The Knaresborough by Nestor

A lot of the existing reviews of this place seem to be from the perspective of people who simply should not be looking to stay at budget accommodations such as this in the first place (Lol). No, this is not fancy. No, there are no frills. But that’s exactly what it’s marketed as and accomplishes the basic functionality of a place to lay your head at night in between busy days exploring London adequately. For the benefit of management, here are 3 very easy suggestions that would have improved my experience greatly and were the only things about my stay that I considered sub-standard for the price I paid. First of all, I rented the top floor room (13) with the balcony. This room was very small but it was exactly what we needed. There was a pungent “sulfur” smell coming from the bathroom drains, but simply keeping the door closed and the windows open in there resolved that. Upon checking into our room, we discovered the previous resident’s trash piled up outside on our balcony. When I messaged the team, they informed me it would be removed the following day as the cleaning crew had already gone home, and just kind of brushed off responsibility for this onto the previous people rather than apologizing for their mistake of poorly cleaning our room. Weird and not acceptable for a real hotel but, remember, this is a BUDGET accommodation so I let it slide mentally. We just left it out there overnight and sometime over the next day it was indeed removed. Part of the reason I chose this place were the advertised laundry machines in the building, which unfortunately were absolutely disgusting and beyond filthy. There are two sets of machine; the 3rd floor one was completely unusable due to the dust filter being completely clogged, and having a strange bucket of liquid placed in front of the door of the washer which I did not feel inclined to dump or move myself. The first floor units were only about 5% better in terms of cleanliness but I desperately needed to wash some items so I decided to go for it. The free laundry detergent pods were floating in a bag of their liquids (some had obviously popped in there) and the dryer took about 2 hours to barely dry my small load because of how poorly maintained and unclean the dust collector was. Meanwhile, I saw the cleaning crew walk past the machines while my laundry was in the dryer, look at the state of it, and ignore it as if it was normal. They obviously do not care to clean anything that isn’t directly asked of them, so many things fall off the wagon. They basically just swab the floors of the rooms and change the bedding. So in short, if the laundry machines were clean and the bathroom didnt have the absolute worst showerhead I’ve ever used, I’d give this place almost 5 stars. It just falls short of the bare minimum in those ways, so it’s about a 3/5 stars IN TERMS OF BUDGET ACOCMODATIONS. Don’t compare this to a luxury hotel, you’ll be disappointed.