She looms over Kingsland High Street, unignorable, with 22 rooms and an air of foreboding; Dalston’s most palpably mysterious guest house, a relic of a disappearing world.
The Rose Hotel is easily missed, with seaside blue trim and elaborate moulding; dingy paint and aged lace curtains on the upper windows, the lower ones fitted with dark glass or unmoving garage doors. The name ‘Rose Hotel’ appears four times in four different fonts. A sign on the front promises three optimistic stars. Open 24 hours. Free Wifi. Occasionally, walking home on a wet evening in the years before COVID, you might have glimpsed a few moustachioed men lounging inside on wide leather sofas. More often, the door was closed.
I arrived in London nine years ago, looking for a city that was neither too sterile nor too wild. Already, Kingsland High Street was catering to more upwardly mobile tastes. The old Turkish restaurants were savvy; Mangal II was winning hearts with its spiky Twitter account and evolving with our growing bank balances (it now serves Galician beef-rib and Carlingford oysters). Other joints followed suit: Umut 2000 installed Edison bulbs; Cirrik invested in natural wines. Those that didn’t, perished – RIP Efes Snooker Club, martyred in the colossal restoration of EartH’s Art Deco theatre.
Somehow, the Rose Hotel remained staunchly seedy. Her blue lights suggested a shadow Dalston, in intimate but decisively separate coexistence. The uninviting exterior reassured us of our intrepidness. It allowed us to speculate on what might really be happening in the lobby, in the rooms upstairs.
I combed Tripadvisor for answers. ‘Scandaloso, sporco, vecchio, caro, puzzolente,’ wrote a guest in 2016 (Scandalous, dirty, old, expensive, smelly). Another reported, in 2011, ‘a message on the wall saying “shithole”’. They described the carpet as ‘marrone color cacca’ and dribbling showers placed in the middle of rooms. Guests found adult mags in bedside tables; foreign toothpicks that materialised on the carpet. Many abandoned their bookings without spending the night. A reviewer from Southampton insisted: ‘only the booze got me through’.
However, this was the shock of hoodwinked visitors, victims of false advertising. No business could survive on such accidental tourism. The Rose needed people who knew what they were getting into. Who had no other options.
I met one. A hard-boiled Dalston veteran, Jack*, spoke about the Rose with the nostalgia of an old booty-call. ‘I’d fuck off there if I had a row with my girlfriend. You could turn up at any time of the early morning.’ He said that the Rose attracted lots of single men and migrant workers. Sex workers too, according to the chatter at the Yucatan Bar down the road. ‘London lacks those types of institutions,’ Jack sighed, sorrowfully. Whatever else it was, the Rose was affordable.
The business was a family affair, run by the Mehmets. They didn’t come off well. One reviewer alleged: ‘As soon as you leave the hotel the managers enter the room, open the windows and turn off the heating.’ Another wrote: ‘I’d sooner sleep on the streets than give such appalling individuals my money.’
