youth hostels, the history, people and ideas behind them
Rudyard Lake in 1935, a year before Orwell's visit, photo courtesy YHA Archive I’ve always admired George Orwell. His beautiful prose is like a window pane. I studied his essays in sixth form and bought his collected essays and journalism that same year. I still have copies of those four volumes. Who couldn’t help but... Continue Reading →
Jack Catchpool and a history of youth hostels The struggle to improve lives fascinates me. It’s an endeavour, sometimes called the life reform movement, that defines the first half of the twentieth century, the era out of which youth hostels leaped, and is the reason why, when I first came across a second-hand paperback copy... Continue Reading →
Jack Catchpool was the key figure, the central force, the driver, coordinator, and chief pioneer of youth hostels. Using all his enormous skills, a wide network of allies and supporters, and his simple faith as a Quaker, he spread the idea of youth hostels throughout England and Wales to the world. This book, published in... Continue Reading →
The changing places of youth hostels On a flying visit to Cumbria, we managed a night at the hostel in Keswick. We stayed in a balcony room with a view of the town's Fitz Park, and the river that, in recent years, has flooded twice. Twice the flooding river wrecked the hostel's ground floor and... Continue Reading →
Tom Fairclough and friends in Germany. Tom is centre, his feet marked by a blue cross A small group of friends from Liverpool went to Germany in 1929. I've written about this before; how they emerged from different groups in different places in Britain at the the time, all pledged to start youth hostels, and... Continue Reading →
