It is not often that I visit the town I was born in, Dartford, Kent, England, even though it is only a little more than 10 miles from where I live and only a few more from the London office of CoStar, STR and Hotel News Now.
If I wanted to stay there, the options are very limited. Really, there is only the 25-room Royal Victoria & Bull Hotel at 1 High St., which I assume is the most august spot in town.
It opened as a hotel in 1753, and was built in 1703, according to CoStar data.
The hotel’s own website suggests there might have been an inn on the site since the 14th century, and as the hotel is probably mostly known for its Sunday roast lunches — at least it was for me when I was growing up — there has been a hospitable lineage at the property for possibly more than 700 years.
I was in Dartford catching up with my cousin and two other childhood friends.
One of them asked if I had seen the new statues of the town’s most-famous sons, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards?
I had not, so off we strutted to pay homage.
Dartford is the first town reached going east and southeast of London that is not in a London borough. (Some parts of two London boroughs, Bexley and Bromley, contain places that have Kent addresses.)
The town is famous for its tunnel (northbound traffic) and bridge (southbound) that cross the River Thames, and it is there off the London orbital M25 motorway where one will find all the hotels. That is, all the hotels in Dartford, but not really.
There are the 185-room DoubleTree by Hilton Dartford Bridge; 165-room Premier Inn Dartford; 125-room Campanile Dartford; and 126-room Holiday Inn Express London-Dartford (yes, it is the sort of place where the word London is added to aid finding its location), among others.
The room count sweet spot is evidently between 100 and 200 keys, and they serve road warriors and local businesses of which there are quite a number wanting the ease of being close to a motorway and London.
I have not ever heard of tourists coming to Dartford, even if they are Rolling Stones fans.
When I grew up, the town disowned Jagger and Richards. They were deemed rebellious and wild, members of the counterculture, not the rock-music royalty they are now regarded.
Remember, since 2003, it is Sir Michael Jagger!
Richards made it clear he did not want that gong.
Jagger went to Dartford Grammar School, as did my older brother, and back in the 1980s, so I remember, the school refused his offer to pay for a couple of squash courts.
After his renaissance as a national treasure, in 2000, he paid for and opened at the school the Mick Jagger Centre, which provides music tuition to pupils and Dartfordians, as the town people are known.
Dartford is no Liverpool or Manchester, though, in terms of its draw for music-loving hotel guests.
One thinks of The Beatles or Oasis, and one automatically thinks of Liverpool and Manchester, and both of those places — far larger than Dartford — have the tourism offerings to attract rock fans.
To give credit where credit is due, it was Dartford Borough Council that commissioned the statues.
There also is a small plaque off platform 2 at Dartford Rail Station — it’s been there for many years — to commemorate the spot where the two met, the legend being that Jagger was holding several records by American blues musicians that in the early 1960s could only be imported, probably painstakingly, from the U.S., a sight that piqued the interest of Richards.
They actually first met some 15 years before then when they attended the same school, Wentworth Primary, where my cousins attended, but they said they were not the friends there they became later, and as rock-inspired legends go, the train station story with the stack of LPs from Chess Records has far more appeal.
From that moment, history was built, but not so hotels in Dartford.
To stay instead in the middle of London is understandably too much of a temptation for most leisure travelers.
But as I was looking through CoStar’s property database while drafting this article, I did notice that the Royal Victoria & Bull was wrongly labeled as being in Swanscombe, a smaller town a little east along the River Thames.
The error has been rectified, and that change has indirectly emanated from the statues in the town center, which were unveiled approximately 18 months ago.
That gives me "(I can’t get no) satisfaction.”
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