Hotel Bristol

Since the mid 19th century scores - perhaps hundreds - of hotels throughout the world have carried the name Bristol. They are traditionally upscale, offering a high standard of accommodation. These hotels had no connection with each other apart from the name, which implied the promise of quality, and may have become popular in part because 'Bristol' is easy to say in any language, even when transliterated into Cyrillic. Evoking the Victorian Golden Age of Travel, many of their colorful and elegant luggage labels have become the centerpieces of ephemera collections, as shown in the embedded image.

The number of Bristol hotels probably peaked in the 1920s. There was one in Burlington Gardens in London, and the Bristol in Mar del Plata, Argentina, was regarded as the finest hotel in South America. A revolutionary's bomb tore apart the Bristol in St Peterburg in 1905 and the Bristol in Copenhagen provided Leon Trotsky with an alibi following his 1936 trial – he was accused of plotting against Stalin at the hotel, which at that time had in fact burnt down.

Two possible origins of the name are the association with the English slave and whaling city of Bristol, and the supposed endorsement of Frederick Augustus Hervey, the 4th Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry (1730–1803), who spent much of his life traveling the continent, demanding high standards of hospitality. It is, however, hard to discover a hotel with that name before 1870.

About 150 hotels called Bristol remain today, mostly in France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany. These include a number of notable establishments.

The five-star luxury hotel in Vienna opposite the Vienna State Opera House is now one of the most exclusive hotels in Austrian and arguably the world after being restructured by the famous hotelier Georg Hochfilzer. To date, the Hotel Bristol in Vienna has hosted many historical figures including Teddy Roosevelt. It was here that the Prince of Wales and Wallis Simpson sojourned at the height of their affair, in 1936, and the most sumptuous suite is named after the Prince of Wales.

Warsaw's 1901 Hotel Bristol is on the ancient and elegant Krakowskie Przedmieście in Poland's capital. It was thoroughly refurbished, in its original style, in the 1990s and re-opened by Lady Thatcher.

Le Bristol in Paris, opened in 1925, is one of only five palace hotels in the city, and its pedigree is immaculate. P.G. Wodehouse was kept there by the Germans during World War II and Suha Arafat had a suite there at the time of Yassar Arafat's death.

Le Bristol is one of the best known hotels in Beirut, and the Bristol in Skopje, Macedonia, where Dame Rebecca West was alleged to have stayed when researching Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, was the only city hotel to survive the 1963 earthquake. The Bristol in Oslo was the first place that Norwegians ever heard live jazz, in 1921, the year that it opened, and it still has a reputation as a music venue.

Naming hotels Bristol is so widespread that it has crept into fiction, figuring as a landmark in Jan Morris's book about the mythical city-state of Hav (2006). Bristol Queens, about a fictitious Bristol Hotel in New York, is the subject of a song by LL Cool J. In 1988 Valerie Solanas, author of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, who shot Andy Warhol, died in the SRO (single room only) Bristol Hotel in San Francisco.

New hotels also carry the name Bristol, such as the Bristol in San Diego, which has Warhol and other art on its walls, and the Bristol in Sheffield, Yorkshire, which got its name because that's where its backers came from – another reason for naming a hotel Bristol, just as the Bristol Hotel in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, is named after Police Chief Everett Bristol, who built it in 1948.

Further reading: High Times at the Hotel Bristol: Twenty Bedtime Tales, by Roger Williams (ISBN 978-0-9555376-0-8, 2007) The Mitred Earl: An Eighteenth-Century Eccentric by Brian Fothergill (Faber & Faber 1974)

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