Home Sweet Home by Lisa Grainger

w

LISA GRAINGER

Home Sweet Home

If lockdown has taught us anything, it’s the value of what we have

Pictured ► The Pierhouse Hotel on Argyll, Scotland.

Lisa Grainger ► Lisa Grainger has worked for The Times – from the arts and news desks to The Times Magazine and LUXX – since 1995. She has won awards for her travel writing on Africa, and is a regular contributor to panels on conservation and luxury travel. Her compilation of African myths and legends, Stories Gogo Told Me, funds schooling for orphaned girls through the CAMFED charity.

Below ► Loch’s Creran, Linnhe & Etive all supply fresh seafood for the dining room of The Pierhouse, Argyll, Scotland.

m going to start off with a list of words. Odd, I know, but bear with me: cagoule, collywobbles, kilt, spotted dick, maze, Ley line, dram, Beefeater. As I leaf through one of my current favourite bedside books – a compendium of the most interesting things to do in Britain – I am struck, for the umpteenth time, by the delightful oddities of our island nation and the words that have evolved to describe our idiosyncrasies. Just the idea that someone, other than Mary Poppins, still uses the word collywobbles makes me smile. Our oddness – of our clothing, our food, our customs and our words – is an intrinsic part of who we are, and part of what makes visiting Britain such a treat. We are perhaps the greatest hotch-potch of any nation, which explains not only the diversity of our life and languages, from Scottish Gaelic to Cornish, but our people. People who are inventors, of things from the telescope to the toothbrush. People who are great thinkers, from Adam Smith to George Monbiot. People who celebrate the unusual – what other nation has a museum devoted to lawnmowers, or an annual race that involves chasing a cheese down a hill? And people who take pleasure extremely seriously; who else castellated, crenellated and sculpted follies in their gardens just for the hell of it? Or built such extraordinary private residences? Or brought back such bonkers souvenirs as Roman pencils and prehistoric sloths from their travels which, thankfully, we can still see in such institutions as the National Trust and English Heritage.

We are, as the great British hotelier Olga Polizzi puts it “a people like no other – and a country unlike anywhere else”. That’s not just because we have the most fabulous cultural riches on our doorsteps in towns and cities from the Tate St Ives to the Scottish National Gallery. It’s the other things that we sometimes forget about. For instance, the 225,000km of pathways that crisscross the English and Welsh countryside which, thanks to our right to roam, give us access to some of the most photogenic stretches of our planet. (Of the latest poll of Europe’s 200 best hiking routes, more than 30 are in the UK.) It’s the ease of our public transport: “People moan about the [London] tube, but it whisks you across the city at incredible speed,” Polizzi says, remembering times she has spent in other cities stuck for hours in traffic. And it’s our food.

“When I bought Tresanton [the Polizzi Collection boutique hotel she owns with her daughter, Alex] more than 20 years ago,” she says, “hardly anyone went to Cornwall on holiday, because unless you had access to a house, there was nowhere nice to stay and nowhere nice to eat. Now there must be five or six really lovely hotels nearby, and absolutely delicious food.” That’s partly because, she says, thanks to technology, “chefs have realised that they can be in touch with the world, and live in the middle of nowhere. They can be in the countryside or by the sea and still run world-class restaurants.”

Gordon Campbell Grey, who sold his eponymous hotel chain to buy the two small Scottish restaurants with rooms that now make up his Wee Hotel Company, says it’s not just the chefs who

have improved in rural hotels but the produce they use. At The Three Chimneys on Skye, he says, the award-winning food isn’t just based on “the very best produce in Scotland, but the freshest. It’s the DNA of the hotel. The chef grows, and sources locally and forages. It’s as good as anything you’ll get in the world.” (Which might explain why even in May, tables are fully booked until September.)

Plus, at his Pierhouse Hotel in Argyll, seafood is all plucked straight from the sea, he says: oysters handpicked from nearby Loch Creran; mussels and langoustines harvested from Loch Linnhe and Loch Etive; and crab, lobster and white fish caught in local waters. It’s become so renowned, he says, that many of their international guests will make a reservation and then arrange their holiday around the booking. “People really care now about fabulous food,” he says. “And if you get a good reputation, they’ll fly across the world for dinner.”

What they come to Britain for is no longer Michelin-starred, ultra-fussy food, he adds, or the sort of refined service for which he was known 30 years ago at his super-slick, ultra-modern One Aldwych hotel in London, where even the width of the slices of limes for cocktails was measured. “Luxury now, I think, is exquisite simplicity without too much fuss and froufrou,” he says.

One of the few positive outcomes of Covid-19, the Scottish hotelier adds, is that Britons who have been forced to holiday in their own country “are bowled over – especially by the scenery. It’s magic: the mountains, the lochs, the big skies. There’s so much to discover here. And so much to do: fishing and hiking and biking. There’s a lot to recommend – apart from the weather, of course. But we have apps now, to figure that out.”

Previously, Campbell Grey says, around half of his clientele were foreign. But in the past couple of years “it’s been glorious seeing British people coming back and the same old-fashioned holidays I had as a child – the same scenery, same rain, same backpacks – and having an amazing time.

His observations are backed up by figures from Visit Britain; in 2019, Scotland had the best tourism figures for a decade – with 80 per cent of overnight stays attributed to local UK visitors. And in the rest of the kingdom, hoteliers are increasingly reporting seeing more British guests. That might be, Campbell Grey predicts, because as hotels modernise, they’re offering experiences to rival those in any foreign country: cooking classes and horse riding, falconry and wine-tasting. “When you look at resorts such as Gleneagles now, there’s very little you can’t do there,” he says. “For someone who wants a grand hotel, with all-singing, all-dancing experiences, and riding and shooting and golf, they showcase some of the best in Scotland, if not the world.”

The power, and wealth, of this country is precisely why foreign hoteliers continue to invest extensively here. In autumn, two new luxury hotels will open in Edinburgh: the 33-bedroomed Gleneagles Townhouse in New Town and Red Carnation’s 30-bedroomed 100 Princes Street. And in London, following the opening of the NoMad London, Mondrian Shoreditch and Pan Pacific London, the city’s first super-boutique hotel, The Londoner, will open in September, followed by the highly anticipated Peninsula London in 2022.

Above, left ► British hotelier Olga Polizzi & the Tresanton Hotel of the Polizzi Collection.

Left ► The Three Chimneys on Skye, part of the Wee Hotel Company.

A London Peninsula, says its general manager Sonja Vodusek, has been the dream of the group’s chairman for the past 40 years. He wanted to be here, she says, “because London is one of the greatest – if not the greatest – city there is. There’s nothing else like it: the theatres, the food, the countryside, the landscape, the sightseeing, the history, the art – and the amazing number of parks.” Which is why, she explains, everything they create in the new hotel will reflect the best of Britain, from the Rolls-Royce transfers “from the plane door to the hotel door” to the uniforms by a British fashion designer and staff “many of whom we will find through the Prince’s Trust”.

The enduring appeal of London, which has more five-star hotels than any other city, might also explain the high levels of investment here. More than £300 million has been spent on The Londoner, which opens on Leicester Square in September, says its hotel director Charles Oak, and more than £5 billion by the Crown Estate on the surrounding area in the past decade. That’s because, he says, “this city is unlike any other.”

The recent surge of local visitors has also been, according to Olivia Richli, the general manager at Hampshire’s award-winning Heckfield Place, because as Britons have started to understand just how hard the hospitality sector has been hit, they want to help. (According to Visit Britain, in 2020 about two-thirds of the value was wiped off the domestic tourism industry, amounting to a £58 billion loss, on top of a £24.7 billion loss from inbound tourism – or about £285 million a day.) And it’s not just older wealthy people who are coming to stay, she says. “It’s young Londoners, who might go to a festival one week and an Airbnb another – and come to us for a treat. That’s been a delightful eye-opener.”

Lockdown is also given us an added appreciation of the value of being looked after by other people, says Polizzi. “I’ve always said that having someone lovely look after you is the greatest luxury, above good food or a comfortable bed. But this summer, having not gone out for a year, it’s going to feel better than ever.”

The other benefits to staying put, all the hoteliers add, are that we won’t have to go to an airport or do a PCR test. Polizzi says she is booked into The Newt in Somerset, which opens its new Farmyard hotel in June, and cannot wait, not only because she’s heard so much about it, but “can go walking and exploring, and won’t have to go through a border”. Richli says she intend to explore London like a tourist “and see all of those incredible things you often don’t do as a local”. And Campbell Gray says he’s just going to soak in the magic of the place in which he lives: on the edge of a loch, with two labradors. “One day, when I was leaving to travel abroad yet again, it dawned on me that I lived in the most beautiful part of the world, and I didn’t want to leave. So I’ve stayed ever since. And I’ve never been happier. It’s magic.”

Left ► Hampshire’s awardwinning Heckfield Place.