MONSTER HOTELS IN LONDON.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume III, Issue 678, 3 July 1882, Page 2

MONSTER HOTELS IN LONDON.

The lively development of hotel enterprise in this country, says a London paper, is one of the most marked features of the day. It is essentially an age of travel, when people pass from one end of the world to the other as naturally as last century they would have crossed the street. But travellers are no longer satisfied with the accommodation and comforts of the older form of inn, and it is to meet their views that these monster caravanseraes are springing up everywhere. Only a year or two back the Grand Hotel at Charing Cross sprang up, like Aladdin’s Palace, on the site of Northumberland House. Now the same company have acquired the ground on which Hatchett’s Hotel stands, at the corner of Dover street and Piccadilly, and another vast hostelry is to be erected on this, one of the best and most central situations of London. It is not easy to understand why these monster hotels thrive, but they are undoubtedly popular. Probably it is on account of the concentration. Everything almost can be done, as in an American hotel, without leaving the house. You can secure seats at the theatre, take tickets by any line, buy and sell shares, clothe your outer and feed your inner man all under one and the same roof. The vastness of the establishment, moreover, instead of hindering, tends to improve the management. Comfort and convenience become a matter of system. We may exchange our personal identity for the numeral of our bedroom door, but we thus become part and parcel of a great mechanism, which performs all its functions with the utmost regularity.