We had been unhappy with our original London hotel and booked another hotel from Paris. And here is the one great drawback to technology: During our train ride we had been using the laptop, on battery power. By the time we neared London and needed to check our confirmation e-mail for the address and name of the new hotel, the battery was dead. Flat as a Parisian crepe. We knew that the hotel was in the neighbourhood of the earlier hotel, but exactly what street it was in, no idea. The girl at the hotel information counter at St Pancras station was able to give us the address to the Bentley Hotel. To our surprise she told us it was a "2-star" hotel. This was news as we had decided to splurge and book what we thought was a 4-star hotel. But it was too late now! It was all booked and paid for. So we approached it with some trepidation. As you'll see from the picture below it was a rough 2-star hotel, and we just had to slum it .

By choosing a new hotel in the same area (Gloucester Road, Kensington) we knew where the Tube station was and we had our favourite restaurants and shops, all without consulting a map. So that unlike most of our time in France and Belgium, sometimes we actually knew where we were.