On the Tiles

There's a certain type of hotel building which, no matter how much they might have dressed it up in neoclassical detail or deco frippery, just oozes seediness from its very pores. This isn't just because of the functional use that the hotels in question were put - most likely the fervid extramarital dalliances of all manner of Lloyd George lookalikes. No, this is a formalist matter. On pondering this question with relation to the backside of the Savoy (the grimily seamy rear to the shimmering Joan Crawford deco of the front) I suddenly realised - it's because of the tiles. Tiles, most obviously, are a thing that is used for the inside of toilets. And the stained, smog-blackened tiling that creeps up the back of the Savoy, adorns most old Odeons and covers the Regents' Palace Hotel can only evoke the incongrously ornamented glories of the Victorian public toilet, with its collection of unnerving smells, punishing toilet paper and gentlemen asking others if they are 'musical' or not. This all seems quite apt, what with sewers and drainage being the 19th century's gift to London, establishing a visual and material link between this and the guilty sexuality of the period. All those tiled Edwardian tube stations just make this more lurid, what with their rather unsubtle use of scarlet.