Why did the GWR not have any hotels on its Northern line?

[Tom Burnham]

1 hour ago, Fat Controller said:

Didn't the Southern also have contractors providing train catering?

Spiers and Pond.

[Tom Burnham]

The Imperial Hotel at Hythe (Kent), I believe formerly the Seabrook, was closely associated with the South Eastern Railway, although as I recall the SER didn't own it directly. There's still a large carved version of the SER coat of arms in the hotel reception.

[Fat Controller]

12 minutes ago, Tom Burnham said:

Spiers and Pond.

Sound's like a plumber..

[TheSignalEngineer]

19 hours ago, MidlandRed said:

It did - The Great Western Hotel, in front of Snow Hill station on Colmore Row - one of the first parts of the station to be demolished after closure to through traffic

The original hotel at Snow Hill waa built in 1863 and altered during the 1871 station reconstruction. 

I don't know when it was converted to offices. Its main problem as a hotel was being built on a steel framework over a 1 in 45 gradient used by heavy freight trains. Smoke from the tunnel drifted up the back wall for most of the day and night.

The roof was badly damaged by an air raid but later repaired. It was finally demolished at the end of 1969.

 

The GWR announced that it was to build a new luxury hotel at the station in 1939. 

Unfortunately Hitler decided to invade Poland a few weeks later and that was the beginning of the end for Snow Hill old station 

 

Extract from Great Western Magazine Vol. 51. No 4

New Great Western Hotel for Birmingham., April 1939

The announcement that the Great Western Railway is to build a modern hotel at Birmingham (Snow Hill) station is yet another instance of the Company’s desire to provide the very best facilities for its travellers and the cities and towns it serves. The hotel is to be constructed on the site of the building now used as divisional offices and restaurant, and will have frontages in Colmore Row, Snow Hill, and Livery Street. The building is to be a six-floored, steel framed structure and will be faced with natural Portland stone. The facilities are to be of the most up-to-date nature and will meet a long-felt want in the City of Birmingham. The ground floor will comprise reception offices, hall, lounge, cocktail bar and cloak rooms; and the existing bar and grill room are to be improved. The first floor will be devoted mainly to public rooms, and will include a dining room with accommodation for 150 dinners, a spacious lounge and a smoke-room. In addition, there will be three private meeting rooms (which can be converted into a single dining-room with seats for 160 people), and display and stock rooms in which business houses can entertain their customers and hold trade shows.

The first floor will also accommodate the kitchens. The remaining five floors of the new hotel will contain the bedrooms, numbering in all 28 double rooms and 142 single – each with a bathroom and lavatory. There will also be a private suite on each of these floors. Central heating, and air-conditioning of the main public rooms, will add to the comfort of patrons, and fire-proof floors will conduce to their safety. The main hotel entrance will be in Colmore Row, and there will be direct access to the booking hall forecourt on the station. New divisional offices and accommodation for the hotel and refreshment rooms staff will complete the rebuilding scheme. Work is to start this year and, when completed, will convert Snow Hill station into one of the most imposing railway structures in the provinces.

[TheSignalEngineer]

This is an artist's impression of the 1939 proposal for Snow Hill Hotel

https://www.warwickshirerailways.com/gwr/gwrbsh1645.htm

[OnTheBranchline]

6 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

In 1929 the GWR advertised as its owned hotels only 4 establishments - the Great Western Royal. at Paddington, the Manor House Hotel, the Tregenna Castle Hotel, and the Fishguard Bay Hotel.  Of these the Fishguard Bay Hotel is not listed as a railway owned hotel in the 1952 timetables.

 

There were a number of hotels with the Great Western name - immediately coming to mind are those in Reading, Swindon, Newport, and Exeter.   Whether they were or were not railway owned at some time I do not know.

 

Yes sorry, this is what I meant.

[MidlandRed]

2 hours ago, TheSignalEngineer said:

This is an artist's impression of the 1939 proposal for Snow Hill Hotel

https://www.warwickshirerailways.com/gwr/gwrbsh1645.htm

 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/loose_grip_99/209460639/in/photostream

 

This Flickr link has a photo of it immediately prior to demolition in 1969. As with most buildings in central Birmingham (and most other places) the building is severely blackened by atmospheric pollution from coal use - a feature prevalent throughout the built up area townscapes in conurbations - it would be the 70s before many buildings were cleaned, completely changing their appearance. 
 

Tgere are some great aerial photos before and after demolition on the Old Birmingham Facebook site.

 

It seems the artistic impression of the frontage of the proposed hotel foresaw the replacement of the Handsworth, West Brom/Wednesbury/Dudley trams which had terminated at large shelters in a single track outside the front of the hotel/station - however the replacement motorbuses (1939) from BCT’s Hockley garage and West Bromwich CT continued to use the same terminus, road and shelters until not too long before the demolition of this part of the station in the late 60s, when they moved to the adjacent, newly constructed Colmore Circus gyratory - slightly further from the city centre shops - some of my earliest memories of public transport (early 60s) are of travelling on BCT Leyland bodied Leyland buses to the terminal in front of Snow Hill station. 
 

 

Edited March 14, 2022 by MidlandRed

[johnofwessex]

5 hours ago, Tom Burnham said:

Spiers and Pond.

 

http://letslookagain.com/2015/06/a-history-of-spiers-pond/

[TheSignalEngineer]

I think that besides its position on top of the tunnel mouth two other factors worked against the Snow Hill hotel. After the Bicester line opened in 1910 the GWR and LNWR came to an agreement over sharing the Birmingham traffic with both running two-hour expresses. 

Besides that the Grand was about 100 yards along Colmore Row, while New Street had the Queen's adjacent and the Midland directly opposite its main entrance.

[34101]

The LBSC hotel at St Leonards West Marina was built across from the station, but was never opened as a hotel.

It had a row of shops at the front of the ground floor.

It later became Pickfords furniture store and is still there.

 

The Bo-peep hotel was moved to its present postion, when the station was built.

After closure of West Marina, West Hill Road was extended as the station approach was removed and variuos bottles from the original inn were found when they carved off several metres of our back garden for the new road.

 

The hotel building is behind the timber merchants.  This burned down many years ago.

 

(image: my copyright, taken 1958)

[KeithMacdonald]

On 13/03/2022 at 22:34, Compound2632 said:

it currently goes by the name of Malmaison Hotel Reading.

 

Surely it won't be getting many French visitors then? Who would choose a "sickness house"?

[phil-b259]

On 14/03/2022 at 00:01, Michael Hodgson said:

I was told the problem with the Midland Grand Hotel was that it was built with early Victorian sanitation and considered impractical to bring up to date - no water closets, just sluice rooms for the servants to empty chamberpots.  It presumably gained more modern plumbing for its use as railway offices however.

 

Not really, yes toilet facilities could obviously be provided but they would be effectively in the old Sluice rooms but that didn't solve the main issue in that the way the building was constructed made large scale alterations problematic. Hence even its use as offices didn't last for that long before it got abandoned completely

 

The main issue IIRC was the floor construction which was all solid stone / brick / concrete with no voids to run pipes or all the other things people expected of  a decent hotel by the 1930s

 

I believe the modern apartments / hotel rooms feature Macerator units and small bore pipework to get round the problem.

[phil-b259]

On 14/03/2022 at 12:26, Fat Controller said:

Didn't the Southern also have contractors providing train catering?

 

Yes

 

from https://southern-railway.com/tag/catering-vehicles/?msclkid=d967945ea54c11ec801b4268e4fb7fac

 

The Southern Railway (and subsequent the Southern Region) contracted out its catering services: on the South Eastern and Central Divisions it was The Pullman Car Co, and the South Western Division was originally Spiers & Pond (the LSWR contractor) superseded by Frederick Hotels in 1930.

 

[corneliuslundie]

Am I right in thinking that the hotel at Paddington was built by a separate company though there were common directors?

And wasn't the hotel accommodation at Swindon station part of the deal with the catering contractor whose successor eventually had to be bought out at great cost?

Jonathan

[Compound2632]

24 minutes ago, KeithMacdonald said:

Surely it won't be getting many French visitors then? Who would choose a "sickness house"?

 

Malmaison is the name of the chain that owns the former Great Western Hotel in Reading. They are named, I suppose, for the Château de Malmaison in the suburbs of Paris, the home of Joséphine de Beauharnais, and of Napoleon Bonaparte before he divorced her. The name means "bad house" rather then "illness house", reputedly because the site had been a base for marauding Normans in the early middle ages. 

 

I've been on the French-language guided tour of Malmaison. I found it wise to keep to the back of the group and not reveal my British nationality... 

[Michael Hodgson]

24 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

The name means "bad house" rather then "illness house", reputedly because the site had been a base for marauding Normans in the early middle ages. 

 

  ... and there was me thinking mal maison meant  house of ill repute.  

[Compound2632]

31 minutes ago, Michael Hodgson said:

  ... and there was me thinking mal maison meant  house of ill repute.  

 

Well, given Josephine's reputation...

 

But she was genuinely, passionately, in love with Bonaparte and distraught when he dropped he in favour of a political marriage with Marie Louise of Austria. Mind you, Marie Louise became equally passionately enamoured of Napoleon, so there was clearly something about him!

[TheSignalEngineer]

3 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

Marie Louise became equally passionately enamoured of Napoleon, so there was clearly something about him!

Big man, big ____

Little man, all ____

 

Add your own choice of word to fit any situatiin.

[Compound2632]

Apologies, bit of thread drift here. To get back on track, I think we can summarise three categories of railway hotels:

1. Hotels owned by the railway company and run by the company's own hotels department - e.g. the Midland's chain of Midland Grand, St Pancras; Midland, Manchester; Adelphi, Liverpool; Queens, Leeds; Midland, Bradford; Midland, Derby, etc.; hotels in this category passed to BTH on nationalisation.
2. Hotels owned by the railway company but run by a lessee - e.g. Lord Warden, Dover; the Great Western Hotel, Reading, was probably in this category. Did hotels in this category continue on the same terms after nationalisation?
3. Hotels that were privately-owned but capitalised on their location by taking the name of the railway company or just named "Station Hotel" or similar.

[Siberian Snooper]

Didn't the GW have a hotel in or near Mortonhampstead?

 

 

[The Stationmaster]

I refer the gentlemen to my earlier reply to this thread -

 

In 1929 the GWR advertised as its owned hotels only 4 establishments - the Great Western Royal. at Paddington, the Manor House Hotel (Moretonhampstead), the Tregenna Castle Hotel (St Ives), and the Fishguard Bay Hotel.  Of these the Fishguard Bay Hotel is not listed as a railway owned (actually Hotels executive as it was at that time) hotel in the 1952 timetables.

 

There were a number of hotels with the Great Western name - immediately coming to mind are those in Reading, Swindon, Newport, and Exeter.   Whether they were or were not railway owned at some time I do not know.  To these I can add Slough which had previously slipped my mind plus - from the 1929 timetable hotel adverts - Taunton and Newquay which were not railway owned.

 

Additionally i have now checked my November 1875 Timetable for hotel information and it lists a number of hotels 'immediately adjacent to 'principal stations' and 'connected to them and the Hotel porters attend the arrival of all principal trains.'  The hotels listed are the Great Western Royal Hotel, (Paddington station); the Great Western Hotel, Birmingham (ceased to be used as hotel many years earlier and became railway offices, demolished 1969); the Crewe Arms Hotel, Crewe; The Queen Hotel Chester; the Imperial Hotel, Great Malvern; the South Wales Hotel, New Milford (in use as hostel accommodation in the 1950s, demolished 1970); and the Duke of Cornwall Hotel. Plymouth.   The timetable listed or had adverts any other hotels which had Great Western as part of their name.    There is no indication of who owned the hotels but obviously most of them were not railway owned.  As an aside of no doubt minimal relevance I have at various times stayed in three of the five which survived beyond 1970.

 

 Alas my 1850s GWR etc public timetable doess not have any information at all about hotels other than naming various of them from which coaches departed or at which coaches terminated.  My conclusion -there werea lot of hotels about which carried the 'Great Western' name but had absolutel;y nothing to do with the railway company