Bournemouth and the Hotel That Understood Everything

A cliffside stay, a traditional seaside town and the fine art of apologising without acting

London was not the destination. It was the large and inconvenient interchange between a flight landing at Stansted and a train leaving for the British seaside.

After landing, I took the Stansted Express to Liverpool Street, one of London’s many mainline railway terminals. Trains to Bournemouth, naturally, leave from an entirely different one. London has never seen a compelling reason to place its major stations close together or connect them in a way immediately obvious to someone carrying luggage.

I needed Waterloo.

That meant leaving Liverpool Street, walking to Bank Underground station and, for the first time, using the Waterloo & City line. It may be the most honest line on the Underground map: it connects Bank with Waterloo and does absolutely nothing else. There are no branches to misunderstand, no intermediate stops and no opportunity to emerge in a suburb one never intended to visit.

For someone crossing central London between two railway terminals, it is less an Underground line than a short tunnel equipped with trains.