The Lost Hotel in Talaat Harb Mall

When you enter Talaat Harb Mall, imagine that if you wanted to spend a lively evening, you would continue straight ahead into the nightclub. If you wanted to spend a day or several days in a room or suite, you would turn left and find reception staff welcoming you, and if you continued walking, you would reach the cafeteria. These were the directions in the historic National Hotel, whose site is now occupied by Talaat Harb Mall.

To learn what the hotel’s overall appearance was like, leave the mall and go to the corner of Talaat Harb Street and Abdel Khalek Tharwat Street. Look at the residential building occupying the corner next to the mall, topped by a dome, or “shakhshikha,” to see what the “lost” hotel looked like. It shared half of the site with that building and had the same exterior appearance.

When it opened in 1921, the hotel stood out from other hotels in central Cairo because people who did not wish to stay there could still enjoy time in its cafeteria, restaurant, or bar, or spend an evening in the nightclub, which shared its entrance and was called “Perroquet,” without needing to be guests. This generally led to the hotel being classified as a second-class hotel compared with luxury hotels in central Cairo such as the Savoy, Shepheard’s, and the Intercontinental. This was reflected in the type of guests, who included second-tier officials, senior employees, and Egyptian and foreign technical experts, in addition to tourist groups. In this respect, it competed with several hotels of the same class in Downtown.

The hotel reached its peak occupancy, like other Downtown hotels, during World War II. As occupancy continued to decline in the late 1950s and 1960s, the hotel management sought to expand its resources by converting part of its basements facing Talaat Harb Street, which contained service facilities such as the kitchen and laundry, into a single clothing store, specializing particularly in leather goods, with multiple entrances accessed by stairs descending below street level. The corner where Talaat Harb and Abdel Hamid Said Streets meet was also used as the headquarters of a travel and tourism company, reached from the street by a newly built staircase.
In the early 1990s, the hotel closed and was demolished. The National Bank invested its land in building Talaat Harb Mall, with five floors in addition to the basement.