Quirky rooms, bold character, proper British charm
Lobbies lie and logos flatter, but the breakfast room never does. From sausage provenance to whether the staff remember your tea order by day two, here's our field guide to reading a hotel's soul through its full English.
Thread counts lie and lobby florists deceive, but a hotel bar tells the truth within ninety seconds. Here's our entirely unscientific guide to reading a boutique hotel by its bottles, garnishes and bar staff.
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.
Somewhere in every great hotel room sits a single object that has no business being there. We argue that this is precisely the point — and offer a field guide to finding rooms with genuine character.
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.
Taxidermy next to the tea trolley. Ceilings the colour of a post-Christmas hangover. A bathtub, in the lounge, for reasons nobody has ever adequately explained. We celebrate the small design decisions that shouldn't work — but somehow lodge themselves in your memory forever.
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.
Somewhere between the 43rd identical beige headboard and the 44th, the British traveller snapped. Here are seven boutique hotels — ours included, we're not shy — where every room does its own thing, gloriously.
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.