I went to London last weekend. I do from time to time. I saw my favourite comedian doing his current tour show at the Leicester Square Theatre on Friday night and I saw my favourite actor doing a Shakespeare play I’d never heard of at the Globe Theatre on Saturday night and I stayed over in London on Friday and then got the train home at 10.30pm on Saturday.
Accommodation in London can be expensive. Hostels can be surprisingly cheap but I can’t be doing with sharing a room with lots of drunk snoring strangers who don’t start coming home until 2am. So I go on comparison sites, set them to cheapest first and filter out dorm rooms. Then I filter out those hotels that look like someone’s house, and London has a lot of them. Finally, I look at distance from wherever I’m going that evening. On one or two miraculous occasions, this process has led me to the Hilton. This time, it took me to the easyHotel at South Kensington.
I don’t mind the easyHotel. I’m not looking for something characterful or individual. I’m looking for a bed and 99% confidence rating that I won’t get murdered in it. But if you haven’t realised, easyHotel is the same family as easyJet, with much the same level of luxury and precisely what I got was a bed that I didn’t get murdered in. Plus two coat hooks I could just about reach.
It was a converted Victorian terrace house just off Cromwell Road – that’s the road that goes past the Natural History Museum and apparently it just keeps going on an on. The street looked just like Cherry Tree Lane, where the Banks family lives in Mary Poppins. So far so good. Four storeys, although what they’ve done to the inside makes that a lot less obvious. But it’s a terraced house, fairly deep and that means not a window in the place. I don’t know if I’ve ever slept in a room without a window before. Even the purple pods at Gatwick have windows, even if all they face is the corridor.
Then there was the space. It was a double room, in that it had a double bed. I would not have wanted to share that space with another person. There was space for the door to open into the room and space for you to stand out of the way while you closed the door and then if you took another step you’d fall onto the bed. No cupboards, no tables, no shelves, no nothing. A bed and a space to close the door. My printed page of information said the TV had all the Freeview channels. I looked up. Oh yes, TV high up on the wall. I read on. The remote control to access the channels cost an extra £5 a day. There was wifi – it ranged from £2 for 15 minutes to about £30 for a week. A week! Who stays in this windowless cell for a week? For the price, you can do better! And housekeeping – it costs extra to have your towels and sheets changed. Just build that into the total price! It didn’t bother me because I was only staying one night but if you were there for a week?
On the positive side, there was a private bathroom. Just one of these little plastic capsule things that gets plonked into so many rooms these days. I was expecting it. This is the hotel from easyJet, of course it has an aeroplane bathroom. It looked clean enough but it smelled weird and I never made up my mind whether it was the smell of a toilet not cleaned often enough, the lack of fresh air from any window or merely the lingering damp smell of the shower.
It was chilly when I arrived, which I hugely appreciated, given how hot London was this weekend. When I got back from Leicester Square it was cool. And by 7.30 on Saturday morning, it was so hot that I had to escape into the cooler air of London first thing in the morning so as to not collapse from heatstroke.
Yes, it was cheap. But it wasn’t that cheap. I’ve paid less in the past for much better hotels. I’ve paid around the same amount for those miracle bargain Hiltons. Unless it’s really cheap, don’t bother. You can do better for less and maybe it’s worth the extra £5 price for that Travelodge for a window and the remote control already being in the room when you arrive.