The UK Times are spending the next few months gathering nominations from the public for their Green Spaces Travel awards: that is, the most environmentally friendly places to stay that have helped to change your attitude to be more green.
One of the first nominations to come in is for the Eco-Lodge in Old Leake, Lincolnshire. We've long been amazed by this place and its founder Andy Reynolds, who's come up with all kinds of creative solutions to keep the lodge as environmentally sound as possible, and who's not afraid to try to teach the rest of us a thing or two, at the same time.
As the nominating guest said, the Eco-Lodge is not the kind of place where they think they're green just because they suggest you shouldn't get your towels washed every day. Instead, you use homemade charcoal to cook homegrown veges and local organic meat. A shed full of old forklift batteries have been converted to store energy generated by a rusty old windmill Andy resurrected from scrap.
Eco-Lodge doesn't sound like the most comfortable place to stay, but it has to win some prize as one of the greenest. We'll be following the Times to see if a few more comfortable yet nearly-as-green places get nominated for the Green Spaces Travel awards.
Simply called The Residence, there's a hotel in Bath, England, that seems to hark back to Jane Austen days of exclusive clubs and high society--except that if we've got the cash, we can stay there too. There are just six rooms for guests but they are part of a larger complex inside an old Georgian house, with a restaurant, bar and gardens also accessible to members of the private club.
Recent guests at TripAdvisor can't speak highly enough of The Residence, with everyone loving the luxurious rooms and a few mentioning the "adults only" drawer, too! But a UK Telegraph review over the weekend was not quite as over-the-top impressed, citing short showers, erratic bar service and inadequate reading lights in bed--but it sounds like they might be a bit on the fussy side.
Blackpool if we've got kids, Bournemouth if we're over 60, Butlins if the weather's being English and we want to stay indoors and pretend we're at the seaside.
The sazzy HotelChatter choice of English seaside hotels is the Captain's Club Hotel in the teensy south coast town of Christchurch, Dorset.
Lesson 2 in Understanding the English: not only do we love trains and antiques, we go loopy over animals and eccentric English pubs.
The Bath Arms combines the two - it's a quirky variation on an old English pub with a safari park on its doorstep.
The Bath Arms describes itself as a 'boutique hotel' but if recent reviews are anything to go by it's more bucket than boutique, with slightly scruffy facilities and a ham'n'eggs restaurant. That said, the novelty factor of an English pub with a Karma Sutra room (oo-er) is worth a bit of discomfort.
Monica Guy is fed up with the old guard hotels of the U.K. that may have entertained her grandparents when they were tripping all over the world in their youth but have since been lasting on reputation and little else. In this new feature, she pits her grandma's favorite hotel against some of the new hip hotels popping up across the rainy motherland. Enjoy.
So you'd won in Oxford and won in Cambridge - your slick boutique hotels were a hundred times smoother than gran and granddad's choice. Proves you can't sleep on a bed of reputation.
But your grandparents excelled themselves in Bath with the much discussed (in upper-class circles) Bath Priory. The quintessential hotel image of Englishness in a hotel that's worth its reputation.
Bath is a beautiful University city in the west of England, with hills as steep as the sides of houses and a newly opened working reconstruction of the healing Roman baths after which the city's named. It's increasingly on the tourist trail as visitors venture further and further out from London.
But Bath is as old as, well, the Romans, and there isn't much room for shiny new buildings. Hotels - anything from mangy tourist pickups to stylish boutique hotels such as the Queensbury hide behind Victorian, Edwardian or even Gothic façades and you've got little chance of knowing what you're in for.
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by amandak
