle of Bramley bath product

Facilities

Photos No 131 facilities

Need to know

Rooms

36.

Check–Out

11am, but flexible, subject to availability. Earliest check-in, 3pm.

More details

Rates exclude a Continental buffet breakfast of bread, pastries, home-made jams, cold meats, cheeses and fresh juices and made-to-order à la carte hot dishes including eggs-many-way on sourdough toast and fluffy pancakes.

At the hotel

Lounge, covered terrace, bookable private dining room, free WiFi. In rooms: flatscreen TV, minibar, hot-water bottle, art books, Nespresso coffee machine, tea-making kit, free bottled water and Bramley bath products.

Our favourite rooms

All 36 rooms have mod-British looks, a king or emperor-size bed and a large rainfall shower, so there’s no skimping on the essentials. The Excellent and Outstanding Rooms are the most indulgent, featuring higher ceilings, tall casement windows and period features like cast-iron fireplaces or parquet floors. Rooms in the King’s House – the most recent addition to the hotel – have a darker palette that skews a little more modern. If you’ve no intention of joining the party in Gin & Juice, request a room here as they’re furthest away from the bar.

Packing tips

Swarovski binoculars to track your gee-gees.

Also

A day at Cheltenham’s racecourse can be nerve-racking – unwind with a muscle-soothing treatment at nearby Cowley Manor's spa.

Children

Welcome. Extra beds (£25 a night for under-16s) and free cots can be added to most rooms.

Food and Drink

Photos No 131 food and drink

Top Table

Settle into a spot on the terrace.

Dress Code

Leave your hoodies, caps and flip-flops at home; opt instead for jeans and luxe knits by day, a bit of sparkle by night.

Hotel restaurant

Food is served throughout the hotel, where guests linger over seasonal British fare in handsomely proportioned Georgian rooms brought up to date with flashes of neon and a splash of art deco. For breakfast, take your pick from the Continental spread and order decadent plates of eggs Florentine, smoked salmon and scrambled eggs on sourdough toast, granola and avo on toast. Come evening, tall stools slink around the imposing central bar of the hotel’s fine dining restaurant, Yoku. It’s worth letting staff know that you’ll be dining at the hotel: tables are popular, with an Asian-inspired menu featuring an edit of sushi, wagyu skewers, crispy king prawn spring rolls and miso-marinated black cod. 

Hotel bar

Head to Yoku or Bar Tokyo for an apéritif, where asian cocktails like Sakura sours and banana & pineapple rum runners are served under the restaurant's opulent chandeliers. The downstairs Gin & Juice bar, a great post-dinner option, is a buzzy and attractive affair sprawling across several rooms, each with a different feel. The long zinc bar is at the heart of the action; resident mixologists have already established it as the best cocktail bar in town with their carefully crafted menu of sours, swizzles and highballs. Order the house cocktail, a delightfully blue coupe of gin and blue raspberry syrup topped with a lemony froth – the bar is heated in the winter, and in good weather the roof opens up for a garden-party feel. Thursday–Saturday things shift into weekend mode with late opening and some top-drawer DJs (Norman Jay, DJ Yoda and Gilles Peterson have all graced the decks). 

Last orders

Breakfast is served 7.30am–11am, lunch noon to 3pm, dinner at Yoku 6pm–9pm (10pm on Fridays and Saturdays, closed on Sundays and Mondays).

Room service

A full menu is available online during restaurant hours.

Location

Photos No 131 location
Address
No 131
131 Promenade Cheltenham
Gloucester
GL50 1NW
United Kingdom

Flanked by the Cheltenham Ladies’ College and the Imperial Gardens, No 131 is on a broad boutique-lined avenue leading down to the town’s high street.

Planes

Bristol Airport, an hour’s drive away, serves domestic and European flights, with onwards connections from Brussels, Amsterdam or Paris. London Heathrow is just over 90 minutes away.

Trains

Cheltenham Spa station, a five-minute drive from hotel, serves Cross Country and First Great Western trains to Swindon, Bristol and London Paddington, as well as Cardiff, Birmingham and Aberdeen.

Automobiles

You won’t need a car for a saunter through Cheltenham’s Georgian quarters, but if you plan on exploring further afield there’s metred on-street parking (£10 a day) in the surrounding area. From London, the drive to Cheltenham's under two and a half hours, and No 131 is just 10 minutes from junction 11 of the M5. Be sure to park in the street behind the hotel before you pick up a parking permit.

Worth getting out of bed for

No 131’s city-centre location is hard to beat. The Promenade is lined with the high street’s pick (Whistles, Hobbs, the White Company); for a leisurely browse of Cheltenham’s best boutiques, jewellers and gift shops, walk up the gentle hill to the Montpellier quarter. Across the road, the Imperial Gardens hosts events throughout the town’s festivals – time your visit to coincide with October’s Literature Festival or June’s food-and-drink-fuelled revelry. No 131 is a renowned party pad from Thursdays onwards, so keep an eye on their events programme and you might just catch a star DJ spinning down in the Gin & Juice bar. If you want to explore further afield, the hotel can arrange riding trips, fishing on the River Coln or clay-pigeon shooting lessons with Olympic trainer Ian Coley, as well as bike hire and picnic hampers for a gentler amble through the Cotswolds.

Local restaurants

Don’t be tempted to take a taxi to Le Champignon Sauvage: you’ll be thankful for the appetite-whetting 20-minute walk there. This small restaurant’s earned praise aplenty with its scintillating menu: expect the very best of the Cotswolds’ farmed and foraged produce – wood pigeon, Hereford snails, ground elder – transformed by gifted hands. Finessed French-fusion plates such as pea and mint kofta, smoked duck, and cured mackerel await at Muse Brasserie, dished up in an equally tempting teal-and-blush dining room, lined with walls of wine bottles and adorned with boughs of apple blossom. The rooftop setting may be the headline act at the Nook, but we’re eyeing the cocktail list and the prettily presented mod-European plates including pan-fried halibut with confit fennel and stuffed saddle of venison. 

Local cafés

Start your day with breakfast at local café the Find, where you’ll find meaty and veggie takes on the Full English, spicy harissa eggs on toast, and fruit-topped porridge. It’s also open throughout the day for leisurely lunches, impromptu pit stops, and dinners on Friday and Saturday nights. 

Local bars

Stop for a glass of wine at vintners John Gordons; the deli has smoked mackerel pâté, charcuterie platters and handsome pies to snack on, too. Carrying on the vino theme, wine-not (sorry, not sorry) head to the Retreat; the menu includes leek and gruyere tarts, gnocchi with grilled courgette and pub classics such as honey roast ham, egg and chips.

Reviews

Photos No 131 reviews
Guy Woodward

Anonymous review

By Guy Woodward, Magazine connoisseur

Right from when I was little, I’ve been a fan of the communal hotel lounge. As a bright-eyed seven-year-old keen to make friends on holidays at garishly decorated Cornwall hotels, I liked that it was both useful and a glimpse into an adult world. Especially if there were board games. I loved board games.
 
These days, the appeal is of a different nature. Being an adult, I am less sociable, and don’t hang out there to meet people. Indeed I prefer not to, save for the occasional reassuring bit of small talk. I am not hoping for a game of Cluedo, either, or even Connect Four. No, this haven now speaks to me simply of indulgence, of afternoon tea, of a sanctuary from chores (and, ideally, from precocious seven-year-olds). And of magazines. I love magazines.
 
So does Mrs Smith. And fortunately, the lounge at No 131 in Cheltenham comes stocked with plenty of them – notably those ‘aspirational’ food, travel and lifestyle titles, laid out extensively on shabby-chic wooden tables that are the perfect height at which to lay your feet (don’t worry – the ‘pre-loved’ nature eradicates any guilt you may feel at such overly familiar behaviour).
 
It takes more than a bunch of glossy magazines to keep me and Mrs Smith happy, I should add. We do not spend our spare time lingering in dentists’ waiting rooms. And it’s true, we do have a sitting room at home where, all being well, only Mrs Smith will ever disturb me. Yet somehow, the lounge at No 131 offers more by way of relaxation. It helps, of course, that in contrast to our own home (and certainly those Cornish guesthouses of my youth) an interior designer has been consulted. The result is a modern interpretation of its Georgian heritage, all high ceilings, vast sash windows, wall-dominating artwork and lavishly upholstered, eccentrically coloured armchairs. The result? Plonked here, we immediately switch off, free of distraction, to be interrupted only by obscenely young members of staff offering pots of tea.
 
Despite its stately reputation, Cheltenham has a fairly young feel. We are advised by said staff to take a stroll to the neighbouring Montpellier district, home to an eclectic mix of faintly Bohemian, arty boutiques, purveyors of everything from retro typewriters to bespoke stationery – both of which Mrs Smith developed a sudden hankering for. The hotel had emailed prior to our arrival to give us the lowdown on events happening. Art featured heavily, from the newly extended Wilson Gallery, to a pop-up outdoor exhibition on the green opposite.
 
This ancient yet modern feel exists throughout the hotel. The colonnaded Georgian architecture backdrops the convivial bar terrace looking onto Imperial Square. Its interior is contemporary, but lived in, materials are often natural and placement is stylised – it’s classic but cool. The creaky, wooden stairs to our room take us past exposed light bulbs in birdcage shades to carpeted corridors and more quirky artwork.
 
We’d booked a Very Good room – a halfway house between the mere Cosy and the extravagant Excellent, combining qualities of both. There are lovely all-natural toiletries; there’s a Nespresso machine; an iPod dock; a big TV with Sky; movies galore via a clever Apple entertainment package; oh, and more magazines.
 
Throughout it all are little touches that make Mrs Smith and I feel warm inside (perhaps too warm on occasion, of which more later). There’s the cute presentation of the hotel particulars in a faux hardback novel on the desk; the wooden stool in the bathroom, where I perch to groom as Mrs Smith defoliates; and the tray of juices and pastries delivered to our door each morning. We learn that some rooms – the Excellent ones, presumably – have reconditioned, freestanding Rogeat Lyon baths dating back to 1875. But frankly, they would have to be made from diamond-emblazoned platinum to outdo the two showers that grace our rather splendid bathroom. Not just any two showers, either. Two walk-in showers with that overhead waterfall thing. All rendered in a classic, understated way to complement the vintage tiling and old-school toilet replete with satisfying pull chain.
 
It’s the same downstairs. The bar is a proper one, with proper barstools, but decorated in oh-so-cool-right-now teal (right down to the luminous cross on the wall, emblazoned with the disconcerting message ‘Sin will find you out’). The extensive cocktail list borrows from – and credits – various incarnations around the world over the last century or so. The dinner menu in the relaxed restaurant – all wooden boards and not a tablecloth in sight – makes a big play of steak, and delivers on the promise, again with homey touches: oversized tea-towel napkins, sauces delivered in mini saucepans, fries in cute little buckets. Service is a bit hit and miss – the downside of such youthful staff – but we stagger upstairs with a fuzzy glow.
 
There is a further bar further downstairs – the more locally-populated Crazy Eights. Thankfully, it’s not too crazy, though it does get pretty lively later on – as evidenced by the hum and chatter seeping up through our open window (and the jar of painkillers provided atop the bar at breakfast). Why the open window? Ah yes, that warmth. A decent air-conditioning system is the only element missing, since the building’s Grade-II-listed status precludes any such installation. It’s a minor quibble though, and fans (and earplugs) are provided – at least it provided grist to the small-talk mill when I bumped into another guest having tea in the lounge…

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