Designing a new tourism
Youth deserving the best
Welcome to Light Travels, snippets of tourism and travel from the 1930’s, exploring a time when youth hostels were finding their place and creating a new kind of tourism for young travellers.
Tourism today conflicts with communities over resources, especially housing. The rise in short term rentals and holiday homes creates tensions in communities and drives hostility between residents and tourists in places like Venice and Barcelona.
Similar dilemmas faced youth hostels in their early years.
Buildings for new tourism
Winchester was the busiest hostel where Hilary Hughes and her friend Margaret stayed, in a mill that had been abandoned until it became a youth hostel.
They had also stayed in a wooden hut at the back of a house, in a “large house backed by an orchard” [1] and “a converted American Air Officers hut used during the war”. [2]
Past admiration
Other travellers had similar experiences of youth hostels that were creating a new form of tourism. Lilian Ash, who preferred to be known as Jane, was using youth hostels around the same time as Hilary Hughes.
She stayed in a teacher’s house, in an old farm “that was rather primitive” [3] and in mansions, including one that the rising waters of a dam would flood a few years later.
Of that one, Lilian wrote “Our admiration of Derwent Hall is past words, we had not imagined anything like it. …one could get lost in its corridors and stairways… “ [4]
Youthful voices
They also stayed at Hartington Hall, an Elizabethan manor house, built in 1611, though parts of its fabric dated back to around 1350.
At Ashover, near Matlock, Overton Hall was “graciously spacious and one could imagine a pleasant, restful and commodious dwelling in its grand days of personal ownership.” [5]
Jane was not romantic about old houses and their owners though. “[F]or all its past beauty and wealth” the house had never “been so rich in happy youthful voices” now it was a youth hostel. [6]
A new identity
YHA was creating an identity for itself and had no idea of the accommodation it would create. At times it thought it would build new hostels. At other times it thought it would use any available building. Early records are full of contradictory thoughts of what youth hostels could or should be.
YHA enjoyed strong links with other holiday making bodies, like the Cooperative Holidays Association (CHA), the Holiday Fellowship (HF) and the Workers Travel Association (WTA). They used large, domestic properties or former hotels for their centres.
Leaders in the youth hostel movement, like TA Leonard and Sir Charles Trevelyan, came from those organisations and might have expected youth hostels would follow their example.
Hopes
Tom Fairclough, a young man in Liverpool who founded the youth hostel group in the city, hoped for help from organisations like the CHA.
In October 1929 he declared the group did not propose “special shelters or anything like that…” Instead he hoped “facilities might be offered by existing associations.” [7]
But HJ Stone, secretary of the HF dismissed that hope in a few, lofty words. Something new was needed. Youth hostels were not for his organisation.
Spoiling
YHA could have followed the lead of Germany where youth hostels first opened. After an initial burst, using any buildings it could find, Germany turned to purpose built hostels.
Youth deserved the best that could be built, not any old castle, barrack or house they could find. Youth hostels in buildings never meant to be accommodation made them difficult to run. They were inefficient and expensive to keep.
By 1926 Germany was opening youth hostels that were purpose built, designed for youth, dedicated to being one thing, not a classroom with add-ons, not a castle.
Building for youth
“We don’t want… any gloomy medieval fortress, any miniature castles from an over-romantic age with mock turrets and lighthouse-like towers,” Richard Schirrmann, the inventor of youth hostels had announced.
“Buildings must be constructed to accommodate youth, the rising generation; simple and functional, light, easily ventilated, yet retaining the warmth, pleasant to live in, beautiful…”
A hope for new hostels like those in Germany emerged in Britain. Sir Patrick Abercrombie, the architect who helped plan British cities like Plymouth and London’s green belt, was also an early supporter of youth hostels.
Yellow walls
Tom Fairclough and the group in Liverpool planned to build “a dozen hostels“ by the spring of 1931 [8].
Another prominent British architect, Clough Williams-Ellis designed the hostel at Maeshafn, on a hillside near Mold, a day’s walk from Chester for hikers heading to the hills of North Wales.
Blue doors in the yellow walls of a central common room opened into dormitories, one for men and one for women. The hostel cost £900, more than expected, far more than expected, more than anyone wanted to pay.
Simplicity
Another architect designed youth hostel was in Surrey. Holmbury St Mary was modern, perfectly designed, in soft coloured local brick, its metal windows picked out in cream and peacock blue.
Dormitories, a self catering kitchen with electric stoves, and a drying room extended from a central hall with windows on three sides.
Everything was made for simplicity, and an open fire was included for sociability, not heating as radiators supplied that.
Too long
But, like the hostel at Maeshafn, it too was expensive, far too expensive. The site alone cost £400 and the final cost may have reached £3548, the asset value assigned to it.
Finding new sites and building hostels took too long and too much money. YHA dropped its dreams of purpose built, designer hostels except on a few future occasions.
Instead it turned to a different style of property. In future it would use existing property, buildings it could rent or buy, opening hostels in buildings that were often surplus to needs.
The resourcefulness of the youth hostel movement at its beginning is a reminder that the best innovations often come from adapting ideas to the unexpected.
Notes
Image of Maeshafn youth hostel at its opening in 1934, courtesy YHA Archive at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, Y050001-Maeshafn 03 1934.
1. Martin, John, Historical listing of all youth hostels and other YHA accommodation.
2. Logbook of Hilary Hughes 1936, Y691019.
3. Logbook of Lilian “Jane” Ash 1934 Y600038-3.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Liverpool Daily Post October 1929.
8. Liverpool Evening Express 29 September 1930.