Ye Newe
The capacious new hotel (8 storeys, 240 bedrooms) now being built by the Knopp Hotel _Company of New York at the corner of Bond Street and Conduit Street is to be called the Westbury. I suppose the spread of literacy was respon- sible for the fact that, whereas the names of inns (whose *signs once had to be recognisable by people who couldn't read) are almost always attractive, the names of Modern hotels are generally either synthetic and meaningless or ostentatious and misleading. Most cinemas, too, seem to have perfectly horrible names, though I suppose it's really only on grounds of seniority that we prefer the Hippodrome and the Palladium to the Regal and the Plaza. I still, however, wish that the firm responsible for the new hotel had dispensed with an appellation which sounds like a cross between a brand of genteel note-paper and a village in a rather dull novel and called the place Knopp's instead.
Previous page
