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Project editors : Jennifer Duggan, Merrill Fabry, Lucy Feldman, Dan Macsai, Cate Matthews, and Nadia Suleman The third in Olga Polizzi’s mini-collection of hotels, the Star opened in its current guise in the medieval village of Alfriston in June 2021. This 15th-century inn, named southeast England hotel of the year in last year’s Best Places to Stay, was transformed with the design-focused eye of Polizzi and her daughter Alex, TV’s Hotel Inspector. Bedrooms in the original building and the modern Sixties-built wings are generous in size and lively in looks, with colourful patterned fabrics and original art on their walls. Food is a focus too, as Tim Kensett, an ex-River Café chef, assuredly uses excellent local produce. For many years known as The Times Top 50 Employers for Women, these awards are run by Business in the Community (BITC), a not-for-profit organisation founded by King Charles, a fact which adds to the credibility of this popular scheme. There is no survey for this list but there is a comprehensive entry form that needs to be completed (this is where we can help). The form consists of three parts: Arty Margate gets the hotel it deserves in Fort Road Hotel, which opened in August 2022, transformed from a ruin of a building just behind the Turner gallery. Aimed squarely at weekenders Down From London for the slightly gritty seaside cool, it has rooms so hip you’ll even want to take the kettle home. There’s great food in the herringbone-floored ground level dining room and a choice of basement bar and rooftop terrace — one of the best places in town for Turner-esque sunset views. Art covers the walls, with an emphasis on works by female artists.
The owners are not just a match made in hospitality heaven, but motivated by the best intention: community spirit. He is Tim Bevan, executive film producer of rom-coms including Notting Hill. She is Amy Gadney, a contemporary artist. They snapped up this pub in their home village of Ramsden two years ago to save it from Spoons-style homogeneity. Their refurbishment has produced interiors as effortlessly alluring as Julia Roberts and as pretty as the pictures in their revolving art exhibitions. The kitchen’s elevated pub grub includes bavette steak and rooms come with four poster beds and roll-top baths. This collection of 21 barns and cottages on a former dairy farm outside Coddenham was conceived as a balm for stressed-out souls, and with its sustainable ethos, fabulous kitchen, outdoor hot tub and country-chic interiors, it delivers handsomely. It’s good fun too, with young staff bringing a sociable atmosphere: at breakfast on a Saturday, the triple-height Great Barn is abuzz. But post breakfast and spa treatments, couples will want to hide away in cosy rooms done out with four-posters and luxuriously deep tubs. In the evening, chef Adam Spicer, a finalist in MasterChef: The Professionals, explains his tasting menu to diners while guitarist Peter Hemsworth plays singer-songwriter classics. There’s a touch of Withnail & I about this brilliantly rebooted 16th-century inn in Shipton-under-Wychwood, near Burford and Bourton-on-the-Water. The racing-green tongue and groove walls, topped by a mishmash of quirky monochrome photography and mounted butterflies and flying insects, lend it an air of dashing respectability — but a frisson of dissolute intention hangs over the bar. It’s a proper boozer, so beer is served in dimpled glasses and the dining is fun, with refined and retro dishes such as venison bourguignon. The ten rooms are briskly boutique. Seaham Hall sits on low cliffs, near a long and lovely beach — but this forward-thinking five-star, east of Durham, has never made much fuss over its sea views. Or rather, it didn’t until May this year, when it opened the two self-contained, single-storey Residences in its grounds, which gaze in wonder at the North Sea. They’re the finishing touch, completing a hotel that already has a sizeable, Buddhist-inspired spa, eye-catching bedrooms and — best of all — an exceptional chef and kitchen team. Come for the beach, stay for the food and don’t forget a walk around Durham Cathedral on the way home. If the weather’s on your side, the whole weekend will feel magnificent.This cluster of barns and outbuildings, reimagined as a 31-room country-house hotel in 150 acres of working ethical farm outside Lechlade, is the definition of eco-chic sustainability. From its botanically themed bedrooms and seasonal-dining cookery to its flower-powered spa and spring-fed swimming pool, it provides such a persuasive argument for organic principles that even determined climate deniers will have their heads turned. To ensure its tasteful interiors remain tranquil, it is an adults-only playground. If you’re in your partner’s bad books, a day in the Botanical Bothy spa within a spa, followed by a slap-up dinner, guarantees a resumption of domestic bliss.
Audience and digital team: Samantha Cooney, Maya Chung, Annabel Gutterman, Soo Jin Kim, Caroline Olney, Kitty Ruskin, Kari Sonde, Kimberly Tal, and Juwayriah Wright The most popular reason why organisations enter awards is to attract and retain customers. The second most popular reason is to help them attract and retain talent. In fact, it is extremely rare that any awards planning session by Boost doesn’t include both as priorities.
Teaching rankings
Yes, we all know it starred in the 1990 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, but don’t typecast the Headland just yet — this Cornish grande dame on the outskirts of Newquay is so much more than its reputation as a spooky Victorian pile. It’s springing into the 21st century with upgrades to its bedrooms as well as a new multimillion-pound restaurant set to open in 2023. Throw in the fact that it’s still family-owned and on the doorstep of one of the country’s best surf beaches, and the Headland will surely put you under its spell. Sorry. Entry is exclusively through the WorkL for Business platform, with organisations asked to set up and send out a survey to their employees. The survey includes questions specially designed by employee experience experts across a range of engagement drivers including: Empowerment, Reward & Recognition, Job Satisfaction, Information Sharing, Wellbeing and Instilling Pride. Every organisation which enters will also receive a complimentary 12 months digital subscription to the Times and the Sunday Times. As your car sweeps up the drive, the River Skell pounds by on one side and Pride and Prejudice-worthy gardens appear on the other. Impressive — but still outshone by the heart-stopping perfection of this Palladian mansion outside Ripon. You could gain some serious weight here. There are brasserie bites at Fletchers, afternoon tea in the Main Hall and dinner at its Michelin-starred Shaun Rankin restaurant, glammed-up Asian restaurant EightyEight, or alpine-inspired Après at the Orchard. Fortunately, Grantley also has one of the UK’s best-equipped gyms to work off excess baggage as well as a sparkling spa and 47 restful rooms. The organisation with ‘the biggest graduate recruitment target,’ within the edition is Teach First. This teaching programme, targeting low income schools and communities has 1,750 places. Other ‘substantial individual graduate recruiters include the accounting and professional services firms PwC, Deloitte and the Civil Service Fast Stream.’ The former has 1,100 vacances whilst the others have 1,000. As each investor is different and will select different investments (particularly if they are a DIY investor) this makes it difficult to compare the performance.
While most companies won’t charge you for transferring your investments to them, others will charge you when you try to leave. It’s hard to find a proper boozer these days, but somehow the young team behind this 200-year-old Zeals coaching inn understand good old-fashioned hospitality better than their elders. They haven’t tinkered too much with the time-honoured formula of flagstone floors, hop-strewn beams, upturned barrels as tables, blazing fires and local beers. But they’ve updated the tempo by introducing a bold colour scheme, bolder art, pub classics on the menu and adding six boutique bedrooms. Best of all, the staff bring generosity, enthusiasm and a sense of humour to work, so a stay easily becomes a feelgood experience. The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers is the definitive annual guide to Britain’s most sought-after and prestigious graduate employers.In the current climate, it would be understandable for graduates to expect a huge drop in employment opportunities post university. 1/5 thof employers have stopped making job offers for vacancies in the Autumn of 2020, whilst 2/5ths have warned that ‘they are likely to recruit fewer university leavers over the next twelve months.’ So if you’ve got a diverse portfolio with different holdings, you could pay hundreds of pounds in switching charges. The Coronavirus pandemic has also opened many opportunities for graduate employment. For example, the edition highlights the experiences of one Leeds graduate who worked alongside eight others at the Nightingale hospital in London. Another worked at a Coronavirus testing centre, through AstraZeneca.
As with previous years, the process involves a thorough survey and a huge written entry. This written entry can be completed and updated across the entire year. If you need a helping hand setting up the ISA, choosing the investments and deciding how much to pay in, Kellands* is offering all of our readers a free hour-long session* with one of its independent financial advisers. They can get a good idea of your financial goals, and help you take the first step to achieving them. What are the fees on an ISA? A quarter of top employers in the UK hope to hire more graduates in 2021, and 1/3 are confident they will match their previous intake. Alice Hawthorn was a racehorse that galloped to glory more than 50 times in the 1840s. These days, put your money on her namesake, an 18th-century inn in Nun Monkton which was first past the post in our 2021 hotel awards, taking the title of best bolt hole in the north of England. On arrival you will nod to cows grazing on one of the UK’s oldest working greens — despite being just a 30-minute drive from York city centre. Before you know it, you’ll be ensconced in the airy, grade II listed inn, munching your way through superior pub grub. Then it’s a choice between cosy rooms upstairs or Scandi-cool garden suites, all glass fronts, fur throws and Douglas fir exteriors. However, according to this year's edition of the Times 100 Graduate Employers ‘there continues to be a wide range of entry-level opportunities' at the organisations featured in the annual guide.
League Tables
You should also be able to invest in funds and investment trusts, though you’ll need to watch out for the charges that can be attached to these accounts. This once-neglected Braemar coaching inn reopened in 2018 after a four-year makeover that earned it our Hotel of the Year title in 2019. The new owners are Iwan and Manuela Wirth (of Somerset’s Hauser & Wirth gallery), and it was the art they installed that first hit the headlines, with a Lucian Freud casually hanging by reception and a Picasso watching over guests in the lounge. Since opening, the hotel has added a whisky bar, guided activities and an annual literary festival that was headed up in 2022 by Ian Rankin and Sebastian Faulks. It’s the place to stay on Royal Deeside. Kayaking, sailing, paddleboarding, osprey-spotting: it sounds like a recipe for a Lake District holiday. But this is Rutland Water, the halfway point between Peterborough and Leicester. Now, thanks to Rutland Hall’s crisp (but not yet all-encompassing) makeover, there’s a family-friendly base on the shoreline as well. This is not, however, a conventional hotel. Accommodation fans out from a medium-sized mansion to a series of annexes and lodges, surrounded by 65 acres of parkland and serviced by a separate restaurant, as well as a 22m pool. Sybarites might baulk at the distance between everything. For families, however, that’s all part of the fun. JAKE EASTHAM Overall winner and Southeast England hotel of the year The Retreat at Elcot Park, Berkshire If anything, 2021’s East Anglian regional winner is even better this year, having achieved its aim of becoming a local boozer first and restaurant with rooms second. When it opened in Fakenham last July the owners used every gadget in the boutique toolbox to turn a beautifully located yet run-down Greene King pub into a fashionable rule-breaker. Expect a flagstone-floored pub, where gamekeepers and farm workers mix with fashionably dressed Londoners over, respectively, pints of Barsham bitter and craft Negronis. Above that, seven colourful, designer bedrooms: some with views of the River Wensum, straddled by the mill, and others overlooking the surrounding fields.
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