Why I adore a big British B&B - The Times
On a recent visit to the National Forest I fell back in love with the traditional British B&B. My family and I arrived at Horseshoe Cottage Farm in Leicestershire late, hungry and grumpy after three hours trapped in the car during the Friday exodus from London. But then our host Linda Jee appeared and set about making things better. Dinner was in the oven, she said — homemade lasagne plus marmalade bread and butter pudding for afters. Should she fire up the hot tub so the kids could have a dip before bed? I almost wept with gratitude. No torchlit tangle with a combination lockbox or digital check-in here — instead a warm welcome from an actual human being.
“You have to love people to do B&B successfully,” says Nicola Crosse, an inspector for the travel platform Sawday’s who has also appeared as a judge on Channel 4’s The Great B&B Challenge. “You need to be a bit of an amateur psychologist too, quickly sussing out whether guests want to be left to get on with it or whether they’re in need of a bit of TLC.” Full disclosure: as a 46-year-old working mother of three boys, I’m firmly in the latter camp. “It’s about being looked after with real generosity of spirit,” Crosse says. “Hosts who throw open their doors and say, ‘This is how we live, come and join in.’”
Far removed from a night at a faceless chain hotel, staying in someone’s home is a much more intimate experience which admittedly can go either way. To ensure guests avoid any real-life Basil Fawltys, sites including i-escape, Coolstays and Sawday’s handpick all their properties. One of Crosse’s favourites at Sawday’s is College Farm Norfolk, where the hosts Richard and Katharine Wolstenholme combine their flair for interior design with a truly memorable breakfast where everything is made from scratch. Then there’s the 16th-century Clapton Manor in the Cotswolds, which offers antique-filled rooms, garden tours and generous morning helpings of Gloucester Old Spot bacon and sausages. “Both Bs are equally important,” Crosse says. “A really comfortable bed and a fabulous breakfast, better than you’d get at home.”
It’s therefore ironic that this pleasing pair of letters has been appropriated by a company that has become a byword for self-catering accommodation — no Airbnb host has ever offered to make me a cup of tea and a boiled egg.
The B&B Association estimates there are about 35,500 owner-managed B&Bs in the UK. “Their beauty lies in their variety,” the chairman David Weston says. “Gone are the days of shared bathrooms. The growing end of the market is luxury — boutique properties that are more like small hotels with extra personality.”
Weston and his wife ran a B&B in Sherborne, Dorset, for more than a decade and he says that meeting interesting people was the most enjoyable aspect of the job. Notable former guests include Richard E Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas. Weston points out that hosts offer face-to-face connection, which has become increasingly valuable in our era of digital isolation. Hosts act as informal guides, helping guests get the most out of their visit by offering suggestions for local restaurants, pubs and activities. B&Bs are also a significant asset to the British economy, Weston says. “Being so dispersed across rural areas, where there often aren’t hotels, means the money guests spend goes directly to local businesses.”
For me the appeal of the B&B goes far beyond the practical. Staying in someone else’s home is an opportunity for licensed nosiness, a peek into the lives of others — something that in my second career as an author I’ve come to value enormously. A scene in my debut novel, In Pieces, was inspired by my first night away with the man who is now my husband at a B&B in Norfolk more than 20 years ago. Back then I felt like we were playing at being grown-ups. Now that I really am one, I want something altogether different: a chance to be cosy in a home that isn’t mine.
My own house is a visual manifestation of my domestic to-do list: I find it impossible to ignore a dishwasher in need of unloading or saunter past an overflowing laundry basket. But a B&B is a liminal space, somewhere I feel more entitled to do the things I really want to: read, do the crossword or stare vacantly into the fire, luxuriating in my own laziness.
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