St Elmo’s Hostel for the Homeless in Hammersmith is a fictional hostel. However, the building is described in enough detail that we have a likely candidate. Strike goes here in Part 2, Chapter 9, to look for Rochelle Onifade.
Strike emerges from Hammersmith Tube station. The sunshine gleams through the glass-covered shopping precinct.
“The distant shops on King Street were heaving with people; it might have been a Saturday. This was a bustling and essentially soulless commercial centre, and yet Strike knew it to be a bare ten minutes’ walk to a sleepy, countrified stretch of the Thames embankment.”
Our best guess is that Strike walks down Queen Caroline Street, under the concrete flyover, and arrives at Sussex Place, which has a building which matches the description of St Elmo’s Hostel.
“St Elmo’s Hostel for the Homeless turned out to be situated right behind the noisy concrete flyover. A plain, ill-proportioned and contemporaneous cousin of Lula’s Mayfair house, red brick with humbler, grubby white facings; no stone steps, no garden, no elegant neighbours, but a chipped door opening directly on to the street, peeling paint on the window ledges and a forlorn air.”
“The utilitarian modern world had encroached until it sat huddled and miserable, out of synch with its surroundings, the flyover a mere twenty yards away, so that the upper windows looked directly out upon the concrete barriers and the endlessly passing cars.”
“An unmistakably institutional flavour was given by the large silver buzzer and speaker beside the door, and the unapologetically ugly black camera, with its dangling wires, that hung from the lintel in a wire cage.”
St Elmo’s Hostel could be one of two almost identical buildings side-by-side on this street, both would fit the description.
“An emaciated young girl with a sore at the corner of her mouth stood smoking outside the front door, wearing a dirty man’s jumper that swamped her. She was leaning up against the wall, staring blankly towards the commercial centre barely five minutes’ walk away, and when Strike pressed the buzzer for admission to the hostel, she gave him a look of deep calculation, apparently assessing his potentialities.”
Strike talks to a gum-chewing woman behind the desk, who calls for Carianne, who tells Strike that someone called Janine had seen Rochelle still living in the area.
Before leaving he nicks the gum-chewing woman’s News of the World.
“It was a warm spring afternoon. Strike strode on down towards Hammersmith Bridge…”
Strike ends up at the Blue Anchor pub.
Find the possible St Elmo’s Hostel building on the map below.