Despite being painted bright green and standing out like a sore thumb in a row of white fronted buildings, the Albany Hotel on Tavistock Place is a tired looking establishment. It has customer reviews to match. Maria Nicola was unimpressed when she stayed: “This hotel was FILTHY do not stay !!!! This hotel was very dusty, small. The bathroom was in a poor state. Had faeces in the toilet and along the rims,” she opined charmingly. Kevin Neiland was succinct and to the point. The hotel was “awful. Good location though.“
I will leave you to decide whether or not to sample the Albany Hotel’s dubious hospitality and will instead draw attention to the two plaques that sit, one on each side of the Albany like twinkling blue eyes separated by a boxer’s nose.
One plaque commemorates Jerome K Jerome who lived at No 32 Tavistock Place in the mid 1880’s. He arrived at this address aged 25 after a hard life (the family were poor and often beset by debt collectors and his parents both died when he was a teenager, forcing him to prematurely leave school to find a job) and having given failed in his attempt to make a career as an actor. He had decided to try his hand as a writer. His years in Tavistock Place were both a hungry time and pivotal in his lfe. How he must have walked these pavements wondering whether he’d ever amount to anything, no doubt short of money and with stomach rumbling. After a succession of rejections which would have eaten away at his self-cofidence, he began to achieve some success, he published a comic memoir of his time as an actor which attracted attention and placed essays in magazines. By the time he moved across the road to 33 Tavistock Road he was on his way. He met and wooed the married Ettie Marris, who he wed as soon as the ink on her divorce was dry, becoming step father to Ettie’s young daughter. They left Tavistock Gardens after honeymooning on a boat on the Thames and settled in Chelsea (things were looking up!). He must have enjoyed the honeymoon so much that he came up with an idea for a book about a group of friends mucking about on the great river. He called it Three Men In A Boat which became his defining, life changing success.
Twenty years after Jerome departed, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, moved into number 36 Tavistock Place, appropriately enough on the left hand side of the Albany. He was well into his career as an insurrectionist, developing an ideology of Communism that would go on to kill more people than any other, far more than the Nazis. And yet Lenin has a much better reputation than Hitler. The monsters of the left seem to always have a kinder treatment from history than the monsters of the right. While he plotted and provoked revolution in his native Russia, Lenin used his days in Tavistock Place walking to the nearby British Museum to work on a new book, the attractively titled Materialism and Empirio-criticism, which would later be forced down the throats of all students in Soviet Russia as an obligatory text. Tavistock Place has much to answer for! Lenin didn’t stay long however and would move to Paris before the book was published.
The days of Lenin and Jerome K Jerome may be long gone but their ghosts still inhabit these streets. Maybe they occassionally bump into each other and talk about boating on the Thames or the pluses and minuses of murdering millions of people who don’t agree with you. I trust Jerome will put Lenin right on a few things.
