A grotty hotel that stood against the forces of east London gentrification is no more. But what exactly was happening within its four walls?
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.’
According to Jack, the two sons, Birol and Steven, handled the night shift. Once, after turning up in the wee hours, he pulled back the sheets in his room to discover ‘a lizard rag’ in the middle of the bed – a jizz-congealed tissue. Unruffled, the son at hand said, ‘I’ll speak to the management about that tomorrow.’
For all the sleaze, the Mehmets appeared to avoid run-ins with local authorities, save for paying a 2009 fine of £858 for indoor smoking, and filing two planning requests – first for a members-only club, then a sauna in the basement (both denied). Generally, it seemed they might continue on forever, brazenly apathetic about being a hotel.
However, by October 2022, COVID had taken its toll. The hotel had grown deathly still. Quietly, an offer was accepted. Greymax Capital, a property investment company, was assured that the building had been vacated. But complications arose; a dispute within the family. Birol and Steven, who jointly owned half of the building, did not want to sell. Was it sentiment or squabbling? Either way, months passed without completion. And then, on a rainy night in January 2023, I ran into a squadron of cops storming the building.
‘It’s not easy to get a warrant for something like that,’ a cop friend mused afterwards. ‘You have to have something pretty solid to go on.’ My curiosity spawned wild possibilities, ranging from the grandiose to the prosaic. Mehmet Senior’s lawyer was tight-lipped. ‘Murat Mehmet is under court protection,’ he told me, and little else. The sons did not wish to comment.
For a year the Rose was quiet, in a new, more pregnant way. An expectation gathered around it; after all, a hotel wants for guests.
Then, this January, a notice appeared: we occupy this property. Rights were stated, the Criminal Law Act of 1977 invoked. They left an email address. Even for squatters, it felt brave, moving into a place like that. Did they realise what, or whom, they might be dealing with? A criminal underworld? Ghosts?
‘Who are you?’ I asked, or something to that effect. ‘A heterogeneous group of individuals,’ they told me. ‘Many of us with anarchist ideals and a sense of community… Have a nice spring day .’
I proposed coffee. They sent Carmen* and Daniel*, who looked – well – like Dalstonites. She was pretty, with a pierced nose and big brown eyes. He was thin, with a serious face that occasionally broke into a warm, gratifying smile. ‘You know, people still have this mentality where squatters are evil people that go into someone’s place when they go on vacation,’ he said. We all laughed.
We talked about the ethics of anarchy, the cost of living, their artistic pursuits. I was mostly desperate to know what it was like inside. ‘Eclectic,’ Carmen smiled. ‘It doesn’t have a proper style.’ Daniel shuddered at the windowless rooms in the basement. ‘I don’t know who would have stayed there. But I wouldn’t.’ They told me they were brightening the place up.
But things hadn’t gone well with the Mehmets. They’d had an unpleasant interaction with one of them and a possession order had been filed. According to Daniel, the owner was afraid, swearing and shouting. ‘You are annoying somebody,’ Daniel said. ‘You cannot deny that.’ Mournfully, they recalled past squats that had functioned more like guardianships, defined by mutual trust.
For two people living on the precipice of eviction, Carmen and Daniel appeared remarkably zen. ‘It’s the practice of the ephemerality of our existence,’ Daniel said. ‘We are fragile and everything goes.’ I asked them whether they thought buildings had souls. It’s not something they’d considered. Theirs was a radical present tense, a world without history, unburdened by terror or judgment or even a healthy scepticism. ‘We should do more energy cleansing,’ Carmen laughed.
Maybe these were the tenants the Rose needed – able to see only its potential. I wondered whether they would transform the place, and whether they would finally invite me inside.
No dice. Just days later, a local historian sent me a photo: emergency locksmiths were at the door of the Rose. In the street, bags and boxes piled high, a few mattresses slouched against a wall. Distressed, the squatters found temporary shelter for a few days, then eventually moved on to an abandoned printing press, which was ‘quite old and destroyed’.
What was it all for?
Summer brought a flurry of activity. Greymax sealed the deal and immediately wanted the half-hotel off their hands. ‘We’ve changed strategies,’ they told me. ‘It’s a good thing for us.’ The property was listed for auction. I signed up to attend a viewing.
We stood outside with coffee cups, eyeing each other. It wasn’t a big crowd: a pair of property developers, a stray speculator. Whoever bought this place would change it. Would it be for the best? Down the road, a tower of swanky aparthotels has risen from the grave of the old Tesco. I thought back to Jack, scrambling in the small hours, and wondered where he would go now.
‘Are you looking for yourself or someone else?’ one of the developers asked me. ‘Someone else,’ I smiled, but it wasn’t true. Standing at the threshold, it was hard not to confront the scale of my obsession. I hesitated. Entering would end something, hoist a final curtain on this neighbourhood. The hotel’s mystique could only be sustained in the abstract. I almost wished someone would stand in my way.
Discoloured carpet. Missing ceiling tiles. Exposed wiring. Rooms junked with pillows and sleeping bags – items that Carmen and Daniel’s crew couldn’t carry. Duct tape slung across the doorframes divides the two halves of the building. ‘You’ll need to brick it up,’ the agents said.
The upstairs rooms, inexplicably painted hot pink, somehow felt saddest of all. A waste bin full of acrylic paints. A framed poster of Kate Moss with a beard. Abandoned efforts at beauty. In the back bedroom, the ceiling leaked steadily. I stepped over a vast swathe of spongy carpet. On the wall bloomed a Rorschach of mould.
A week later, half of the Rose sold for £1.23 million. ‘I’ve heard lots of good words about it,’ the auctioneer said, and I wondered what those words were specifically.
Location, I imagine. Potential.
* names anonymised to protect identity
