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THE WESTMINSTER PALACE HOTEL, facing the Abbey, has one of the best situations in London, and is a very good example of French Renaissance architecture. It realizes the expectations even of the luxurious of the commercial classes. One-half of the hotel is let to the India Board, else this building alone would contain three hundred rooms. It has thirteen sitting-rooms, gentlemen's and ladies' coffee-rooms (the latter an exceedingly fine apartment), several committee and dining-rooms, with one hundred and thirty bedrooms, besides servants' apartments.

Hotels - list of hotels, Victorian London

Westminster Palace Hotel, with the Westminster Column, Queen Anne's Mansions, and the Royal Aquarium. Photograph from Round London (George Newnes, 1896).

http://www.lookandlearn.com/history-images/M820811/Westminster-Palace-Hotel-with-the-Westminster-Column-Queen-Annes-Mansions-and-the-Royal-Aquarium?img=1 Look and Learn

At the Abbey end of Victoria Street, the Westminster Palace Hotel opened in 1861. Most nineteenth-century hotels were associated directly with travel – the coaching inns where Dickens’ characters stayed or the new railway hotels that were built alongside London termini through the 1860s. But the Westminster Palace was free-standing, the prototype for late Victorian and Edwardian hotels like the Ritz, the Cecil, the Savoy and the Russell. Gustave Doré and Blanche Jerrold used it as a base in producing their famous illustrated essays on London: A Pilgrimage, published in 1872. No wonder one of Doré’s most famous illustrations was of the remnants of the Devil’s Acre, only a few hundred yards away, with the strangely open space on the left – witness to the undeveloped margins of Victoria Street just out of the picture – contrasting with the dense slums in the centre of the illustration.

Victoria Street had a large number of professional offices – of charities, missionary societies, surveyors and engineers – many in purpose-built offices such as Westminster Chambers, across the street from the Westminster Palace Hotel.

Richard Dennis, Victoria Street – Virtues and Vices, Talk at ‘Too Bold for Its Day: The Development of Victoria Street’ exhibition, SW1 Gallery, 19/9/2006.

VICTORIA STREET, opened in 1851, runs to the west to (+ mile) Victoria Station. This spacious but somewhat dull street is flanked by more or less handsome blocks of offices and chambers, a remarkably large proportion being occupied by civil engineers and architects. Abbey House, formerly the Westminster Palace Hotel, at its east end, was a frequent scene of conferences, arbitrations, and similar meetings; a tablet in the old Conference Room records that the Act of Union founding the Dominion of Canada was framed there in 1866-67.

Findlay Muirhead, Victoria Street, London and Its Environs, Blue Guides London 3, 1927

Notable residents: Ray Ellington, 1953-? http://www.notableabodes.com/person-abode-details/9791/ray-ellington-musician_244-abbey-house-victoria-street-westminster-london

During the Blitz, Victoria Street was hit directly on at least eleven separate occasions.

At the eastern end of Victoria Street, nos 15-16 Victoria Chambers (on the site of today’s Department for Business, Innovation & Skills) were destroyed, as were St Margaret’s Mansions, 14 Victoria Street (north side) and businesses close to Abbey House, opposite the Sanctuary and the junction with Great Smith Street.

Ronan Thomas, Victoria Street SW1 1940-1945, West End at War

Conservative Campaign Headquarters Until 1958 CCO was based at Abbey House, Victoria Street, then moving to No. 32 Smith Square, Westminster.

Conan Doyle financed and operated the Psychic Bookshop, Library and Museum at Abbey House, 2, Victoria Street from 1925 to 1929 http://www.lostworldread.com/westminster.htm