Ok, so it’s been 3 years since I wrote anything on this blog… what can I say?… “the novelty wears off”?… “times run away with me”?… “I’ve been really busy with work”?… it doesn’t matter. We’ve all been quarantined and are now dreaming of better times and probably other places than our own 4 walls – yeh… I literally have just 4 walls, and no garden where I’m now living. Well… there’s ceilings and floors and stuff if you want to get picky, but the point is that having no outside space is tough when you’re stuck indoors for weeks on end. So I happened to randomly dredge through the photos on my phone from the last 10 years of living in Bath and I found that I had a pretty nice image archive of outside spaces around the city. Not only that, but it reminded me about how our lovely little city has so much more to offer visitors than just a quick look inside the Roman Baths Museum and/or listening to someone-in-a-period-costume-who-wants-you-to-believe-they’re-someone-they’re-actually-not, tell you stuff about an C18th writer who didn’t really like Bath very much. So in these coronavirussy times I decided to start make friends with […]
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If you’ve ever thought it would be really fun to spend time rummaging through antique shops and reclamation warehouses with a seriously deep wallet, in order to furnish a property, then London hotels Hazlitt’s, and Batty Langley’s would make you seriously jealous! What’s more is that they’re both 17th century buildings, and the interior furnishing is pretty much all period, from the radiators, shower fittings, and bathroom hooks, to the door knockers, desks, chairs and beds. Hazlitt’s is as about as central as it gets in London’s West End, right next to Soho Square and surrounded by night life, restaurants, and theatres to the point that you’d need a few weeks to do it all any serious justice. Curiously, the noise that this suggests wasn’t a problem for us as we had a room at the back of the hotel, which made it feel like we were miles from anywhere, without even that familiar background noise of the city I’d normally expect. Batty Langley’s is one of the newer properties in this group of unique hotels and is hidden away in a side street within 5 minutes walk of Liverpool Street station; a couple of minutes to Spittalfields Market; and next […]
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Judging by the photographs in the visitor information booklets at Markree Castle hotel, the building was in a ruinous state and nothing short of a mess in the late 1980s. The elder brother of Charles Cooper, who had been offered £6000 to pull it down completely, had recently inherited the property. But Charles managed to purchase the property from his brother, and there begins the story of how this spectacular countryside hotel became what it is today.
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