Anniversaries invite sentiment;
Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons earned something better. In 2024, forty years after Raymond Blanc OBE opened the doors of his Oxfordshire manor, the hotel was crowned Winner of Best UK Hotel of the Year at the
2024 Travelling for Business Awards, a ruby-year triumph over the finest names in British hospitality.
The numbers behind the milestone remain scarcely believable. Within a year of opening in 1984, the honey-stone 15th-century manor at Great Milton won two Michelin stars, and it has never let them go, four unbroken decades at gastronomy's top table, a feat no other British country-house hotel has approached. A Michelin Green Star, held since 2021, recognises the sustainability woven through the operation, from the celebrated potager that supplies the kitchen to a philosophy of seasonality that predates the term farm-to-table by a generation.
Yet Le Manoir, now part of the Belmond family, has never been merely a restaurant with rooms. Thirty-two individually designed rooms and suites, twelve themed gardens including the tranquil Japanese tea garden, two thousand fruit trees and the Raymond Blanc Cookery and Gardening Schools compose a complete world, one that happens to sit within easy reach of Oxford, Heathrow and London, which is why boardrooms have long borrowed it for retreats, client dinners and occasions that need to be unforgettable.
Judges in 2024 saluted both the legacy and its living energy: an anniversary year of special menus and celebrations that treated four decades not as a museum piece but as a running start. In a shortlist completed by Cliveden House and The Pig at Harlyn Bay, the verdict confirmed the country's most decorated hotel as, still, its best.
The anniversary year itself became a masterclass in how heritage institutions stay current. Special menus revisited four decades of the kitchen's greatest hits, celebrations drew alumni chefs whose careers began in Blanc's brigade, a diaspora that has seeded top kitchens across Britain, and the gardens continued their expansion as a living curriculum for the cookery school. Le Manoir at forty behaved like an institution mid-story, not one taking bows.
The
Travelling for Business Awards exist to mark exactly such standard-bearers, and Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons' 2024 title honoured a British institution at forty, with its founder's maxim, only the sublime, undimmed.
