HOT TOPIC
Hostels often feel as much a part of the landscape as the hills themselves, but this summer the YHA put 20 of its buildings up for sale. If they’re lost, these shared spaces are likely to be gone forever.
“I didn’t discover youth hostels until my twenties, but then they played a major part in me discovering the great outdoors and finding a whole new world,” says Anne Brunger, from Durham. She’s in her 70s now and favours Alpine huts or hotels these days, but credits the cheap, friendly accommodation for supporting her early love of adventure and the outdoors – a love that has lasted her whole life.
She’s not alone. Since Pennant Hall, Britain’s first youth hostel, opened in 1930 in north Wales, youth hostels have provided low cost, communal accommodation to people of varying means, all over the country. Pennant Hall closed the very next year due to contamination of the water supply but 73 more opened in 1931 and by 1950 there were 303 operating across the UK – the highest number ever in the UK.
Now there are less than half that, and in June this year the Youth Hostels Association of England and Wales (YHA) announced that 20 of its 150 hostels would be put up for sale. Preference, they said, would be given to those seeking to take them on as a going concern, whether operating independently or under the YHA franchise, but if buyers of this kind are lacking the YHA will look further afield. Hostels could be turned into private homes, making developers a searing profit, or could become pricier hotels. In either of these last two cases, they’re lost to the people who rely on them most and there are few other low-cost accommodation options to fill that gap.
Among those up for sale are Patterdale, Hathersage and Rowen – a tiny hostel in an old Welsh farmhouse, perched at the foot of the Carneddau. Should the buildings fail to find a buyer as-is, they will be sold and the profits put into maintaining the remaining hostels. YHA Hathersage, a nine-bedroom Gothic style Victorian villa, is offered for sale as a business at £500,000 freehold. Its price as a private property is unknown but, by comparison, a much smaller three-bed terraced house in the same village is currently accepting offers from £575,000.
On the one hand, this opens an opportunity for local people and community-led organisations. On the other, there is the fear that some are sold privately for a snippet and lost to the general public forever.
FOR SALE
Why are hostels for sale?
“It’s a difficult time for the YHA, but also for hostelling in general and I think there are two or three things behind that,” says James Blake, Chief Executive of the YHA. “One is
