Hotel London

Writing this review in the middle of a coronavirus-induced lockdown, the idea of a place to which people travel, and where they mingle, and jostle, and dine together, dance together, even sleep together, seems little short of fantasy. And the critical point of this book is precisely that. Inspired by her own love of hotels and informed by a dazzling array of critical thinkers—from Bourdieu to Benjamin, from Foucault to Lefebvre, from Koestenbaum to Koolhaas, from Simmel to Soja, from Mumford to Merleau-Ponty, and many more besides—Barbara Black presents the Victorian hotel as a space of modernity, enchantment, luxury and freedom. In truth, such characterisations are not all that original. The idea of the hotel as something distinctively modern dates back to the nineteenth century itself. Nor is this analysis always wholly clear or entirely accurate in its focus. It is notably weak on visual material: misreading some images; failing to engage critically with the architecture which is often illustrated but rarely interpreted precisely. Moreover, although ostensibly a study of the very largest, ‘grand’ or ‘palace’ hotels that emerged in Victorian London, much of the source material employed is less specific, dealing with all manner of hotels and other forms of accommodation. Some of them are not even located in London. There are digressions—often interesting but still digressive—into the empire, Europe and the United States of America. The book begins with a meditation on the board game Monopoly and finishes in the author’s home town of Saratoga Springs in upstate New York

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