I have life membership of the Youth Hostels Association of England and Wales, which has been great value over the years – but for the last decade or so I really haven’t stayed in British hostels much. Recently I’ve stayed in official HI hostels in Italy, Paris and the USA, and whenever I’ve been updating the Rough Guide to Europe on a Budget the Swiss association has put me up in its lovely hostels (usually in a private room, thanks). But the England and Wales association has closed most of its more attractive hostels, concentrating on cities and large modern hostels that can take school groups. Indeed, one problem is that often, even when there is a hostel in the right place, it’s full because of a group booking. Closed or full, that seems to be the choice – not much use for the independent traveller. Any idea of a network of hostels within cycling distance of each other has also been lost, except in the Peak and the Lake District – you need a car nowadays. It’s incredible that second-tier destinations such as Salisbury and Lincoln are now hostel-less – how can a hostel in these tourist towns not cover its costs?
However the YHA has seemed more like an arm of the property business than a youth charity for years now, and one sometimes gets the sense that closing hostels down has become its purpose rather than an unfortunate side-effect of economic circumstances. It’s telling that when a new chief executive was appointed in April 2017 he said: ‘My initial priority as chief executive is to deliver the new business plan and lock in the success that has been achieved in recent years’.
The sense that the YHA has been taken over by bureaucrats and bean-counters was reinforced recently when I wanted to meet a friend in Milton Keynes. There is still a decent smallish hostel here, of all places, in Bradwell, one of the original villages swallowed up by the New Town, with a couple of cheery and remarkably cheap pubs nearby. But I booked for the wrong date and had to change it – I sent two emails to the hotel and had no reply at all, I phoned and had no answer, and the YHA’s call centre, which was meant to be open on Sundays according to the first webpage I found, wasn’t. When I called on Monday morning I was dealt with very professionally, but I had a strong sense of over-centralisation. And if they aren’t dealing with their emails and phone calls at the hostel, there needs to be an auto-reply or redirect to say so.
Once you get to the hostel, it’s absolutely fine, apart from the strange lack of hooks in the shower cubicles, and the manager is great. You also need to show photo ID to check into a hostel now – something to do with child protection, I suppose (there were no children around when I was in Milton Keynes) but it’s hard to see that it would actually make any difference.
As for Milton Keynes… the museum is only open weekends and half-term, which ruled that out. The World War II code-breaking museum at Bletchley Park is excellent, but I’d been there not too many years ago. So the high points were the Concrete Cows and the little robot vehicles that deliver fast food in the centre. I remember the concrete cows from years ago, reasonably lifelike and grazing in a field by the railway, but after years of decoration/vandalism these are now in the MK museum and they’ve been replaced by ‘replicas’ that look like rejects from someone’s GCSE art project. They’re not so visible from trains now and stand on wood chips rather than grass in the Loughton Valley Park. We had fun discussing their self-referentiality as meta artworks, or something.
As for the pods, they look like student bed-sit fridges on wheels and bustle around on the pedestrian/cycleways at a maximum 15mph. Apparently passenger-carrying pods are also on trial in central Milton Keynes (or centre:mk as it’s now been branded). But we in the tech hub of Cambridge are not at all jealous, because we have Amazon Prime deliveries by drone. Well, just two Beta customers, apparently, but the first delivery took just 13 minutes from final click to delivery. But apparently you still need to put out a welcome mat that the drone can recognise.
Good read. I am afraid that the YHA seem to have lost the plot and even allowing for the changing world with more options available etc, the new business-focussed management seem to have jettisioned all the original aims and objectives of the YHA and turned them into a cross between a property management company and a corporate hospitality chain. The last straw recently was when I learnt that they now host wedding parties with loud music going on well into the night (as at Ravenstor recently). You have to ask what the point of the YHA these days…if they were honest they should ditch the YHA name and admit that they’re no longer interested in individual travellers or small groups travelling under their own steam .
There’s a mighty list (‘Youth Hostels Association (England and Wales) Historical listing of all youth hostels and other YHA accommodation’) of all YHA hostels ever in this PDF: http://calmview.bham.ac.uk/GetDocument.ashx?db=Catalog&fname=YHA+Historical+listing+of+all+youth+hostels+and+associated+accommodation+Y900003.pdf
It’s a thought-provoking read (and seems very thoroughly researched). You can’t help feeling sad at all those lost hostels. Riding around Lincoln last summer I was taken aback to see Woody’s Top had gone – so not only are there no Lincoln hostels, there aren’t even any in Lincolnshire.
Wikipedia has a page of Present and Past Hostels, and that’s upsetting too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_youth_hostels_in_England_and_Wales
Oh, and, by the way, the cycle parking at Bletchley Park is RUBBISH.
Maybe the existence of so many other hostels has put some of the official youth hostels out of business. I seem to remember that when I was young, there was a choice between youth hostel or B&B or hotel. There weren’t really many travellers’ hostels.
I have recently been to an official youth hostel for the first time since probably high school. Coincidentally, it was in Hagen, which is the German equivalent to Milton Keynes: a city which most people wouldn’t want to visit, with an image too negative to be completely true, and the seat of the country’s state-run distance learning university.
Because I was there for a one-week seminar, the price per night mattered a lot and I checked into a 4-bed dorm a t the youth hostel. Luckily, I had the room to myself for all except one night. The other guests were school classes (surprisingly disciplined and quiet) and Eastern European construction workers.
The service was friendly, the breakfast was good, the rooms were spacious, the showers and bathrooms clean. Some of the staff were volunteers (there is a federally subsidized one-year volunteer program, something like a voluntary national service in Germany), but still it looked a bit like the concept is on its way out.
I paid around 25 EUR/night for a bed, so already when travelling as a couple, a B&B or now an AirBnB could be rented for the same money.
The youth hostel in Hagen actually has a deal with the distance learning university there. As a student, you don’t need to be a member of the YHA, nor pay the extra fee. That might be an idea for the youth hostel in Milton Keynes because Open University students need to travel there from time to time for exams, seminars or to use the library.
Hi Andreas, good to hear from you. In the summer of 2016 I spent about a thousand Euros on German hostels, so I know they’re good and generally where you’d expect to find them ! Anyway, it’s a little complicated – some hostels that the YHA decided to close were rescued with local authority help and run as independents. Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t. An independent hostel can use the YHA booking system and to all intents and purposes appear to be an official YHA (HI) hostel – but most of them seem to give up because the costs and bureaucratic hassles are too great. But I don’t think they’re closing hostels because of competition from independents – in eg Lincoln and Salisbury there just is nowhere cheap to stay now.