Another slice of old Bangkok disappearing beneath a mall?
For the first time in many months, I recently drove down Surawong Road to the junction with Charoen Krung (New Road) and was surprised and disappointed to see that the Trocadero Hotel was swathed in a shroud of tarpaulins and corrugated iron sheets, obviously in the process of demolition.
I may have missed something, but the Trocadero’s demise seems to have gone unremarked, and I think that is a pity.
Admittedly, in recent years some online reviews indicated that the Trocadero provided accommodation of a standard that only the hardiest of budget travellers would put up with, but it wasn’t always so. Dating from the 1920s, the establishment was one of the first of several Western-style hotels built in Bangkok to challenge the venerable Oriental in meeting the needs of the well-heeled European and American tourists who were beginning to visit Asia in increasing numbers. Even in the 1940s, the Trocadero was still up there with the best. Its advertisement in a guidebook to Bangkok published soon after World War II highlighted “fully screened rooms equipped with ceiling fans and attached bathrooms with running water”. Such luxury! In 1940s Britain, hotels with what we now call “en suite facilities” would have been hard to find.
The Trocadero was never an architectural gem, even before modifications and additions, but it was a reminder of a more elegant and stylish era before the advent of mass tourism and all its accompanying horrors – has anyone tried to visit the Grand Palace recently? I’m sure the hotel could have been modernised and renovated while keeping a traditional feel, but no, I suppose it will be replaced by another concrete, steel and glass monstrosity, designed to cram in as many tourists as possible. Thus Bangkok loses another little bit of its history. So sad, and sad too that most Thai people seem not to care that so much of their built heritage is being sacrificed to Mammon.
Robin Grant
Bangkok
