The world’s first hotel built from recycled shipping containers has popped-up in Uxbridge, West London.
Eighty-six shipping containers make up the new Travelodge Hotel in Uxbridge, England.
Most people would not consider a shipping container to be a comfortable place to spend the night, but a new Travelodge hotel in England thinks it has found a way to make it appealing.
Located in a suburb of London called Uxbridge, the new hotel contains 120 rooms and was constructed in about four months on site, said Greg Dawson, a spokesman for Travelodge. That time included laying the foundations for the building. If constructed using traditional methods, the entire project would have taken about 15 months to two years to complete, he said. The hotel opened on August 15.
The modified steel shipping containers were fitted with hotel fixtures in Shenzhen, China and then transported to England by boat, Travelodge said in a statement. The 86 individual containers then were stacked together “like giant Lego blocks” on the actual site in about 20 days.
The building method is very efficient and makes it possible to build in tricky locations, Dawson said. He noted that the location of the Uxbridge hotel at a former bus station in a busy shopping district probably could not have supported traditional building methods because of limited access.
Each prefabricated container comes fully-equipped with fixtures, furniture, and windows. Travelodge, says that constructing a hotel this way is 25% faster and 10% cheaper than the more traditional construction methods. Also, construction is much quicker, because all that has to be done is to fit each container together like it was a giant Lego set.
The building style is also cheaper than traditional methods, Dawson said. The rates at the hotel currently match those at conventionally-built ones. But Dawson said the savings from the lower building costs get passed on to the consumer because they will allow the company to keep prices at the same rate even as utility prices and other costs continue to rise. The rooms at the hotel are about £20 (about $37) if booked online and £40-50 (about $73-$92) for walk-in guests, Dawson said.
Verbus Systems, a U.K. contractor, approached Travelodge with the idea, Dawson said. The hotel company currently has plans to open a new hotel in the U.K. every week for the next ten years, Dawson said, and the shipping container building method that Verbus proposed would help the company keep up with its target rate of growth. Travelodge has opened about 100 hotels in the last four years.
Travelodge is exploring the idea of building more shipping container hotels in the U.K. A similar project of 310 rooms is already under construction near Heathrow airport and will likely open in December, Dawson said.
The London area may see more these ‘portable hotels’ pop-up around the city as the 2012 Olympics approaches.
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