Hotel Café Royal

At the beautiful Hotel Café Royal on Regent Street, Suzette Field’s A Curious Invitation organises extravagant masked balls, taxidermy classes, and wonderful, intimate salons. Suzette has played a huge part in making London’s party scene fun and glam again, and was a pioneer of vintage-inspired cabaret and burlesque in the city. The hotel has been amazingly restored, and the salons are always interesting—historian Antonia Fraser on life with Harold Pinter, for example. Plus it’s a chance to check out the mad, gilded, mirrored Oscar Wilde Bar—a place where the man himself once held court.