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The solar cells planned for Skiddaw House YH have now been installed, according to the News & Star. Eighteen photovoltaic cells will draw around 2440 kWh a year from the Lakeland sunshine, which will power everything from the lights to the washing machine.

It’s not quite the end of electrical improvements at the hostel: the batteries used to store the solar energy for night time use are unable to deal with the amount of energy the new system can deliver – leading to wastage. New batteries will cost £3000, which is the next fundraising target for the “Friends of Skiddaw House”.

If you want to lend your own support, the hostel’s website has information on how you can help.

SYHA have entered into an interesting partnership with Perth College UHI (University of the Highlands and Islands), according to a story in The Courier.

The Association will operate the college’s on-campus student accommodation, serving students during term-time and opening up as a hostel during the holidays. The regular hostel in Perth closed some years ago, so this will fill that gap in the network, albeit for only part of the year.

Hostels have long operated in student accommodation both north and south of the border, in Edinburgh and in Durham for example, but this is the first case I know of where a hostelling association has been a provider of such services as well as consumers of it. Who knows, if it works in Perth we may see this approach down here too.

Yahoo Travel and Visit Britain have put together a list of “Britain’s highest and most precarious places to rest your head” entitled Top 10 Rooms with a View. The good news for YHA is that two of the places selected are YHA youth hostels: Coniston Coppermines and Pen-Y-Pass.

Whilst I’m really pleased to see YHA getting such good publicity, it’s a slightly strange choice. As already established in a comment on this site, YHA has higher hostels than these two: Coniston at 190m and Pen-Y-Pass at 359m don’t measure up to Langdon Beck at 383m, and Skiddaw House towers above them all at 470m! I’m also not sure about the views – the view from Wastwater YH (albeit from the grounds rather than any of the rooms) was recently voted Britain’s favourite. I guess they were just spoiled for choice when it comes to lofty hostels with impressive views, where would you have chosen?

In fact, given that their core business is delivering accommodation in scenic parts of the country, “A Room with a View” would be a really good slogan for YHA to use. They’d certainly have no shortage of suitable rooms to choose from.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail has been running with the story “Youth hostelling can cure cancer”. Actually that’s not true, they haven’t got to that one yet, but they have been plugging the Association as a venue for family holidays:

If you want a cheap break, try a hostel  -  many are geared up to families these days. The YHA says it has family rooms still available on various dates over the summer holidays at family-friendly hostels in Ambleside (the Lake District), Malham (North Yorkshire) and Sheringham (the North Norfolk coast), and at the recently built National Forest hostel in Derbyshire.

So be prepared to meet a few Mail-reading families in the common rooms of Britain, and – who knows – with all this A Room with a View stuff, maybe Helena Bonham-Carter too!

Three former, or soon-to-be-former youth hostels have appeared on estate agency site Right Move:

• Bangor YH
• Hunstanton YH
• Scarborough YH

The information provided suggests the buyer might want to continue to operate each site as a hostel, and offers to include fixtures and fittings to that purpose. So there’s a possibility that each of these might survive in some form, albeit as independents.

Karl has posted some information on the YHA forum about the hostel under construction at Berwick:

The six-storey, grade 2 listed Granary is in the process of becoming a vibrant multi-use facility including a Youth Hostel, meeting rooms and bistro managed by YHA and Art Gallery managed by Dewars Lane Art Gallery Company.

The third and fourth floor of the building will be the Youth Hostel accommodation which will have 55 beds, all en suite and facilities for disabled guests.

The Marketing team are currently making plans for YHA Berwick’s website page to be built so we can start promoting the new facility to our customers and start taking bookings over the coming months before the hostel officially opens in February 2011.

The building is still predominantly a building site at the moment, but most of the hostel bedrooms and bathrooms are now painted along with the communal areas such as the lounge, dining room and self catering kitchen so our newest edition to the YHA network is coming along nicely!

YHA Berwick fact: The building has a 1.2 metre lean – greater than the famous leaning Tower of Pisa!

Further south in the county, there’s further news of a scheme we last heard of back in November: a hostel opening in Alnwick. According to the Northumberland Gazette, the Alnwick Community Development Trust has been working with the YHA on plans to open a hostel in the town. If those plans are approved, the 57 bed hostel could be open as early as spring next year. It’ll be a proper hostel too:

The hostel will have a reception, small shop, lounge, drying room and boot store, as well as a classroom, communal dining room, self-catering kitchen and a serviced kitchen.

There will also be en-suite bathrooms.

I feel a grand tour of Northumberland coming on…

The people behind the independent hostel being developed in Norwich have sought help from local firms in making it environmentally friendly, according to the Norwich Evening News. If successful, they’ll create a building so energy efficient that they’ll actually sell electricity back to the grid.

Speaking to the paper, developer Jason Borthwick said:

Although it looks relatively traditional we want it to be really innovative in terms of the building materials we’re using. We’re looking at things like straw bale building, wooden frame structure, whole-roof photovoltaic, solar panels to heat all the hot water. We’re hoping it will be something really quite different and what we’re looking for at the moment is interesting, innovative ideas.

Of course, YHA are no strangers to eco-friendly developments, notably at Langdon Beck YH. There may be tips and techniques they can pick up from Norwich and apply to their hostels.

It’s been a long time since I heard anything about the community buy-out plan for Coldingham YH, which started with massive local support after the SYHA closed the hostel in 2008.

Well, the news is in, but it’s not good for those hoping to see this hostel reopen. The Berwickshire News reports:

Community efforts to buy Coldingham Youth Hostel and keep it running as a low budget tourism facility were thwarted when they failed to secure lottery funding to help them purchase the building, and now there are plans to turn it into two houses and two flats.

Read the full story to find out more.

YHA have announced that eight of their youth hostels will close at the end of this year. The hostels in question are:

• Capel Curig
• Exeter
• Grasmere Thorney Howe
• Hunstanton
• Kendal
• River Dart
• Saffron Walden
• Scarborough

These closures result from an in depth review of YHA’s financial position and future strategy carried out by the management team over recent months. The money required for essential repairs and refurbishment of these hostels could never be repaid by their likely levels of occupancy, hence the need to let them go. Sadly, this is unlikely to be the last set of closures in the next few years, as YHA seeks to batten down the hatches and see off the recession.

It’s not all bad news though:

The two major investment schemes for this year will be at YHA Castleton (Derbyshire), supported by funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and at YHA Oxford Street in London.  In May YHA’s Board of Trustees will look at opportunities for further funding this year at popular small country hostels.

Expect interesting times ahead as the new strategy makes itself felt.

The Lake District Sustainable Development Fund has made a £26,000 grant funding the installation of photovoltaic cells to generate electricity at Skiddaw House YH, according to a Grough report. The money will also pay for new insulation made from natural fleece (presumably the same stuff they’re using at Eskdale).

Skiddaw is just one of many hostels in the Western Lakes who operate green energy schemes. Just one thing worries me – is solar energy really the right choice for the Lake District? Derwentwater and Black Sail are powered by rain…

We’ve already had one laundry list of ideal hostel features this year, here comes another. This time it’s from backpacker Adam Seper writing on the BootsnAll travel site about “8 Things that Separate Great Hostels from Average Hostels“. Here’s his list (the original article has a lot more detail on each point):

1. A real bar – with real drink choices – placed in a logical location within the hostel
2. A good chilling area and (not or) a good place to hang out with other travelers
3. A breakfast that offers a little bit more
4. A computer station and (not or) WiFi
5. Staff that actually cares
6. Location, location, location
7. A kitchen that can actually support the capacity of the hostel
8. A good view

Once again, he’s talking about international backpackers’ places, rather than the outdoor market (not that those two are mutually exclusive), but it’s still a pretty good list. For walkers’ hostels I’d add an efficient drying room with a sink for cleaning boots, no doubt you could add more.

What I find interesting is that both this list and January’s “ideal” list include a self-catering kitchen, but neither of them mention hostels’ provision of main meals. I know this is hardly a scientific sample of hostellers’ views, but they do seem to be going in the opposite direction to YHA on this issue at least.

What do you think?