ECCENTRIC HOTELS

Britain is full of beautiful purpose-built hotels, opened by pioneers like César Ritz and Richard D’Oyly Carte (of Savoy fame). However, it also leads the world in converting existing buildings into hotels. Some of the more eccentric structures that have been repurposed include prisons, churches, fortresses, and even whole villages. It seems the British will convert anything into a hotel.

Take Bailiffcourt, for example. Sitting on the Sussex coast, it consists of a series of medieval houses, barns and stone cottages, all reassembled on the private estate of the wealthy Guinness family. Only the 13th-century chapel is in its original place. Walter Edward Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne, and his wife, Lady Evelyn, intended Bailiffscourt as a place for roaring parties. She had her bedroom in the Manor House (now the hotel’s reception) while he had his in the Thatch House, a reconstructed medieval building that he shared