London luxury

The British capital's most iconic hotels are eager to welcome the growing wave of Chinese tourists, Mike Peters reports, with the city's best shopping and dining in easy reach.

Claridge's. The Berkeley. The Connaught. These iconic London hotels boast such colorful history and character that millions who never slept there feel they know them well, thanks to movies, literature and celebrity sightings.

Claridge's, in fact, is the subject of an immensely successful BBC documentary. The Guardian newspaper, noting the hotel's history in the context of the current buzz over the new Great Gatsby film, hints that novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1921 stay at the hotel was a harbinger of the glamor to come, and notes that "interior architect Basil Ionides' 1929 overhaul transformed Claridge's into the self-appointed 'art deco jewel of Mayfair'."