Mulberry Tree Hotel

The Mulberry Tree Hotel is a hotel with a small adjoining shop, now integrated internally as a public house. It was built in 1907, designed by William and Segar Owen, and has undergone internal alterations since. The building is constructed of red stock bricks with blue diapering, with the upper floors faced in applied small stones (likely imitating flints), brick quoining, and gable copings. The dressings are of red sandstone and red terracotta, including window surrounds and mullions. The roof is hipped and covered in green slate.

The building has an irregular L-plan on a corner site, with a splayed corner facing the left (London Road). It is designed in a Free neo-Jacobean style, using diapered brickwork, mullion-and-transom windows, steep gables with finials, and tall chimneys. The hotel is two-and-a-half storeys and has a three-window facade to Victoria Square, including the splayed corner. Notable features include coved eaves, a broad attic gable over the centre, a smaller attic gable to the right, and a stone Dutch gable to the splayed left corner.

A wide loggia, formed by a Jacobean-style open-work timber balcony supported by two white granite columns, covers the centre of the ground floor. This protects a canted bay window in the centre, along with one doorway to the left and a coupled set of doorways to the right. The ground floor also includes a single-light window with an enriched terracotta lintel and a transomed six-light window. The first floor has a large, transomed, 14-light window with a glazed balcony door, and a three-light mullioned window to the right, with further windows in the gables above. The splayed corner features a sandstone design, with a six-light bow window at ground floor, framed by panelled pilasters with carved consoles supporting a first-floor oriel with a cross-window and Renaissance enrichment including a Dutch gable. Tall, clustered, and corniced brick chimneys are situated in the centre and on each side slope.

The five-window return facade to London Road includes a broad gable in the centre, a stone two-storey canted bay window to the right-hand half, a matching canted bay to the left, and tiered two-light stairwindows between them. The former shop attached to the right of the main range has a gabled, Tudor-style, timber-framed facade with a simple doorway and shop-window at ground floor. It also features a jettied upper floor with square framing, a canted oriel with honeycomb leaded glazing, a jettied timber-framed gable with large moulded brackets, and oversailing eaves also on brackets. The interior has been altered, but the main range retains its original hotel staircase. The hotel forms a group with the Red Lion Hotel on the opposite side of London Road, and with the Police Station on the east side of the square.