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10 articles
The cage lift, the juddering veteran, the mirror at knee height — Britain's independent hotels are home to the most characterful lifts in the land. We make the case that a hotel lift is really a time machine with a door.
A spa menu can be copied by any hotel with a budget and a brochure. A ghost, however, takes centuries to cultivate — and no chain has ever franchised one. We make the case for the resident spectre as Britain's finest, and least expensible, marketing asset.
Before the star rating, there was the comments book by the door — a leather-bound confessional of tea-stained honesty. We've been reading ours closely, and British travellers have been telling on themselves for decades.
While the rest of the hotel sleeps, one person holds the fort, the spare paracetamol and the phone number of a taxi firm that actually answers. A love letter to the night porter — the quiet, coffee-fuelled guardian of British hospitality.
Loyalty schemes are for airlines. These nine fiercely independent British hotels trade on attitude, history and a healthy refusal to do things the corporate way. Meet the indies with more personality than a chain has rooms.
Strip away the daylight polish and a hotel shows its true face after eleven — the night porter's quiet wisdom, the corridor-lit wander, the bar's final half hour. A love letter to the British hotel after dark, and a nod to our own lodge-keeping ancestors.
Open-plan lobbies may win the Instagram likes, but Britain's great hospitality tradition lives in the small, dim, gloriously enclosed corners. A defence of snugs, window seats and the lost art of hiding well.
Minimalism had a good decade, but Britain has moved on. From Cornish boltholes to Edinburgh townhouses, we trace how maximalism conquered the boutique hotel — and why travellers wanted it all along.
Chester has 2,000 years of history, shopping galleries built on stilts, and a Roman amphitheatre just sitting there like it's no big deal. Here's how to do Britain's most underestimated city properly in a weekend — with plenty of stops for food, drink and mild architectural disbelief.
Before we put four-poster beds in a former friendly society lodge, the Odd Fellows were putting the 'odd' into Victorian Britain for over a century. Here's the story of the mutual society, the ornate halls they left behind, and why a building with a past beats a room with a laminated information folder every time.