Less hotel, more gentrified flophouse: The Albion Rooms, Margate – review

A strange venture for the Libertines, a band that crashed around Camden in the noughties

At some point we’re going to have to confront the idea of whether the Libertines’ new venture The Albion Rooms is a hotel or not, so we may as well do it now: I am going to argue not. The place has all the markers of a hotel, sure – lush-smelling locked-to-the-wall handsoap in the bathrooms (Haeckels bladderwrack + fennel, in case you were wondering), a miniature fridge in every room, large room keys tied to a massive wooden pellet as a keyring. A bunch of things that convincingly make the argument that The Albion Rooms is a hotel. But then you go through a door and a band is merrily recording a single in there. Then you open your wardrobe and there’s a quite frightening panorama of Jesus painted inside. There’s tea and coffee facilities but there’s also a curated box of Libertines-endorsed vape juice, sitting by the teabags. At some point during the night, the mask of “hotel” slips, and The Albion Rooms becomes something other: an escape room just for goths, an afterparty from a very sumptuous music video. It’s less a boutique B&B, more a place you happen to sleep in while having the luckiest bender of your life.

This is sort of the point. Though the building was previously a bed and breakfast – one of the worst-rated in the country, everyone here will cheerfully tell you – it was originally acquired to turn into studios and as a sort of “stay here when you need to” place that seemingly has, at some point in its three-year history with the band, housed each of the Libertines for a while in turn (ask the right people about The Albion Rooms’ dining area and you’ll provoke a haunted look and the memory that it previously housed Pete’s many dogs, or “six wild wolves”). The fact that it’s a hotel that provides clean towels and allows people to sleep here then eat a hearty breakfast feels more like luck than judgment. Less a hotel, more a sort of “gentrified flophouse”.