Adventures at Bankside House

Nestled in the fringe of Southwark, London, is a bed and breakfast accommodation called Bankside House. In reality, it is the dormitories for the London School of Economics but they let out the rooms during the summer.

Bankside House is a marvelous place to stay actually, although there are signs posted in the lobbies about fines for cleaning up vomit (ah, those college kids) and they run study groups for teenagers during the summer months. This was my home for the summer of 2007.

First of all, if you are going to live in London, you are going to learn to walk. Bankside House is conveniently located between two tube stations--Blackfriars and Waterloo. Either one gives you a brisk 20 minutes walk there and back but I generally chose Blackfiars because it was better lit at night.

I was studying at The Globe that summer, so it was just a stone's throw from the theatre and right across the street, quite literally, from the Tate Modern. The rooms are comfortable but not spacious. I loved mine. It was a single room en suite with another single and a bathroom for the two of us. There was only a shower in the facility, but there was a tub on the floor for those who wished to have a soak.

The pros of living at Bankside House, besides location, location, location, was the food. Being a B and B, they had a wonderful dining hall. With your room key as ID, you could enter and they had all manner of goodies to choose from. The first thing you came upon was a serving buffet filled with yogurt and cheeses. These being two of my favorite things on the planet, I could have feasted right there. As it was, I had brie every day for breakfast--no lie! Brie has become so expensive in the U.S. so this seemed such a luxury. The yogurt was in a huge punch bowl, which didn't look too appetizing if you are not a sharer, but I didn't care so I plopped a huge bowl of this on my tray every day as well.

Now Americans generally complain about English sausage, but I find it rather tasty myself, having grown used to it when Gram used to have it when I was a kid. I guess the blend of spices seems sort of bland. I prefer soysages anyway and to my surprise, they were part of the menu. The second and third buffet carts were for fruits, eggs and breakfast meats. There were also some home fries but, to be honest they never looked all that appealing to me. I was in my glory between the fruit, cheese and yogurt anyway.

Breads were the last cart and zap, out into the dining room. Cereals and an assortment of teas were along one wall. You had to be quick to nab one of the better teas--they didn't replenish very quickly. There was also coffee and juice.

But enough about food. In the basement there was a fully operational pub, a huge television (which never had anything interesting on it as far as I could tell) and a laundry room. It was nice to gather with my friends at the end of classes on occasion and grab a beer in the pub. I became somewhat fond of shandies--beer and lemonade.

Drawbacks? The Italians! That summer, Bankside House was home to around 200 students from Italy. Yes, all at once. There were other nationalities as well, but it was the Italians that would make their indelible mark.

My first experience with the kiddies was in the elevator. My room was on the eighth floor. The Italians used to like to jump into the elevator, push all the buttons, and then jump out just before the doors closed. They found this uproariously funny and the thing that would really tick you off is that you could hear them laughing all the way up as you stopped at every floor.

The other thing the Italians loved to do was snatch the two public computers and use your computer time. Because there were only two desktops available, finding a moment to log on was primo. You had to make a reservation and then were only on for twenty minutes at a time--which should have been enough to check your e-mail right? Not when the kids were around. They would use up their twenty minutes and then dip into yours. "One more minute," the would tell you in either fractured English or in Italian. Fortunately Italian is close enough to French and Spanish for me to have understood much of what they said. After five or ten one more minutes, they would courteously thank you and LOG OUT! This way, another five minutes of your time was eaten as you re-opened everything.

Another source of fascination for these special darlings was the laundry room. There was a machine that you could put a ten cent piece in and it would spurt detergent at you. Of course, they presumed you would have a cup to catch it. Not so with this crew. They loved the chaos created by spurting powder all over the place and then running for cover. It was also one of their pastimes to start all the washing machines and dryers so that you couldn't do your laundry. OR to beg a coin because theirs was gone (eaten by the detergent spout no doubt).

Perhaps the height of the shenanigans came when we were evacuated at three am. Of course, this was a day in which we had an early class. When we first heard the alarm, we thought maybe someone was pranking us. Then the Resident Advisors were knocking on all the doors. The building was on FIRE! In various stages of undress, five or six hundred people poured out onto the roadway in front of the building. Of course, this was exactly where the fire trucks wanted to be, so we got hustled down the road a piece. I was lucky. I had gone to bed in my sweats that night because it was chilly. Some of my friends were not so fated. A couple of the guys were in boxers and one was in his tighty whities--fortunately someone gave him a bathrobe. The ladies were in everything from hair rollers, to nighties, to pajama tops. It was crazy. As we sat shivering we heard one of the RAs say, "Those damn kids." We thought--yep, they were pranking. It turned out, however, that several of--you guessed it--the Italian kids were sneaking cigarettes in their dorm room and this is what set off the alarms. Bankside House is pre-dominantly smoke free and the children were not allowed to smoke in any case. (To this day I wouldn't put money on whether it was cigarettes or some whacky tabaccy.)

Come to find out, this was the second time they had pulled a stunt like this. The first time, I guess I was either out or just slept through it. In any case, the Italian kids were put on warning--shape up or go home! I found out later, there was a new shipment of them arriving the day I left. Ha, ha, ha.

With all of this, it might seem like I am saying don't stay at Bankside House. On the contrary, it was fun and exciting. If you want someplace to stay that is inexpensive then Bankside House is the place. (By the way, a week before I left England, a Starbuck's opened in the building next door. What more could a girl ask for?)