This Sunday, my nighttime routine looks a bit different.
Teeth brushed, face washed, I tap my keycard against the scanner and enter my black-painted dorm. My bed awaits, but it’s a climb: I heave myself up a set of wooden stairs and roll up the shutters on my sleeping pod.
Getting in requires wriggling around all my luggage, but once I’m in, I’m in. The shutter comes down and locks with the click; I turn the light off. All I can hear is the whoosh of the air conditioning. And my fellow guests below me. If I reach above my head, I can just about touch the ceiling of my pod.
Welcome to Zedwell’s world of Japanese-influenced sleeping ‘capsules’: stackable pods boasting lighting, a bed, some hooks and erm… not much else.
Though these style of hotels are common across Asia, they’re less so in the UK — until now. Newly opened, Zedwell’s offering gives travellers something a little bit different: namely, the chance to spend the night in possibly the biggest capsule hotel in the world, for a mere £30 a night. Even better, it’s a mere minute’s walk away from the city’s biggest attractions. When it comes to location, you can’t get much better than Piccadilly Circus, and these guys are a hundred metres away from the famous fountain at its centre.
The catch? As ever when it comes to London, it’s space. The capsules clock in at around one metre by 2.2, and for one night only, I have come to give them a whirl.
With Zedwell’s capsules (or cocoons, as they dub them) the buzzword is efficiency. Situated opposite Zedwell’s other hotel – a more conventional one, with actual rooms – this spinoff is still in the middle of being built. In lieu of a main entrance, which is still being built, I enter through a discreet side door, and spot a bin with building debris through a set of locked double doors higher up.
The whole hotel is supremely light on staff – barring a couple in the reception, I didn’t see any others throughout the whole hotel – and check-in is done via a series of iPads set along the wall. For novelty’s sake, you even get to code your own keycard; it’s very futuristic.
Fittingly for a hotel boasting almost a thousand beds, there’s also a system to how the pods are numbered. My pod is 1304, I’m told: 1 for the floor level, 3 for the dorm and 4 for the capsule within that.
Nice and easy, I think. Wrong: navigating the hotel’s warren of corridors feels like getting lost inside a labyrinth. All the walls are painted a doom-laden black, and to cap things off, there aren’t any windows – they’ve all been sealed off, to accommodate Piccadilly Circus’ famous wrap-around screens, which lends the entire building a sort of spaceship-lite aesthetic.
Those are compounded by the pods, which look rather like they’ve been designed to put people into cryogenic slumber for the long voyage to the promised mother planet. My dorm is small – about 8 beds – but some of them stretch to 100. Combine that with the strip lighting and the whole thing feels rather dystopian.
Anyway, the cocoons. Mine is up on the top level (though they stack three deep in some of the other floors, my dorm only has two ‘floors’) and boasts a roll-up door that feels rather like I’m letting myself into the world’s tiniest garage.
Inside, things are snug. Two hooks on the wall are intended for baggage – though I’m told I can leave my luggage outside in the dorm if I feel brave enough. I don’t.
There’s a light along the back wall, along with a mirror, a dimmer switch, and plugs to charge various devices. Above the bed, a vent blasts cooled air into the pod – and provides some soothing white noise to fall asleep to (which I do, though I wake periodically through the night with the rather confused impression of hearing heavy rain against a windowpane).
The beds themselves are actually rather comfortable, even if it does take up the entirety of the pod’s interior. Egyptian cotton sheets and towels are the order of the day, and if the mattress is thinner than a bog-standard one, you can’t tell.
And that’s it. The pull-down shutters can be fastened from the inside with a catch, or padlocked shut from the outside for extra security – say, for people leaving their pod for a day of exploring. Those padlocks cost extra, though. It’s like the Ryanair of hotels.
On a whim, I venture down to the ground floor in search of cold water for my bottle (all the water supplied in the bathrooms is disconcertingly hot, even from the taps) and discover a vending machine stacked with padlocks, slippers, water, eye masks and condoms. The logistics of that last one don’t quite add up, given you can hardly sit up solo, but hey, maybe it’s one for the optimistic.
Back upstairs, it’s time for bed. Through the dormitory doors there’s a massive mixed gender bathroom with showers and toilets, piping eerily cheerful classical music at all hours of the day and night. The water is hot (I try again, but cannot locate any cold taps for my bottle) and the space is well-cleaned. Guests wander in and out, brushing their teeth and pyjama’d up. A massive suitcase outside my companion’s pod suggests somebody, probably a tourist, is home – but the clientele, I learn later, is surprisingly varied.
Despite only having been open a month, Zedwell’s capsules have seen massive demand, especially during weekends. And it’s not just tourists: I’m told it’s popular with businesspeople (where do they hang the suits?), families and even locals who are out late and don’t want to splash out on an Uber before their 6am start the next day. Not surprising, given that a taxi to Zone Three would probably cost more than a night here.
Bed time. The eye mask is on, the ear plugs are in and the dimmer switch turned way down. My dorm is quiet, thankfully – though whether that’s down to the soundproofing or the fact it’s a Sunday is unclear – and passes without incident.
Is it claustrophobic? Slightly. Once the mask is on, though, it’s possible to drop off, feet sandwiched firmly between my two bags.
But getting up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet is a chore. Unlocking the roller doors, leveraging myself out and blinking like an owl in the light of the toilets, while that dratted muzak pipes overhead, isn’t conducive to a good night’s sleep. Those dystopian corridors suddenly look menacing; this is compounded by the fact there are no staff around.
When the morning comes, it’s with a slight sense of relief. Checking out is the work of a moment, an exercise in efficiency.
Zedwell already has another capsule hotel in the works, to open in Leicester Place sometime next year on the site of the beloved Prince Charles Cinema. And there are big plans on the horizon: an underground passageway connecting the capsule hotel to its big sister next door, as well as a dedicated Tube entrance of its own. I’m told that the aim is for tourists to roll straight off the next train and into their beds without ever being outdoors. For the thousands of people checking in, they’re clearly onto a good thing – and you really can’t argue with that price.
Rooms from £30 a night; zedwellhotels.com
