Compass Hotels moves out of Kings Cross

Compass Hotels will this week transfer its London headquarters to Harpenden from its flagship hotel, the Great Northern hotel at Kings Cross, which closed its doors to customers last month.

The hotel had just completed a four-year refurbishment programme and the scaffolding had only been down for a month when it realised last December that long-planned developments at Kings Cross and St Pancras stations over the next six years would prove much too noisy for its guests to tolerate.

General manager Mike Davies, who has been with the hotel for 13 years, said landlord London and Continental Railways had agreed to take back the lease and compensate Compass Hotels.

The Grade II-listed hotel with 87 bedrooms and nine conference rooms was built in 1854 as London's first purpose-built railway terminus hotel.

Compass Hotels was set up by two former directors of British Transport Hotels in 1983 to buy from British Rail the leases for the Great Northern hotel and the Great Eastern hotel at Liverpool Street (now owned by Conran Holdings and Wyndham International).

The company is left with management contracts for the Abbey hotel in Bath and the Manor House hotel in Alsager, Cheshire.