John Harris hits the nail on the head (Youth hostels are a muddy, joyful miracle. Losing them to Brexit and the cost of living would be a tragedy, 30 July). We have just finished one of our annual one-week stints as volunteer managers, this time at Poppit Sands in Wales, and can testify to all it offers and also to the concern from hostellers on hearing that it is for sale. These hostellers included families with young children enjoying an inexpensive seaside holiday, travellers from Belgium, France and Germany (having mutually despairing conversations about Brexit) and walkers on the Pembrokeshire coastal path hoping for a room and a hot shower (which we could supply).
Youth Hostels Association properties not only provide safe, clean, affordable accommodation but they also frequently offer stunning views and quirky buildings full of history. And they have souls. As volunteer wardens and longtime hostellers, we have met fascinating people, discovered local history and folklore, and stayed longer and done more than if we had had to budget for hotel or guesthouse accommodation.
Volunteer wardens like us have enabled less economic hostels to survive. We fervently hope (as does the YHA) they will continue to do so.
Gillian and Stephen Chowns
Ledbury, Herefordshire
• John Harris says it all about the forthcoming sale of yet more youth hostels. As a baby boomer (now 73), I spent many happy days hostelling around the Lake District as a teenager with pals. We experienced independence, freedom, nature, responsibility, the value of friendship – so many new experiences for a trifling amount. Youth hostels have been part of my life ever since, having taken my own young – then older – family. I am still a member.
The proposed sales are nothing short of a national tragedy. The Youth Hostels Association was formed to encourage the finest of traits and opportunities for (mainly) young people. Their wonderful philosophy was one of generosity, mutuality and opportunity. Much of its original funding (and amazing buildings) were provided by individual philanthropy at a time when the common good and opportunities for all were readily understood and supported by a forward-thinking nation.
How sad that the self-interest, greedy policies and self-absorption so rife in Tory Britain today will mean the demise of even more egalitarian opportunities for all.
Nancy Knowles
Hume, Scottish Borders
• John Harris is right to mourn the loss of so many youth hostels. The YHA has played a huge part in my life and those of thousands of people like me. While attending an otherwise uninspiring secondary school in Luton in the 1960s, I was fortunate enough to be introduced to hostelling by my music teacher, who was prepared to take groups of us away from our urban environment to experience the joys of walking, youth hostelling and the British and European countryside. Later, I joined the Dunstable YHA local group, forming lifelong friendships and developing my sense of adventure.
The YHA helped me develop an understanding of the possible, broadening my horizons, raising my aspirations and leading to a lifelong love of travel, walking and cycling.
Robin Taverner
Colchester
• I write with sadness as I think I am the only surviving member of the national management team (and in the case of Haworth, the local management team) who took the decision to create the present youth hostels at Patterdale, Eyam and Haworth (which are among those John Harris lists as being sold off). That was in the justified expectation that these would be among those supporting more marginal hostels (eg those in rural East Anglia, where I first became involved in YHA management). To the best of my knowledge, this continued up to the start of the pandemic.
John Goodrich
York
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