Last summer, my friend Louisa and I attempted, in vain, to swerve destiny. It started with a wedding invitation, printed definitively on thick card: our mutual pal was planning to marry a very nice man in a very nice church in a county ending with “shire”. Why not, Louisa suggested, make a weekend of this thing? We could rent an adorable Airbnb, ask a friend or two to join and enjoy a few days outside of the big smoke. Good idea, Louisa!
Except, after a fortnight of searching, it became apparent there were no suitable houses within our budget. OK, I suggested, how about a niceish hotel, and we stop off for a pub lunch on the way down? We soon realised those places were booked out and, really, how much did we want to spend on rooms in which we’d only be crashing for a few hours of interrupted sleep?
This back-and-forth stretched across late spring into early summer, until one Saturday morning in June, I bombed down the M4 without stopping off for so much as a packet of Scampi Fries, navigated a roundabout of service stations and pulled into a Travelodge.
Except: was this a Travelodge? It sure looked like a petrol station to me! “Can I park by the Shell?” I asked the lady at the front desk. “You can park anywhere,” she said, with the look of someone who has been asked this question every single day of her current employment. “Even if it’s not in the bay parking?” I asked. “Even if I’m pretty sure I could reach the gas pump from the driver’s seat?”
Anywhere! That’s what this nervous parker likes to hear. And so I dropped my car keys into my weekend bag, checked into a room and entered the smooth-brained, leave-your-Volkswagen-anywhere-you’d-like world of Travelodge for 21 hours.
Travelodge was born, like WD-40 and Tony Hawk, in San Diego, California. The first motel—known then as the rather less subtle “TraveLodge”—opened roadside in 1940 as a budget-friendly alternative to hotels. Hotelier Charles Forte imported the Travelodge brand to the UK: the first outpost landed in Barton under Needwood in 1985 (still going strong, and only moments away from South Derbyshire’s finest birds of prey enclosure, according to TripAdvisor).
Whatever sordid romance motels conjure in America—a place for John Cheever characters to meet, a setting for a Lana Del Rey music video—evaporated somewhere over the Atlantic. Over here, you can find them in cities (London has 80) and seaside towns and near where people get married. More often than not, they perch by the side of a motorway, sandwiched between a Little Waitrose and a Costa, inviting people into their rooms but not for too long.
I am no architect, but it is easy to define the Travelodge look: red brick (corporate rather than collegiate), the least useful windows of all time (absolutely nothing to see here), the greatest amount of navy ever committed to signage (I’m not sure any brand has used so much blue, or in such a boring way, before). But a lack of vibes has not harmed business. There are over 600 branches in the UK, with outposts recently opened in Rotherham, Colchester and Bristol. Coming soon to Skegness seafront and the good people of Chiswick!
Across its 40-year residency in the UK, the chain has switched ownership several times, which probably means an awful lot to shareholders in far-flung boardrooms, but I imagine in the hearts and minds of most Brits, it has remained exactly the same: a place you stay when nowhere else is quite right (or, if we’re being honest, available).
Perhaps the clearest distillation of Travelodge’s appealing anonymity can be found in its logo. While the American version was, for a long time, “Sleepy Bear”, a dozy ursine in a nightcap, we have an optical illusion that appears both like a person sleeping and a road cutting through hills at sunset. It is not a badly designed piece of corporate double-take, though whatever the intended message—sleep so soundly you become a mountain?—it’s rather lost on me. My takeaway: stay here and you will disappear into the background.
When I told a friend that I was staying at the Travelodge near Stonehenge, his eyes became suffused with both terror and nostalgia: he had once stayed there with his university cricket team. Another told me she made an emergency stop there after a weekend at a friend’s house in the country.
I had stayed in Travelodges, or places like Travelodges, before—on schoolboy field trips, on long journeys through France—but this felt different. I had paid to be here: as a 30-year-old adult who had packed his own luggage and ordered a set of measuring utensils from a gift registry and was only slightly regretting picking fish on the RSVP.
This Travelodge, it turns out, is the only place in the world that has seriously made me consider journalling. My recollection is a blur of wipe-down surfaces and uncontrollable air conditioning, a memory as disconcertingly fuzzy as the sound-proof carpets. So I instead refer to the website’s description.
Included in the standard rate is: tea and coffee, a desk, a duvet and pillows, a television, blackout curtains, ensuite bathroom, fresh towels and a “comfy armchair”. You can buy Wi-Fi for EUR3. (I didn’t: it seemed very unlikely that I would need to scroll Instagram to fall asleep after hours of dancing to Spandau Ballet.)
Other features that were important enough for me to commit to my phone’s camera roll: the world’s smallest and loudest kettle, windows that opened a full 35 degrees, and a view directly onto a brick wall. A single piece of art, comprising glittery, abstract shapes, blue and red to match the throw, which was neither comforting enough to instil calm nor intriguing enough that it could serve as a desktop screensaver.
The website neglects to mention that the rooms render 5G useless: something to think about when you are clambering into a morning suit—definitely not bought on eBay, definitely not flammable—and you need to seek advice from a YouTuber about tying a Windsor knot.
At some point, between drinking canned vodka sodas in Louisa’s room and returning several hours later to collapse on a bed that even a monk might concede could use a comforter, I started to ask fewer questions of Travelodge and began to ask more questions about myself. Was it funny that my friends and I were dressed in tails and trotting over to a country manor? None of the staff blinked. Did it matter that we had Subway and Diet Coke for breakfast? As if!
The following weekend, I drove to a Travelodge for another wedding. Same crowd, different shire. This time, I didn’t ask about parking. Was I in the designated space for the adjacent Starbucks or the McDonald’s opposite? Who knew? And, more importantly, who cared?
I checked in, still stubbornly refusing the Wi-Fi charge, and wondered what kind of person I could become in this in-between zone. I tied my silly Windsor knot, I brewed my freeze-dried coffee, I did not attempt to open the window. I sat on my comfy armchair. I did, for the first time in months, absolutely nothing. I have had the good fortune to stay at some very nice hotels in my life, perfect places lined with infinity pools and palm trees, which have promised to clear my mind and rejuvenate my senses.
These outposts may have once enabled a sense of adventure, but they now offer something just as tantalising: the sense that whatever you do, it doesn’t really matter all that much. A swipe of a keycard and then… Oblivion.
A few weeks later, during my stay at a third Travelodge, for a third wedding of the season, I was on autopilot. Coffee, morning dress, armchair. My favourite piece of artwork over the headboard. And, sorry… had I not seen this shimmering mishmash before? In one of the less dignified entries into my Google history, I searched “art in Travelodge rooms”.
Nestled beneath a few proudly written press statements about the chain’s interiors was a link to an Instagram page entitled @travelodgeart: an account that posts artwork from Travelodge rooms throughout the United Kingdom. I saw the same exact picture in every room, cropped into squares or rectangles or slightly larger rectangles.
I sent the page to Louisa, in the neighbouring room, who asked the question many might have when considering the artwork hanging on these walls: “why bother?” Travelodge, with a reassuring commitment to monotony, seems to say: “bother just enough”.
