Once the sumptuously-decorated ballroom of the Great Eastern Hotel, Hamilton Hall was moth-balled at the start of World War II and was largely forgotten until the early 1990s, when it was converted to a Wetherspoons pub and named after Lord Claud Hamilton, the nineteenth-century chairman of the Great Eastern Railway Company. Fortunately all the original fixtures and fittings were rediscovered in an old storeroom. It must now be of the grandest bars in London, a single, large, high-ceilinged space with a balcony above the ground-floor bar, ornately decorated with chandeliers, mirrors, framed murals and plaster mouldings, in the Rococo style (or Late Baroque), an eighteenth-century Parisian artistic movement.