In spite of the explosions, the world's most bombed hotel was anexhilarating base in the 1970s, writes Renagh Holohan

'A headquarters, a training school, a private club and only marginally a hotel," wrote the Guardian journalist Simon Hoggart about the Europa Hotel in Belfast during the 1970s. He was there. And so was I.

Now the owners of what has been described as the world's most bombed hotel have published In The Headlines: The Story Of The Belfast Europa Hotel, to mark 30 years of business, with quotes from many of the journalists who hung out there while covering those early, heady, dangerous days of the Troubles.

Hoggart's reminiscences, which the book reproduces, continue: "Everyone came to the Europa - the press mainly, but everyone else came because of the press. If you were a politician, or a soldier, or even a paramilitary, you knew that was where to put the word out. It was the information exchange."

At the book's launch, last week, his fellow journalist Chris Ryder said the Europa was "as sacred to Belfast as the Titanic slipway and Van Morrison". A BBC film showed some of the 29 bombings it has endured - and even to those who had experienced them it was spectacular stuff.

There was much praise last week for staff who evacuated guests so speedily and safely, then returned to clear up. On one memorable occasion, when the kitchens had been destroyed, a barbecue was set up outdoors. It worked a treat until somebody realised it had been set up above a gas main.

The book includes messages from more recent guests, such as Bill Clinton and General John de Chastelain, and a foreword from "semi-permanent resident" George Mitchell, but it is the tales from the 1970s that make the best reading.

Hoggart remembers accidentally locking the swing doors out of the hotel on Bloody Friday, when there was a bomb scare in the kitchen. The BBC's John Simpson, in A Mad World, My Masters, writes: "They kept the nightclub going throughout the 1970s as though they were in the south of France, and the kitchen provided excellent room service only 20 minutes after each new bomb scare."

His fellow broadcaster John Sergeant, in Give Me Ten Seconds, tells how he narrowly escaped Northern Ireland's first letter-box bomb just outside the hotel. He recalls that he learnt much about the construction of bombs at the time and that British army bomb-disposal teams were often on hand. He was also relieved to discover that the Europa was strong enough to withstand the bombings.

In her autobiography, The Kindness Of Strangers, their colleague Kate Adie writes of the death threats telephoned to her at the Europa and how "Northern Ireland taught me one of the simpler aspects of fear: that threats in your own language are far more frightening than anything delivered in a foreign language by people who look different".

Trevor McDonald of ITV News describes the Europa as the only place to be. "It was a womb, an oasis, a home from home. There was even calm within the hotel." Strange, really, that memory, as the most dramatic picture in In the Headlines shows McDonald racing across Great Victoria Street after a bomb has gone off at the Europa.

Max Hastings, the former Daily Telegraph editor, describes the Europa as a haven of tranquillity and comfort amid the mayhem. "One got used to losing a certain amount of glass in the windows when the bombs went off and to seeing all manner of crooks, thugs and even paid up killers in the restaurant among the journalists," he writes. "People are always surprised to be told how much many of us enjoyed reporting from Northern Ireland 30 years ago when we were young, foolish and adventurous . . . . Being able to retire to the Europa after a long day amid the flying rocks and bottles, and increasingly bullets, was one of the things that made it bearable."

Other contributors, including this writer- who moved The Irish Times's Belfast base to a Europa suite in 1973, after the paper's office was blown up - Conor O'Clery, Derek Brown of the Guardian and Bob Chesshyre of the Observer, tell tales of Robert Fisk, Simon Winchester and the ever-present manager Harper Brown, who, when Hoggart and his chums complained about the service, replied: "They know you are getting it on your expense account."

Ryder spoke with affection of the times we finished our meals alfresco - which meant taking bottles of wine onto Great Victoria Street as the bomb squad moved in - of intelligence officers changing their clothes in the gents and of having guerilla warfare on the doorstep.

Hotels elsewhere have similar stories, but this one is ours - and, as Ryder said, it kept many sane at a time of dreadful bloodshed.

• In The Headlines by Clive Scoular is published by Appletree, £19.95