Checking into the world’s most bombed hotel

Sitting sipping a pre-dinner martini by the window of the first-floor Piano Bar of the Europa Hotel, looking down at the locals and tourists wandering into the Crown Liquor Saloon opposite for an obligatory pint of Guinness, it’s almost impossible to imagine the past.

A past in which the same scene, rather than one of a busy, vibrant city was one of rubble and broken glass. The streets echoed not with happy chatter but the wail of sirens.

The Europa, which has just completed a five-year, £15 million refurbishment, was bombed 33 times between 1971 and 1994, leaving it jostling for the title of the world’s most bombed hotel with the Holiday Inns in Sarajevo and Beirut. The windows were broken so many times, making a fortune for local glaziers, that those at the front were almost permanently boarded up.

As a result, it was dubbed the Hardboard Hotel – and rooms at the back with proper windows cost £10 more per night. In the bar on the top floor, drinks were served by the Penthouse Poppets, Northern Ireland’s answer to Playboy Bunnies, but journalists tended to congregate in the Piano Bar on the first floor.

I was a reporter on Belfast daily the News Letter at the time and while the Piano Bar tended to be frequented mainly by the local and international press who stayed at the hotel to report on the Troubles, occasionally we local journalists would wander in. The work was fascinating, but this was of course a terrible time for society.

Since those were the days before mobile phones, when a bomb went off, everyone would sprint down to the phones in the lobby to file their stories to copy takers. Our running joke was that those stories always started with: “Hello, copy? Ready? Right, mark this Belfast bomb. Yes, I know, same as last week. OK, here goes. ‘As I stand here in the burning rubble…take PA.’

PA being of course the Press Association news agency, whose correspondent Deric Henderson was always first on the scene of any disaster. He looked so permanently exhausted we wondered if he ever went home and slept.

On one particular night in the Europa, a shortwave radio tuned slightly illegally to the police frequency was on discreetly in the background as usual when it crackled into life with reports of a riot on the Republican Falls Road. Someone went downstairs to phone McGlade’s, where the photographers drank, and tell them to get up there pronto. “They’re all drunk,” he said when he came back up again just in time to buy another round, “so they’ve sent the least drunk one up.”

When nothing was heard for an hour, he went down to call again and returned with the news that the photographer had taken shelter in a shop doorway and grabbed some shots of the rioters hurling bricks at the police, then it had all gone quiet.

He stuck his head out to see why, was knocked unconscious and woke to find a frozen salmon lying beside him. The silence had been because the rioters ran out of bricks, so they’d broken the window of the local fishmonger’s and started hurling assorted seafood at the police instead, only for the wayward salmon to fell the unfortunate photographer.

We laughed so much that we almost forgot whose round it was, but at least the photographer had a nice salmon to take home for dinner.

Today a painting hangs behind reception by local artist Colin Davidson of the 71 bus he used to take home from school, and to signify the year that the hotel first opened – 1971. Its rooms then could not compete with those today, post-refurb, now featuring muted earth tones from dove grey to slate blue and pale marble bathrooms.

In 1995, Bill Clinton stayed at the Europa when he was the first US President to visit Northern Ireland. His entourage booked 110 rooms and the security staff were there for months beforehand, wearing sharp suits with mysterious bulges, speaking into their cuffs and checking every nook and cranny in sight.

The week before he arrived, all the journalists covering the visit were gathered in one of the conference rooms at the Europa for a briefing. Someone stood up at the head of the room and said: “Hi, my name’s Don Williams, and I’m a secret agent.” “Well, you’re not any more, are you?” said a voice at the back.

So there were as many laughs as bombs there, but the last one went to Sir Billy Hastings, who bought the Europa from Grand Metropolitan Hotels in 1993 and spent £8 million refurbishing it before reopening it the following year.

Billy was a fabulous character who drove a Rolls-Royce with a personalised number plate ending in 1066. I was sitting behind him at the reopening when I noticed his wallet sticking out of his back pocket and pointed out to him afterwards that I’d been very tempted to grab it. “Geoff, are you kidding? After all I’ve spent on this place, there’s nothing in it,” he laughed.

Sadly, Billy is no longer with us, having died in 2017, but his son Howard has just overseen the hotel’s most recent refurb, bringing tastefully refreshed bedrooms and an air of understated elegance throughout.

Billy would have approved, and as I sit here in the Piano Bar looking down at the happy, thriving scene below, I raise my glass to him before going down to dinner, then heading to bed in a room that has real windows.

Geoff Hill travelled as a guest of the Europa Hotel (028 9027 1066; hastingshotels.com/europa-belfast), which offers doubles from £160.