Investment and development company Criterion Capital has completed the acquisition of a major central London block, buying the 732 room St Giles London Hotel.
The purchase completes a site assembly that has taken several years. Criterion already owned the basement of the property, and has subsequently acquired the freehold of the site. Now, having bought the rights to the main hotel property on the upper floors of the development, it can now look to further exploit the potential of the asset.
A Site with History
For Criterion Capital founder Asif Aziz, the acquisition puts him in control of a property that has long been on his radar. As a young surveyor, Aziz was part of an agency team that advised the YMCA on its disposal of the hotel in 1993, when it was bought by Ravenscroft Investments.
More recently, via his business Criterion Capital, Aziz acquired the site’s underground car park in 2006. He subsequently secured approval to convert the car park to create one of London’s largest underground hotels. The concept of hotels without windows has since grown momentum, and Criterion’s Zedwell hotel brand now leads on creating hotel rooms across UK sites where conversions were previously considered not possible, or too difficult to succeed.
The St Giles site was purchased from sellers, a consortium led by Malaysia’s IGB, for a price understood to be around GBP220 million. To support its aggressive expansion plans, Criterion has agreed a financing package of GBP294 million, provided by Maslow Capital.
The funds will support the St Giles site acquisition costs, and also back existing development work at another Zedwell hotel conversion site, Haymarket House, where a 508 bed Zedwell hotel is being created within a former office building.
The addition means Criterion now has a hotel portfolio of more than 3,700 operating hotel rooms across London. With existing commitments and development projects already under way, that will grow to more than 9,000 rooms by 2029.
Other active London sites for Zedwell include offices at Princes Street in the City of London, where a 150 bed hotel is planned. At Mansell Court, another empty office building to the east of the city a conversion is planned to create a 200 room hotel. In Trafalgar Square, the company has plans to convert offices in the Trafalgar Buildings property, to create Zedwell Trafalgar Square.
Adding Hotels in Regional Cities
The brand is also expanding outside the UK capital. In Edinburgh, work is under way to create a 328 room Zedwell hotel, converting a former department store on the city’s Princes Street. The property is expected to open in autumn 2026.
In Manchester, Criterion Capital is already working on its first hotel, a 187 room Zedwell on the edge of Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester, with an estimated opening date in 2027. The company has acquired a second site, on Deansgate, where it plans to convert a property to a 157 room hotel, across five floors. This received planning approval in November 2025.
