The Safestay hostel in London is Posh – but minus the pricetag

With ‘poshtels’ popping up all over the world, Suzanne Harrington ventures across the water to investigate London’s Safestay hostel.

When you think ‘hostel’, this is what might come to mind: backpackers, bunks, budgets, bare walls, bad bathrooms, beastly discomfort. Basic, basic, basic - a total lack of luxury.

This was my experience - I never questioned it because hostels were basic for a reason.

They were a super cheap place to sleep and stash your backpack - I used to grade them in my head on a scale of mediocre to nightmare.

There was the prison cell hostel in Varanasi, India - actual cells, with metal-barred internal windows and iron doors, evil showers, and food that nearly killed me, all for around 75p a night.

The place in Vietnam that had been converted - at least, in theory - from an army barracks to a tourist hostel, complete with barbed wire, frogs in the shower, no food, and watchtowers.

The hostels in Phnom Penh and Kuala Lumpur with the fist-sized cockroaches, the one in Sumatra that stank of rotting fish, and nearer home, the hostels in Barcelona and Madrid that were actually not hostels at all, but brothels.

I have stayed in them all, and more. I have experienced bedbugs, food poisoning, insomnia, and a frequent sense of awe at the sheer grimness, willingly traded for the price of a cheap bed, an economy which allowed me to travel further and for longer.

If I’d stayed in proper hotels, my trips would have lasted days rather than months.

Cheap hostels were just what you did in the pre-TripAdvisor, pre-gap year, pre-iPhone era of bumming around the planet by the skin of your teeth, before the very essence of budget travel was commodified and given a health and safety makeover.

Now I am a fortysomething parent in a grown up relationship with another fortysomething parent, and the idea of staying up all night drinking hooch and smoking weed with other backpackers in some South Asian backwater no longer fills me with delight.

Nor do I travel for months on end anymore - these days it’s all about fitting in with the school holidays.

Dinky little boutique hotels are an occasional treat, and I am not always in the mood for alternatives like Airbnb if on a flying visit and not feeling especially sociable. And yet budget hotels can be a bit soulless.

There must be an alternative, surely. Turns out there is. The humble hostel is undergoing an upgrade.

According to a report from the World Travel Market in London recently, there is an upsurge in ‘poshtels’ - ‘posh’ hostels - where the aesthetics go beyond cracked lino and threadbare sheets, and where there are mod cons like Wifi and en suite bathrooms.

From Cape Town to the European capitals, names like Clink, St Christopher’s Inn, the Generator and Safestay are increasingly popping up.

It is mostly Generation Y, says the report, who are the principal demographic of these new era hostels - that is, those born between 1981 and 1990 - but poshtels are equally keen to be seen as a viable alternative for business travellers, families and members of Generation X. People like my partner and I.

So what is a poshtel actually like? Is the concept, like so much in our shiny digital age, more style than substance?

Or are hostels really in the process of becoming less austere? Will they still be as cheap? Or is the idea of a poshtel just a way of hiking up prices?

There’s only one way to find out. The two of us book into the Safestay hostel in London.

It’s located in Elephant & Castle, which, although fairly central, is not London’s most beautiful area; it’s a bit gritty, a bit urban concretey, but not so that you’d need a bulletproof vest or anything.

The hostel, which also has one in York, is in a beautiful old building about five minutes walk from the tube station - it used to be the Labour Party head quarters, before Tony Blair moved the party somewhere more corporate.

We arrive at 11pm, having spent the evening in Brick Lane in the East End, and are greeted by a smiley receptionist. Inside looks nothing like a hostel.

Instead it reminds me of an Ikea showroom crossed with a designer primary school, all bright warm colours - pinks and greens feature a lot - with comfortable pink armchairs, and a general air of clean, modern spaciousness and light. The absolute opposite of dark and dingy.

Despite being here in the name of research, my partner and I are not dedicated enough to stay in an actual dormitory, and instead have booked a family room with an en suite bathroom.

This costs £78, but sleeps three people, so if you were three friends sharing it is indeed very economical - or you can get a dorm bed, which start at £23 per night, in dormitories for 8 people.

Each dorm bed has a curtain for privacy, a reading light, and a lockable cage under each bed for your belongings - everything is finished in warm shades of dark pink.

Being a couple madly in love, however, we have no wish to sleep in bunks in a roomful of other people, no matter how lovely they are, or how comfortable the surroundings. No, we want privacy.

Our room is a good size, with a large wall mounted flatscreen and two clear perspex armchairs, which look very Philippe Starck-y.

The bathroom is no-frills but clean as an operating theatre. There are two very comfortable beds - a double and a single. There’s just one problem though - they are bunks.

The single bed is directly on top of the double one, so you can barely move without banging your head. As a couple madly in love, this is not ideal. I’ll leave it there.

Next morning we go for breakfast and see that apart from a handful of individuals hunched over their laptops - there is free wifi in the communal areas - we are definitely the oldest guests.

It feels like your parents turning up at the school disco, but not necessarily in a bad way. Breakfast is basic, but free, which makes it taste better.

The communal area is a relaxed, friendly space, nicely finished, with lots of twentysomethings of dozens of nationalities milling around, having what looks like a pleasant start to their day.

Outside is a spacious terrace where guests go to smoke and chat each other up. Overall the atmosphere is busy, but peaceful.

It feels very, very safe.

My partner and I both agree that while we both found roughing when we were young to be adventurous and character-building, we would both hate for our own young adult children to find themselves in the same kind of dumps we stayed in during our youth.

This place, with its Wifi and its croissants and its fancy pink armchairs, would provide an ideal base for any young person coming to an overwhelming metropolis like London for the first time.

It would be equally good for a family on a budget, or for young couples who are not looking for a romantic hideaway.

Back home, if your kids are staying at a poshtel, you could totally relax knowing that they are in a nice place hanging out with other nice kids, and without a cockroach in sight - unless of course you consider cockroaches to be character building.

Or unless the whole idea of trying to protect your kids from cockroachy hostels is just long distance mollycoddling.

Personally I am undecided - in India, my kids and I roughed it a bit, which upped their appreciation for the nicer places. But if they are setting out alone, I imagine I would prefer them to be somewhere safe - like Safestay, or somewhere similar.

Dorm bed from £23 a night; Private en suite room (sleeps 3) £78 a night.

www.safestay.co.uk