Bonkers Belfast Hotel

For some reason that I am unable to decipher, Tripadvisor has not listed this review.  It maybe the rude words engraved on the mirror!

This was a most fabulous and completely bonkers hotel. The reception bell was a large eight legged silver gilt rather menacing crab; there was a huge black octopus hanging in front of a golden framed distressed mirror plate, and the wallpapers were engaged in a small riot. Glorius chandeliers were dressed in black lace and a side lamp was affixed to the grinning brass head of a monkey. Another octopus, smaller, spread it’s golden tentacles over the hat and umbrella stand besides the door. Alarming portraits adjourn the walls and there’s a wide horizontal mirror with rude words engraved into the plate. My breakfast pots of Earl Grey were served in quirky teapots from the owners extensive and eccentric collection of teapots that are found on display in the hotel bar.
The rooms are themed; the Bronte room for a turbulent romantic weekend; the Samul Becket room for a bit of drama, the Yeats room or the Seamus Heany room with poetry for breakfast, the Van Morrison room for those dark nights of the soul and a C.S. Lewis room with rather a large wardrobe. One room that might be missing is a padded cell!
I have travelled to far and distant places, a hundred or more hotels that all fade away into the bog standard and generic and are soon forgotten. You will not forget the Harrison Hotel! It will stay with you long after you leave, you will always, with great affection, recall it’s bonkers character.
You may have stayed in many hotels some of them quite friendly but you are unlikely to ever have experienced the warmth of the welcome at Harrisons. You may have stayed in hotel rooms with massive Smart, flat screen, multi channel satellite TV’s. There are no TV’s in any of the Harrisons rooms, and if they did have TV’s then they would probably be 1954 models showing only black and white documentaries about bohemians and surrealism.
In the Belfast taxi on our way to the Railway station and home I remarked to the taxi driver that a hundred years ago the owner of the Harrison might have been publically burned at the stake as a witch.
“She might still be” he replied, and we laughed with the joy of it all for we had been caught by the magic of the spell of the Harrison hotel.