The British State as Hotel Occupier on the Home Front, 1914-1922: A Model for Comparing Experiences in the Wartime Hospitality Sector

Abstract

This article presents a model and method for investigating hotels on the British home front during and after the First World War. It explores the roles of hotels and other places of commercial accommodation in wartime—as shapers of the contours of conflict and its aftermath, as well as conduits for, and sites of, political, economic and social contest. In so doing, it adopts an innovative and influential theoretical model used for exploring the roles of hotels in more recent conflicts developed by Fregonese and Ramadan (2015). The wider study highlights how hotels were implicated within the infrastructure of war and details how the machinery of the British central government grappled with programmes of hotel requisition, adaptation and compensation. In particular, it argues for the value of identifying establishments and districts in which hotels were enrolled for wartime uses and outlines a project that is systematically comparing their functions and operations in wartime and the transition to peace.