London: Smart NHS Russell Square Hostel

The Smart NHS hostel is near the British Museum, with its fab new rotunda! Photo copyright Margaret Sharrow 2009

You're looking for somewhere cheap to stay in London. You want it to be central, and easy to get to. You want a bit of privacy, but you don't mind going down the corridor to the loo. You want clean, and well-organised. You want 24 hour access.

What you don't want is a 24 hour party.

Roll up to the Smart NHS Russell Square Hostel. For the older traveller, or qualified health professionals looking for work in London, it's a dream come true. Just around the corner from Russell Square, it means you can get the tube from Heathrow without changing lines, and take advantage of the lift at the tube station (there are a small number of stairs to negotiate with luggage).

You will be sleeping in bunks, but they are hospital-clean (you have to do your own hospital corners, but they provide the sheets), and best of all, have curtains, so you can sleep, read and change in privacy.

All the showers are together in the basement (gents' & ladies' separate), saving water and annoyance ('Who's STILL in the bathroom?!'), and although you have to keep pushing the button to keep the water flowing, it is HOT HOT HOT in a very nice way. And in the ladies', there is a locker room outside with free use of hair dryers. There's even a diffuser (for the hair inept, this is an add on gizmo that distributes warm air over a larger surface area, to what effect I know not, being one of the hair inept myself).

In the morning, there is free tea and coffee (instant), and the inevitable toast conveyor belt experience - place two slices on the ramp at one end, and wait for them to trundle slowly through, and pop out on the slide at the other end. The conveyor belt isn't actually inevitable - I've stayed at some hostels where they have normal home toasters, and after the French girl ahead of you has popped the maximum four (or two!) slices down, you have no choice but to stand and wait... not great when fifty plus people are trying to breakfast simultaneously. So at Smart NHS I was extremely grateful. And nobody else wanted the crusts, so it was pretty easy to tell which toast was mine.

Another great feature of this hostel is the sense of security. You need a £10 cash deposit for your key card, which you need to get past the 24 hour reception room, and into your own room (from 4 to 24 beds, depending on price). Furthermore, for around £1.50 per day, you can pay to have your card activate your own security drawer below your bunk, where you can safely store your goodies. For extra large items, or to have a look round the day you leave without trailing your wheelie luggage everywhere, you can leave them in the storage room for £1.50 per item per day. However, unlike other hostels that leave you to fetch your items yourself, giving you a key attached to something improbable like a cricket bat (a veritable passport to theft), the Smart NHS staff accompany you to the room, to make sure that you only take your own ticketed items. Brilliant! Why doesn't everyone do this?

Best of all, there are no unaccompanied under 16s allowed, and aside from the odd school group booked into their own room, there are very few under-18s here. The large number of job-seeking nurses, medical technicians, etc. means that you are far more likely to see people spending their evenings glued to the free wifi access on their laptops (you can pay 50p per 15 minutes to use their computers, too) than wanting to have a singsong in the common room. And there are always a number of mature backpackers lurking about, on the Ikea sofas in front of the two televisions.

In fact, the only drawback of the place is that you just might end up on the top bunk... of three! But the ceilings are high enough that I didn't bash my head when sitting up, and I kind of got used to it - thank heavens for the secure bars on the exit side, or I would have spent the nights in a state of vertigo.

N.b.: 10% deposit payable online at time of booking. To pay the balance on arrival, it's best to have cash, as they don't take UK debit cards, and credit cards have a 5% processing fee. You also need £10 refundable key deposit. Laundry: £4 wash, £2 dry (ouch!)

HSBC cash machine is down the street from Russell Square tube station, and 24 hour Tesco Express across the street from the station. To reach Smart NHS, turn left out of the station, left again at the corner by the newsagents, and left again on the next proper street, opposite the President Hotel. Smart NHS is on your left, not tremendously signposted but with signs asking you to be quiet and considerate, a good omen...

Smart NHS Russell Square Hostel

Address: 70-72 Guilford St, United Kingdom, London, WC1N 1DF

WebSite: http://smartbackpackers.com
Email: srsbookings@smartbackpackers.com
Phone # : +44(0) 20 7833 8818
Fax # : +44(0) 20 7221 9444

Information correct as of 8 September 2009.

Northumberland: England's Wyoming

Let's be honest, I had wanted to go to Holy Island for about four years. So when I had the opportunity to stay with friends near Newcastle for a week, it seemed the perfect opportunity to add on a few days exploring northern Northumbria.

I stayed at Chatton Park Bunkhouse, on Chatton Park Farm near Wooler. Having forgotten to pack my sleeping bag meant £3 extra per night, so £18 per night in total (price on the website is not current). However, I had the place to myself, and it is brand new as of conversion in 2007, very clean, and Jane and Duncan are very friendly and caring. Generally the place is booked by groups, so do phone ahead especially if planning to visit at the weekend. I think it would be pretty difficult to visit here if you didn't have your own transport, either two or four wheeled. The setting is lovely, the cat and dogs friendly, and the kitchen has a lovely woodburning stove that would be extremely cosy in winter. (No microwave, though, so it's a good time to go back to making real porridge and real pasta instead of ping! meals. Got delicious Northumberland sausage from the butcher in Wooler...)

For those who prefer the YHA, the hostel at Wooler has an interesting history as a bunkhouse for land girls during World War II. It was chockablock for the dates I wanted, but then I am usually a very last minute planner (read: spontaneous!) and it seemed nice enough, bursting with tourist brochures. Speaking of which, the Cheviot Centre in Wooler contains not just an excellent tourist info centre but is a community centre with endless activities, groups and meetings, as well as being the best place for the visitor to Wooler to use the internet. For £1.50 you can use up to the minute computers for as long as they're open (10-4:30 seven days a week), versus the public library, open erratic hours (closed Tuesdays, and was it Thursdays?) and although very friendly, costing £1 per half hour for non-Northumberland residents, and 20p per sheet to print versus 10p per sheet at the Cheviot Centre.

Enough of the practicalities - what of the place? The landscape has a spacious feeling generally absent in small-scale Wales (except for inland Pembrokeshire), plus the wonderful northern Baltic light that has a more blue quality than the grey-green light of Wales. Don't get me wrong, I love Wales, but I was open to appreciating the differences. I began to think of Northumberland as England's Wyoming, a big sky country but also with a great coast (obviously there are no endless sandy beaches in landlocked Wyoming!)

What I was after was my usual range of apparently doing nothing, in the landscape, interspersed with mooching lazily around the hostel, and lurking in cafes. I found a good one in Wooler...

The surprise discovery was that Northumberland, like other places I enjoy (including areas of Scotland such as the drive through Kilmartin), is rich in prehistoric rock art, in particular the so-called ring and cup marked rocks. These are large boulders, usually exposed level with the earth, glacial probably but I am no geologist, that have been carved with indentations, usually around an inch or two in diameter, that collect the rain ('cups'), and/or Celtic-looking designs of concentric circles. They date (without me checking references) between 1500 to 3000 years ago, and as usual archaeologists can only speculate as to their purpose. It is always a big thrill for me to locate these, as they tend not to be very well signposted. In Kilmartin there is a fairly well, if understatedly, marked chain of these. In Northumberland, there can be no marking whatsoever... an Ordnance Survey map is essential. I found them at two locations... and then there was Holy Island, best left for another article.