Context 165 - August 2020

C O N T E X T 1 6 5 : A U G U S T 2 0 2 0 41 Food and drink GRAHAM TITE From Chaucer to Fawlty Towers Inns, coaching houses, assembly rooms, railway hotels, resort and spa hotels, cheap and expensive hotels, boutique hotels: the history and literature of hotels is long and rich. The church was the first hotelier. The Latin word hospes , meaning guest, was the origin of the word hotel, which we took into the language later from French. Travellers were supplied with shelter, security, a night’s rest and something to eat. A small sum could be charged for this. Pilgrims on their way to holy shrines made up much of the clientele. Inns, a speciality of the UK, represent the next architectural development after the simple rectangular halls, usually sited on a floor raised above ground level, that typified the first monastic models. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (late 1300s) The Tabard in Southwark is already recognisable as an inn constructed around a yard, the predecessor of hotels.The pen portrait of the Host (hotel manager) shows him as an upright and efficient character.The Tales soon move on to the Cook, a Roger from London. His tale is about Perkyn, who appears to have made food for sale at a sort of deli in Cheapside, a main thoroughfare into which Perkyn was often tempted to stray. Hospitality and the inns on main routes thus entered early in our literature. The Maids Head Hotel claims to be England’s oldest. A former courtyard inn (or perhaps two inns, later merged), it stands next to the medieval Norwich Cathedral. This location demonstrates the links with Christian observances that first gave rise to our hotel heritage. As coaching routes developed further from the 1600s and into their heyday about 1800, basic comforts were offered every few miles at the roadside to traveller and horse alike. At the feet of hills extra stabling provided ‘cock-horses’ to haul the coaches up steep gradients. Where routes converge, you can expect to find full-sized inns that offered stabling, meals and upstairs private rooms of varying size and quality. These picturesque buildings provide elements of the architectural urban scene all over England,Wales and Ireland, and in some parts of Scotland. Some inns still operate as hotels, but with their rear yards mainly transformed from stabling to car parks. The few exceptions still to be noticed are worthy of action to preserve any fabric of the former stables. When an inn prospered it might add an upstairs ‘assembly room’ as a fashionable meet- ing place for such activities as music, dancing and cards. These amenities are distributed at about 15-mile intervals in the most prosperous areas. Larger centres such as Chichester could offer more than one assembly room and may have catered to rival Whig and Tory clienteles. A fine stair (as at the Druids Head, Kingston- upon-Thames market) leads up to these impos- ing public spaces. As time progressed, around 1800 and at the immediate pre-railway peak of the carriage trade, purpose-built coaching establishments evolved to take the place of the architecturally improvised traditional inns. Southampton leads the way here, with two competing, neighbouring Paragon Street station and the Royal Station Hotel, Hull