Don’t forget your toothbrush
It’s coming up to midnight on Thursday 30 June 2022. I’ve got a fairly busy Friday coming up so I should have been asleep a while ago. Anyway this probably isn’t necessary, staying up like this. The anticipation is high though.
With a couple of minutes left of this day, my laptop is open on the right website. My fingers are poised. One minute now. But still - is this really necessary? Can’t it wait until morning?
Midnight strikes. I hit it. Refresh the calendar, nothing. Refresh it again. And again. Forty seconds have now passed, and at last I can see June 2024 in front of me. Yikes! There’s one four-day opening left. BOOK! Details. Confirm. Success…!
The background to this absurd situation is that despite being a devotee of gardens, plants and garden history - I’ve never been to one of the world’s most well-loved places, Sissinghurst Castle Garden in Kent. Most famous for being the creation of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, this garden also has notoriety as one of the National Trust’s most popular and busiest gardens. At times, this has been to its detriment. And this is why I was determined that the only way to see it was to stay the night there.
Released at midnight on 1 July 2022, by 12:01am all availability to stay in Priest’s House, Sissinghurst had been booked.
Fear not - I won’t be hiding in the viburnum bushes and waiting for the team to lock up at the end of the day. I’ll be staying in the ‘Priest’s House’ at one end of the garden. Booking for this charming three bedroom cottage is so in demand for the peak times of year (like rose flowering time in June) that within those first forty seconds of Friday 1 July 2022 when the June 2024 booking opened - all but one four-day period got booked up. And that’s when I’ll first explore Sissinghurst.
It’s not just the exclusivity I’m looking forward to - it’s the times of day. We generally open places to visitors between mid-morning and late afternoon. These are some of the harshest sunlight conditions to explore the textures and colours of a garden. It’s clear that many of the photographs we see in gorgeous gardening magazines are taken at 6am or 8pm.
I’ll be able to wander through the various garden ‘rooms’ (with coffee or cocktails depending on the hour) and get the closest feeling possible to what life was like when Vita and Harold entertained their Bloomsbury friends there.
Accommodation and visitor destinations can be very happy bedfellows.
County Durham has a deficit of bed spaces for its growing visitor numbers. Within the county, the Auckland Project is this week opening its first place to stay: Park Head Hotel. The project’s attractions are already too compelling and too many to fit into one day. This new thirty-eight bedroom establishment will see people able to explore the attractions of Bishop Auckland at leisure and invest in the supplier and nighttime economies of this place in so much need of regeneration.
I worked on St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall a few years back. Hundreds of thousands of visitors a year take a boat over to this tidal island each year - or wait for the tide to reveal the causeway. We ran the small hotel on the mainland end of the causeway: the Godolphin Arms. As I was waiting for a meeting there one morning I chatted to a couple staying in the hotel. They were having a lovely stay but had no intention of going any closer to the Mount! “The view is all we need, no matter what time of day,” one of them happily told me. Far from being insulted that we hadn’t enticed them to visit, I realised how the places we look after have the power to appeal to people in such simple ways - in this instance as a live picture from their hotel room window.
Bedrooms at the Godolphin Arms in Marazion, Cornwall look out at St Michael’s Mount - an ever changing view.
On the theme of views, imagine if the last thing you saw before you closed your eyes to sleep was a blue whale skeleton. Such is the experience in the Natural History Museum’s Dino Snores events. Initially offered to children bringing their parents along too, there are now specific grown-up Dino Snores sessions. I like the fact that both adult and child events have various offer levels to suit different budgets with extras included for the more premium choices.
A few years ago the annual Visitor Attractions Conference focused their programme on adding accommodation to day visits. It was entertaining, fascinating and inspiring. I took professional insight away, but after one presentation I also told myself one day I’d book Tiger Lodge at Port Lympne. Taking note of the visitors to the bird table outside my kitchen window with my first coffee of the day is one thing - but eating breakfast with a fully grown tiger the other side of the glass would be a memory for the ages!
What if you haven’t got a world famous garden, an island, giant fossils or living breathing big cats? How do you offer accommodation if you’re operating a small museum in a congested urban environment with no potential spaces?
I believe every landscape, every collection, every historic building has something in it which can be brought to life in different ways as part of an evening or early morning experience. And if you haven’t got your own accommodation or spaces to develop accommodation - how about partnering up with nearby hotels, guest-houses or self-catering establishments? Yes - there’s administration involved, but bundling up combinations of admission tickets, dinners and overnight stays not only generates revenue but it also provides a really easy decision making and booking process for potential guests.
Think of me in June 2024 as I temporarily take up residence in Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst. She once wrote about her White Garden there “I cannot help hoping that the great ghostly barn-owl will sweep silently across a pale garden, next summer, in the twilight”. I’ll settle for at least one clear moonlit night.