Hotel deals and special offers in South East

Imagine a luxurious resort with spa, pools, tennis, kids’ club – even a cookery school – at a quintessentially English country house, and you’ve captured the enduring appeal of Chewton Glen.

Standing grandly above the Thames, in National Trust gardens and pleasure grounds, an Italianate mansion built by Charles Barry for the Duke of Sutherland ‘seems to have hosted everyone who is anyone’, from Winston Churchill to Lawrence of Arabia.

The lovely views across the Evenlode valley from the terrace or dining room could almost distract you from the exceptional food at this dining pub-with-rooms on the edge of a Cotswold village.

A passion for Kent produce, a monthly dining club, tee times and transport to nearby golf clubs, including Royal St. George’s, are among many reasons to commend Marc Bridgen’s village gastropub.

In a lovely village roamed by New Forest ponies, on the Beaulieu river, this Victorian Arts and Crafts inn is run as a luxurious, characterful hotel, with fine-dining restaurant and a pub in a 1920s wing.

Amid the evocative, sheep-grazed wetlands of Romney Marsh, between golf course and shingle beach, an Edwardian house built by Clough Williams-Ellis is now ‘a lovely, secluded hotel’.

A timber-framed and tile-hung dining pub-with-rooms in a hilltop High Weald village is the veritable cat’s whiskers, say many of our readers.

The eggs Benedict are ‘made right’ at Mindi McLean’s B&B, in this ‘beautifully and tastefully restored’ 200-year-old barn at the heart of a historic village.