Weekend Deviation – Farewell to the City Hotel

If you’re looking for somewhere to live I’d suggest Graham Greeneland – a great place I visit and revisit often and am never disappointed. Popping round the world there are quite a few Greeneland locations you can hang out in: The Metropole in Hanoi, the Oloffson in Port-au-Prince (The Trianon in The Comedians), the Majestic, the Continental and the Mondial in Saigon, the Sevilla in Havana and others. Nobody really beats Greene for place.

Sadly though you can no longer hang out in one of Greene’s most famous hotels – The City in Freetown, Sierre Leone. The City appeared in Greene’s travelogue Journey Without Maps (1936) and appeared as The Bedford in The Heart of the Matter (1948) and again in a 1968 essay on post-independence Sierra Leone. In Greene it was, typically, hot, sweaty and full of rogues…and marvellous.

I’d heard there was a fire there some time ago but that the structure remained and functioned as a hotel, or rather as a rooms-by-the-hour brothel but now it has been destroyed completely and is gone. Shame.