the Penn Club needs you

I received the email below this afternoon and read it with a heavy heart.

Damn this COVID! Only five minutes before receiving the said email, I was standing in my colleague’s office talking about COVID.

“What if it never goes away?” I said. Bill Gates, who seems to be an expert on this subject, says it’ll go away in mid-2021.

Based in the heart of central London, The Penn Club has been one of my favourite small hotels for many years. On occasion my mother stayed there, and I’ve recommended it to friends. The location is perfect: a 15-minute walk from St. Pancras train station and in the heart of leafy, beautiful Bloomsbury. Oh, and steps away from the eminent British Museum and my favourite bookshop-cakeshop.

 

I’ve had some memorable moments during my stays there:

The morning I was awakened by a rustling sound at 5 a.m. I went to my window, looked down onto the street below and saw the most magnificent fox sauntering down the sidewalk. A fox! In central London!  He had been rummaging in one of the rubbish bins.

Reuniting with my two childhood friends, Kathy and Claire, in December 2018;

Meeting up with an ex-boyfriend there (oh, there were so many ex-boyfriends …);

Eating English breakfast in the communal dining room and having really pleasant conversations with total strangers sitting at the same table (breakfast is included in the price of the room);

Returning to the hotel after walking 7 to 8 hours all over London and relaxing in the quiet Cadbury Room with the daily newspapers and many books at my disposal. It’s a warm and welcoming place, not swish or posh, but cozy and tranquil.

Why is it called the Cadbury Room? Because the hotel fosters a spirit of fellowship in accordance with its Quaker values. Although not a formal Quaker institution, they maintain traditional Quaker values of integrity, equality, tolerance and simplicity, honesty and fairness in all of their dealings.

The great English confectionary companies: Cadbury of Birmingham, Rowntree’s of York, and Fry’s of Bristol were all rooted in Quakerism in their early years.

I go to London every summer for the simple reason that London is my favourite city. I wasn’t planning on going this year (because of COVID), but maybe I’ll change my mind. (Update: no I cannot, the U.K. has just imposed a 14-day quarantine on all travellers to Britain from France.)

Here’s their website. If you do go to London at some time, please stay here before it’s too late.

Welcome to The Penn Club

And here’s the email I received today:

Dear Friends of The Penn Club,

We hope that you and your families are well at this time of crisis. With a spirit of openness and transparency, we are writing to update you on how things stand at the Club in these extraordinary Covid-19 times and to ask for your help.

In this our Centenary Year it has been a particularly hard blow to experience, since March, the most severe imaginable drop off in business. We had hoped once we were able to reopen after our enforced closure that life at the Club would slowly return to normal. However, since reopening, room occupancy is very suppressed with July falling from an average occupancy in recent years of 91% to 3%. The outlook for the next few months is concerning, with pre-bookings not getting above 7%. Apart from a handful of visitors following on from the key NHS health workers we hosted over the worst-hit months, bookings are unsustainably low.

If we find that we are unable to bounce back financially in the coming months, we may, as a last resort, be (and are) forced to consider closing. Should this happen the Board is resolved to retain enough money to discharge liabilities (including towards our wonderful staff team) in a responsible and fair way so we cannot completely run down our reserves to zero.

We need your help. First, if you can possibly do so, please come to stay again. Our safe buildings are being meticulously cleaned and maintained to the highest standards and our health and safety processes can be relied upon. Feedback we have been receiving from visitors who have been to the Club since we reopened is that travelling to and being at the Club feels very safe.

London is uniquely quiet and fascinatingly attractive. Most Museums, Galleries, cafes, restaurants and other attractions are open and welcoming. Trains are not busy and even in London the tube and buses are relatively quiet. The wearing of mandatory face masks on public transport means infection risk is very low. Our location within walking distance of Euston, Kings Cross and St Pancras means many arriving into these termini can avoid public transport if they wish.

The Chancellor recently announced a cut on VAT for hospitality businesses. We have passed the full saving on to our guests. The reduction makes quite a bit of difference to our room rates.

Second, we need you to spread the word about the Club to your network of relatives and friends. We welcome all to our safe haven, renowned as home for one who is away from home. We are considering setting aside a portion of rooms for longer stay guests similar to how the Club operated in the past. Do you know someone who needs a place to stay to avoid commuting every day? If you have any bright ideas of what we could be doing to bring in additional income and encourage more visitors, do please get in touch.

Please be assured that we have not lost heart and that The Penn Club Board and management team are steadfastly working to survive this crisis and emerge into our new century. We have much valued your support in the past and realise how much the Club means to so many people. We hope that together we can continue to build and strengthen our shared home from home in Bloomsbury.

In Friendship

Robert Gibson and Fergal Crossan
Deputy Chair on behalf of the General Manager
The Penn Club Board

Here’s a blog post written in August a few years ago about Bloomsbury, The Penn Club and my favourite bookshop-cakeshop:

https://julietinparis.net/2014/08/27/my-london-bloomsbury/

9 thoughts on “the Penn Club needs you

  1. I’ve stayed here twice thanks to you, Juliet, and loved it. Wish I could help, but a trip to London is not in the cards for me in the near future. I will certainly recommend it to others – but no one I know is travelling either. Brutal.

    • ‘Brutal’ is the word. And for how long?? Just learned this morning that the U.K. is imposing a 14-day quarantine on all travellers from France to the U.K. starting at 4 a.m. Saturday. So, forget London this summer.

  2. Juliet thanks for sharing this. I learnt alot about the Penn hotel, its Quaker values and even that Cadbury was rooted in the Quaker ideology. I will definitely pass this around to friends in London. Indeed the Bloomsbury area is so special with all of its intellectual history…. please leave us soon o deadly virus…

    • Thanks so much for passing this around to your friends. This is living proof of the economic, not to mention emotional and community suffering that COVID has caused. Thousands of businesses will go bankrupt, thousands will find themselves unemployed. We had no idea. 2020 was supposed to be a good year.

      • Indeed… 2020 has been a horrific tragedy.. may we all find our way out of this intact, in one piece…

  3. Thanks for this tip. The Bloomsbury area is my favorite location for a stay in London. For those hankering for fish and chips, try North Sea on Leigh Street/Marchmont Street.

    • Well, now that you’ve mentioned it, CB, and after googling the place and looking at the photos, I’m hankering for fish and chips right now!

      Whenever I can get myself over to London, I will go there. Thanks for the tip.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s