Last weekend, I was in London for a work Christmas thing and I stayed on afterwards for a couple of things of my own so I needed somewhere to stay. My usual flavour of cheap anonymous boring chain hotels being sold out by the time I went to book it the week before (yes, I wasn’t very organised about the whole thing) and where I ended up was at the Zedwell Capsule Hotel at Piccadilly Circus and it’s… weird.
It’s a capsule hotel, so instead of having rooms, it has “capsule cocoons”, which I refer to as “coffins”. Every guest has a single bed in a space about four feet high and four feet wide with a roller shutter door and you crawl into it like you’re crawling into a bivvy bag and shut yourself away for the night. It’s very space efficient, especially as they’re stacked on three levels, so they’re really packing guests into the “dormitories” and it’s a relatively cheap way of spending a night in London – although £69.30, which is what I paid, is hardly cheap. Maybe it’s because I stumbled across it and booked through booking.com rather than going direct, or maybe you only get the £30 rate if you book a bit further in advance. Or maybe they do surge pricing – as I write this introduction on November 27th, it’s £83.30 direct for the night I’ll be there and £97.30 for the night after. This coming Saturday, it’s £140. Do not pay more than I did and preferably not even that much. A bunk bed in a hostel would be a lot cheaper and a lot more spacious but here at least you have a little privacy, although try not to think about the fact that the person in the next capsule is a matter of inches away.
The details
The location couldn’t be better, right at Piccadilly Circus. I’m always a bit concerned about finding the place but it’s got a big shiny “Zedwell Capsule Hotel” over the front door, so it’s hard to miss. It’s right where Shaftesbury Avenue meets Piccadilly Circus, on the left as you walk towards Piccadilly Circus or the right as you walk away from it. Piccadilly Circus Tube station is right there, so it’s really easy to get to and really easy to get to.
Reception is a big influencer-grey space with sofas and spaces to work and a couple of vending machines – I think their big idea is that you spend the evening working and being sociable in here before retreating to your capsule to sleep but it’s not a very cosy space, definitely not big enough for however many hundreds of capsules they’ve got and anyone who’s staying here has probably booked it with the intention of literally just sleeping here. Mostly you just come here to check in. There’s a staff member standing by with a laptop in case of problems but mostly you use the next available screen to check yourself in. You just need your name and email address, then it prompts you to take a room card from the pile to your right and activate it by putting it on the card reader.
What it tells you on the screen is a little overwhelming, so I took a photo of it because I knew I’d forget all the details before I got upstairs. I was “Floor 2 Dorm 2.2 Bed 2206”. Floor 2 is easy enough, although there are always too many people in the lift. Dorm 2.2 turned out to be easy enough. Each floor is divided into a certain number of corridors with doors at each end. The first one from the lift was Dorm 2.1 so the next one was 2.2. Good.
Then you just walk along until you find coffin number 2206, which was almost by the door. It was a third-storey capsule, which was a surprise to someone who thought they only went as far as top and bottom capsule. There are funhouse steps up to them, where there’s one step on each side, so you have to start at the right foot. There’s a little tiny “landing” outside the second and third storey capsules so you’ve got space to get in and out, take off your shoes, lock the door and so on.
There’s a shared bathroom on every floor, mixed sex unless you pay access for a female-only corridor and services. A big grey room with grey doors and long communal sinks that have hand dryers concealed under the mirror. Towels are an extra £5 and the showers aren’t great – they work on the old-fashioned leisure centre premise of pushing the button every thirty seconds or so and although they advertise the showers as having changing space, everyone needs to get changed in that space at pretty much the same time and the showers spray all over the place and soak them so the floor is permanently wet in there. On the upside, they’re pretty clean – cleaners seem to be in and out every five minutes.
The corridors themselves are weird – unrelentingly grey and black and remind me of nothing as much as Quasar, the laser tag place I grew up with. There’s a boarded-up window outside the lift on the second floor, presumably to maintain the illusion that this is a post-apocalyptic timeless world where it could be day or night or the end of the world and you just don’t know. There are directions and arrows and labels on all the walls so it’s hard to get properly lost but it does feel weird.
What’s it like in the capsule?
You know, it’s not so bad. Almost the entire space is the bed but there’s room between the mattress and the wall for a slim bag, a pair of shoes and whatever jumper you’ve just taken off. Actual storage space consists of two hooks on the wall near the door and a narrow shelf above the bed for things like water bottles and your phone, with a power point for charging and the controls for the lights and heating/cooling. The back wall above the shelf is a mirror, to give the illusion of space. A lot of people leave their shoes outside the door but I’m paranoid about that sort of thing – it’s half a mile to the nearest Primark barefoot for a pair of replacement shoes if someone steals your shoes in the night.
If you’ve got more luggage than you can hang on the hook, or tolerate on the bed by your feet, there’s a luggage storage room by reception for £15 per piece, plus the cost of a lock, by the sound of it. If everything you need for the night is in your luggage that’s too big for the capsule, bring a smaller bag and have your overnight stuff broken down into it to save yourself rummaging in reception and carrying an armful of clothes and necessities. A lot of people take a chance on just leaving their big suitcase outside their capsule but if I’m not going to do that with my shoes, I’m not going to do that with my suitcase. Fortunately, I did the reading in advance and knew to try to fit three days and four events into the smallest hook-friendly bag possible.
The second issue is locking your capsule and this is something they don’t mention anywhere on the website. They lock from the inside no problem. Slide the door closed and turn the little knob. But if you want to lock your pod from the outside, if you’re planning to leave the premises during your stay, you’ll need to bring your own padlock or buy one from reception. Knowing in advance that I was going out for the evening and would be leaving my work laptop in my capsule and having read the Google reviews in advance, I knew to take my own padlock but it would be very easy to not know that and leave all your stuff unsecured. It took a minute to figure out how the lock works – push it in to turn it, pull it out to lock it, push it back in again to turn it back.
What’s it like to sleep in a capsule?
But once you’ve figured all the peripherals out, like luggage, towels and padlocks, what’s it actually like to spend a night in the capsule? I’m not the best person to review this sort of thing. I’m a caver and a dwarf and I’ve been the occupier of a one-man tent for ten years. My tolerance for claustrophobic spaces is legendary.
It’s high enough for most folks of unremarkable height to sit up in without too much fear of smashing their skull in. If you’ve ever slept in a one-man tent, it’s far more spacious than that and you don’t need to worry about waking up to find the walls soaking wet with condensation. It’s not as quiet as the website makes it sound – you’re basically in a triple bunk bed in a dorm with up to 50 people but the bunk bed has walls – but it’s not too bad. The roller shutters make sliding noises, you can hear the doors at each end opening and closing and your shoes make a big noise on the stair-ladder if you make a bathroom visit at 2am because you’re not going to do that barefooted.
Once the light is out, it’s impossible to tell you’re in a confined space. It’s dark – not 100% dark but darker than many hotel rooms I’ve stayed in and no annoying LED shining blindingly from the TV. You can sit up suddenly without banging your head. You can’t full-on starfish without hitting the sides but if you can sleep in a single bed without falling out, you can probably sleep ok in the capsule without touching the sides.
I found it a little bit warm in there so I put the fan on. I’m not sure how much it cooled the capsule but it was an excellent source of white noise to drown out the small noises from the rest of the dorm. Other than that, it was pretty comfortable. What with the shelf, the hook and the gap between the wall and the mattress, there’s more storage space than I anticipated, it was quieter than I expected, the bed was more comfortable than I expected and it was a surprisingly cosy night. I’d stay here again.
I think it has a lot of potential but some things that need improvement. The capsules need to have an old-fashioned pre-existing lock of some kind that you don’t need to bring yourself – ordinary hotels have managed for decades to put locks on their doors; this isn’t something difficult – and there needs to be luggage storage within the dormitory area because I bet only a fraction of guests are taking up the offer of £15 to not be able to get at your luggage overnight. I really enjoyed the novelty and I enjoyed the very central location – or I would have done if my plans before, during and after had actually been in the heart of central London. No doubt at some point I’ll use it again. But for the price, if you’re thinking ahead to your London trip more than a week in advance, you can do so much better.
I Am A Polar Bear 