THE HOTEL FROM HELL

A year ago, I stayed at the Hotel from Hell. I name it and shame it – the Wellington Hotel, Vincent Square, Victoria, London. I was in room G2. I could tell because someone had pasted a rectangle of paper with the legend ‘G2’ scrawled upon it. The exterior façade of the place was peeling – Victorian grace replaced by Elizabethan squalor.
The tiny leaded glass panes in one of the windows of G2 had come away in places from the lead, and the panes waited patiently to crash and tinkle to the ground below. The single light came from a bulkhead fitting in the centre of the ceiling of the type that used to be fitted to minesweepers, circa 1944. An electrical conduit pipe ran from it down one wall. You could rest your head on it as you lay on the bed, for there was no headboard.
The room reminded me of a more austere version of Fletcher’s cell in ‘Porridge’, but the walls were painted cream, rather than green. The plug chain in the sink in the corner was attached to no part of the sink. Some idler had made off with the caps for the taps, so you didn’t know which was hot and which was cold. You soon discovered however, when you were scalded when you ran your hand under the hot tap. Paradoxically, however, the showers in the grotty shower room along the passage, where you could catch fifteen distinct diseases just touching the shower-head, ran permanently cold, so if you wanted to wash your hair or your extremities, you did so in the sink.
The carpet on the floor was of the cheapest needlecord and was dark brown in hue to attempt to disguise the stains in the same way as teenage girls disguise acne by trowelling on makeup. Just as certainly as trowelled maquillage did with the teenage girls, so the carpet failed on all counts. The furniture was of the gimcrack variety, and would have been rejected by a boot sale. The wardrobe door was secured by a hasp and staple, though the padlock was missing. One of the runners on the top desk drawer had collapsed and the drawer was simply jammed in place.
The towels smelt as if they had been washed in vinegar. The bedsheets were the cheapest possible cotton/rayon mix, and the duvet seemed to be constructed of some unidentifiable material akin to tarpaulin. The single green blanket had the texture of carborundum paste. The painted walls were gouged and chipped in many places, and the room looked like a hospital waiting room designed by Albert Steptoe.
I had a view out of the leaded window – I could see the fire escape, littered with empty cigarette cartons, juice bottles, old newspapers and older rags, and plastic bags blown hither and thither. There were no tea-making facilities, no iron, no trouser-press, no mini-bar, no tiny shampoos, no bath gels, no headed stationery, nothing to steal to make your stay in a hotel even moderately tenable. I was surprised there wasn’t a chamber-pot so that you could slop out of a morning.
The cost of this extravaganza, including a continental breakfast comprising a couple of slices of spam on wholemeal bread that could only appear on a menu in somewhere like Albania, was £95.
I got my revenge – I left several chewed pieces of gum on the undersides of the furniture where they would lie undetected until the furniture collapsed in piles of dust, which should have happened by now.