The Bull and The Hide

The room was small, but very clean, with daily housekeeping, good-quality toiletries, and access to a little pantry with snacks and drinks. The area is handy for sightseeing: Liverpool Street Station is across the street, Spitalfields Market is a five-minute walk away, and there are plenty of good places to eat and easy tube connections to the sights. Still, I wouldn't stay here again. I booked mainly because Booking.com showed the hotel as having “4 stars,” but The Bull and The Hide has no stars. At over 250€/night, that felt like false advertising. Check-in was easy but odd: the employee asked for no ID or booking confirmation, just my surname, then handed me a key. We expected stairs to our tiny top-floor room. What we didn't expect was that neither our mobile data nor the hotel WiFi worked properly. We could connect without a password, but it was usually unavailable or painfully slow. At this price, I expected WiFi boosters on every floor. The decent-sized “smart-TV” only opened Amazon Prime, with no Netflix, HBO, Disney+, Sky, or satellite TV, so we were limited to Prime or British channels. On our first evening, as we were leaving for dinner, someone tried our locked door. When we opened it, a man was about to put a key in the lock. He said he was an employee checking that the door was shut for security. That left us uneasy, and we didn't leave valuables in the room. If I were travelling alone, I would have asked for a refund and moved hotels because it felt so unsafe. There was no sign to put on the door for privacy or to skip housekeeping. At checkout, nobody asked how our stay had gone. They simply took our keys.

Vanea made our Christmas Eve visit to the bull a real pleasure. The service was so kind and cheerful, and he kept the festive mood going. It's rare to get that sort of welcome the day before Christmas, so we'll definitely be back!

Unless you have no other choice, I'd avoid this place. London, and this hotel in particular, sells the historical story about being established in 1600 and all that, but the quality doesn't match the high price. The rooms are tiny, and with a pub downstairs, you can smell and hear it at night. Paying €300+ a night and having to use the pub's shared WiFi feels almost insulting. It's like an overpriced bed and breakfast without breakfast.

It's a nice pub in a quiet side street, and the London Pride was very good. There were hardly any customers, though plenty of tables still had empty glasses on them. I had to get the bar person's attention while he was sitting and using his phone. He stayed glued to it the whole time we were there and left the glasses on the sticky tables. Such a shame for a nice pub.