Central Hostel

Central Hostel has cheap beds (in the London hostel market, the price is pretty much unbeatable). The location isn't bad either -- only a few blocks from the Bayswater underground stop, which is on the Circle line that will take you to Victoria Station (buses from Luton airport have drop-offs there), Tower Hill, Notting Hill, and other notables. The neighborhood is comfortable, safe, and middle-class, and near a pretty church. Internet and luggage storage are both available. The check-in staff are all very friendly and helpful.

Now for the accommodations. To get into Central Hostel you have to descend a flight of stairs from street level, and then you enter the common room (very kitschy), which was packed with a noisy visiting student group when we first arrived. The walls of the entire hostel are decorated with murals, and while some of them are pretty good, they are gigantic, bright, and cartoonish -- this is a hostel aiming at a very young demographic (at twenty, we felt too old).

Our dormitory is a horror -- three bunk beds, with metal frames that creaked and shook as if they were going to fall apart, with thin, terrible mattresses (we couldn't move all night because the springs were so poky), linens of questionable origin, and no ladders to the top bunks -- so when your bunkmate comes in at 4 a.m., they will definitely wake you up trying to pole-vault onto the top of your rickety, creaking bed. There is an overflowing trash can, and the "en-suite shower facilities" consist of a shower stall plunked in the corner of the dorm room, without any walls or doors or any kind of privacy, in a mixed dorm, mind you. Apparently nobody had found this prospect appealing in quite awhile, because there was mold on the floor of our shower stall.

To be fair, the toilets (two for a whole floor of six dormitories) are quite clean. Breakfast in the morning is a couple loaves of white bread, generic Nutella, jam, and Nescafé instant coffee. They do have a DVD collection and Playstation, but only one TV and it's in high demand, so if you want to be able to choose what you're looking at you'll have to camp out there for quite awhile.

So basically, Central Hostel is a classic case of "you get what you pay for." If you're on a budget and a little skeeze doesn't bother you, you could do worse, but you're definitely not guaranteed a good night's sleep.

-- Exclusive Hostelz.com Review