Oxford's legendary contributions to the sum of human knowledge may lure millions of tourists from across the world. But the city of dreaming spires, cobbled streets and scholars may not wish to boast too loudly about its latest, and far less distinguished, award.
The Nanford guest house, opposite the Oxford University rugby ground on Iffley Road, has been voted the dirtiest hotel in Britain.
According to visitors to the TripAdvisor travel website, the hotel is "horrendous", "squalid" and a "total and utter dump". Not all of them were so charitable: one poster felt that the Nanford was "dirty, smelly and should be shut down".
The ramshackle hotel is certainly no threat to the Randolph Hotel over the bridge, the bar of which Inspector Morse often haunted, and those expecting Bridesheadian wooden panels and dining tables heaving with plovers' eggs and champagne may want to look elsewhere for accommodation in the city.
Nanford's style is more what estate agents might call "effortlessly retro" - not least because much of the decor appears to date from the late 1970s and early 80s. The walls are woodchip, the carpet a swirly, vertiginous affair rarely seen today except on TV, and the backyard an apparent homage to Steptoe and Son. But £30 a night - plus a £10 deposit for the key - still buys you an en suite room with a TV and very efficient central heating, and includes breakfast. It also buys you peachy-orange walls, an Artex ceiling and a laminate floor that shies away from the skirting board, dusty pipes and cracked plaster.
The en suite - a 7ft by 3ft miracle of precision engineering - boasts a lumpy lino floor, a pink and green loo and cigarette-paper-thin walls that make eavesdropping on fellow guests a guiltless pleasure. Its faux-marble wall tiles are studded with rawlplugs that look like bullet holes, while the showerhead, which is held together with tape, hovers above a copper pipe covered with verdigris. The TV is a collector's item of nostalgia for the lazy Saturday afternoons of 25 years ago when it would have broadcast bouts between Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks.
But apart from the bathroom and the wardrobe, which leans into the room at a menacing angle, there is little to set the Nanford guest house apart from a thousand more around Britain. It has the same electric kettle, the same mismatched cups and saucers and the same tiny pots of UHT milk and tasteless tea.
TripAdvisor complaints aside, the two rooms the Guardian saw yesterday afternoon were almost spotless. The beds were soft, the sheets and towels clean, and the floors vacuumed. Even the loos had had a splash of bleach in the not too distant past.
It's difficult to know whether the Nanford is guilty of failing to live up to visitors' lofty expectations of Oxford, or if the rooms are a bit hit and miss.
The hotel's proprietor was distinctly unimpressed by the survey - and by some of his guests yesterday.
He declined to be interviewed, saying only: "I don't give a damn what TripAdvisor says."
