The great British bed and breakfast has its origins, it is said, in Roman officials needing somewhere cheap and cheerful to stay while traversing the remote regions of their empire – and nowhere was more far flung than Roman Britain.
Perhaps, given that the locals were a conquered people labouring under the Roman yoke, it's no surprise that more attention was lavished on the "cheap" than the "cheerful".
The concept was revised during later years, when monasteries took up the slack and gave overnight succour to travellers, and the term bed and breakfast came into popular use after World War II when displaced foreigners needed a place to stay and people began to open their homes and provide a morning feed.
Perhaps it was the impact of rationing and the general austerity of those post-war years but the British B&B soon became synonymous in the popular imagination with rock-hard beds, faded, see-through towels, poky rooms, dodgy dunnies down dingy corridors and flint-faced, stone-hearted landladies.
No doubt this was what Roald Dahl had in mind when he penned the short story The Landlady in 1959. Subsequently included in The Tales of the Unexpected book and filmed in 1979 it tells the story of Billy Weaver, a young man who spends the night in a B&B in Bath with a landlady who is also a taxidermist. Suffice to say it doesn't end well for poor Billy.
Interestingly, Billy is advised to look into staying at a B&B by a kindly vicar who describes them thus: "Landladies, kippers and roller towels…" Which speaks volumes about Dahl's experiences in these establishments.
Fourteen years after Dahl ruined B&Bs for anyone with an active imagination, a naive young American by the name of Bill Bryson arrived in Britain from Europe and found himself bedding down in a Dover B&B run by "a formidable creature of late middle years" he called Mrs Smegma.
Now 1973 might not seem like another country (to some of us) but it was closer to the start of World War II than today and compared with its transatlantic cousin the British hospitality industry wasn't so much in its infancy as still gadding about in leaky nappies.
Bryson writes amusingly about the number of rules that Mrs Smegma reeled off like a sergeant-major at roll call: "When breakfast was served, how to turn on the heater for the bath, which hours of the day I would have to vacate the premises and during which brief period a bath was permitted (these seemed, oddly, to coincide), how much notice I should give if I intended to receive a phone call or remain out after 10pm, how to flush the loo and use the loo brush, which materials were permitted in the bedroom waste-basket and which had to be carefully conveyed to the outside dustbin, where and how to wipe my feet at each point of entry, how to operate the three-bar fire in my bedroom and when that would be permitted (essentially, during an Ice Age)."
After she leaves the room a bewildered but defiant Bryson locks the door and bravely pees in the sink. (Come on, who hasn't? I remember this one B&B in Edinburgh during the … hmm, perhaps a story for another time.)
Things have changed. Today, the UK punches well above its weight in the B&B stakes. In January 2014, TripAdvisor named Bindon Bottom, a Victorian country house at Dorset's picturesque Lulworth Cove, as the best B&B in the world. And of the top 10, six were British, two American and the others were in Morocco and Thailand.
In 2015, the top accolade went to Millgate Bed and Breakfast in Masham, Yorkshire, followed closely by the Shola Coach House in Portrush, Northern Ireland. The Llwyn Helyg Country House in Llanarthney, Wales, sits at sixth while Beach Cottage B&B, Inverness, and Edgar House in Chester occupy eighth and 10th respectively.
At Bindon Bottom – a name so quintessentially British as to deserve its own saucy seaside postcard – rooms cost from £90 and the price includes a full English breakfast. This heart-stopping start to the day – the average full fried English has about 1190 calories – is a mainstay of the great British B&B and, according to a poll conducted last year by the Daily Mirror, simply must consist of fried eggs, smoked bacon, thick sausages, grilled tomatoes, fried mushrooms, toast and baked beans – though some avant-garde establishments have been known to throw in, gasp, black pudding or hash browns.
At Bindon Bottom they go above and beyond with a breakfast that includes, in time honoured fashion, Dorset sausage, Dorset bacon, Dorset free-range egg, vine tomatoes, local mushrooms, organic baked beans and a Johnny-come-lately potato rosti.
And despite all this, the B&B is under threat as never before from boutique designer hotels and the cheap chains but, most of all, from the seemingly ubiquitous Airbnb. According to the B&B Association there are some 25,000 bed and breakfasts in the UK but 65,000 premises listed with Airbnb – a number that grew 73 per cent in 2014 alone.
David Weston, chief executive of the Bed & Breakfast Association, is taking on Airbnb by lobbying hard for changes to regulations that he thinks disadvantage bed-and-breakfast owners. Writing on the association's website he argues that B&Bs and Airbnb are not competing on a level playing field and that regulations dealing with fire safety and liability insurance should apply to the newcomers, too. This is something Airbnb disputes.
And Weston adds: "British B&Bs should be celebrated – not only are they at the heart of sustainable UK tourism, contributing billions to local (especially rural and coastal) economies but the best are world class."
It's certainly not all bad news. The B&B sector in the UK is a £2 billion industry which makes up one fifth of the total serviced accommodation sector in the UK – and it's making inroads into the United States, too, where the number of B&Bs has exploded in the past 20 years.
The California-based Professional Association of Innkeepers International reports that, in 1980, there were 1000 bed and breakfasts hosting 1 million guests. At the turn of the millennium, that had grown to 28,000 properties hosting 50 million guests (many of them tourists from Britain, Germany, Canada, France and Australia who grew up with B&Bs).
Oddly, there are said to be more B&Bs in the South Island of New Zealand than in the whole of Australia.
My own love affair with the B&B came many moons ago when I went on a driving holiday to Wales in a Mini that wouldn't fire up in the morning unless it could be rolled down a hill and jump-started. "Are you on a hill?" was a question for which even the most robust of B&B landladies wasn't prepared.
Why driving from London to Wales in a dodgy Mini seemed like a good idea is lost in the mists of time but it was an adventure – and one given added layers by the B&Bs in which we stayed. Not all were good, some were awful, but they were never bland. And in the years since, if there's a choice, I'll always opt for the B&B over anything else.
So what's the attraction? Well, the perfect B&B is, like George Orwell's Moon Under Water pub, an impossible fantasy but, like that famously fictitious hostelry, there are a few qualities that all the best ones possess.
First among those is the personal touch. You can almost tell from the first meeting with the owners what your stay is going to be like. The best of them are friendly, relaxed, slightly eccentric, often quirky and, most of all, welcoming right from the start. After all, these are mostly people who like people (well, except that bloke in Swanage who seemed to be auditioning for a remake of Fawlty Towers).
After that it's pretty simple. The aim, as Terri Chichester, owner of The Cross at Croscombe B&B in Somerset, wrote in a blog post on the subject, is "to provide a warm welcome, a comfortable place to stay and a hearty breakfast to begin the day". It also helps that the hosts generally live on the premises and can be relied upon to dish out local insider knowledge and recommendations on the best local pub/restaurant and how best to get there.
At the Hollycroft bed and breakfast in the New Forest village of Brockenhurst, for instance, Adrian Burks and Zofia Karol greet new arrivals with a pot of tea and biscuits. Weather permitting, these are taken in the garden where doves dicker around dinky dovecotes and chickens bustle self-importantly in a (sometimes) fox-proof pen.
In the morning the chickens' eggs glow like the sun next to locally bought bacon and sausages in their English breakfast and you find yourself chatting, as we did, about the time one of the wandering New Forest donkeys foaled in the street outside the house: "There we were, all out there in our jim-jams."
These, then, are not places for the anti-social or those who prefer the bland anonymity of a corporate hotel or motel. They are for those who seek out the local, the independent and the idiosyncratic – and who relish the chance for a natter with a stranger over a snag, toast and coffee.
It was at one such place on the Isle of Islay, off Scotland's west coast, that a chap at breakfast recommended the Lagavulin single malt scotch distillery, sandwiched between Laphroaig and Ardbeg. I took his advice and thus started a long-term love affair with Lagavulin's Pedro Ximenez cask finished Distiller's edition. For which I am thankful, though my wallet begs to differ.
