Chronicle No. 65 · Places

Shepheard's of Cairo: The Terrace Where Empire Sat, and the Day It Burned

A pastry apprentice built the most famous hotel in Africa. On 26 January 1952 a crowd burned it to the ground.

Samuel Shepheard was, by trade, an unremarkable apprentice pastry chef. In 1841 he opened a Cairo hotel called the Hôtel des Anglais, at first with a partner, Mr Hill, who was head coachman to Mohammed Ali Pasha. Shepheard became sole owner in 1845, sold up in 1861 for £10,000 to the Bavarian hotelier Philip Zech, and retired to England.

The house kept his name and grew enormous. The German architect Johann Adam Rennebaum completed the definitive building in 1891; the Arab Hall followed in 1898, with further extensions in 1904, 1909 and 1927.

Its real product was the terrace, facing the Ezbekieh gardens. In 1911 the writer Blanche McManus described the scene there: a crowd, clothed in all colours, and of all degrees of brilliance, is gathered to hear the band play, gossip and watch the multi-coloured population of this most cosmopolitan of Oriental cities drift ceaselessly past.

Inside, the American Bar was so crowded it was nicknamed the long bar — for the length of the wait, not the counter. Its bartender Joe Scialom mixed the Suffering Bastard there for hungover Allied troops. Winston Churchill and the Aga Khan passed through.

And that was the problem. Shepheard's had become the most visible symbol of British Egypt. On 26 January 1952 — Black Saturday — the Cairo Fire took it, and it burned to the ground.

A new Shepheard Hotel opened on the bank of the Nile in 1957.

Every great house eventually stands for something beyond its own service. Know what yours stands for, and to whom.

“a crowd, clothed in all colours, and of all degrees of brilliance, is gathered to hear the band play, gossip and watch the multi-coloured population of this most cosmopolitan of Oriental cities drift ceaselessly past”

Lesson: A hotel is never neutral — whom you welcome, and whom you quietly do not, is read by everyone standing outside.

Shepheard's Hotel, Cairo, on a 1915 postcard — the terrace facing the Ezbekieh gardens.
Shepheard's Hotel, Cairo, on a 1915 postcard — the terrace facing the Ezbekieh gardens. — Wikimedia Commons · Unknown author · Public domain
Carriages waiting at the entrance, when Shepheard's was the address in Africa.
Carriages waiting at the entrance, when Shepheard's was the address in Africa. — Wikimedia Commons · Unknown author · Public domain
The hotel garden at Ezbekieh, early twentieth century.
The hotel garden at Ezbekieh, early twentieth century. — Wikimedia Commons · Unknown author · Public domain