The GCW Tour, A Few Bits of the UK and Ireland: Stratford, Hotel Mysteries

Given that I made our hotel reservations about five weeks in advance during the UK's busiest tourist season, I guess I should've known. I was looking for a hotel with a room for three people, and a picture like this came up...

So I booked it. 

Now I was picturing picturesque and quaint, but the fact the place actually had rooms available so late in the game should've warned me that something was off. When we pulled around the back to park, here's what we saw...

And then we checked in and went to our room...

In short, this was the most corporate hotel we've stayed at so far. But that wasn't actually a bad thing. The beds were huge, it had a nice view from the window...

...and given what a zoo Stratford is, having some corporate support wasn't such a bad thing. But here's the real reason I'm posting about our hotel.

If you spend as much time sitting in bathrooms as I do, you learn to notice things about the various facilities you're using. How the tile was laid. How cabinets were installed. Basically, anything to occupy the mind. What occupied my mind in our room at The Falcon was this...

Notice the pipe is at the foot of the bathtub, so opposite all the bathtub plumbing. It comes out of the wall, there are a few connectors to make it jog and expand to a larger pipe, the pipe goes out, throws a U-turn, and heads back. At the other end you've got roughly the same connector set-up and the pipe disappears back under the tub. 

Here are close-ups of those two ends...

Now what on earth is that pipe doing? Why is it there? That's the question that occupied my brain every time I went into our bathroom. (If you know the answer, leave a comment or shoot me an email.)