This hotel with shared bath facilities is marketed as hip and urban. In reality, it’s more of a hostel and it is pretty awful. I’ve given it a 2 instead of a 1 because you won’t find cheaper accommodation anywhere in New York and, as long as you’re pre-warned and don’t believe the hype at www.westendstudios.com, it’s okay.

Where to start? The building is 1 block over from Broadway, near 110th street station so you’re only 10 minutes away from anything. It needs a lot of work. There are many layers of paint on the walls, all of which is chipped. The carpets are filthy and I refused to walk on them in my bare feet. The bedding, thankfully, was clean but that was the only thing that was.

Our room was 120 degrees and there was no way of turning the ancient radiator down. Instead, we had our window open the whole time so the room was only semi-stifling. Having dealt with the temperature in the room we were dismayed to find that our radiator knocked, banged and hissed all night long. We had a toilet and sink in our room but I was frightened to use it - the carpet dipped rather worringly just in front of the toilet so I was worried that the bathroom was going to end up on the floor below at some point.

I seemed to be one of the last people to use the shared bathroom on our first morning and that was a huge mistake. It was absolutely filthy by the time I got there and I hunted around until I found cleaning supplies. The following mornings I made a point of being the first in there so it was fine.

Our expectations of the West End Studios were low but we knew we would be out from 9am to late so weren’t fussed about amenities. I didn’t mind the basic or dilapidated rooms but it could have been a lot cleaner - I’ve since seen some horrendous pictures on Tripadvisor of people’s bed bug bites after their stay at the studios although we didn’t experience any problems.

New York is a city where you truly get what you pay for and we paid $136 (total) for a double room for 4 nights so we can hardly complain that it wasn’t 4 star.