The Grosvenor Hotel on London's Park Lane is one of the world's premier five-star hotels, an unabashed temple to extravagance and glamour. Built back in the 1920s on the site of the former London residence of the Dukes of Westminster, this magnificent palace of luxury today boasts some five hundred bedrooms, an opulent ballroom and a 2,000-capacity Great Room that, over the years, has played host to an array of glittering events from society charity balls to TV award ceremonies. In Celebrity Hotel, Neil Kirby, a former General Manager of the Grosvenor, looks back at his extraordinary rise from below-the-stairs washer-up to bespoke-suited manager and, in doing so, lifts the lid on this formidable institution. What emerges is an entertaining, highly amusing portrait of two contrasting worlds the below stairs world of the hundreds of pageboys, chambermaids, valets and porters who keep the hotel's cogs turning and the exclusive, above stairs one of the well-heeled, spoilt and super-rich.

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