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In late June, I needed to spend the night in London without having any place to do so. So I booked a room at Dean Street Townhouse because someone, somewhere, I swore, told me they’d liked it. Yet as I sat in the back of a black cab from Gatwick, smelling like the soggy pasta I ate 8 hours ago in seat 42B and sending the same text over and over—“You liked Dean Street Townhouse, yeah?”—I got the same response. “Never stayed.”
Check-in at the hotel, which is part of the Soho House group, is at 3 p.m. I arrive just past noon. The interiors feel like a polished English country house: a rich wooden bookcase lines the peach painted walls and a chandelier hangs from the ceiling, while a circular turquoise tufted velvet couch sits in the middle. Just beyond is another sitting area where a coffee table has a print copy of The Daily Telegraph. Antique lithographs hang right behind it. My room isn’t ready yet, but the woman at the reception desk tells me a secret: behind that bookcase is a trick door that leads to a corridor with two full bathrooms. Would I want to freshen up?
It’s there, jetlagged in a secret shower lined with Cowshed spa products, that the lightbulb finally goes off. Wait—I didn’t hear about this place. I read about it. In Spare.
Yes, Spare: Prince Harry’s scorched earth memoir that sold 3.6 million copies in its first week and dominated the newspaper headlines for many weeks more. Because he revealed everything! He revealed that Camilla Parker Bowles allegedly leaks private information about the royal family to the press. He revealed that Prince William allegedly physically assaulted him. He revealed that he (not so allegedly) got frostbite on his penis. And he revealed the origin story of how, exactly, he met his now wife Meghan Markle: “Soho House at 76 Dean Street. It was her headquarters whenever she came to London,” he wrote. “Sometimes she just left her luggage at Soho House for weeks. They stored it without question. The people there were like family.” The couple met there for their first date, for which Prince Harry was 30 minutes late.
But that was far from Dean Street’s only mention. The pair held several clandestine dates there, including one where Harry “navigated a sort of maze through the bowels of Soho House” before finally reaching Markle’s hotel room. They spent the night together: “In the morning we needed sustenance. We phoned room service. When they knocked at the door, I looked around frantically for a place to hide. The room had nothing. No cubbyhole, or wardrobes, no armoire,” he wrote. “So I lay flat on the bed and pulled the duvet over my head.”
And there I was, standing in a towel, in those same bowels where their famous love story began.
Maybe I should say infamous. Ever since Harry and Meghan left the royal family in 2020—which they announced, somewhat chaotically, via Instagram—they’ve been a couple shrouded in controversy: some people love ’em and think they were crushed by an outdated institution that refused to change. Other people hate ’em and think they just want to be stars in the spotlight. Some people think it’s a mix of both, and some people just don’t care. But for the past eight years—since news broke that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were dating—it feels like we haven’t gone a single day without their names in the papers.
A few hours later, my room is ready. I’m handed a heavy bronze metal key that looks like it should be unlocking a vault of secret treasure rather than a hotel room. After a few twists of the knob, the door swings open. Inside is a four-poster bed with a floral headboard all surrounded by walls painted a soothing pale blue—like if Daphne Bridgerton took a time machine to the 2020s and decided to redecorate. A claw tub sits by a window where Dean Street bustles below with Britons drinking pints outside a nearby pub on the first nice day of summer. It’s all very lovely. But instead, my back is turned and I’m staring at the wardrobe in the corner. Its presence deeply disappoints me, as it means that I don’t have the same room as Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
Lying in bed, the raucous cheers from the pub crowd becoming a kind of white noise, I wondered why I even cared. Perhaps it was because I was conditioned to. As a child, my life revolved around Disney movies. And just as I grew out of those, I grew into Kate Middleton: in March 2004, The Sun broke the news that Prince William had a girlfriend: “Wills gets a girl!” read their frontpage. It somehow reached me, a sixth grader in the suburbs in Connecticut, whose parents allowed her an hour a day on the family’s Windows 2000. Despite Kate being a child of multi-millionaires who went to prestigious English schools, they painted her as a Cinderella: she was a middle class girl who managed to win the heart of the future King of England through beauty and grace. In my freshman year of college, I set my alarm to 6 a.m. so I could watch their wedding—but I partied too hard the night before and slept through it. When I woke up and realized what happened, I felt disappointed in myself, despite it being the wedding of these two distant people I didn’t and would never know.
As Kate Middleton stepped into her role as Princess Catherine, I stumbled into my early twenties. I met a boy that I loved. For a while, it was perfect. Then it wasn’t. And every time we fought, a delusional thought crept up from my subconscious even as I fought to push it back down: What if a prince was still waiting in his castle? Just as our relationship ended, the press uncovered Prince Harry was dating Meghan Markle. The familiar narrative I’d thought about had actually emerged: an American commoner had charmed the Prince of England with her elegance and intelligence.
Until it went completely and utterly off the rails. The British tabloids published racist articles about Meghan and paparazzi began to swarm her home. Meghan’s own father sold her out to the press—and told TMZ he wasn’t coming to the royal wedding before his own daughter. A year and a half after their wedding, they quit the monarchy entirely. In March 2021, the Duchess of Sussex revealed to Oprah she struggled with suicidal thoughts through it all. As I sat on my couch, watching it all unfold on television, I texted my sister: “Well, this is all just really fucking dark.” Suddenly, a prince seemed like the last thing anyone, anywhere would ever want.
My phone buzzes and I look at the WhatsApp notification. “Grabbed us a table outside,” it said. I jot up, take a quick look in the mirror, and put on some lipgloss. “Be right there,” I text back in the elevator.
I walk out to Dean Street and he’s there watching the crowd. His sunglasses are on and his legs outstretched.
“Hi,” I say in my American accent.
“Hello,” he says in his British one. He smiles. I smile right back.
