Victorian Piles…

I’ve just spent the last three working days in the Great Victoria Hotel in Bradford, built as the Great Northern Victoria for the railway (GNR). It is owned by a private small chain, that also owns the Woodlands near Morley (and a third near Sheffield). You can go for a virtual tour here- click the red spot above the entrance on the photo to enter the lobby and click on the doorway to the right to enter the room I now know rather well. (I nicknamed the art piece Jackson Pollock’s Dysentry).

The Great Victoria is a 19th Century station hotel in a style repeated around Britain in the larger towns and Cities during the Industrial revolution. It has been tastefully refurbished with a juxtaposition of designer furniture and modern art. The blurb speaks of relaxing surrounded by a persuasive blend of urban chic and Victorian grandeur.

It didn’t strike me as too grand but it is rather elegant with lofty ceilings and subdued ornate pilasters atop the decorative plasterwork. After three days there, though, you start to notice the metaphorical coffee stains such as the cracked & peeling plaster, the faulty air conditioner and all of the faulty lamps in the light fittings.

The food was rather good, although I’m easing off on my consumption at the moment as I could do with being able to fit into quite a few tight trousers in the wardrobe. I took a snap of these mini-burgers today- they are really tiny at about two inches high (very tasty though).

The outside of the Hotel is pleasantly symmetrically formed, apart from a hideous cast iron emergency staircase sticking out like an eyesore. The hotel faces the (contemporary) law courts building on a public square so it is not as though it is down a back lane.

This shed-like structure at roof level particularly grates to this pair of eyes.

The nicest Hotel I ever stayed in was the Doha Sheraton in Qutar. The worst depends on the context, I suppose. Blackpool ones with clapped out matresses, the one in Manchester that took in DSS and had holes kicked in the doors, the luxury themed suite at Alton Towers where an early night was out of the question because of the noise of the lobby cabaret below, the Hotel I stayed in at Coventry for my first interview where they had rubber sheets…

I notice that this other website for the Hotel chain owners has the staircase much more low key. Either the lower levels have been airbrushed out or they have had to add extra exit routes since then.