Written in Grief and Anger!

The Youth Hostels Association betrays its members!

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These last weeks many sorrowful conversations have taken place in Youth Hostels all over the country as people visited their favourites for the last time.

The YHA’s excuse for closing these hostels is that they are unpopular and unprofitable. Yet whose fault is this? I stayed in Blaencaron, a delightful little hostel in a pretty valley just outside Tregaron. The changing light shone on the hills and sunlight sparkled through trees on the brook rippling beside the lane. What better surroundings could you wish for if you need to escape from city living, or if you live, as I do, on the Welsh Borders and wish to explore beyond your local area? It was the perfect stopover for anyone wishing to break their journey in mid-Wales or to stay longer in one of the most magical landscapes in Britain.



Red Kite - the symbol of Blaencaron

Did the YHA promote these points? No, it did not. It described Blaencaron and its two sister hostels of Tyn Cornel and Dolgoch as ‘bunkhouses’, and then claimed that Blaencaron was its least popular hostel. (Yet even the most expensive Youth Hostels, where the organisation has spent millions on makeovers, have bunks.) Reading this unflattering description, people naturally stayed away. If the YHA had told the truth about Blaencaron being a comfortable cottage, with everything you need for a marvellous self-catering holiday, yet easy to reach by road if you prefer to eat out, people would have flocked to it. Then the YHA, if it lived up to its charitable aims, would have been hard-pressed to find a reason for selling it. Yet after these closures the YHA will not have a single hostel in the whole of mid-Wales!



Blaencaron lies within the circle. On the approach, the hills look much steeper than this.
Where does the YHA expect people to go instead? For some years I existed in modern, revitalised Tyne and Wear. I will not risk offending its residents by stating exactly what I thought of it. It’s enough to say that never will I return under any circumstances whatsoever! Yet the YHA promotes a hostel in Newcastle-on-Tyne! An article in the latest issue of its magazine ‘Triangle’, describes Newcastle as ‘vibrant’, yet if you read between the lines, you realise how little there is to attract you, (other than watching the Great North Run!). Now I live on the edge of mid-Wales, I could not experience a more life-enhancing contrast!

This exposes the fallacy of the YHA Chairman’s stated objective of providing ‘great hostels in great locations.’ Is it abnormal to prefer miles of beautiful green hills to grey city streets where you avert your gaze from the eyesores? To want to see wonderful Red Kites instead of town pigeons? No, of course not! And what are the stated aims of the YHA itself? ‘To help all, especially young people of limited means, to a greater knowledge, love and care of the countryside.’ Yes, the countryside, not the city! So why didn’t the YHA promote the fortunes of Blaencaron by publicising it in ‘Triangle’?

The YHA claims to have huge debts, yet the hostels it chooses to promote can receive makeovers worth as much as half-a million each. We realise that old buildings require maintenance, but the makeovers go far beyond this. Sometimes they provide disabled access, but otherwise I’ve never noticed that they significantly improve a hostel visit. Why exactly do we need individual bedside lights more than we need affordable accommodation in beautiful countryside where there is nothing cheaper than a B&B? Remember most B&B landladies will charge you pounds extra if you have the temerity to turn up on your own or only stay for a single night!

However the revamped hostels do seem to attract a lot of Japanese backpackers. Not that I have anything against the Japanese, and hostelling does give lone travellers the chance to make friends with each other. Yet they are from the richest country on earth, so could presumably afford up-market accommodation if the YHA had not compromised its charitable aims of helping people of limited means by trying to attract them.

Foreign visitors tend to travel where guidebooks make them want to go. Priorities can be different if you are exploring your own country. The plight of walkers and cyclists who can no longer travel between hostels has been widely publicised, and so has the fact that increased airfares and fuel prices, plus concern about emissions, will drive more people to this type of holiday in the future. Yet the YHA claims to promote sustainable transport!

So why are so many hostels really closing? Once the YHA was run by its members, who cared about the hostels. Now businessmen run it. In Blaencaron I learned about a deliberate policy of creating under-use in certain hostels, so the YHA has an excuse to sell them now that property has become so valuable.

I’ve already described the underselling of Blaencaron itself. I heard reliable first-hand accounts of more cases. A life member of the YHA had tried to book herself into a certain hostel. ‘Sorry,’ said the manager. ‘There’s a group coming, so they have sole usage.’ Later in the conversation he admitted: ‘There isn’t really a group coming next week. I’ve been told to say there is, in case one turns up.’ So the hostel reported insufficient bookings, and was subsequently sold because it was ‘unpopular’! I myself tried to book into Llangollen earlier this year, but was told it was a groups-only hostel, so I was turned away. Now it is also closing.

Another Youth Hostel shut because of under-use is Kirkby Stephen on the North Pennines in Cumbria. For many years a friend took me to the Swaledale Tup sales held in this interesting little market town each autumn and we stayed in the well-appointed hostel, a few minutes’ walk from the auction ring, for half the price of a B&B. These sales are so crowded that you can hardly squeeze in to watch the auction, yet how many of the hundreds attending them stayed in the almost empty hostel? Just the two of us! Did people at the sale even consider the hostel? Did the farming community realise that you don’t have to be young, or a member, to stay?

I asked my friend, who identifies with farmers and shepherds.

He was adamant. ‘Oh, it wouldn’t enter their heads!’

‘If they had known what the hostel was really like, would they have come?’

‘Yes, they probably would!’

So what stopped the YHA from promoting the hostel as ideal accommodation during the sales?

Yet on my visits to Badby YH in Northampton shire, I never noticed a shortage of visitors. A year or two ago it was sold as ‘unpopular’. Why? It was a chocolate-box thatched cottage on a village green in a county where all rural housing is very expensive!

Another excuse the YHA uses is that some of these hostels need costly maintenance. It also had a lot to say about the losses it sustained during 2001, Foot-and-Mouth Year. During that time, when the countryside was closed and events cancelled, one of the few ways left of getting out of town was to stay in a Youth Hostel. After all, I needed to escape from Tyne and Wear! So people like me did not visit Youth Hostels less. We visited them more! Thirlmere in the Lake District always attracted a good crowd, yet the YHA made gloomy noises about the state of the building, and decided it had to go.

I met a hosteller who had voiced his concerns to a visiting executive. ‘Oh!’ exclaimed the executive disdainfully. ‘You wouldn’t want to stay in accommodation like this!’

Why not? Thirlmere may have needed patching up, but it was much-loved, and popular even during Foot-and-Mouth Year! Perhaps it really was impossible to save the building, but the recent spate of closures has done a lot to destroy the YHA’s credibility.

Blackboys Youth Hostel is meeting a similar fate. It lay deep in the Sussex Weald, the kind of countryside I'd dreamed of all my life, and when I first left home its warden was my landlady. Sadly my job didn’t last, but I found another in West Sussex, an hour and a half from my former haunts. So I joined the YHA to stay in my old friend’s hostel at weekends. It didn’t matter that I travelled alone because I found so many new friends there as well as old ones nearby. On my first stay, for thirty-six hours I experienced the kind of happiness I had previously only associated with an annual holiday. I was instantly hooked! In time I moved away, but did people really stop loving Blackboys? According to a recent letter in ‘YHA News’, they loved it to the end.

Not one of these tales is hearsay and many more such stories are being told up and down the country. It would be interesting to know how the organisation can go against the wishes of donors, when buildings have been left to it in trust, so that future generations can enjoy them as hostels.




Granted Blaencaron isn't a thatched or half-timbered cottage, but otherwise, what's wrong with it?
In fact, the sides are of stone and the windows are large enough.
Blaencaron is in good repair. Like many other people, I contacted the YHA as soon as I realised it was under threat to let them know my feelings. We merely received the standard brain-washing about it being ‘unpopular’ and ‘unprofitable’. At least we actually received replies. A hosteller who wrote a general letter about closures to the head of YHA in person didn’t even receive an acknowledgement.

If we couldn’t attend meetings in person, we found other people to speak for us at regional AGMs. What good did this do? I met a person who had received a letter of invitation to a YHA meeting. When she arrived, YHA officials, all with flashy number plates like YHA 1 and YHA 2 on their cars, patronised or ignored her.

I could leave the organisation in disgust, but, as I said, I’m a life member. Years ago it seemed to me, and to others like me, that we would always be glad of inexpensive holidays, so £16.00 for life membership represented a good investment. Now we doubt the YHA values us at all. It must cost it far more than £16.00 to keep sending us literature about themed weekends we can’t afford and hostels in tourist hotspots and cities we don’t want to visit.

Is the excuse that the organisation is primarily for young people? But the plaque with the YHA’s aims on the outside of hostels states that they are for all, and obviously older people can also be of limited means. As I discovered on my first night in Blackboys, neither are hostels there just for inexpensive nights away from home. People value friendships made in simple Youth Hostels where fellow visitors talk to you. In a B&B you may hardly see the other guests.

So the YHA is a failure whichever way you look at it! As a charity it has departed from its objectives and as a business it is in the red. So we speculate on its true objectives. Remember the personalized number plates, YHA 1 and YHA 2? Close all the hostels and top management would lose their jobs. Close as many as they can, sell the buildings, and they can continue to fund their expensive salaries.

I wish all success to the wonderful people of the Elenydd Hostels Trust who are doing their best to keep Tyn Cornel open, and if I didn’t need replacement joints I would certainly be staying there. With luck, they'll even save Dolgoch as well. Meanwhile Blaencaron is valued at £150,000. If I were wealthy, I’d not only buy it but also promote it well, so people would come to know what a gem it really is!

Instead, I wrote my final entry in the visitor’s book, closed the door for the last time and looked back in longing. There is a time and a place for grief. I walked beside the little stream in tears.

Rosemary Cooper.

30th September, 2006.

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I found this poem in remote Dolgoch Hostel, which I was delighted to find I could reach. The track is not too rough!

Dolgoch. We go back We know not where. Back to the stars, Earth and sky. And we should have loved more And feared less. But what we can never forget And what is eternally true, I along with you, Walked these hills And knew this place. Peter Curry.

Photos by courtesy of the Elenyndd Hostels Trust

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Links to former YHA hostels, which are now independently run.

The Elenydd Hostels Trust is doing its best to keep Tyn Cornel open, and also has an interest in Dolgoch, both in this magical part of Mid-Wales.

Corris Youth Hostel A friendly welcome awaits you in spectacular scenery in North-West Wales.

Ninebanks Youth Hostel Another friendly welcome, this time in a glorious part of rural Northumberland.

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