Page 108 - Livre Beau Rivage Palace

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This chequered history is a reminder that the concept of interwar haunt of kings, princes and film stars, and makes the most for the annual conferences of the main political parties (and to taking long walks or drive(s) towards the fine golf course at Sospel’. This
the international grand hotel is itself not always straightforward, of this lively and sometimes exalted past on its website, where the some who have never done so, usually because their holding of was the stuff of specialised interest rather than popular or enduring
especially when a building’s career is not linear and intersects with conference and its associated security measures (including a Royal the office predated the foundation of the hotel or its use as a party legend. But the Elstree Moat House Hotel, in the outer suburbs
a complicated national and international history. The subsequent Air Force observation post on the Great Pyramid of Cheops) are conference headquarters). In this guise, as a local journalist put it, of north London, shows much more interest in its own links to
meetings of Great Power leaders at Potsdam, in the summer of given extended treatment. 24 the Imperial ‘became the virtual seat of government on many occasions, the soe and in other exciting aspects of its past than does the St
the same year, also formed part of what became an extended This should also remind us that associations with international most notably during the momentous 1963 Conservative conference when Ermin’s, even though in this case the actual building associated
negotiation between the identities of palace, hotel and museum for high politics and diplomacy are not solely a matter for Europe or the leadership of the party was battled out within its walls’. The key with the soe, the Thatched Barn ‘roadhouse’ hotel, built between
the buildings in question. The Cecilienhof, part of the Sans Souci indeed the West. The key meeting in the development of a provisional speeches in the struggle between R. A. Butler, Quintin Hogg and 1927 and 1933, was demolished in 1989 and replaced by a new
Palace complex, was the last palace to be built for the German International Civil Aviation Authority, for example, took place in the future Sir Alec Douglas-Home to succeed Harold Macmillan hotel on the same site, diluting the directness and authenticity of
imperial family, completed during the First World War but in the 1944 at the Stevens Hotel in Chicago, as 52 participant nations and as prime minister were made in the Winter Gardens conference the hotel’s status as a ‘real place’ with direct and tangible links to
fashionable English Tudor style which had international currency 2 observers, with 955 delegates, laid the foundations for what was arena, but the real power struggles took place within the hotel, ‘real people’. It is now celebrated as the wartime site of inventive
at the time. After its use for the Potsdam conference in 1945 it to become a highly important post-war international regulatory which ‘was busier at 4 a.m. than at 4 p.m. due to the seething mass of secret activities, including the manufacture of exploding rats and
became a museum, and part of it eventually became a hotel, in organisation for the growth of commercial air transport. The people who just wouldn’t go to bed because of the great dramas unfolding’. other devices aimed at demoralisation and destruction, while also
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which combined guise it became the heavily guarded location Imperial Hotel in New Delhi, originally an Art Deco building of Such contests for control, at a time when British influence was still drawing attention to its pre-war incarnation as a playground for
for the g8 foreign ministers’ summit meeting at the end of May the mid-1930s, has been described as the place ‘where the nation of genuinely global in its reach, were of far more than merely national film stars from the nearby Elstree studios, and a rather louche spell
2007, as well as for international gatherings on climate change Pakistan was founded’ in the post-imperial settlement of the mid- significance. as a Playboy Club in the 1960s. Here the marketable nature of past
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and world trade during the German presidency of g8 during that 1940s, and visitors who are aware of its past are apparently prepared An example of a different but related sort is the St Ermin’s associations is based on their retrospective glamour and colourful
year. Its earlier role as a base for top-level diplomatic negotiation to pay a premium to stay in the old wing, to conjure up the ‘ghosts Hotel, close to London’s Houses of Parliament, a middle-ranking aspects, the tales that can be told about them, rather than more
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was emphasised in reports on these meetings, which may come of Nehru and Jinnah’. The relationship between grand hotels and metropolitan hotel rather than an international palace, which direct association with great diplomatic events or international
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to provide in their turn an additional dimension to the future international politics has been a genuinely global phenomenon, at celebrates its lavish Victorian interiors (it was built between 1887 high society.
mystique of the palace hotel itself. least since entrepreneurs (mainly European or from the eastern and 1889, and became a hotel in 1900), but is coy about its historic Even a solid English provincial town-centre hotel like the
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Earlier conferences in the series organised by Allied leaders to shores of the Mediterranean, in the first instance) started providing role as the original headquarters of Special Operations Executive George in the Yorkshire manufacturing centre of Huddersfield
discuss issues of mutual concern during the second half of the war accommodation with such pretensions wherever imperial (soe), a British Second World War covert operations body directed may have laid claim to an internationally significant past: it was
might also be held in former palaces. The use of the Mena House travellers began to generate demand for their services in the great against the German occupying forces on the European continent, here, at the end of August 1895, that the meeting was held which
Hotel on the outskirts of Cairo, convenient for the Giza pyramids, international age of steam, as in the case of the Raffles Hotel in and about its importance as a meeting place for a right-wing faction established rugby football’s Northern Union, which split off from
for the summit meeting of November 1943 was a case in point. Singapore and the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, both founded in within Britain’s parliamentary Labour Party during the 1970s, the national amateur Rugby Football Union to form the basis for
This attractive but eccentric hotel had been the royal lodge for 1887 as pioneer ventures in their particular parts of the world. 27 which might be thought to prefigure the emergence of Tony Blair’s the separate sport of rugby league, which is now played in more
the Khedive Ismail, enlarged in 1869 for the visit of the French Nor are such acknowledgments and commemorations ‘New Labour’. Here we have an interesting past which requires a than thirty countries across the globe. This has inscribed the name
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Empress Eugénie before passing into private English ownership of meetings with international import necessarily confined to certain amount of specialised cultural capital to be appreciated by of the George Hotel in the history and foundation myths of an
and becoming a hotel under the unpredictable stewardship of the the great international capital city or resort hotels. The Imperial what is unlikely to be more than a niche market of the curious and international sporting body with an important cultural presence in
Locke-Kings. The English novelist and travel writer Evelyn Waugh Hotel at Blackpool, the most prestigious and politically significant well informed, especially where the subject matter is the internal France, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea (where it is the
commented in 1930 on its ‘terrific charges’ and lax administration, but establishment (opened in 1867) in a seaside town whose dominant factional history of a national political party. Something similar national sport) and the Pacific Islands as well as in northern England,
praised the tranquillity, the luxuriance of the gardens, and the ‘very identity soon came to be that of the world’s first working-class would apply to the Hôtel Annunciata in Mentone, on the French a distinction that the hotel itself proudly celebrates on its current
great beauty of the surroundings’, while he enjoyed the picaresque seaside resort, with an overwhelmingly domestic and enduringly Riviera, where an international guide book in 1938 highlighted website. Here we have an interesting example of a meeting whose
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variety of international tourist life – ‘Australians in jodhpurs with regional visitor trade, has dedicated its Number 10 Bar to the presence of ‘the famous French statesman, André Tardieu, who can original dimensions were small and provincial, with delegates
topees and fly-whisks’ and ‘astonishing courtesans’. The hotel was an celebrating the British prime ministers who have stayed there be seen quite frequently with other leaders of the French Right parties arriving from a relatively small area of industrial England, but whose

Banquet at the Beau-Rivage Palace during the first International Union of Architects
(UIA) Congress. The UIA was founded in Lausanne on 28 June 1948 with Jean Tschumi
as chairman of the organising committee. Also present at the banquet was the
honorary president, the French architect Auguste Perret.

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