Safestay, York: hostel review

Sitting right on York’s historic Micklegate, this converted Georgian townhouse is a smart, innovative hostel with private rooms and dorms

Fluted columns, feisty carpets, neo-classical symmetries, mauve leather … I’ve just arrived at Safestay, newly opened in York, and I’m trying to get a handle on what kind of a beast this is. It has beds, for sure, and does breakfast, albeit a simple continental affair, but it is not a B&B. It has a bar and a staffed reception, but is certainly not a hotel. There’s a luggage room, dorms and a launderette, but this is no backpacker bunkhouse either. Safestay, as far as I can tell, is occupying territory somewhere between all these options, and doing it with some panache inside an early Georgian gem of a townhouse. This is the second Safestay and definitely a chip off the old block, if you know the first – in an 18th-century building on Walworth Road, south London.