Tavistock Arms Hotel

I was awoken in the night at 3am to shouting and knocking on my door. "Help!", said my friend. "What is it?", I said. "Help! The toilet has exploded. It is spraying water like a shower. It is all over the bathroom, into the bedroom and is leaking through the ceiling downstairs. I can't get a hold of the manager and I don't know what to do". I rushed into his room and all of what he said was true. I phoned the owner and like the veritable Hercules he is, he turned the water off. This was quick thinking on his part - wise, like an owl - but it did mean that in the morning we could neither shower nor flush the toilet; fortunately, there was some water left over in the kettle, which we could use to brush our teeth as the taps were also broken, like David Cameron's Britain. There were no spare rooms, so my friends had to sleep in the newly fertile room, and received a whopping 50% discount from the owner for their trouble, after we asked him for one. Also, the electrical sockets in my room didn't fit plugs into them and the wifi didn't work. There is no sign on the hotel, which makes it quite difficult to find, but it is distinguishable by its ugly shade of pastel orange, and the car park looks like that scene from the film No Country for Old Men. Although my friend's toilet exploded, mine did not, which I suppose is a positive. Overall, I actually find the image of an entire hotel's worth of unflushed toilets to be a rather apt one for my time at the Tavistock Arms. Bog standard? If only...

The bar/reception was strangely dark when we entered, the owner did not appear for several minutes. The decor of the rooms is reminiscent of your granny's house, the odour the same. Everything proceeded as expected until three o'clock the following morning. The sound of rushing water woke my friend and I. After some confusion we discovered a torrent emanating from behind the toilet and an expanding pool of water on the floor. In a matter of minutes a significant amount of water had flooded the room and we decided to panic. Whilst I used the waste paper bin to bale water in the shower, my friend phoned the number on the room key, no answer. We shouted through the office door, nothing. My friend called the police but they didn't help either. Finally, the startled proprietor appeared, to halt the chaos. The water was turned off and all returned to normal. The water remained off throughout following the morning. Meaning washing was out of the question and another friend in an adjacent room was unable to flush his toilet after his morning movements. The owner was unapologetic in the morning but gave us a token 30 pound refund when we asked. All in all it was an unpleasant but idiosyncratic stay. Something that cannot be said of more competent, yet less maverick establishments. On the upside, the owner was browsing eBay for a swimming pool upon our arrival so maybe the future is bright. Not quite sure where he's planning to put it but it shows ambition. Also the kettle was half-full so we could brush our teeth. However it wasn't enough to shift the material in the toilet. You can't have everything.

Stayed for one night. The room smelt, the plugs had metal in the sockets so you couldnt use them and WiFi didn't work in the rooms. A mains pipe burst in the bathroom in the middle of night flooding our room so we had to bail water out of bathroom at 3am and meant there was no running water for the morning. The owner gave us a 50% refund on that room but only after asking and he didn't seem to be that bothered about us having to deal with it. Not his fault that the hotel was full so we had to sleep in the flooded room but don't think he apologised for any of it once. Overall not a great stay and wouldn't stay there again.