Holt Hostel

This is a purpose-built Youth Hostel, constructed in the 1930s in a simple Neo-Georgian style. It is essentially single-storeyed, though a basement accommodates the sloping ground and originally served as a large bicycle store. The building is timber-framed and weather-boarded, set upon a rendered brick basement, with a felted roof. The design features a shallow gabled central range, with pediments at the front and rear, flanked by flat-roofed ranges with bold overhanging eaves, a form that clearly expresses the building’s function: the central gabled range houses the kitchen and common room, while the dormitories are located in the flanking blocks. The building’s simple construction and form are given careful architectural treatment; the basement and the pedimented central section are white-painted, contrasting with the darker stain used elsewhere, with corner pilaster boards and eaves also white, as are the window frames.

The front elevation features a three-bay pedimented section in the centre, originally intended for a central door flanked by windows, though this has been altered from the original design which featured three identical full-height windows with distinctive horizontal small panes and lozenge overlights. Single windows are in the outer bays. The five windows in each return elevation, and the original windows in the outer bays, were originally small-paned sash windows, apparently single sashes which dropped down within the walls. They originally featured louvred shutters which have since been removed, though these survive on site. A modern timber balcony, supported on rendered pillars, provides access; this replaces an earlier stone-arched balcony and its flanking stone stairs. A fine inscribed slate positioned beneath the balcony records the hostel's early history, noting the contribution of the Holt family of Liverpool and its opening at Whitsun in 1931, and the gift of the land in 1937 in memory of Gwendolen Symonds, a pioneer of the Youth Hostel Association who loved young people and beautiful places.

Original paired doors to the basement are found in each return elevation, consisting of boarded doors with lozenge-glazed top lights. The rear elevation has also been altered; the central bay is recessed behind the pediment, but the original symmetry has been disrupted by the insertion of an additional room into the left-hand side loggia. However, the original doorway into the kitchen, along with its flanking window, remain intact: the door is part-glazed with distinctive horizontal panes, mirrored by the glazing in the adjacent window and with a lozenge-glazed overlight.

The original layout largely survives. The central front room serves as the common room and features a beamed ceiling, boarded walls, and floor. Directly behind it is the kitchen. In each flanking wing, long corridors provide access to four-bunk bays, with wash-rooms to the front, and a warden’s bedroom to the rear right.