Open to All: How youth hostels changed the world

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Youth hostels changed the world. Beginning in 1929 with no money, no leader and only a simple idea, today they boast bars, restaurants, and en suites. You can find them in cities, in towns, in the wilderness, in castles, mansions, mills, and converted hotels.

Open to All is a completely new history of youth hostels in England and Wales. It tells the story of youth hostels, how they grew as part of the outdoors in the 20th century, from the ‘back to the land’ movement, through national parks, to consumerism. They began as a voluntary movement and developed into a modern, centralised organisation, managed by paid staff. Today they are part the contemporary world of the internet, of Trip Advisor and Airbnb.

Throughout the narrative, there are observations from the writer's own experience working in youth hostels in the Lake District, running a small hostel in the woods in Devon, raising a family in a youth hostel and as YHA's head of communications during the foot and mouth outbreak at the start of a new century.

Youth hostels were part of a world wide romantic story, one of the great social movements of the 20th century, like the mods and rockers, teddy boys, hippies and punks. Slightly anarchic, ascetic and abstemious, in favour of freedom, youth hostels began as a grass roots movement, anti-materialist, pacifist and populist, in love with the pastoral and rural retreats, escapist.

They also began as one of the last of the big voluntary ventures, emerging from the 19th century’s drive to improve people’s lives. Descended from the Scouts, the Guides, the Boys Brigade and others, part of the force to preserve the countryside, linked to the National Trust, youth hostels were idealistic, charitable, conservative, worthy and paternal.

By the 1960s youth hostels had become an institution, part of the social life of the country. They settled into a kind of complacency. They forgot their radical roots. They clung to rules and achieved a reputation for being old and out of date when the 1970s caught them.

Open to All covers the next 30 years using new and original material as youth hostels struggled for survival as first one then another event fell upon them. Soaring inflation, rising prices, the demands of their own staff for better conditions, industrial action by teachers, accidents involving children on school trips, each forced change on youth hostels while successive generations demanded more comfort, more privacy and more freedom. Other organisations, institutions and political parties and all of us in our own lives faced that same struggle to modernise.

Finally the foot and mouth outbreak and the internet disrupted youth hostels to an extent they could not avoid or escape. Youth hostels had no choice. They changed themselves to meet the changes they had created in the world. They changed themselves to meet the demand of a new generation for the kind of footloose independent travel youth hostels had done so much to create.

Duncan M Simpson worked for many years in and for youth hostels, as a seasonal assistant and manager. For 12 years he was head of corporate affairs for YHA . Chapters of history are interspersed with stories from his working life of nearly 40 years, working in and for youth hostels.

Based on wide ranging research and original material, Open to All is the fascinating story of youth hostels, of how they grew up and how, having changed the world, youth hostels raced to catch up with the young people they had set free.