Travellers' Checks | Canada gets delivery of Chinese-built modular hotel, from Shanghai to the Great White North
- Guest rooms have been prefabricated in China and come complete with furniture, television sets and other fixtures and fittings
- The yet-to-be-named modular hotel is part of a growing trend in the hospitality industry
Chinese visitors should feel at home in a new hotel being built in the small city of Iqaluit, in Canada’s largest and northernmost territory, Nunavut. That’s because its guest rooms have been prefabricated in China and are being delivered from Shanghai this month, complete with furniture, television sets and other fixtures and fittings. The hotel, which broke ground last year and has yet to be named, is due to open next spring.
Prefabricated hotels seem to be catching on with larger hotel companies, too, although “modular” seems to be the preferred industry term. Last month, Hilton opened its first modular hotel, the 155-suite Home2 Suites by Hilton San Francisco Airport North, while Marriott is currently raising the “world’s tallest modular hotel”, the 26-storey AC Hotel New York NoMad, which will open late next year in midtown Manhattan. As well as painted walls, the prefabricated rooms will arrive on site containing beds and bedlinens, finished flooring and even bathroom toiletries.
Take a tour of London’s blue plaques
Played in an Oscar-nominated performance by Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game (2014), and this month announced as the new face on Britain’s redesigned £50 note, Alan Turing was born at the Warrington Lodge Medical and Surgery Home for Ladies, in Maida Vale, London, in 1912. In 1935, the building became The Esplanade Hotel, and in 1944, was renamed The Colonnade Hotel.
English Heritage added a blue plaque to its exterior in 1998 to commemorate the birthplace of Turing, often called the father of computer science and artificial intelligence.
Another scientist with similarly paternal credentials can be found around the corner, almost within earshot, at 9 Clifton Gardens, where a blue plaque is dedicated to Ambrose Fleming, the father of modern electronics. This Edwardian terrace house was once part of the infamous Worsley Hotel, which occupied a row of several houses, and was destroyed in one of London’s worst hotel fires.