Royal Hotel And Owen House

The Royal Hotel and Owen House comprise a house, later a dispensary and public house extension, now a shop and bar, dating to around 1800 and the 19th century. They were built for Viscount Fauconberg. Constructed from dressed sandstone in narrow courses with ashlar dressings, the building features slate roofs with coped gables and gable stacks. The original house is of double-depth plan and includes a central doorway, a small rear extension, and a full-height square-headed staircase window at the rear, alongside another stair window on the right-hand gable with a round head on the second floor. It has three storeys above a basement, expressed as a plinth, and three bays between raised quoins, beneath an eaves cornice. The windows are sashed with 12 or 9 panes, with plain surrounds; the ground floor windows are tripartite with 9:12:9 panes and flat-faced stone mullions. A blocked square niche above the doorway originally housed a Coade stone plaque of the Good Samaritan, now located elsewhere.

The left-hand section was built as a public house around 1900 and is of three storeys and two bays. Its sashed windows, without glazing bars, have stone surrounds, with paired windows on the first and second floors, the latter of which have gablets above. Shaped hoodmoulds with carved rosettes adorn the ground and first-floor windows. The left-hand ground-floor window is tripartite, while the right-hand window has been altered with a door insertion. A moulded door surround is partly blocked and contains a window alongside. The left-hand return wall to George Street is of three irregular bays, with a lower two-storey wing continuing towards the left.

Inside, the rear staircase has stick balusters and a ramped mahogany handrail. The second floor is now a single room with exposed roof trusses, which were formerly a women's ward when the building served as a dispensary.

The building initially functioned as the town house of Charles, Viscount Fauconberg, who died there in 1815. Between 1832 and 1906, it was the third home of the Lancaster Dispensary.