A THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS

A romp through the history of hotel typology, from Chaucer’s Tabard to the Ritz, caravanserais to Fawlty Towers, concludes that, far from being innocent places of sojourn, hotels tell us tales about ourselves

Words Hugh Pearman

‘In southwark at the Tabard as I lay…’ Is Chaucer’s brief name-check of the Canterbury pilgrims’ departure point the earliest mention of a hotel in English literature?  It depends on what you regard as a hotel. There’s hospitality space to be found pre-Chaucer, such as Heorot, the great mead-hall of Hrothgar, king of the Danes, in Beowulf. There, guests bedded down with the household. This was the mini-break from hell, of course, for those who happened to be slumbering there when the fearsome monster Grendel or his still more terrifying Mum came a-slaughtering.

The events described, mixing legend and reality in the manner of the time, are set around the year 500. Archaeological excavations on the presumed site of Heorot – at Lejre on the island of Zealand in eastern Denmark – have revealed a sequence of three halls, each an impressive 50m long, from exactly this period. In those times, travellers would routinely depend on the smaller halls of the local lords in much the same way.  Later, monasteries would perform the same function, for everyone, not only pilgrims, while the castles of ruling warlords and the great country houses from Tudor times onwards routinely offered hospitality to the nobility, or those of on the business of state. But rival establishments also existed for commoners from early medieval times in Europe: inns. They had sprung up somewhat earlier elsewhere in the world. What is reckoned to be the world’s oldest hotel, the Hoshi ‘ryokan’ or traditional inn in Japan, allegedly dates back 1,300 years to 718, when it was founded to house guests visiting a restorative hot spring. The world’s oldest authenticated hotel is thus also the first spa hotel and, even more remarkably, has been managed by the same family throughout its history – 46 generations thus far.

But let us in Britain return to Chaucer’s Tabard, a relatively modern building of 1307 which was built by the Abbot of Hyde. It catered for a two-way flow of customers: the abbot’s monks, when business took them to London; and pilgrims on the road out to Canterbury, seeking the shrine of the ‘holy blissful martyr’  Thomas à Becket. Chaucer knew it and its landlord Harry Bailey, because it was a handy stopover for him as a frequent commuter from Kent.  Being sited on the edge of town, it thus corresponds to such establishments beloved of sales reps as Day’s Inns and Travelodges or – for those on a slightly higher expenses grade – Holiday Inns, which as we know are generally not for holiday-makers, but for workers. My absolute favourite of the genre – where one can stay ludicrously cheaply of a weekend when the sales force is absent – is the Holiday Inn at Runcorn in Cheshire, which is a cross between a motorway service station and a Roman fort.  I have had to resort to this when Liverpool has been full up, which means when Liverpool FC is playing a home game. Football fans and architecture buffs are both modern pilgrims. But I digress.
Sir Nikolaus Pevsner considered hotels in his last great work of 1976, A History of Building Types. The Tabard was an inn, a type which Pevsner defines simply as being smaller, and with fewer public rooms, than a hotel. An inn, the Herr Doktor Professor reckoned, would have no more than ‘a tap room and some tables to eat at’. Plus, presumably, rooms to sleep in. But he is clear that the modern notion of a hotel emerged originally from the inn, though he makes passing reference to the ‘xenodochium’ of classical antiquity and the caravanserai of the East.

Typically of Pevsner, no sooner has he mentioned these fascinating variants of the hotel than he declares he intends to ignore them. His account of hotels thus begins in medieval times in Europe. For the record, caravanserai were dotted along the trade routes of Asia. The equivalent of coaching inns or motels, they were usually laid out on a courtyard pattern, with individual niche-rooms for travellers around the courtyard, stabling for animals and centralised facilities such as refectories and bathhouses. From the early 16th century, they became quite elaborate pieces of architecture.

Xenodochium, meanwhile – the Latin word derives from the Greek – is defined as ‘a house for the reception of strangers’.  The term later came to be used for the hospitality quarters within monasteries, catering for pilgrims and rough sleepers. In this later incarnation, a modern example is the ‘hostry’ of Norwich Cathedral, effectively a place of reception for pilgrims. Long vanished, Norwich’s hostry has just been rebuilt in modern guise on the same site by Hopkins Architects.

The cathedral is clear that it is applying the three Benedictine principles of ‘worship, hospitality, and learning’.  The cathedral church does the first, Hopkins’ earlier refectory the second, while the hostry does the third. The cathedral defines the hostry’s purpose as ‘an open building where visitors can be introduced to the life, work and beauty of the cathedral itself, where students can learn about its history, purpose and value, and where people from the whole community can come together socially or to engage with issues of common concern.’ The hostry works in parallel with the refectory on the hospitality front: the difference is that, unlike its medieval predecessor, you can’t stay there, and part of it is used for the cathedral’s Song School and for choir rehearsals. But with more than 600,000 visitors a year, the cathedral is most certainly in the hospitality business.

As commissions go, this was a labour of love rather than profit. Hopkins was first appointed following an architectural competition in 1995, and the hostry, the last of its three elements, has only just been completed. Total construction value for refectory, upper cloister, and hostry amounts to £12.5m. This is a forensic kind of architecture and it depends utterly on long-term fundraising (thanks to the Heritage Lottery Fund) but the resulting buildings have forms that – apart from the useful innovations of glass and steel – would not have astonished the poet of Beowulf. The notion of the Great Hall is alive and well.

Pevsner, meanwhile, fossicks through Europe with Prussian thoroughness, unearthing fascinating detail (‘Italian inns in the 13th century had a common sleeping room and single rooms only for VIPs. In the 15th century they were often managed by Germans… At Borghetto near Verona in 1556 the guest had to sleep in one bed with his tutor, his host and hostess and their baby.’)  For him, the story of hotels begins with two medieval Angels – at Grantham and Newark in Lincolnshire – and two Georges, at Glastonbury and Norton St Philip in Somerset. He traces the story from there through the great inns of Germany, the marvellous hotels of the railway age, to the 1972 Hyatt Regency in Atlanta by John Portman, with its vertiginous atrium and wall-climber lifts. He has something approaching a kind word for Butlins’ holiday camps ‘where you have a cabin to yourself and free access to ample public rooms and entertainments…they are ideal for the gregarious and those who are longing to be gregarious.’ What a shame the great architectural historian did not live to see Center Parcs, or the formalised camping resorts of Eurocamp. Never one to shun the downbeat conclusion, Pevsner concludes with motels, offering as his last line: ‘How sordid motels can be some will remember from Lolita.’

Today we have reached a point where hotels have split into a bewildering number of types. Apart from all the subtle star-gradings of the budget mass-market chains, from France’s ultra-basic Formule 1 upwards, we have the business hotels geared up for endless conferences and functions; themed resort hotels, most famously in Las Vegas, the Emirates and South Africa; and pod hotels at airports. There is a new breed of spa hotel, where the touchstone is still the sumptuous austerity of Peter Zumthor’s Thermal Baths in Vals, contrasting with the greater opulence, say, of Jean Nouvel’s Hotel des Thermes in Dax or Mario Botta’s Tschuggen Bergoase Spa in Arosa, carved into a mountain 1,800m above sea level.

There are the ‘boutique’ hotels with their design-led identities – some now quite large, such as Eva Jiricna’s wildly successful Josef Hotel in Prague. It’s unique, but it’s also part of a chain – the 176-strong Design Hotels group, an ‘international lifestyle brand’  based in Berlin.  Terence Conran’s Boundary Hotel in London’s Shoreditch belongs to the group, as does the Scarlet eco-hotel in Cornwall, featured on page 52 of this issue.

Those seeking greater exclusivity via a members’ club will find that these too are expanding internationally. London’s Soho House club is now opening in several other countries, while its Shoreditch House offshoot in East London’s Tea Building will soon be competing with Conran by offering hotel rooms to members and non-members alike, in a new extension by Archer Architects. Developer Derwent London is not only Stephen Archer’s client but also his landlord: his nine-strong studio is in the same building. Opening in March, the 27-room hotel hotel features a Cor-Ten clad extension rising from behind the retained white walls of a former pub on the corner.

Hotels are inseparable from popular culture. Hotel California. Heartbreak Hotel. Hotel du Lac. Hotel de Dream. Grand Hotel. The White Hotel. The Haunted Hotel. Hotel Babylon. The Bates Motel. The Overlook Hotel. Chelsea Hotel. Puttin’ on the Ritz. Fawlty Towers. These places have a hold on our imagination as repositories of everything from high living and romance to crime and horror. Which brings us back, pretty neatly, I have to say, to the Great Hall of Hrothgar. From Beowulf to Psycho, we know the dark side of the hospitality business. But if that’s fiction, so too is A Room with a View. Everything about ourselves, good and bad, is reflected in this one building typology. The hotel, in the end, is a frontier colony.