Premier Inn vs. Travelodge?

Travelodge v Premier Inn: battle of the budget hotels

I swear I read this Times article a lot more recently than two years ago. But given how time apparently starts to gallop in middle age, who knows. I have a Times subscription so I’ve no idea if it’s paywalled. A recent stay in a Travelodge after a gap of a few years brought it to mind.

The Travelodge logo

The Travelodge reviewer in the Times article stayed in a ‘Super’ room at the Travelodge London City, itself billed as a ‘flagship’ Travelodge. The Travelodge PLUS programme, of which the London City hotel is evidently part, was launched in 2018 and features the Super Room category and a new Bar Café concept. I’ve never stayed in one. Unless there are a lot of them, they’re a bit of a suspect comparison – it would be fairer to compare a “regular” Travelodge with a regular PI.

The Premier Inn logo

The Premier Inn reviewer in the article stayed at the Worcester City Centre branch (one that Ruth and I have stayed in; it overlooks the cricket ground), and notes the addition of Premier Plus rooms, as well as the chain's London-based ‘Hub by Premier Inn’ outlets (I stayed in one of these in 2021 - unbelievably tiny room but nice and amazingly high-tech bed). Premier Inns are slightly more expensive than Travelodges and generally have a dining option, whether this is an integrated restaurant or an arrangement with a pub/restaurant next door. Travelodges were originally on A-roads or motorways, and therefore pretty much always had a Little Chef or a motorway service station next door, so I guess the ‘dining option’ thing was kind of catered for; the newer ones in town centres don't have dining options, or at least I didn't think they did, but the introduction of the Bar Cafés in some is presumably an attempt to be more competitive with PI.

Bed at the Hub by Premier Inn London Soho

Since the advent of Premier Inns I rarely stay in Travelodges, as they now seem slightly shabby in comparison. However, I do have a nostalgic fondness for the earlier days of Travelodges and can still remember how lovely, clean and modern they seemed when I first stayed in them.

History and ownership

Travelodge has had a chequered ownership. It was originally owned by Trusthouse Forte, then bought by Granada in the 1990s. Ownership passed to Compass Group in 2001, then to Permira in 2003, and then to Dubai International Capital, a UAE-based company, in 2006. Since 2012 it’s been owned by Goldman Sachs and various hedge funds. Premier Inn has always been owned by Whitbread, though it’s only been called that since 2007; Whitbread established it as “Travel Inn” in 1987.

The excellent Motorway Services Online has some interesting stuff on the history of Travelodge. They were originally Forte Travelodge and I remember them forming part of Forte’s comfortingly reassuring collection of graded hotels, with Travelodge being the most basic, then Posthouse, Crest and Grand, in order of splendour. I never stayed in a Grand; I did stay in a Crest once, in Exeter, and I remember staying in at least a couple of Posthouses. Travelodge grew out of Little Chef Lodge, which MSO notes was the UK’s first budget hotel chain; this was owned by Forte and became Forte Travelodge in 1988, merging with a US-brand TraveLodge. MSO note that "many Forte Travelodge customers were 'trading up' from the less desirable accommodation they would normally stay in".

Me outside a Forte Posthouse in Hampstead in 1995

Prior to the more recent Travelodge PLUS upgrade, an earlier modernisation programme completed in late 2015 which gave Travelodges a makeover from their original branding. My extended Travelodge stay in 2014 - see below - was during the modernisation period, as some of the hotels I stayed at had been modernised (Old Stratford, MK Central) while others (Buckingham, Marston Moretaine, Shenley Church End) hadn’t.

My early Travelodge forays

I first came across Travelodges in the early 1990s when I was in my early twenties and they seemed to me an absolutely wonderful alternative to the B&Bs or cheap hotels which were my alternatives at the time. Then, they seemed to be mainly beside dual carriageways; they seem to have moved more into city centres since. I may be being over-nostalgic but I have more of a fondness for the roadside motel-ethos of the original type.

I think I first stayed in a Travelodge with Ray in 1992 – we had been part of an organized 18 Plus holiday to the Haven park at Caister, but made our escape after a couple of nights (I’d been the previous year, and rapidly realized that once had been enough) and went to visit Cambridge. We phoned the nearest Travelodge – on an A-road somewhere on the outskirts of the city, from memory – and as I recall were disappointed to find it booked up for that night. It had availability the following night, so we booked it, and sucked up staying in a cheap B&B that night, which, true to its type, had a shaky-looking shower in the corner of the room (presumably thereby enabling it to claim ensuite facilities) and various handwritten notices stuck around the room. The only one I remember was telling us not to throw condoms down the toilet, but there were probably others telling us not to speak, leave our pants on the floor, etc.

Ray and I were sufficiently taken with Travelodges to subsequently take a whole week’s holiday travelling around the country and staying in different ones. I can’t find any photographs from this trip, though it seems unlikely that I didn’t take any as I did own a camera at the time. Who knows. I can’t definitively remember all the hotels we stayed in, though I think we started the trip by driving up the A1 to Scotch Corner and staying in the Travelodge there, before working our way back down the country.

The Travelodge Year

Much more recently, I found myself unexpectedly staying in Travelodges for a good portion of 2014, following the burglary at my first rented MK flat around the end of 2013. Because of the burglary I didn’t initially feel inclined to rent another flat and dithered a bit about what to do. My head of unit at the time did not like staff working from home (oh, sweet irony) meaning that my modest request to work from home one day a week on a temporary basis to save on hotel bills met with a “No”. I think originally I only intended the Travelodge arrangement to be for a month or so, but it stretched to most of the year until I cracked and took out my tenancy at Wolverton Park in early 2015.

Although the Travelodge thing was OK initially, it rapidly became fairly depressing, in part because in order to make the four nights a week thing affordable, I was often obliged to stay at the OK but moderately drab pre-refurb Buckingham hotel, which still had old style branding, chunky grey CRT TVs and an offputtingly musty smell in more than one of the ground floor rooms. Also, I think that regular existence in hotel rooms, as opposed to the odd stay as I do now, can give you a sense of a little too much anonymity. The post-refurb Old Stratford hotel was much nicer and I did book in there as often as I could. The also-post-refurb MK Central hotel near the railway station was generally more expensive and I only stayed there for the odd night.

A room at the Buckingham Travelodge in March 2014

A room at the MK Central Travelodge, also in March 2014

Although I’m being a bit rude about the Buckingham hotel – it was the one I stayed in most and I was moderately depressed for much of the time - I did encounter a couple of worse ones. I ruled out the Shenley Church End establishment early on after only a couple of stays. That was a dreary former Innkeepers Lodge that hadn’t then even been updated to Travelodge’s old branding, never mind their new branding – the rooms didn’t seem Travelodgey, too much dark wood and I have a feeling they might even have had actual keys to the doors. I remember on one of the stays being given a room that didn’t lock and having to go back to reception to say “um, no” – it can’t have been fully booked (perhaps unsurprisingly) so they did re-allocate me to a different one. (On the other hand, they did at least have modern-style TVs in the rooms, which I had forgotten until I revisited the photo below.) Judging by their current entry on Travelodge's website, the hotel has now been refurbed. Sadly too late to rescue it in my eyes though. My good opinion, once lost, is lost forever.¹

The Travelodge Shenley Church End

A room at the Travelodge Shenley Church End in February 2014

I also once stayed in the Marston Moretaine hotel just off the A421 on the east side of MK, which was also pretty awful - I was initially given a room that stank of cigarette smoke, despite the hotel’s allegedly no-smoking policy, and I remember leading the guy on reception through the equally faggy-smelling corridor to my room so that he could smell it. I think he said something non-committal, but did give me a different room at a fresher end of the building. The one upside of the MM hotel was that at the time it still had a Little Chef next door, as these opened early and gave you somewhere to get breakfast (something that was a challenge all the way through the Travelodge Year). I remember having a quite OK cafetiere of coffee and some passable French toast.

View from my room at the Travelodge Marston Moretaine in June 2014

The LC has presumably gone now, as I think they all have. I do remember Little Chefs quite fondly; they were OK. I remember having a number of their “Early Starter” breakfasts in younger years. Strangely enough there was a piece on the BBC News website about them only this week.

While I was staying at the Buckingham Travelodge, the former Little Chef building was boarded up the entire time (probably adding to the faintly depressing air) but has now been freshened up into a Starbucks. I don’t particularly like Starbucks but much better to have the building back in use.

Some 'just add water' fodder, of the type I was often reduced to during the Travelodge Year:

More disturbingly, I also found this picture from 2014, with what looks like a Travelodgey backdrop. I don't remember often drinking über-budget wine, but perhaps I did.

Recent post-COVID times and Premier Inn use

Since working from home, moving back to Reading and the opening up of society again, I have been travelling up to MK every 2-3 weeks to spend a couple of days working on campus, to remind myself that I do actually have an employer (not that the regular Teams meetings and pay packet aren’t also a reminder of this, but you know).

Requiring overnight accommodation for a night every two weeks, as opposed to four nights a week, obviously affords much more choice of where you stay, with the result that I’ve been opting for Premier Inns pretty much every time. Milton Keynes has at least four Premier Inns which, if you book them a reasonable distance ahead and on the right night of the week (Tuesday: not great; Thursday: great) are very reasonable. I’m often able to book a “Premier Plus” room for only around the £60 mark. As the Times piece says, this gets you complimentary “Ultimate” Wifi (though actually PI’s free wifi is not too bad), an armchair with a footstool, a mini-fridge containing bottled water, a Nespresso machine and a piece of artwork with an artists’s label (albeit the one in the photo below was called 'Untitled'²). You do also, as Liz Edwards says in the Times article above, get to approach them down a better-smelling corridor, with a DIFFERENT CARPET from the regular room corridor. Perhaps it’s sprayed with special “posh corridor” smell.

Here are some soothing pictures of a Premier Plus room I stayed in recently at Milton Keynes' Willen Lake hotel.

'Untitled' by Gemma

Extra large shower

As a footnote, having said that thing about opting for PIs almost every time: with an eye to economy I have once tried out the Travelodge at the MK Hub (OK, but a yucky carpet), and a few weeks ago elected to return to the MK Central Travelodge, as I’d thought this one was quite an OK one during my Travelodge Year. It is indeed OK, but not as nice as a PI. I booked something called a “Standard Plus” room, thinking this might be comparable to the PI “Premier Plus” offering, but on arrival the room looked exactly as I remember them looking when I’d last stayed there 10 years previously. I did take in that there was a coffee machine and quite a selection of tea/coffee/hot chocolate options. On checking out the following morning, I asked the woman at the reception desk (it was staffed, unlike when I’d arrived when I’d had to wait quite a while for anyone to come along and check me in) what exactly it was that had made my room Standard Plus. Her response: “It’s got a coffee machine in it. And hot chocolate.” I made an unconvincing appreciative noise and thanked her, but I think she then lobbed at my retreating back “And a new chair!”. I was sceptical on this last point as the small chair in the corner of the room was the style that had been put in at the time of Travelodge’s refurb in the 2010s, but wasn't going to argue.

The Standard Plus tray of stuff

¹ Acknowledgement: Mr Darcy
² Why do artists do this? If you're going to go to the effort of painting something, might as well title it while you're at it.

More Hidden London

Saturday 3 February

Following last October’s Euston tour, I offered to treat Ray to a ticket to another one of the tours as a birthday present. Ray is cursed by having been born on Boxing Day and therefore doomed to a lifetime of birthday sidelining due to everyone being too exhausted/bloated to celebrate it much. I’ve always tried to make some effort to acknowledge his birthday but was ashamed to realise that I don’t think I’ve bought him a birthday present the past few years, so decided to redress the balance.

This tour was titled “Charing Cross: Access All Areas”. Its focus is the disused Jubilee Line areas at Charing Cross, plus the construction tunnel that runs under Trafalgar Square. We took the Elizabeth Line (useful service, this) from Reading to Tottenham Court Road and then walked down to Charing Cross. We had a bit of time to kill before our slot for the tour, so wandered briefly into Victoria Embankment Gardens. Amazing to think that this gateway was once actually at the water’s edge.

Gateway that used to mark the north bank of the Thames

Charing Cross was formerly, but is no longer, on the Jubilee Line; today it’s on the Bakerloo and Northern lines only (both older than the Jubilee). Several different underground stations seem to have been called Charing Cross: Strand (Northern line) and Trafagar Square (Bakerloo line) were combined when the Jubilee Line opened in 1979 and renamed Charing Cross, while the original Charing Cross tube station was renamed Embankment in 1976.

Original route of the Jubilee Line

The original Jubilee Line opened in 1979 and ran between Stanmore in the north to Charing Cross in the south, as per this from the closed area we visited at Charing Cross. Evidently it was actually supposed to have opened in 1977 to coincide with the Queen’s Silver Jubilee but overran by two years – according to our tour guide, this was due to a cock up in the construction of the new escalators at Charing Cross (which, ironically, were destined only to be in use for 20 years). (The Jubilee Line was originally going to be called the Fleet Line, but was renamed in honour of the Jubilee. One hopes that the impact of this patriotic gesture hadn't worn off a bit by the time the line eventually opened.)

The Jubilee Line extension opened in 1999, providing a connection through to the redeveloped London Docklands. The extension was started from Green Park, the last but one station on the original Jubilee Line, and bypassed Charing Cross. The reason for abandoning Charing Cross was something to do with tunnel alignment and avoiding twisty-turny bends under the Thames. This useful image that I nicked from the internet shows the current Jubilee Line; the new stations are to the right of Green Park.

The lead tour guide proved to be the same exuberant young chap from the Euston tour, though he split the talking with an assistant guide on this occasion. We started off by going down the stairs to the tube station concourse at CC. After another exciting being-led-through-usually-locked-doors moment, we found ourselves at the top of a set of escalators. We walked down these (they’re switched off now) into what was the Jubilee Line area.

The escalator we'd just walked down

The disused Jubilee Line area at Charing Cross

Although the Jubilee Line at Charing Cross is no longer on the live Tube network, its tunnels are still used for storing trains and its escalators and platforms are hired by TV and film companies. We paused in the above hall area to watch some video footage of various TV shows: I can’t remember all of them but they included an episode of Spooks I think, plus something showing Matt Damon running through a crowd (The Bourne Ultimatum?) plus the James Bond film Skyfall, in which Daniel Craig (or possibly his stunt double) slides down an escalator in pursuit of a baddie. Evidently the disused platforms and other areas get customised to represent whichever tube station is required for the production, as with the faked Circle and District Line sign below. The (empty) train in the platform picture had just pulled in when we got there; I think the guide said that the old platforms and tunnels are still used as holding bays for TfL stock.

One of the disused platforms. Train not in passenger use

The escalator used in Skyfall

Ah, British Rail

Fake Circle and District Line sign

For the next bit of the tour, we were taken into the construction tunnel that was dug in the 1970s to carry away spoil from the alterations to Charing Cross to accommodate the new Jubilee Line. According to the tour booklet, this was to allow the spoil to be loaded onto trucks in a quieter location rather than cluttering up the Strand. The tunnel goes right under Trafalgar Square, with a bend in the middle to avoid the foundations of Nelson’s Column. The unloading site was where the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery now is, and the last part of the tunnel has been blocked up and backfilled (bit of a shame - would have provided lots of material for an art heist movie).

The bend in the construction tunnel to avoid Nelson's Column

The blocked-off end of the tunnel

The last thing we were taken to see was the Craven Street ventilation shaft, built at the time of the Jubilee Line's construction to allow heat to escape from the tunnels. For this, we were issued with specially-reinforced caps as we had to duck under some low bars to get to it. According to the tour booklet, it’s almost as tall as Nelson’s column. Afterwards we walked round into Craven Street to identify the outside of the building that houses it.

In my reinforced cap

Looking up the ventilation shaft

The exterior of the Craven Street ventilation shaft

After the tour, we walked up through Bloomsbury to King's Cross and had a nice lunch at the Kimchee.

More books I have read

'The Night Tiger' by Yangzse Choo

Semi-mystical story set in 1930s Malaya (as ‘twas then). There are two protagonists: Ren, an 11-year-old orphan employed as a houseboy, and Ji Lin, a young woman in her late teens apprenticed to a dressmaker. They do not know each other but from the start are obviously on paths that will lead them to meet each other at some point.

The story centres around a severed human finger, its origins and a quest to reunite it with its owner. The detached finger belonged to a Dr Macfarlane, Ren’s employer. When Macfarlane is dying he asks Ren to find his finger and reunite him with it before 49 days have passed. The body must be made whole again before this deadline, or Macfarlane’s soul will be doomed never to find peace. After Macfarlane dies, and following his instructions, Ren travels to the home of William Acton, a surgeon and friend of Macfarlane’s, bearing a note vouching for Ren and asking Acton to take him on as a houseboy, which he does. It later transpires that Macfarlane lost his finger during a hunting trip with Acton, who donated the finger as a specimen to the hospital where he works.

Ji Lin is doing a secret second job as a dance hall hostess, to pay off the debts her mother has run up playing mahjong. Ji Lin comes into possession of the severed finger from a punter at the dance hall, who dies shortly afterwards. She is later approached by another man at the dance hall, who asks if she knows where the finger is and claims that it’s a family heirloom of his and the first man stole it from him. Later, Ji Lin helps her stepbrother Shin, a medical student, to tidy the pathology storeroom at the hospital where he is working over the summer, and they discover a lot of specimen fingers are missing.

This book was a perfectly enjoyable read but I think I lost the plot a bit (Reese Witherspoon informed me on the back cover that I wouldn’t be able to put it down, but I’m not sure I’d go that far). It was a bit hard to keep track of who had stolen the finger from whom/where. Ren and Ji Lin keep having very similar dreams involving Ren’s twin brother Yi, who died three years earlier. There are five bearers of Chinese names that form some sort of set corresponding to the five Confucian Virtues: Yi (righteousness), Ren (benevolence), Ji Lin (‘ji’ meaning wisdom), Shin (‘xin’ meaning faithfulness) and a mystery fifth element, Li (meaning ritual or order), whose bearer is not identified until late on. Several different people are doing wrong things: turns out Yi has been causing bad things to happen to his brother in the hope that Ren will join him in death; an orderly at the hospital is selling body parts as good luck charms; and a third person is able to bring about other's deaths through force of will. That's quite a talent.

The story makes reference throughout to the legend of the ‘weretiger’, a tiger who can assume human form (or was it the other way around?). The finger is rumoured to have been a weretiger’s finger. There are hints dropped throughout that Dr Macfarlane was a weretiger, but the story stops short of confirming the legend as reality - it does state that prior to his death Dr Macfarlane had been thought to have been losing his mind a bit. This blog post discusses weretigers and mentions Choo's novel under 'The Weretiger in Modern Media'.

'Deep Country' by Neil Ansell

Neil Ansell’s story of his five-year tenancy of a remote cottage in the Welsh mountains. Mum passed this on to me. I’m not as interested as I probably should be in extended descriptions of wildlife and scenery, but was reasonably interested in why Ansell had made this decision and how he had managed to live. As it turns out, it’s never made clear why Ansell moved to such a remote place, but he refers to “having burned what few bridges I had left”. While reading the book I kept expecting that at some point he would explain what he meant and what had led him to choose such a lifestyle, but in fact he never shares what took him to the cottage. Evidently he knows the owners of the estate that the cottage is on, and took over its tenancy from some friends of his who had decided it was a tad too primitive for them. Prior to Ansell’s occupation, the cottage had last been lived in full-time over 40 years previously. He apparently moved in with only a bag of clothes, wanting to “know how lightly I could tread on the earth”.

The cottage seems to have had pretty much no modern facilities, being without electricity, gas, running water or plumbing. He doesn’t go into detail on how he coped with the last, but refers to bathing in local rivers. It seemed incredible that he decided to do without a cooker: he declined to buy the previous tenants’ two-ring cooker, on the grounds that he didn’t want to lug gas bottles up the hillside and instead elected to cook over the fire – I was amazed that he'd managed to successfully cook anything by this method, though I realise that people must have done so in the past. Also incredibly, he managed without a car, relying on hitch-hiking for local travel, and indeed also to get to the cottage in the first place. I had no idea anyone still hitch-hiked.

Ansell is incredibly self-sufficient, living in primitive and isolated (by UK standards) conditions. He seems to have been able to turn his hand to all manner of practical tasks, to the extent that I suspected he must have had some previous experience of backwoodsmanship. He earns occasional money doing chainsaw jobs in the woods, and also did some work (voluntary, I assume) for a local field centre, monitoring bird boxes and the like. He picks mushrooms – he does note that he knows his way around mushrooms – and preserves them in vinegar and herbs. He makes jam, from what I can’t remember. One winter he was snowed in for six weeks, and evidently managed. I was amazed at how well he must have stocked up if, as he relates, he didn’t need to immediately rush to town to buy anything when the thaw came.

There’s a LOT of detail about birds and bird behaviour, which was quite interesting though the extended descriptions didn’t always hold my attention very well. I’m not all that knowledgeable about birds so kept having to Google images of the creatures Ansell was describing, as well as e.g. the relative size of a goshawk vs. a thrush. There’s additionally other, furrier, wildlife: foxes, polecats, stoats, hares.

He’s not overly heavy on the introspection, but of the snowy winter just mentioned, he notes “it felt liberating to wake in the morning and know that today there was no chance whatsoever that I would see anyone, nor tomorrow either”. There are some interesting reflections on thinking you know yourself and discovering that there is, perhaps, no fixed self. It’s certainly an amazing amount of time to have spent alone – he occasionally meets local farmers/farmworkers during daylight hours, but relates spending most evenings staring into the flames of his fire.

Ansell lived in the cottage for five years. In the latter stages of his time there he developed what sounds like a pretty serious thyroid condition, involving hospital treatment, and reluctantly has a phone installed as a consequence. It’s not clear though that even this illness was what made him revert to living in a town. As he relates it, after five years, he felt he had to move back to ‘normal life’ if he was ever going to, or he would end up staying at the cottage permanently.

‘Deep Country’ was published in 2011. In this Guardian piece from the same year, Ansell expands a bit on his life prior to moving to the cottage and on his reasons for leaving it.

'Solitaire' by Alice Oseman

Alice Oseman is my OU colleague Guy’s niece, and secured a six-figure publishing deal for Solitaire when she was still a teenager. I wouldn’t usually put Young Adult fiction on our book group list, but I was quite curious to see what sort of book a publisher buys from a teenager. (Guy actually recommended Alice’s later novel Loveless in preference, but I’d already put Solitaire on our list by then.)

The story: Victoria ‘Tori’ Spring is in Year 12 at Harvey Greene Grammar School for Girls, or ‘Higgs’. There’s also a boys’ grammar school in the town, which Tori’s brother Charlie and his boyfriend Nick attend. ‘Higgs’ accepts boys into the sixth form, so some boys have transferred over, including Tori’s primary school friend Lucas Ryan, and one Michael Holden, with whom Tori becomes friends, albeit she seems unwilling to think of it in those terms.

‘Solitaire’ – or rather Solitaire.co.uk – is a blog which is initially blank but then messages start appearing on it. It comes to the school’s attention when its creators start playing music over the school tannoy, putting posters up around the school and hijacking the school's computer systems. As the messages progress, Michael observes to Tori that they seem to be particularly relevant to her. Things eventually turn sinister at a house party, when a post appears on Solitaire inciting the partygoers to beat up one of the Year 12 boys present. Bothered by this, Tori decides that she must stop Solitaire.

Tori’s brother Charlie, who is in Year 11, has had various issues including an eating disorder, obsessive-compulsive behaviour and self-harming. A couple of the others expressed reservations about the relative ages of Charlie and Nick, in that Charlie is only 15. I can’t say that aspect of their relationship bothered me overly, or indeed had even occurred to me (they’re only one school year apart, for God’s sake – it’s not as though Nick’s 35) but other aspects of it didn’t seem entirely healthy, namely the degree to which Nick seems to be expected to look after Charlie and the pressure put on him; Tori’s blaming of Nick after Charlie’s brief relapse seems entirely unfair. (Slight sidebar: this might be my age showing but a world in which the school rugby captain can have a boyfriend, and this not be worthy of remark, seems like Utopia to me. Is this really how it is in schools these days? Or was this slightly rose-tinted thinking on Oseman’s part?)

Tori thinks her classmates are all soulless conformist idiots and that she’s miserable because she has some sort of deep insight that her parents and friends lack (actually, in fairness the latter part isn't stated explicitly, but you get the strong impression that that's her view). She appears to be in a bit of a down phase of recent-ish onset: her grades have slipped since entering the sixth form, perhaps due to some sort of fallout from her brother’s problems; perhaps due to difficulties with her friendship group, albeit that her ill-feeling towards her best friend Becky is pretty transparently due to envy of Becky’s social standing. Becky is evidently still fond of Tori, as evidenced by the final storyline where she runs to the school still in her pyjamas to try to rescue Tori from whatever it is she’s planning to do. Despite studying A-level English Literature Tori hates books and doesn’t read them, because none of it is real – though she loves films, which she admits herself is illogical. (At one point I found myself thinking, in grandma fashion, that she’d probably be happier during the day if she didn’t stay up all night watching films.) 

I thought Solitaire was an OK read. I didn’t hate it, and it was quite interesting to get a taste of the sort of thing that the modern teenager might read. An important message seems to be Tori’s discovery that everyone’s a bit miserable really, or certainly a lot of people of her age. There was plenty that was irritating about Tori, but that’s not to say she’s an atypical portrayal of a teenager - she's probably pretty spot on. And I did keep trying to bear in mind that I’m hardly this book’s target audience.

Oh, and I've never read The Catcher in the Rye, so have no idea whether the comparisons are remotely justified.

Postscript: Solitaire was first published in 2014. The first thing you encounter on opening the edition I read was an author’s note from Alice Oseman dated 2020, urging her readers to ‘Please read safely and responsibly’. At this, I muttered that reading is not meant to be a “safe” endeavour – it’s meant to expose you to new ideas and sometimes to scary or unpleasant things. The note appears directed at readers who are fans of Oseman’s more recent graphic novel series Heartstopper, which has been picked up by Netflix. It sounds rather as though she has made some edits to Solitaire for her Heartstopper audience – are they younger? I don’t know.

Postpostscript: do UK secondary schools now have tannoys? I mean, they might do for all I know. V. American. Also, it's a bit odd that the term ‘sixth form’ is even still used given the switch some while back to American naming of school years – I mean, it made sense in my day when the last two, non-compulsory, years of secondary school WERE actually the lower and upper sixth, but less so now that they’re termed Years 12 and 13. (As far as I can gather the UK has still stopped short of adopting the US terms for the final four years of secondary (high) school (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior) but perhaps it’s only a matter of time.)

Hawksmoor walkabout

Saturday 17 February

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

From T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land:  Part I. The Burial of the Dead

The Waste Land. The keynote of a selection of T. S. Eliot poems that formed part of my A-level English Literature syllabus. As a sixth former, the literary references and constant foreign-language insertions helped to make the whole poem opaque to me – evidently our teacher had expected this, because my A-level text has annotations next to practically every line where she had had to explain to us what Eliot was believed to have been talking about. I’m aware that TWL is regarded as a significant poem and am quite prepared to believe it is, but it was certainly lost on me at the time. I’ve just re-read Part I in the course of locating the above quote, and enjoyed it rather more than I remember doing at 18. Perhaps having to study something always takes the life out of it a bit.

(For a long while now – quite possibly ever since my A-level – Mum has suggested that I read The Four Quartets, especially Little Gidding, as giving a more positive impression of Eliot. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t think I’ve read them yet.)

The reason for the quote from TWL was its reference to the church of St Mary Woolnoth. Various small snippets from TWL had stuck in my mind over the years, of which the name of this church was one, though I had never specifically sought it out before. Mum visited me in Reading a couple of weeks ago with a view to visiting some of the churches designed or contributed to by Nicholas Hawksmoor, an associate of Sir Christopher Wren who assisted with the concerted rebuild of churches that seems to have taken place after the Great Fire of London.

We took the Elizabeth Line from Reading to Liverpool Street, Mum armed with this useful map by Blue Crow media (pic nicked from their website). We ended up visiting six churches, the first five clustered reasonably close together in the City. Of the six, only two (St Mary Woolnoth and Christ Church Spitalfields) were fully designed by Hawksmoor; the others he contributed bits to, spires in the case of three and the top part of the tower in the case of one. There are a total of six churches wholly designed by Hawksmoor but visiting all of them would have meant travelling around a bit, and we decided to largely confine ourselves to several churches close together in the City of London, with a detour at the end at my request to view CCS. Unfortunately we had both overlooked to check in advance whether any of them were open on a Saturday, and none of them were – or perhaps Christ Church Spitalfields was, but we were tiring by then and didn’t bother to investigate. So we had to confine ourselves to viewing them from the outside - but had an interesting walkabout in the process.

St Michael, Cornhill

There was quite a large group of people assembling outside SMC – we couldn’t tell why, maybe waiting for a tour guide. I couldn’t photograph it properly without getting them in, hence this oddly-angled picture of the tower. Did snap this information board though. Apparently the upper parts of the tower were by Hawksmoor.

St Mary Woolnoth

Hawksmoor’s only City of London church out of the six wholly designed by him. St Mary Woolnoth is an unusual and severe-looking church, crammed onto a ridiculously tight plot at the junction of King William Street and Lombard Street. It was hard to tell whether at some point it had had a churchyard – it doesn’t appear to have one now. The little walkthrough behind it (Post Office Court) looks relatively modern so maybe the churchyard was sold off for building at some point. The church seems to have done well to still be standing – by all accounts it was threatened with demolition more than once and had Bank underground station constructed underneath it, losing its crypt in the process. Additionally, part of it seemed to be housing a Starbucks when we passed. Amazed it's maintained its dignity throughout all that.

St Mary Woolnoth

St Stephen Walbrook

The church of St Stephen Walbrook has a plaque on the side noting the founding of the Samaritans by its then-rector Chad Varah. Apparently the first Samaritans branch operated from a crypt beneath the church. Looking at the Wikipedia page, it doesn't actually mention any involvement of Hawksmoor in this church, but it appeared on Mum's leaflet so presumably there was something - a spire, I think.

Near to this church we found ourselves passing the Bloomberg building, and I mentioned the Mithraeum to Mum in passing. As it looked open, we decided to pop in - it was much more crowded than when Ruth and I had visited in January 2020 but we were able to catch the “immersive experience” where they dim the lights and play some recorded Latin chanting, such as the lads at the Temple of Mithras might have indulged in in the past.

St Stephen Walbrook

St Michael Paternoster Royal

After leaving that, we went down past Cannon Street station and along Upper Thames Street for a look at St Michael Paternoster Royal, where Dick Whittington is allegedly buried though no one now knows exactly where his grave was. Unlike the others, this church did have its door open, but we weren’t sure whether it’s still actually a church – there were some young people with musical instruments going inside. We poked our heads inside; the building seemed to be split into a church area in one half and what seemed to be some sort of meeting hall occupying the other.

St Michael Paternoster Royal

St James Garlickhythe

Hawksmoor designed the spire for this Wren church. I remember going to look at it briefly on a walkabout with Ray some years ago, probably amused by its name (see also St Andrew by the Wardrobe).

St James Garlickhythe

After St James G, we decided to seek lunch and after a bit of indecision found ourselves in Koya City, a Japanese noodle restaurant in the Bloomberg Arcade. I had fancied some Asian food but thought this looked full on passing it, but Mum spotted a table in the corner. Apparently Dad thinks she has a knack for e.g. finding a parking space in a car park that appears full. I had the Kamo Hiya-Atsu, duck in hot broth with cold udon. The duck soup was delicious; I wasn't so sure about the cold noodles. Mum had a frankly intimidatingly large tempura prawn: I think we had been expecting a selection of smaller prawns.

My lunch

Mum's massive tempura prawn

Christ Church, Spitalfields

After lunch I decided I wanted to go and see CCS, this being the only of Hawksmoor’s churches I could have visualized in advance. We retraced our steps back towards Liverpool Street and then veered off to the east, though ended up taking rather more of a meandering route than I think we needed to have done. On the way we passed this statue in Devonshire Square.

'The Knight of the Cnihtengild' by Denys Mitchell

We viewed the striking church from the side and the front before heading back to Liverpool Street.

CCS from the side

CCS from the front

Since our trip, I’ve learnt about Peter Ackroyd’s 1985 novel Hawksmoor, apparently about a series of murders committed in the Hawskmoor churches. Thinking this sounded a bit of a laugh I’ve just ordered a copy off AbeBooks for £2.95. Mum has been wading through Ackroyd’s London: The Biography for a little while now; I am hoping the novel proves somewhat lighter.

Walk with the Ramblers from Checkendon, 7.5 miles

Sunday 21 January

Another walk with the Mid Berks group, organized by Robert, whom I’d chatted to on the Lower Earley walk a couple of weeks earlier. There were only four of us on this walk – me, Robert, Alison, who’d also been on the Lower Earley walk, and a guy of about my age called Douglas, who works in financial services for Bloomberg and commutes to their City office a couple of times a week. (I did comment that I’d been in the basement of his building and what a lovely job Bloomberg have done with the Mithraeum. I might be remembering wrong but I’m sure he said something about having had to do a Mithraeum Quiz as part of his induction. That might have been a joke, I suppose.)

This walk started and finished in Checkendon, a village about eight miles north of Caversham and about a 15-minute drive. We met in a small car park by a recreation ground. To get there, I made use of what3words for the first time – it worked very well.

From the car park, we crossed the road and took a path across a field, stopping to look back at Checkendon Court. We then took country lanes towards Hammond’s Wood, turning left before we got to it and crossing over the A4074. Before we got to the road, Robert pointed out John Buckley’s ‘Nuba Survival’ sculpture in the distance over at Hammond’s Farm.

Shortly afterwards we had a bit of a conundrum as the footpath is signed through the grounds of a property called Massey’s Pightle, but there was also an enticing sign next to it informing us that there were dogs running loose. We decided to skip that and carried on up the lane, which joined the footpath a short way on, though when we looked back the way we’d come there was a sign sternly saying “Field Cottage Only”. Clearly the two properties are fighting it out as to who likes walkers less.

Looking back at Checkendon Court

We followed footpaths through Woodcote and then took a path leading through the grounds of the Oratory School – in fact the right of way leads right past the front of the main school building. After passing the school buildings, we walked towards a bank of trees running alongside the A4074 and down a set of deep steps down to the road, which we crossed (again) and went up a set of steps on the other side. I’d guess these steps aren’t all that well used – I’d never noticed them when driving past (you wouldn’t, really; also, it’s a dangerous stretch of road and you’d do well to have your eyes on it) but did locate them on Google Maps/Street View later. Here are the ones on the Oratory School side of the road:

From Exlade Street we followed the path through fields up to Corker’s Lane and then turned right and into woodland, where we stopped and sat on a fallen tree trunk to eat lunch.

Field near Exlade Street

Woods

After lunch we carried on through the woods to Busgrove Lane, and then walked uphill through woodland towards Wyfold Court. Our route didn’t pass close by the house, though we did pause to get a glimpse through the trees of its turrety exuberance.

Wyfold Court just about visible through trees

Here’s a much closer-up picture that I took on a walk with Ray back in 2014.

We completed the walk via Basset Wood and Ipsden Wood back to Checkendon.

Route of the walk: