Londoners get rooftop pool atop BT Tower in hotel revamp
Key Points
- MCR Hotels will install a rooftop swimming pool 177 metres above Fitzrovia at the BT Tower.
- Public access to the top of the tower returns for the first time since the 1971 bombing closed it.
- MCR bought the Grade II listed tower from BT Group for £275m in February 2024.
- Public consultation runs at UCL's Jeremy Bentham Room on 11, 12, and 16 May 2026.
- BT must remove telecoms equipment before construction starts, with completion expected around 2030.
MCR Hotels will open a rooftop swimming pool 177 metres above Fitzrovia as part of plans to convert London’s BT Tower into a luxury hotel.
The American hotel group, which bought the Grade II listed structure from BT for £275 million in February 2024, will host its first public consultation events at University College London this month.
The proposals also include routine public access to the top of the tower and its podium buildings for the first time in nearly half a century, a new publicly accessible square, retail shops, restaurants, and walking routes through the site.
The redevelopment marks the end of the tower’s working life as a telecommunications asset for BT.
BT removed the tower’s microwave aerials more than a decade ago because fixed and mobile networks now carry the traffic that the tower once relayed across the country.
The company also migrated its Media & Broadcast services, which used the tower as a global interchange point for live television, onto a cloud-based platform.
The sale forms part of a wider property simplification at BT, which is cutting its estate from 300+ offices to around 30 as it shifts investment into fibre rollout through Openreach and reduces headcount by up to 55,000 jobs by 2030.
MCR, the third-largest hotel owner-operator in the United States with a $5bn portfolio of 150 hotels, originally appointed Heatherwick Studio as architect when the deal completed in 2024.
The firm later dropped Heatherwick and appointed London-based Orms to advance the scheme.
Orms previously converted Camden Council’s brutalist headquarters into The Standard hotel opposite St Pancras and worked on Outernet London at Tottenham Court Road.
The 189 metre tower opened as the Post Office Tower in 1965 and closed its public viewing gallery in 1971 after a bomb detonated near the top of the building.
Its revolving 34th-floor restaurant, which took 22 minutes to complete a rotation, never reopened to general visitors. The proposed scheme would restore public access to a London skyline landmark that has been off limits to anyone other than BT staff and invited guests since the bombing.
The hotel is not expected to open anytime soon. BT must decommission and remove sensitive telecoms equipment from the tower before MCR can begin construction, a process expected to conclude around 2030.
Payment for the sale runs over multiple years and completes only when BT vacates the building.
MCR will run three consultation sessions in the Jeremy Bentham Room at UCL, 23 to 25 Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT.
A virtual feedback form will go live on the consultation website at 5:30pm on Monday 11 May for those who cannot attend in person.
For UK consumers, the project promises routine access to a London skyline landmark that most people have only ever seen from below.
For BT, the new hotel closes the chapter on a building that once carried the nation’s calls and television signals but no longer fits a network running on fibre, mobile, and cloud.
