The Clarence Hotel And Attached Railings

The Clarence Hotel, now offices, was originally built as an inn in 1785 and extended in 1811. It was restored around 1990, with the addition of a Georgian Revival shop front onto the left party wall. The exterior is painted to resemble Flemish bond brickwork, with stucco dressings and a tiled hip roof.

The building is four storeys high over a basement, with an eight-window front. A broad, round-arched entrance features a fanlight with decorative glazing bars and Tuscan pilasters on its jambs. A prostyle porch of Tuscan columns, responds, and an entablature with a projecting cornice shelters the entrance, and cast-iron railings form a balcony above. To the left of the entrance is a late 20th-century shop front set behind a distyle in antis aedicule, balanced by a carriageway on the other side of the porch. A single window sits between the entrance and the shop, and two are to the right, all with cambered arches and projecting sills. Variations in window spacing mark the original 1785 building from the 1811 addition, with the heights of the second and third floors gradually diminishing toward an attic-like proportion. A modillioned cornice runs along the elevation, supporting shallow, guttered eaves. Brick stacks are visible along the party walls, and another is positioned between the sixth and seventh window ranges. Cast-iron railings enclose the areas to either side of the entrance, with repair plate visible on the upper left side of the carriageway.

The interior was not inspected.

Historically, the hotel is the only surviving example of the inns that once lined North Street. Initially called the New Inn and run by a brewer named Mr. Wichelo, it included a coffee room, billiard room, sitting rooms, kitchens, and 26 bedrooms by 1812. Model dwellings were added to the rear court in the 1850s, when the area was considered Brighton's most notorious slum. A magistrates court was established in 1808 and relocated to the site again between 1821 and 1823. The name was changed to The Clarence in 1830 to honor William IV, formerly the Duke of Clarence. The hotel closed in 1972, reopening in 1979 as a building society headquarters, and then undergoing restoration and conversion into offices in the late 1980s.