As The Crow Flies - Ed. 2 - All I Want is a Pub with a Room

“What time is the hotel bar open until?” a guest asks me, and I find myself somewhat taken aback for a moment. I know what they meant, and so I smile politely and answer their question, but I feel a slight discomfort at their exact choice of words. This is not a hotel bar, it’s a pub with rooms. This has always been a distinction that we are keen to stress. It may seem a tad pedantic but the two phrases produce starkly contrasted images in our mind.

When I think of a hotel bar, I think of a cold, dingy, soulless room. The transient nature of a hotel means that all of the most important components of a pub are forgotten in it's bar. A community needs a nucleus around which to form, and the short stay nature of a hotel means that bonds formed in such places can only ever be fleeting. The quiet hum of conversation between a crowd of regulars that you get in a pub is notable by its absence in a hotel bar, instead there is only a handful of individuals sitting forlornly at island tables, in silent vigil. The stirring of ice, piercing the quiet, like the toll of the dead. A hotel bar is an afterthought; a place of necessity, not of desire.

A pub with rooms is different. There’s something nostalgic about staying over a pub that can be difficult to place. The big hotel chain boom in the UK was in the late 70s and early 80s, so there are a couple of generations for whom there is very little reason to feel reminiscent about staying above a pub, but we still do. Just the word “inn” conjures up images of medieval English buildings with a roaring fire, pewter tankards and a warm bowl of something brown. The endurance and popularity of media associated with medieval England has, at least partially, fuelled the sentimentality we feel when lodging above a pub. Nostalgia is a powerful emotion after all, it is warm and comforting, but more than that it provides a connection to our past which evokes a feeling of permanence.

It’s this sense of permanence versus the transience of a hotel bar that marks the biggest difference between the two. The community that is built around a pub gives it a pertinence that extends beyond its walls, and in doing so provides a legacy that survives the bricks and mortar.