Stayed for 3nights in August and my only complaint was the weather. The hotel is in a really great area to visit London.The street outside is quiet but yet you are only minutes from Oxford street and the centre of London. If you stay around the hotel there are quite a few restaurants and bars in the Russell Sq area.
The hotel itself is very welcoming and anything we asked for was organised.
Read some of the previous reviews and think they must have been to a different hotel.
Room was fine and breakfast was good and the staff friendly and welcoming.
This is a small bed and breakfast but very good and we would stay again.

I have just returned from London where I spent a total of nine days at the Thanet Hotel in London's Bloomsbury -a very convenient area for shopping and going to the theater and right near the British Museum and interesting restaurants. The Thanet at 8 Bedford Place has a bright blue awning and boxes of lush blooming flowers on either side of the steps to the entrance. The rooms are bright and cheerful with colorful bedspreads and drapes. The single rooms are rather small for a stay of more than 2 or 3 days, but the owners will allow you to stay in a larger room at the single price if there is one available. (In the recent heatwave,small had the advantage as the fan provided quickly cooled the room.) There is a dining room on the ground floor overlooking the street where a very good English breakfast is served, with lots of choices, including great sausages brought in from the country. Richard and Lynwen Orchard, the owners and managers, are very friendly and thoughtful concerning their guests needs. It has become a home away from home for me.

We booked a quad room at this hotel through Laterooms(--) based on the positive reviews on this website and the pictures and descriptions on the hotel's own website. We were looking forward to a cozy and welcoming B&B. We should have paid more attention to the review entitled "Avoid the 3rd floor at all costs". When we arrived at the hotel, they insisted that we sign in before showing us our room (we should have seen the red flag right there), but we were tired after a 15 hour train trip and checked in first.

We were shown to room 15 on the 3rd floor. Albert did help with the luggage, but the stairs to the 3rd floor were so steep as to make me worry about my children's and my own safety. Once in the room, things did not get any better. While it was clean and had a fireplace, there is nothing else positive I can say about it.

The floor was tilted so badly that the head was lower than the foot of the beds, the bathroom was so tiny that you needed a shoehorn to get in and out of it, and the floor creaked so badly when you walked on it that anyone getting up in the middle of the night would certainly wake everyone else up. The worst thing, though, was the heat. Room 15 used to be the attic, and it is directly under the roof. We arrived during a heat wave (a rare event to be sure), but the room was sweltering. There was only 1 tiny window. Albert suggested that we keep the curtains closed and stay out during the day, returning to the room only at night when it might be cooler, which to me was not a solution. What is the point of having a hotel room if you can't go there except to sleep? We sometimes like to rest a bit before going out in the evening, for example. We asked about getting a fan, but there was none to be had. After 15 minutes in the room, we decided we couldn't take it anymore, and called our 2nd choice hotel, which had a room available.

When we came downstairs with our luggage, we told them we were leaving, and when it became clear that there was no way we would stay without being given a different room, they offered to call us a cab. We accepted their offer, but they instead called a private car hire service (no doubt getting a little kickback in the process), which turned out to be more expensive than a city cab would have been.

When I contacted the manager (who was out of town when this happened) to request that he waive the cancellation fee of one night's stay since we had not been offered a satisfactory room in the first place, he instead told us that because we had booked through Laterooms, he was obligated to charge us for all 3 days of our planned stay. It was only after I contacted Laterooms and my credit card company that he agreed to refund us 2 of the 3 nights. Needless to say, we won't be back.

This was our third stay at the Thanet and it will likely be the last. I still adore the location and the room was fine: small but clean and comfortable with nice tea making service. However, we stayed for five days and it was probably the last day before the breakfast servers and one of the two men at the desk decided to smile. We travel often and prefer small hotels and B&Bs; we almost always feel welcomed and enjoy chatting with the folks who work there. Not the case this time. The older woman who served us in the breakfast room made us feel like we were imposing simply by sitting at the table. The same offerings each morning also got a bit tiresome so perhaps we just stayed too long. The atmosphere simply was not friendly.
Next time, we'll pay a bit more and stay elsewhere.