The Royal Hotel

THE ROYAL HOTEL

A house built in the late 17th century (believed to be 1688), now converted to a hotel. The building was enlarged and converted to a high-class hotel in 1889 when the New London Inn to the right was joined to it. The structure stands on Barnstaple Street in East-the-Water, Bideford.

The original late 17th-century range is built of solid rendered walls with a slate roof. It is two storeys high with a garret, forming a single-room-deep plan with three rooms across, the middle room serving as the stair compartment and original main entrance. Two original closets are set into the first floor of the left-hand room. The front elevation presents an eight-window range. The ground storey is horizontally channelled with a moulded plinth and late 19th-century keystones with eagles projecting from them, topped by an entablature with a frieze decorated in circular panels. The upper-storey windows have bolection-moulded architraves and bracketed sills. A parapet is designed as a simple entablature. The original entrance has double doors, each leaf featuring a flush lower panel built out in shallow pyramidal form, with a taller enriched panel above containing a round head. Windows throughout both storeys have two-paned sashes with margin-panes. The right-hand half of the building is closely similar in style, presenting a four-window-wide facade with one window on the splayed corner and four on the return front to the right. An entablature sits above the second storey with a prominent cornice. In the third storey, the corner window and the adjoining window on each front are developed into a quasi-octagonal turret with a genuinely octagonal steeple. Adjoining windows are finished with triangular pediments containing incised royal arms and surmounted by ball-finials on pedestals. One ground-storey window on Barnstaple Street is a former doorway, its first-floor entablature built out as a bracketed hood and surmounted by a scrolled ball-finial. The main entrance on the return front has pilasters and a low segmental hood on massive brackets. Windows have plain sashes throughout, except in a canted bay to the right of the ground storey in the return front, which has barred sashes and a top entablature. The rear elevation facing the former railway platform (now a public path) is two storeys high in similar style to the front, with a single-storeyed porch with panelled piers and a gable with ball-finials at either end. A large canted bay window projects to the left. Simple 19th-century iron railings stand in front, with steps to the left bearing more elaborate baluster-rails inscribed TARDREW & CO. BIDEFORD. An old red-brick chimney with upper courses projecting to form an entablature sits on the ridge of the 17th-century range to the left, alongside several late 19th-century red-brick chimneys in similar style.

Wood's map of 1842 shows a left wing and rear block. In 1889, the New London Inn to the right was joined to the house, rebuilt or enlarged, and the whole was converted to a high-class hotel. This added range is two rooms wide and three rooms deep, with the middle room containing the entrance hall and main staircase. The rear block of 1842 was also rebuilt or converted into a domestic range with direct access to the railway platform behind. The courtyard between it and the 17th-century house is now occupied by a single-storeyed dining room with a covered-in well. The remainder of the building is three storeys high. Mid to late 20th-century double doors and a canopy, possibly replacing an earlier entrance, occupy the position of the third window from the right.

Interior

The 17th-century range contains a wooden open-well staircase rising to the garret. The balustrades are very heavily built with pulvinated closed strings, turned balusters, and square newels with flat moulded caps and flower-pendants. The handrail is flat and moulded. Bolection-moulded plaster panels ornament the undersides of flights and landings. A dado with raised bolection-moulded panels rises to two heights on the first-floor landing; upper panels elsewhere are probably 19th or 20th century. At the first floor, double doors give access to each adjacent room, featuring bolection-moulded panels, pulvinated friezes, and broken triangular pediments.

The Kingsley Room to the right has raised bolection-moulded panelling of two heights in varnished deal with a boxed cornice. A bolection-moulded wood chimneypiece has an overmantel with a bolection-moulded panel containing an original oil painting of a rural scene. The hearth features black and white diamond paving stones and a 19th-century interior with coloured patterned tiles. Bolection-moulded double doors open to the right. The room also has an original moulded plaster ceiling with enriched ribs and high-relief wired ornaments depicting birds, serpents, cherubs, masks, cartouches, fruit and foliage; a quatrefoil centre panel completes the design. Bolection-moulded panelled shutters are fitted throughout.

The Kingsley Bedroom to the left is closely similar but features painted panelling and plain shutters. Its chimneypiece has no oil painting, but inset is a smaller mid-19th-century white marble chimneypiece with a contemporary keyhole-shaped iron grate. The ceiling has simpler-shaped panels with fewer enrichments and a smaller range of wired ornaments. The front closet to the left also has raised bolection-moulded panelling.

The 1889 extension has a wooden stair in a roughly late 17th-century manner, with ground-floor public rooms finished in the same style. At the rear of the ground floor to the left, three cells with studded wooden doors and inspection hatches survive, probably from the mid-19th century. Wood's map of 1842 identifies the 17th-century building as the 'Old Work House'.

The original house is reputed to have been built for John Davie, a merchant who was mayor in 1688. Its workmanship is of even higher quality than that of the contemporary houses in Bridgeland Street. It contains the best urban plasterwork of its date in Devon, rivalled only by that of the Exeter Customs House. In 1937, Lilian Sheldon described the front as carrying the inscription COLONIAL 1688 HOUSE; a more recent metal plaque reads 'Formerly Colonial Buildings Erected 1698'. Charles Kingsley is traditionally said to have written 'Westward Ho!' in the Kingsley Room, although the local historian W H Rogers disputes this claim.