I think we’re the only guests in the Redcar Hotel in Bath. We do hear other people from time to time, but they only seem to stay one night at a time. And, for some reason unknown to us, these guests are housed right next door. Why the staff can’t put at least one room between us and these nightlies, I do not know. There was the guy with a bad cough, the two girls who arrived at two a.m. and talked loudly till four a.m., and last night the guy who yakked on his phone. On our last night, it would be great if everybody else on our floor has already checked out.
In January when I booked this room, I must have been looking only at price and location, because otherwise this is a tired old dump. The basics are here: beds, carpeting, toilet, shower, hook on the bathroom door. But modern amenities are absent. I had failed to read Tripadvisor before the booking.
The only wi-fi is on the main floor in the down-at-the-heel lounge, where I sometimes sit on a great, overstuffed leather chair. I place my laptop on a glass table on a metal frame painted gold, a suggestion of Bath’s former Roman opulence perhaps. There is absolutely no catering to guests wanting to do any business or writing. No desks, no office-type chairs, no wi-fi in the rooms, no copier: no business services of any kind. In that way it seems this place is purely for leisure, a pretty old-fashioned concept.
And, aside from the meager offerings in the lounge (alcohol and coffee) and the tea bags and the paper tubes of Nescafe in our room, there’s no accommodation at all for breakfast or snacks. We have been breakfasting at Caffe Nero, Patisserie Valerie, or Starbucks. If you want to have coffee, porridge, fruit, and pastries before 10 a.m., those are your choices.* We are close to grocery stores, restaurants, and tearooms–and the lunches we’ve bought have been fabulous. But still.
Some of the wallpaper in our room is torn and faded. The bathroom is compact, and only in an Amtrak sleeper suite have I seen a sink so tiny. The shower water is hot and the toilet hasn’t plugged up, so we’re happy with the absolute basics. Mostly. The original kettle provided was filthy and the replacement they brought was not much better, so my roommate bought us a small one at Waitrose.
The desk clerks, maids, and managers seem, to my ear anyway, to be Russians. Wearing white shirts and black slacks and leather jackets, they hang around the bar and drink when they’re off shift or taking a break. Or maybe they’re on shift and on permanent break. The women especially seem to enjoy loud music and loud talking. Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” was blaring one morning when I was doing some lounge-based editorial work. This was the song the Russian police choir enthusiastically covered at the 2014 Winter Olympics.
I can’t imagine the cleaning women have much to do once they replace our towels and make our beds. It seems to me they must then be done for the day. It was reported to me that they also take great care in cleaning the lounge, which seems to get little use except by a lone American writer and the morning I found the desk clerk sleeping on a couch.
It’s a great thing this hotel is in a great location, because we’re pretty sure that the morning we leave, a sign will–and should!–go up at the front door saying, “Closed for Refurbishment.” My friend stayed at a hotel near the Redcar on a recent visit. When she asked about the Redcar, the hotelier said, “Oh! Very bad!”
* See also “Breakfasting at Starbucks when abroad. Really?
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