Heartbreak Hotel, Holborn.

Photo: Tim Hadrian Marshall.

From Barton Fink, Joel and Ethan Coen, 1990:

Chet: Are you a trans or a res?

Barton: Excuse me?

Chet: Transient or resident?

Barton: Oh, I don’t know. I’ll be here indefinitely.

D.S.: Tim Marshall, a regular contributor to The London Column, recently brought this set of photos to my attention. They are souvenirs of a bleak period in his life when, in search of ‘a quiet place to hide’, he checked in to one of those big Art Deco hotels that loom like sentinels across Holborn. Tim’s state of mind is indicated by the fact that he renewed the booking on a daily basis, which meant that he was constantly shifting from room to room, becoming both transient and resident at the same time.

Photography is full of sad hotel rooms; Tim’s pictures remind me of canonical images by Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, William Egglestone and others. They also bring to mind scenes from 1940s film noir, not to mention the aforesaid Barton Fink and, of course, The Shining. But all those references are American; most of the sad hotels referenced in British culture are of the sad, faded or seedy boarding house type, the ones found in Graham Greene or Patrick Hamilton novels, Larkin’s poems, Rattigan and Pinter plays, etc. (Over thirty years ago I found myself spending a winter’s night as the only guest in a B&B in Scarborough, a huge Victorian house where the landlady was a gentle widow. I remember her showing me the accommodation and commenting that she had many backpackers staying in summer, and that she regretted not travelling when she was younger; as she spoke, snow began to fall past the bedroom window. That encounter struck me as the quintessential British bed and breakfast experience.)

Anyway, here is Peter Ackroyd on the subject. He too is invoking the drabness of small Victorian or Edwardian hotels, but the melancholy of the temporary resident in the metropolis is nicely evoked: ‘London has always been the abode of strange and solitary people who close their doors upon their own secrets in the middle of the populous city; it has always been the home of ‘lodgings’ , where the shabby and the transient can find a small room with a stained table and a narrow bed’.  (London the Biography).

I wouldn’t wish anyone to think that Tim is in any way strange or shabby; but five pictures of anonymous hotel rooms amount to a working week’s worth of hell.

All pictures © Tim Hadrian Marshall 2005.