The Old Manor House Hotel

A manor house latterly converted to a brewery and now a hotel, located on Front Street in West Auckland, Bishop Auckland. The building dates from the late 16th century and mid 17th century, with early 18th-century and 20th-century alterations. It is said to occupy the site of a 15th-century manor house.

The structure is built of rubble stone with ashlar dressings and a plinth. The roof is finished with stone slates and stone chimneys, with a section of pantiles at the rear right wing eaves. The plan follows an H-shape with a square stair tower positioned between the rear arms. The building is of two storeys with a symmetrical facade displaying a 2:3:2 window arrangement, with pairs of windows in the outer wings breaking forward.

The front elevation features a central early 18th-century nine-panel door set in an architrave with Corinthian pilasters supporting a scrolled segmental broken pediment topped with a cartouche. Flanking this door are late 16th-century segmental-headed lights with moulded spandrels, set in mullion and transom 2-light windows. Similar mullioned windows appear above. Relieving arches span the ground-floor windows. A wide 2-light sash sits directly over the door with a drip string extending across the flanking 2-light mullion windows. The inner returns of the wings contain 3-light windows with mullion and transom detailing on the ground floor and mullioned windows above, some of which are blocked. The front gables of the wings display 3-light 16th-century windows in the gable peaks, with early 18th-century architraves to renewed sashes featuring fine glazing bars on the ground and first floors. The gables are coped with overlapping stone and roll-moulded finials. Large stone chimneys with offsets project from the left return, from the eaves at the right return, and from the inner walls of the rear wings. The long left return incorporates 16th and early 18th-century windows, whilst the right return features 18th-century sashes and an added extruded porch positioned between the front and rear sections of the wing, with the rear section set back.

The interior contains high-quality architectural detail. The rear section of the right wing, now the hotel bar, formerly served as the kitchen and has a rubble inner wall partly exposed to reveal a stop-chamfered, wide moulded stone fire surround with rounded corners set beneath a relieving arch. Within this surround sits a brick beehive bread oven raised on a high square brick plinth, with a low panelled cupboard to its left. A ledged boarded door with wrought-iron sneck is fitted to the opening. The beams display sloping stop chamfers whilst the joists have ogee stops. A lined recess beside an inner door from the passage connecting to the front entrance hall may indicate a draw bar slot, suggesting an earlier external wall has been enclosed during 16th-century building work, or that access to a recess to the left of the fire in the bar has been blocked.

The front entrance hall is finished with a stucco ceiling decorated with moulded crossed beams and fleur-de-lys motifs in panels between them. The close-string stair rises from front to back within the hall before entering the square rear stair tower, where it becomes a dogleg stair. Carved newels throughout bear modified pineapple finials. The handrail is high and gripped, with laurel leaves carved along the frieze and guilloche moulding on the string. The balustrade is richly carved with scrolled pierced foliage and features shallow risers. The top two flights are fitted with splat balusters and a plain string.

The ground-floor rooms are extensively panelled, except for the left front room (said to be housed in the Bowes Museum), in early 18th-century style of fielded and raised panels. The Eden Room, occupying the centre of the right wing, contains 2-panel doors with a dentilled ceiling cornice and an oval ceiling panel decorated with a large leaf pattern. The White Room features 6-panel doors, tapered fluted pilasters with jewelled bases and egg-and-dart capitals, enriched panelling, bead moulding over a foliage frieze, and a ceiling stucco panel with fleur-de-lys and crown motifs. Broad ceiling beams run throughout the upper floors. Within the stair tower, wood and lath partitioning on the top floor creates a small room. The roof structure visible in the attic rooms of the wings and in the floored roof between them is of very high quality, constructed with triple pegged collared trusses incorporating raised king posts, side and ridge purlins, longitudinal ridge bracing, and carpenters' marks in sequence of construction. Stone slates are pegged with oak.

The manor house served as the principal residence of the Eden family from the 16th century until their removal to Windlestone, as documented by Conyers Surtees in his History of the Township of West Auckland (1924).