Centenary celebrations for Belgrade's Hotel Bristol

Celebrating the centenary of Belgrade's Hotel Bristol, Predrag Najdenov, Front of House Manager, sends these early pictures. The hotel looks hardly changed at all from its bright beginnings. The neoclassical building was designed by architect Nicholas Nestorovic and enjoyed a few brief pre-war years when the Serbian and Austro-Hungarian monarchies set the social pace in the city. In 1924 the exiled Zog of Albania lived here. Today, the two-star hotel is a protected building. Its 62 rooms and suites include the luxury Rockefeller apartment. See their website.

Letter from the hotel to an address in Sarajevo, 1929

The building in 1920 looks just as it does today

The dining room

Where in the world is this Hotel Bristol?

Roland-François Lack, who runs The Cine-Tourist website has emailed this image of the Bristol Hotel from Cloak and Dagger, starring Gary Cooper. In the film, directed by Fritz Lang and made in 1946, Cooper plays a spy who flies to Zurich. "Everything is shot in Hollywood," says Roland-François, "but there is a brief shot of stock footage showing a European-style street with a Hotel Bristol."

He says he spent a "very enjoyable morning" here on the Hotel Bristol Site, but still could not find it.
Well, no, this one hasn't come up before and there is no image of it in the extensive Hotel Bristol archives.

The hotel is clearly not the present Hotel Bristol in Zurich (pictured below)

So where in the world was this hotel? The shop sign beside the hotel is not legible, but the figures above the store may be a clue.

Conrad Uhl's Bristol Berlin

"The Kempinski Hotel Bristol Berlin remains the premier hotel in western Berlin" according to a recent report in Conde Nast Traveller. The Kempinski opened in 1952 as the first modern 5-star German hotel. But it wasn't the first Berlin Bristol, of course. The pre-war Bristol, bombed out in 1943 with the loss of some 200 lives, was in Unter den Linden, where the Russian Embassy now stands. It was very much associated with its owner Conrad Uhl – in fact during the First World War, when all English names were eradicated from German businesses, it was called simply the Conrad Uhl. This pre-war poster, from 1910, recently went on sale at Amazon.

The Bristol was where the rich and famous stayed when they visited the city. Among Conrad Uhl's delicate tasks was to deal with the boys from Capri that arms manufacturer Fritz Krupp brought to the hotel -- the story is told in "Krupp's Dying Shame", one of the tales from High Times at the Hotel Bristol.

Sombre mood in Paris Bristol after Aurora killings

The star-spangled Paris premier of The Dark Knight Rises was cancelled on Friday as news of the massacre by the murderous Batman figure in Aurora reached the city. Staying at the elite five-star Le Bristol, the film's stars, Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway and Marion Cotillard immediately abandoned publicity interviews. According to the rolling news on The Daily Telegraph website, there was "total confusion" at the Bristol where a French journalist reported, "The mood caused complete panic. All the publicists and other movie staff were taking calls and shouting, while actors and actresses returned to their hotel suites."
   Film fans continued to hang around Le Bristol waiting for autographs from the stars, but on Saturday they decamped, according to the NY Daily News, "sneaking out through the parking garage in a fleet of black cars with tinted windows without saying a word to clueless fans cooling their heels on the sidewalk."
   The picture here shows the dismantling of the premier cinema venue. Doubts were raised about the film's planned national distribution, due on July 25.

Hotel Bristols from the past

Two images surfaced recently on the net. The Hotel Bristol in Havana, Cuba, produced a number of cards and labels. But this one is different: a fresh looking image of a holiday resort of the 1920s. The distinctive, angular script typeface of the hotel name was often used on its publicity material. The hotel was advertised as a fireproof building with 100 rooms.

The Hotel Bristol in Carrasco, a suburb of Montevideo, Uruguay, no longer exists. But it looks as if it might have been a happy family holiday resort, with a beach, Playa Bristol, named after the hotel. Perhaps that was before Carrasco airport was built in 1947 to serve the capital.

Graham Greene says, "There's always a Bristol Hotel"

Graham Greene's 1939 novel  The Confidential Agent opens with the arrival of the hero 'D' at Dover. He has been abroad for so long that his passport photograph bears little resemblance to him, and as result a detective takes him aside to question him.

..."Perhaps, if you would let me know where you are staying in London," he says, "...an addresss?"
..."Bristol," D replies. "There's always a Bristol."
..."Not in England," the detective replies, and he goes on to suggest the Strand Palace as a suitable hotel for somebody who clearly could not afford the Ritz.

It is true that there was no Hotel Bristol in London at the time. The Bristol Hotel in Burlington Gardens, described in the 1900 Baedeker as "a high class house similar to the Albermarle", had not survived. But there was at least one Bristol hotel in England.

The Hotel Bristol in Newquay, which is still flourishing, was started by Howard and Minnie Young in 1927, Mr Young having just returned from the Continent where he had seen a number of smart hotels called Bristol.

This postcards (right) of the Hotel Bristol in Brighton has no date on it, but may well be from around in that time. On the sea front, it is now the Bristol Bar. There was also a Hotel Bristol in Folkestone about the time Graham Greene was writing.

In 2007 Jurys hotel in Bristol changed its name to simply The Hotel Bristol – surprisingly, it was the first hotel in the city to have the name.

Bristol's Brigstow for sale

The Brigstow in Bristol is up for sale. The four-star hotel (116 rooms) by the Welsh Back waterfront, has a good reputation under its manager, Tim Howes, who was kind enough to bulk order copies of High Times at the Hotel Bristol when it was first published. His reason for the interest? Brigstow is an old name for Bristol, a Saxon word meaning the place on the bridge. The hotel is on the market through Savills, who are asking for offers exceeding £9m (£77,500 per room). They are optimistic about finding a buyer. "Bristol's hotel market is currently outperforming the UK regional average," says James Bradley of the agent's hotel team. "We have already received significant interest."
We certainly look forward to the Brigstow's continued prosperity.