Copthorne Hotel London Gatwick

The Copthorne Hotel London Gatwick is a four-star Millennium and Copthorne hotel on Copthorne Way, RH10 3PS, three miles from Gatwick. It is a separate property from the Copthorne Effingham Park on West Park Road, profiled separately on this site as the closed Afghan ARP-era hotel. The London Gatwick site is a 200-plus bedroom modern hotel with extensive conference and wedding facilities.

The Copthorne Hotel London Gatwick became a migrant hotel in 2021 to 2022 when it offered sanctuary to Afghan refugees; when those moved on under the resettlement scheme, the site became home to up to 1,000 men, women and children of different nationalities under the mainline Home Office asylum accommodation contract^[1]GOV.UK.

East Grinstead and Uckfield MP Mims Davies issued a public statement on her constituency website calling for the Copthorne to be returned to its original commercial purpose. She said the local community had been very patient and supportive, but the patience had understandably worn thin and the community rightly felt it had done its bit. She framed the campaign as serving the airport, local businesses and providing job opportunities for local people^[1]GOV.UK.

The Copthorne Hotel London Gatwick became a major protest flashpoint during the August 2025 wave of weekend demonstrations outside UK asylum hotels. Sussex Express published photo coverage of the demonstration outside the hotel, naming the asylum-hotel use directly during the UK-wide protest weekend^[2]Press.

At the £170 per person per night Migration Observatory benchmark^[3] and the up-to-1,000 figure cited by the local MP, the Copthorne London Gatwick running cost works out at as much as £170,000 per night and roughly £62 million per year at full asylum occupancy. Even at a more conservative 600-resident average the site lands at about £37 million per year. The May 2025 NAO contract review put the average per hotel run rate across the wider portfolio at about £5.84 million per year^[4]NAO, so the Copthorne sits well above the national average given its scale.