Adultery, assassination and Agatha Christie: the dark side of the hotel

You might be surprised to learn that hotels have played a large role in our history, finding themselves in divorce papers, inspiring a new genre of fiction, and even facilitat. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Professor Eloise Moss tells Lauren Good about some of the complex stories that have played out in the world's lodges and guest houses. Hello, Eloise. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. I think most of those listening, myself included, before reading your book, would think of hotels as Fairly unremarkable places, I suppose. There's somewhere you stay on holiday or sleep for a work commitment, perhaps, and that's about it. But your book, The Secret Life of the Hotel, completely changes that picture. As an overview before we dive into some more of the details. What role did you discover the hotel has played in history? Well, I think hotels have played this really complicated part in our our national story and also in our global story. Hotels have been venues for diplomatic meetings, they've been spaces in which ordinary people have

formed new relationships, romantic relationships, or broken old relationships, even marriages. They've been spaces in which people have asserted their rights of belonging. So for instance, my book looks in detail at a lot of protest movements who have occupied spaces in hotels or asserted their right to stay in hotels as part of British civil rights movements, and that includes people of colour. Fighting against the colour bar during the twentieth century, LGBTQ people demanding their right to stay and pursue romantic relationships inside hotels. All sorts of people, disability activists as well, suggesting that hotels architecture is inherently exclusionary for them and making sure that hotels are held to account and when hotels wouldn't bend to their will actually building new hotels for disabled people to use themselves. And so there are myriad ways in which hotels Architecture, their infrastructure, the way their staff interacts with guests, the treatment of staff as well, especially staff from disadvantaged backgrounds, staff who were migrants or impoverished and

Female staff especially have been not necessarily treated brilliantly by hotels over time. They've often been left in quite marginalized roles and not in senior management roles. All of these things indicate the way in which hotels reflect broader trends in our history and our society, who we include, who we exclude, and what way we represent Britain to the world because they host Diplomats, they host visiting royals, they host a tourist population that's very, very diverse and very global in character. And they're often the first space that people encounter when they visit this country. And so these messages about whether people are welcomed or excluded. actually play a huge role in how we're viewed as a as a country on the global stage. There's so much to discuss here, Eloise, and we will delve into some of those bits in a little while. But first of all, I just wanted to touch on what you said there about the fact that hotels haven't always been inclusionary spaces. I think we assume that now that anybody has the right to go on holiday and stay in these places, but that hasn't always been the case. Absolutely. And hotels were originally conceived of

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