Gardening: Rooms with a View ; Stay at Some of London's Chicest New Hotels, and You Will Be Treated to the Work of the Leading Garden Designer Mark Gregory. Dominic Lutyens Checks in. Photographs by Philip Sinden

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MARK GREGORY doesn't paint himself as a salt-of-the-earth Yorkshire lad, but he is incandescently proud of his pedigree as the grandson of a Jarrow marcher. It's hard to reconcile this heritage when you consider that Gregory heads up a successful landscape contractor which operates in the more glam domains of garden design. Gregory has collaborated with Ian Schrager on the garden features of his swanky London hotels, the Sanderson and St Martins Lane, and, most recently, on the capital's revamped Howard, of the Swissotel group, refurbished at a cost of pounds 16m.

But the relevance of the Jarrow reference soon becomes clear: "My grandfather lost his job in the …