One of the main oddities that strikes me about hotels is, more so than any workplace, or any other workplace I have experienced, practically all skills are represented here. There are gardeners, cooks, cleaners, administrators, empaths, laundry-doers. There is brawn and brain in harmony. This is to the extent that a large hotel, more so than any other workplace I have experienced, would easily transfer over to becoming a fully-functional self-sustaining community. A team of gardeners cultivates the food, a team of chefs prepares the food, a team of entertainers keeps everyone company, a team of people-people spices up the communards’ respective lives.
If a group of hotel employees successfully organised, they could readily start a completely self-sustaining community, even an alternative society. In the hotel I work in, there are 240 employees, all of a vastly different ilk. The raising of the new nation’s flag, and the humane dismissal of all managers, would give birth to this grand, different institution.
The problem are the guests. Each guest occupies a space in a hotel that could easily fit an entire family of refugees.
We are reminded of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Premier Inns around London and Manchester did become social institutions, “houses of hospitality”. Forced by their imminent lack of function, which depends on the reality of swift travel, hotels were forced to learn the works of mercy and the rigours of Franciscan love-thy-neighbourism. Sadly, the too-quick end to this alternative and Medieval use of hotels was quickly brought to an end.
Perhaps if this social function hadn’t been altered, one would never have noticed the mingling of polished guests with the most vulnerable members of society. And, accidentally, a new, dynamic social system would have been created. One in which the hotel lobby would have been at the vanguard of social change – welcomed by a concierge retrained as a monk retrained as a concierge.
The hotel auditorium would interchangeably be a hotel auditorium and a site of prayer. After the conference is finished, Evensong could begin. Travelling salespeople would be so impressed and beckoned by the allure of the incense and the immanence of prayer that they would join. Some would become novices.
Perhaps these reflections are driven by the fact that my Oxford PPH, St. Benet’s Hall, is closing. One has to take a wistful view of this: here, at a long table, businesspeople and Benedictine monks did mingle at formal dinners. The prayer of ages thundered through the college, infusing a surprising soulability. The Medieval met the modern, where increasingly secular (and often Brutalist) colleges dominate the city.
Squidditas 