The Great Eastern Tavern

The Great Eastern Tavern is a public house located in Hertford, built in 1843 with later alterations in the late 19th and mid-20th centuries. The building is constructed of yellow stock brick laid in Flemish bond, featuring a stucco plat band and cornice, topped with a Welsh slated hipped roof and red clay 'V' chimneys with orange terracotta pots. It has an L-shaped plan with an infill between the arms that creates a curved front.

The exterior is two storeys high and includes two wood sash windows with glazing bars, which are recessed in brick reveals under rubbed brick arches on the first floor. There is a central window in the re-entrant section. The ground floor features a projecting flat-roofed yellow brick bay window from the 1950s on the left and a late 19th-century shopfront entrance to the former off-sales on the right, which includes three light moulded wood mullion and transom windows with leaded upper vents, above a patterned stucco stallriser with circular motifs. The entrance door on the left is half-glazed, flanked by rusticated stucco pilasters, with a fascia positioned just below the first-floor window sills.

At the centre of the ground floor, there is a loggia with antae and pilaster responds, a curved wood fascia, a moulded cornice, and cast-iron railings surrounding the flat canopy roof. The entrance, altered in the mid-20th century, has two half-glazed doors in the centre with sash windows on either side.

Inside, the tavern was refurbished in the 1940s and features a central bar that serves two main bar rooms. The upper floors have not been inspected. Historically, the building was constructed as a hotel by the Eastern Counties Railway to serve the original Hertford Station, which was replaced by Hertford East Station in the 1880s. The Great Eastern Tavern is similar in design to the contemporary Station Hotel located in Station Place, Ware.