‘We hope to help young people to a greater knowledge, love and care of the countryside, and thus promote their health, rest and recreation,’ declared GM Trevelyan, noted historian and founding president of the Youth Hostels Association. ‘To this end, our intent is to supply cheap accommodation on Spartan lines.’ That was back in 1930, when the world found itself in the grip of a fearsome recession and industrialised societies feared they had reared a crop of pasty, urban slobs who might grow old without ever walking across an open field. You can see why youth hostelling might be ripe for a comeback.
In my teenage years, a summer spent youth hostelling alone or with a few friends was a parentally endorsed holiday option. But if Trevelyan’s wholesome mission statement had won over successive generations of elders to the YHA’s cause, his institution was losing touch with elements of its intended customer base: being even more shallow and arrogant than the typical 1980s youth, I would rather have camped in the still-smouldering ruins of Chernobyl’s reactor 4 than shared a dormitory with the prematurely bearded Kumbaya-humming hostel stereotypes and their fetid cagoules.
Thanks in part to my boycott, but more significantly to a shift in attitudes that has decreed our world too dangerous for the young to explore unsupervised, Britain’s youth no longer goes a-hostelling as it once did. Forty per cent of guests at the YHA’s 220 UK residences are now over 26, and two-thirds of its members are even older than me. There has also been a drift to the city: the seven YHA hostels in London generate almost half the network’s trading surplus, and occupancy rates at the more rural outposts have dropped to ten per cent. To the financial embarrassment of the YHA’s management, but the delight of its muddy-booted hiking hardcore, youth hostelling has become a well-kept secret.
The extent to which the phenomenon has faded from the juvenile radar became clear as I questioned my daughters en route to the YHA’s branch in the Cotswold town of Stow-on-the-Wold: neither had ever heard of a youth hostel. The 13-year-old, a veteran of many offbeat trips in my company, admitted she was half-resigned to spending the weekend with troubled runaways. The image problem youth hostelling faces in appealing to today’s youth is simple: it has no image.
Compelled to reinvent itself, the YHA is now pitching its non-metropolitan hostels squarely at the cheap-and-cheerful family market. To do so, it must first re-educate any parents who may harbour unhappy hostelling memories.
‘Times have changed,’ my ten-year-old read aloud from the YHA accommodation guide. ‘You don’t have to share, do chores or stay out in the rain.’ Her tone made it plain that this was a misguided attempt at reassurance. It sounded like a modestly enlightened regime of National Service.
The Stow hostel does not bellow its presence. We walked past it twice before spotting the little green-triangle logo. Being a majestic double-fronted 17th-century townhouse, it hardly looked the part. Then again, very few YHA hostels do: the association snapped up most of its properties in the 1930s and 1940s, when big old houses were going cheap. Pot luck is all part of the hostelling fun, but your chances of staying in a truly splendid listed building are good. Locations are invariably excellent, too: the Stow hostel is slap-bang in the middle of one of the Cotswolds’ most becoming high streets and right next to a cosy pub.
