Financial Times Friday 4 January 2019
https://www.ft.com/content/8c62cc04-037a-11e9-9d01-cd4d49afbbe3Queen Elizabeth 2 was a trans¬atlantic liner launched into the space age. It is a wonderful paradox, a final expression of the most glamorous mode and period of travel, which arrived on the seas in 1969 just as Concorde was making its first test flight and Apollo 11 was landing on the Moon. The ship could make the journey from Southampton to New York in four and a half days. Concorde could do London to New York in less than three and a half hours but still, the QE2 was the fastest ship in the merchant navy. Today, the last great transatlantic liner is going nowhere fast. Permanently moored in the tepid blue waters of Dubai’s old cruise terminal, it is now a floating hotel and surely one of the most fascinating monuments in a city of self-conscious icons. In 2007, Istithmar World, the Dubai government-owned investment vehicle, stepped in to save the QE2 from the scrapyard for a reported $100m. The initial plan was to strip it down and create what general manager Russell Hanson described to me as “a seven-star hotel”, but it slowly transpired that they would then be left with a hulk with the history — and ultimately the value — stripped out in a local market saturated with super-luxury accommodation. So instead the new owners embarked on a long and meticulous restoration of the ship’s interiors while doing what they could to bring them up to the standards expected from a modern hotel. The results are really quite strange, utterly fascinating and not at all what I had anticipated. I had expected to encounter a sleek, mid-century interior, a cocktail of Modernist minimalism and post-Art Deco glamour, some kind of echo of the golden age of transatlantic travel shot through with 1960s chic. But the designers clearly struggled with the question that afflicts all those attempting to restore a historic structure: which layers do you leave intact, and what do you strip away? From the outside the ship has the same stunning presence it always did, a streamlined, slender profile that evokes the attenuated body of an E-Type Jaguar, compared with the clunky white floating behemoths that are contemporary mega-cruisers. But its interior was refined and remodelled over the years to keep up with fashion, the last major refit having been in Bremerhaven in 1987. The exterior of the QE2, moored in Dubai’s old cruise terminal The result is an interior that is pure provincial 1980s German luxe. The 224 cabins are kitted out in an unruly mix of black classical and Post Modernist detail — a television cabinet that looks like a catafalque, a bathroom that seems to be emulating an expensive corporate imitation of padded-shoulder Hollywood glamour, hints of Art Deco, even stronger hints of Patrick Bateman. But they are also roomy and comfortable. Mine had a terrace looking on to the interminable sandy construction sites of Dubai, pockmarked at night by a constellation of tower-crane lights, which was oddly soothing. The nine diesel-electric engines were shut down for good in November 2008, when the ship arrived in Dubai after a farewell tour of the UK, but there was still a deep rumble that seemed to be coming from the bowels of the hull. I was told it was probably the turbocharged air-con retrofitted to counteract the effects of a huge metal hulk slowly roasting in the Gulf sun. Fair enough. But there was also that distinctive, albeit faint, smell — a combination of engine oil, cleaning fluid and kitchens that seemed so characteristic of the sea, from cross-Channel ferries to island-hopping boats. The Golden Lion, now Dubai’s oldest pub Back outside the cabins the 1960s reappeared. Some corridors retained the veneered-wood linings and doors with elegant flush handles so characteristic of an earlier incarnation. A more surprising survival was what was on those walls. The corridors are a time capsule of mid-20th-century British art, an astonishing gallery of prints and lithographs by artists including John Piper and Graham Sutherland but also Miró, Picasso, Léger and others, some signed, some mass-market, some decorative, some quite eccentric and magical, a kind of lucky dip but well worth a leisurely stroll dodging the cleaning trolleys. There is also a glass case with an eye-wateringly detailed 12ft model of Mauretania, a forerunner of the QE2 as one of the fastest transatlantic liners. One space retains a little of the techno-futurism of the Moon-shot era. The former first-class lounge, the Queen’s Room, is a louche landscape of organic mushroom-stalk columns and an illuminated ceiling. Contemporary photos show a space inhabited by moulded white plastic chairs, Frisbee coffee tables and low-slung sofas. The furniture has gone but a hint of its cool remains and, in some of the other surviving lounges, with their sunken seating areas, you still get a frisson of the sheer mid-century modernity. More than anything it evokes scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with which it is, of course, contemporary. The restaurants, unfortunately, entirely lack that Modernist finesse. Even the Queens Grill (“Gentlemen are required to wear jacket and tie in the restaurant for dinner,” reads the now non-prescriptive brass plaque) looks like a tired provincial German hotel restaurant close to closing time. Which is a shame, because the food and service are very fine indeed. Even more anachronistic is The Golden Lion, now Dubai’s oldest pub. It has commemorative shields from previous ports of call on the walls, brass beer taps, naff brown pseudo-rustic furniture, a hideously patterned carpet and a menu rich in pies and deep-fried stuff. But it still doesn’t quite look like an English pub, rather like one of those facsimiles in a motorway service station or an Asian airport. The quarter deck hallway On the other hand, those unappealing chairs and tables are older than Dubai’s oldest skyscraper, so even the fake heritage here has heritage value. And in a way, that is the curious thing about the QE2 as it sits here. It is, by Dubai standards, archaeology. Even in their 1980s incarnation, the restaurants are the oldest surviving interiors in the city. Though still afloat, the QE2 is umbilically linked to the land, a skybridge and a multicoloured pipework jumble (like a mini Centre Pompidou) sucking up power and water from the dockside. But it is also hooked into the city by an odd lobby-cum-museum that looks like one of those too-large temporary buildings on a defunct expo site. Half airport departure lounge, half corporate orientation space, the bland volume is, however, stuffed with an utterly engaging set of relics, from one of the original space-age white chairs from the first-class lounge to a mock-up of a (very sparse-looking) 1969 cabin. There are old posters and menus, suitcases and a selection of apparently typical flowery brown-and-orange Dralon fabrics. It is not quite the glamour you may have expected. A deluxe room The ship has been accepting guests since April last year but is still a work in progress — a “grand opening” will take place later this year. Labourers were stripping decks and bashing metal during my stay and some of the cabins have yet to be restored. Many, in fact, will never be used again as, set deep in the ship and without even portholes, they can’t really be used as modern hotel rooms. In more ways than one, the QE2 is a kind of curious limbo, a boat that floats but can’t move (and one with its bridge left exactly as it was on the day the crew last docked, maps and everything), a sleek, super-luxury liner that looks a little tired and dated, a period piece with an interior from the wrong period. But it is also almost certainly the most remarkable and distinctive place to stay in all of the Emirates, a piece of recent history that, in its Gulf context, looks like gorgeous and irreplaceable heritage, and a last monument to an age that now seems almost impossibly distant. Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design critic
