Guest Reviews - A Thank You Letter

Here at The Highbury Centre, we love hearing from our guests. Good feedback really makes our day, as we work hard to ensure that everyone who stays with us feels welcomed, happy and secure. We’re so much more than a guest house – we offer renewal, restoration and relaxation to those who come to us in need of all three.

With this in mind, we were delighted to receive a letter of thanks (and we do love a letter!) from a guest who spent time with us in June. She had stayed with us many times over the past 20 years and this last visit was an emotional one as she was then travelling to her new home in Ballarat, Victoria, Southern Australia. She enclosed a photograph of our breakfast room window in her letter, explaining that it now hangs in her sitting room on the other side of the world.

She goes on: “Many are the breakfasts I have eaten in your breakfast room and sitting there, I have looked through this window out into the garden. Now I can still look through that window in this photo which is in my sitting room.”

Our guests often tell us how beautiful and peaceful they find our walled garden. It’s a lovely view from the breakfast room. Our guest was reminded of the poem by Matthew Arnold, “Lines Written in Kensington Gardens” on her visit. She quotes the penultimate verse in her letter:

“Calm soul of all things! Make it mine

To feel, amid the city’s jar,

That there abides a peace of thine

Man did not make and cannot mar.”

Her final paragraph explaining the way The Highbury Centre guesthouse makes her feel filled us with emotion and thankfulness for the ministry we are privileged to offer. “There is a way in which Highbury exudes peace. I, like so many of your visitors, have come to you tired and often stressed, and there have found my spirit renewed. You provide peace and we are healed. Long may you do so.”

For 125 years, we’ve offered a place of refuge and peace for workers for the Lord in London. Receiving letters like this reminds us of the joy there is in having a ministry of hospitality. We look forward to welcoming many more guests to our peaceful Christian guest house in the future.